Tehran calling
Pajamas Media has posted the video of Richard Miniter's interview of Major Martin Weber at Camp Victory in Baghdad along with Miniter's report "Iranian weapons, American lives." Miniters's report provides the context for the interview, which is simply devastating:
Bear this is mind, when you watch this exclusive Pajamas Media video shot in Iraq. The video offers startling new evidence of Iran’s involvement in the insurgency. It is the first up-close, online video showing captured Iranian weapons. These particular weapons have not been shown to the public before.The information provided by Major Weber is devastating, but so is the attitude -- part indifference, part hostility -- displayed by the MSM toward the subject.Far from being offered up by the military, it took me weeks of wangling to see Maj. Weber. The military does not want to talk about the mortars, rockets and bombs flooding in from Iran. It has been burned by the press every time the subject comes up.
Senior officers also realize that the Democrat-led Congress doesn’t want to hear about Iran’s sinister role in Iraq and that President Bush does not want a confrontation with Iran now. To make the interview even harder to get, Maj. Weber’s specialty, Explosives Ordinance Demolition or EOD, has a culture of not talking to the press. Any EOD officer who does, owes his unit a case of beer for each appearance.
So conspiracy theorists who feel this exclusive Pajamas Media Video is military propaganda couldn’t be more wrong—the military would have been happier if the interview never happened.
Finally, Maj. Weber agreed to this exclusive interview with Pajamas Media on two conditions: that a public-affairs officer be present to interrupt him if he said anything with political ramifications, and that the conversation be limited simply to the weapons themselves.
I agreed to those conditions because a large story the rest of the media missed: the weapons themselves. These Iranian weapons and others like them are killing American soldiers.
Twice before the military has tried to present to the press overwhelming evidence of Iran’s involvement in the Iraq war, only to be met by hostile skepticism. The skepticism basically takes the form of three questions:
1) Couldn’t these weapons have been made anywhere?
2) Isn’t it fishy that these weapons were marked in English with American-style dates?
3) Isn’t all of this a ploy to justify a neocon war with Iran?
As you will see from the video, Maj. Weber can definitively answer the first two questions. As for the Daily Kos-inspired third question, well, who can address questions from planet Paranoid? And who should bother?
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