After the Dog and Pony show in early April, Betrayus ordered his staff to compile a 'Dossier' on Iranian involvement in Iraq. As I pointed out in this previous post a dossier was being prepped and then mysteriously delayed. Meanwhile, the drumbeats of war continued unabated. With the MSM dutifully reporting Baghdad Bergner's repeated claims that al Sadr was being supplied by Iran and that caches of weapons and EFPs were found in Karbala proving the connection.

But, lo and behold, that much ballyhooed find was inexplicably squashed and *crickets* were heard from the MSM when the 'Iranian supplied' cache was finally unveiled for the reporters. Somehow Bergner failed to mention Iran even once during the presentation, the sudden silence from the MSM was deafening, which I covered in this post.

Not once did Bergner point the finger at Iran for any of these weapons and munitions, which is a striking change from just a couple of weeks ago when U.S. military officials here and at the Pentagon were saying that caches found in Basra in particular had revealed Iranian-made arms manufactured as recently as this year. They say the majority of rockets being fired at U.S. bases, including Baghdad's Green Zone, are launched by militiamen receiving training, arms and other aid from Iran.

Hmmm... Now why would he pass up the golden opportunity?

Today's Asia Times has an excellent article from Gareth Porter highlighting the US's sudden silence on Iran's role in Iraq...

US plot to nail Iran backfires

The George W Bush administration's plan to create a new crescendo of accusations against Iran for allegedly smuggling arms to Shi'ite militias in Iraq has encountered not just one but two setbacks.

The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki refused to endorse US charges of Iranian involvement in arms smuggling to Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, and a plan to show off a huge collection of Iranian arms captured in and around the central city of Karbala had to be called off after it was discovered that none of the arms was of Iranian origin.

The news media's failure to report that the arms captured from Shi'ite militiamen in Karbala did not include a single Iranian weapon shielded the US military from a big blow to its anti-Iran strategy.

The Bush administration and top Iraq commander General David Petraeus had plotted a sequence of events that would build domestic US political support for a possible strike against Iran over its "meddling" in Iraq, and especially its alleged export of arms to Shi'ite militias.

Hah, Imagine that... Gareth goes on...

US officials also planned to display to reporters Iranian weapons captured in both Basra and Karbala. That sequence of media events would fill the airwaves for several days with spectacular news framing Iran as the culprit in Iraq, aimed at breaking down US congressional and public resistance to the idea that Iranian bases supporting the meddling would have to be attacked.

But events in Iraq did not follow the script. On May 4, after an Iraqi delegation had returned from meetings in Iran, Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said in a news conference that Maliki was forming his own cabinet committee to investigate the US claims. "We want to find tangible information and not information based on speculation," he said.

Senior US military officials were clearly furious with Maliki for backtracking on the issue. "We were blindsided by this," one of them told Zavis

Tut, tut... Bad Maliki! It gets better...(or worse?)

The Iraqi commander in Karbala had announced on May 3 that he had captured a large quantity of Iranian arms in and around the city. Earlier, the US military had said that it was up to the Iraqi government to display captured Iranian weapons, and now an Iraqi commander was eager to do just that. Petraeus' staff alerted US media to a major news event in which the captured Iranian arms in Karbala would be displayed and then destroyed.

But when US munitions experts went to Karbala to see the alleged cache of Iranian weapons, they found nothing they could credibly link to Iran.

What about those nasty EFPs?

The US claim that Iran was behind their growing use in Iraq was the centerpiece of the Bush administration's case for an Iranian "proxy war" against the US in early 2007.

Soon after that, however, senior US military officials conceded that EFPs were in fact being manufactured in Iraq itself, although they insisted that EFPs alleged exported by Iran were superior to the home-made version.

The large cache of EFPs in Karbala which are admitted to be non-Iranian in origin underlines the reality that the Mahdi Army procures its EFPs from a variety of sources.

But for the media blackout of the story, the large EFP discovery in Karbala would have further undermined the credibility of the US military's line on Iran's export of the EFPs to Iraqi fighters.

Where's the Beef? Either, the proof or the MSM reporting the lack of proof? MIA, as usual...!