Baghdad Briefing

Another five members of the IRGC were taken out of an Iranian diplomatic office in the Kurdish Iraqi city of Erbil in mid-January and are still being detained. When the U.S. military raided this office, which Iranian officials insist has consular status, they allegedly caught the group trying to flush documents down the toilet. At least one of the suspects was trying to alter his appearance by shaving his head. And one of the detained men, the officials claimed today, also had explosive residue on his hands. Additional exhibits at the briefing included two IDs from the suspects held in this raid. One was an official IRGC ID for a 43-year-old colonel named Baqer Qabshavi. The branch of his work was listed as "intelligence." The second card was a student ID from Iran’s Imam Hussein University for a bearded middle-aged man named Hamid Reza Askari-Shekooh. His area of study was listed as "strategic defense studies."

Was all this evidence the smoking gun that some had expected? Not exactly. Much of the information presented today had been discussed by military officials before. "The begging question of a smoking gun, of an Iranian standing over an American, with a gun, it's never going to happen," the analyst said in the briefing today. "It's plausible deniability. They invented it." Nor did the briefing try to make a substantive case for a U.S. attack on Iran—something much speculated about after the original press conference was cancelled abruptly and without explanation more than a week ago. A senior official acknowledged that the briefing had generated a lot of buzz, particularly in Washington. "Everybody was trying to make it more than it was," he said. "The multinational forces are not trying to hype this up more than it is."

© 2007