"Just Because We Haven't Found Any..."

By Cernig

McClatchy continues to be the only mainstream U.S. news outlet which crosses the t's and dots the i's when quoting military "assessments" in Iraq. They've figured out that "we assess" means "we guess", so why can't the other news companies?

But I want to make note of what appears to be a new spokespuppet for the Cheneyites down at MNF-I. Maj. Alayne Conway got saddled with a major announcement in the ongoing surge of non-evidence against Iran. She may well turn out to be as much fun to watch as Lt. Col. "Baghdad Barry" Johnson used to be. (Whatever happened to him, anyway?)

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a top U.S. commander who is in charge of a large swath of Iraq south of Baghdad, believes there are about 50 members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps in his battlefield area, military spokeswoman Maj. Alayne Conway said.

Conway said that U.S.-led forces have not caught any of the Iranians, but she said military intelligence and recently discovered caches of weapons with Iranian markings on them indicate that the Iranians are there.

Lynch's assertion is the latest in a series of accusations leveled by military officials against Iran. They have warned that Iraq's neighbor is actively supplying Shiite insurgents - specifically, the Mahdi Army - with deadly weapons that have killed dozens of U.S. soldiers.

...Spokeswoman Conway said that since April, the military has found 217 weapons in four provinces south of Baghdad that it suspects were supplied by Iran. She said the military has not caught any Iranians or Iraqis smuggling weapons across the Iran-Iraq border, but she believes it soon will.

"Just because we're not finding them doesn't mean they're not there," Conway said.

I seem to recall the last time a line like that was used, the U.S. ended up invading Iraq on a phantom WMD hunt.

She said a brigade of about 2,000 soldiers from the country of Georgia will soon be patrolling the border and may find further evidence of Iranian meddling.

She helpfully didn't mention that the Brits have had a battalion on deep patrol looking for just such evidence for a year now, without success.