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'POLITICS-US: Seizure of Iranians Failed to Validate Bush Line

Analysis by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (IPS) - The George W. Bush administration's campaign to seize and detain Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officials in Iraq, presented by Bush himself last January as a move to break up an alleged Iranian arms smuggling operation in Iraq, appears to have run its course without having been able to link a single Iranian to any such operation.Despite administration rhetoric suggesting that the U.S. military had solid intelligence on which to base a campaign to break up Iranian-sponsored networks supplying armour-piercing weapons, what is now known about the kidnapping operations indicates that the actual purpose was to obtain some evidence from interrogations that would support the administration's line that the IRGC's elite Quds Force is involved in assisting Shiite forces militarily. None of the six Iranians now held by the U.S. military, however, has provided any evidence for the administration's case despite many months of very tough interrogation usually employed on "high value" detainees. Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia, told IPS he believes the administration badly wanted to get information from the Iranian detainees that they could use to make their case, but has been unable to do so. "I'm convinced that they haven't gotten anything out of them," he said in an interview. "They haven't come up with anything they can shop around." The programme has also been a political embarrassment in relations with U.S. allies in Iraq. U.S. military seizures of Iranians who the U.S. military claimed were IRGC Quds Force officers have been condemned not only by the Shiite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki but by Kurdish leaders as well. The U.S. military apologised in August for "a regrettable incident" in which eight Iranians were arrested in Baghdad, and then freed after Iraqi protests. The U.S. quietly released nine Iranian detainees last week, two of whom were seized in the Kurdish city of Erbil in January, saying they were "of no continuing intelligence value". The others do not appear to have been part of the deliberate targeting of Iranian officials. What was later learned about the U.S. raids on Iranian officials in Kurdistan last January and again in September and in Baghdad last December shows that the U.S. military was targeting Iranians merely on the basis of their affiliation with the IRGC, while claiming publicly to have intelligence of their involvement in weapons trafficking.'

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