MILAN RAI
Rai wrote a recent briefing paper titled “IED Lies: The U.S. claims that Iran supplies Improvised Explosive Devices to Iraqi insurgents. No serious evidence has been provided[PDF].”

Rai is author of the book 7/7: The London Bombings, Islam and the Iraq War.
More Information

STEPHEN ZUNES
Professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, Zunes said today: “Displays of a few bomb fragments hardly prove the Bush administration’s contention that 170 Americans [and allies] have been killed with weapons sent by the highest levels of the Iranian government. For one thing, the Iranians back Shiite militias in Iraq allied with the U.S.-backed government, not insurgents attacking American and Iraqi government forces.

“Secondly, there is a huge black market in various explosive devices, so it would not be surprising to find components from any number of countries. Thirdly, EFPs [explosively formed penetrators] like those shown by U.S. officials have been used by the Irish Republican Army and other insurgent groups for decades and can therefore hardly be treated as a nefarious Iranian invention designed to attack American troops. Even the Iraqi government didn’t buy these latest charges by the Bush administration.” Zunes is author of the book Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism and is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus.
More Information

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167