Drilling Down to Iran

Just so you know there IS an English translation the MSM chooses to not use for some reason:

Al Qods = The Blessed
Al Qods al Sharif = The Blessed site of Our Fathers (which is the Muslim name for 'Jerusalem')

Therefore, the Iranian Al Qods Brigade is NEVER referred to as the "Jerusalem Brigade", because that would be illuminating and show bias....

Most of you have heard me refer you to Richard Fernandez who posts on his blog The Belmont Club. Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail is another good blogger with a military mind who is providing insight not found in the paper of record (that would be the New York Times, for those of you still playing catch up). One of his recent posts is on Targeting the Iranian "Secret Cells" operating in Iraq who are the ones using Explosively Formed Projectiles (EFPs) against American troops. These are the next gen Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) used by the 'insurgents' operating in Baghdad.

(By the way, this has not been an easy war for the Mainstream Media (MSM) to choose sides on, linguistically speaking. If "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and the MSM's enemy is GWB, then HIS enemy in Iraq is the MSM "friend du jour". (GWB's enemy in America is the Democrats, so that shows you how they checked their math.) Their problem is that the US Coalition Forces originally referred to the Iraqi Sunni resistance as "insurgents" and the MSM picked it up without realizing what they had done. Now that "insurgent" is part of the vernacular, they can't quite figure out how to refer to the Iranian sponsored Shiite resistance in Iraq from the Mahdi and Badr Brigades. They lamely refer to these groups as "militias", while referring elsewhere to Hizbollah and Hamas interchangeably as "armies". And then when Hamas went and got itself elected head of Palestine, the inbreeding of the nomenclature collapsed and they pretty much ran out of euphemisms for "the enemy of my enemy". If you are truly cynical, you should expect the MSM to start referring to the Iranians as "Our friends" (using the imperial 'Our') and just cut to the chase. If you want to have fun when They do this, send a letter to your newspaper's ombudsman demanding They correct the use of 'our' to 'Our' and then sit back and watch Their little heads spin around.)

Back to Bill Roggio. He is detailing two Iranian cells: the Sheibani network and the Qazali network. The Qazali network was described as, "as a radical splinter Mahdi Army unit which operates under the aegis of the Sheibani network." Roggio further points out that General Petraeus stated the Qazali network received "substantial funding, training on Iranian soil, advanced explosive munitions and technologies as well as run of the mill arms and ammunition, in some cases advice and in some cases even a degree of direction."

I think it was Roggio's blog where I found out that satellite imagery had found a replica of a Mahdi Headquarters shrine (replica sites are used for practicing tactics by SOP forces) in Iran just prior to the snatching of five US Army soldiers last January who were part of a team occupying that shrine.

Soooo anyway, check this guy out from time to time as you hit the web. You'll learn more from him than from reading the NY Times, the (harumph) "paper of record" as they refer to themselves.