Sounds like they are gearing up for W.W. 111.

[Dawn Meredith]

Iran next??? Some damn scary shit!!!

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world...-1.1013151

[Ed Jewett]

There is a theory that all of the preparations and propaganda, while ostensibly focused on Iran, may actually be a maskirovka for a first strike against Russia and China. Time to dust off the Pentagon's old Crisis Relocation planning as well as the Civilian-Military Contingency Hospital System. :2in1:

[Peter Lemkin]

Hot damn, I love parades...we can have one for the end of humankind.....and a last picnic.....no need for charcoal or fire of other kinds - all will be kindly provided by all those nukes that have been gathering cobwebs - but still work just fine....that most have forgotten about....in the phony war period we now live in. The USA never stood-down from WW2, IMO and has been very quietly, with good PR cover [to all too many] and propaganda continuing to wage a war of conquest against those who would stand in the way of our [USA's and connected] Oligarchy and Deep Political Establishment. All for profit, power and empire. But that last parade and picnic will be a real blast!:goodnight::goodnight::goodnight::goodnight:

[David Guyatt]

I'm posting the whole article below for posterity.

The following caught my eye however:

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” said Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, co-author of a recent study on US preparations for an attack on Iran. “US bombers are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he added.

The preparations were being made by the US military, but it would be up to President Obama to make the final decision. He may decide that it would be better for the US to act instead of Israel, Plesch argued.

Might this has been the underlying subject of Joe Biden's recent controversial visit to Jerusalem? A sort of "don't do it - we'll do it instead because we need to keep all our middle east allies on board"? sort of discussion.

Final destination Iran?

Exclusive: Rob Edwards

Published on 14 Mar 2010
Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.

The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures.

Experts say that they are being put in place for an assault on Iran’s controversial nuclear facilities. There has long been speculation that the US military is preparing for such an attack, should diplomacy fail to persuade Iran not to make nuclear weapons.

Although Diego Garcia is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, it is used by the US as a military base under an agreement made in 1971. The agreement led to 2,000 native islanders being forcibly evicted to the Seychelles and Mauritius.

The Sunday Herald reported in 2007 that stealth bomber hangers on the island were being equipped to take bunker-buster bombs.

They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran
Dan Plesch, director, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, University of London
Although the story was not confirmed at the time, the new evidence suggests that it was accurate.

Contract details for the shipment to Diego Garcia were posted on an international tenders’ website by the US navy.

A shipping company based in Florida, Superior Maritime Services, will be paid $699,500 to carry many thousands of military items from Concord, California, to Diego Garcia.

Crucially, the cargo includes 195 smart, guided, Blu-110 bombs and 192 massive 2000lb Blu-117 bombs.

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” said Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, co-author of a recent study on US preparations for an attack on Iran. “US bombers are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he added.

The preparations were being made by the US military, but it would be up to President Obama to make the final decision. He may decide that it would be better for the US to act instead of Israel, Plesch argued.

“The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely,” he added. “The US ... is using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.”

According to Ian Davis, director of the new independent thinktank, Nato Watch, the shipment to Diego Garcia is a major concern. “We would urge the US to clarify its intentions for these weapons, and the Foreign Office to clarify its attitude to the use of Diego Garcia for an attack on Iran,” he said.

For Alan Mackinnon, chair of Scottish CND, the revelation was “extremely worrying”. He stated: “It is clear that the US government continues to beat the drums of war over Iran, most recently in the statements of Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

“It is depressingly similar to the rhetoric we heard prior to the war in Iraq in 2003.”

The British Ministry of Defence has said in the past that the US government would need permission to use Diego Garcia for offensive action. It has already been used for strikes against Iraq during the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars.

About 50 British military staff are stationed on the island, with more than 3,200 US personnel. Part of the Chagos Archipelago, it lies about 1,000 miles from the southern coasts of India and Sri Lanka, well placed for missions to Iran.

The US Department of Defence did not respond to a request for a comment.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Pakistani President (Pervez Musharraf) said that, following the attacks of 11 September 2001, the US made some "ludicrous" demands of Pakistan.

"The intelligence director told me that Richard Armitage said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age'," he said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/5369198.stm

Richard Armitage, (aka Colin Powell's "white son" after their Phoenix Program exploits during the Vietnam War), subsequently denied the claim.

I'm inclined to believe the Pakistani version of this, ahem, conversation.

Use of the type of "bunker-busting" bombs shipped to Diego Garcia would indeed bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.

In passing, I note that the phrase "smart bunker-busting bomb" is an oxymoron.

[Ed Jewett]

Of late, the US has ramped up upgrade and production of heavy weaponry -- including DU and nuclear -- and made their delivery systems more sophisticated, faster, stealthier et al ad nauseum. The US and Israel, jointly and independently, have vast quantities of deadly attack modalities already in position, whether the target be Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan or Afghanistan. [It -- the people, cultures and more -- does not matter to them... they will harvest the subterranean assets after they have removed the irradiated top-cover.]

The dust, airborne debris, and ? fallout [political, radiation, etc.] of any extensive attack has, as its downwind, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, homes to --somebody count them, please -- more than a few brown-skinned, other faith types.

If "this" "goes down", it will not matter whether Israel or the U.S. is determined to be the aggressor/culprit, for several reasons:

1) their aggressor tendencies are already independently evident;

2) their policies, strategies, armament systems and more are so badly interwoven that any attempt by one to extract itself from the opprobrium will be met with derision; and

3) the tragic consequences will overwhelm the debate, the world, and the future.

[Ed Jewett]

Letter to the Editor: Stovepiping To Persia Written by Chris Floyd Tuesday, 16 March 2010 01:17 (UPDATED BELOW)

Dear New York Times,
OK, OK, we get the picture: you want the United States to attack Iran. Why don't you go ahead and put a permanent banner across the top of the front page with the Cato-like adjuration: "Iran Must Be Destroyed!" Or maybe you could just tack it on to every single story: "Yankees Trade to Bolster Outfield; Iran Must Be Destroyed." "Mixed Results for Apple I-Pad; Iran Must Be Destroyed." "Markets Anxious Over Health Care Vote; Iran Must Be Destroyed." "New Bistro Revels in Bohemian Ambience; Iran Must Be Destroyed."

After all, hardly a week goes by now without some big juicy piece of Times scaremongery about Iran's nuclear program, usually with the same image of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a lab coat looking blankly at metal tubes. The thrust of these stories is always the same: Iran is galloping toward nuclear weaponhood -- a "global threat" that "cannot be allowed to stand." Last week, it was Bill Broad, goosing the rubes with this little number, a supposed "science" piece: For Iran, Enriching Uranium Only Gets Easier.
For a moment, let's put aside the fact of Iran's persistent denials of a desire for nuclear weapons -- including the explicit, repeated statements of the theocracy's supreme religious and political leader that such weapons are anathema. And let's put aside the fact that despite the most extensive and intrusive inspection regime in the history of atomic energy development, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran is not doing exactly what it says it is doing: developing non-weaponized nuclear power for peaceful purposes. These are just facts, after all -- and facts, as the sainted Ronald Reagan once told us, are stupid things.

But even if we were to grant the fevered fantasies of our masturbatory militarists the slightest tincture of credibility -- or even take their brazen propaganda as gospel truth -- they have never yet explained exactly why Iran's possession of nuclear weapons would be a greater "global threat" than, say, the bristling arsenals produced by the illegal, covert, crimeful programs in Israel, India and Pakistan. Nor are we told why an ill-gotten Iranian bomb would be worse than the vast "legal" nuclear arsenals of Russia, China, France, Great Britain and, of course, the only nation in the history of the world that has actually used nuclear weapons to slaughter hundreds of thousands of defenseless civilians, the United States of America.

Or to put it another way, in the immortal words of Arthur Silber: "So Iran Gets Nukes. So What?" (For more, see note below.)

But as we've mentioned here often before, "there is literally nothing that Iran can do – or not do – to divert the American elite's desire to strike at their land and bring it under domination." They are of course already waging secret, slow-motion war against Iran right now, and have been for many years, with sanctions, terrorist campaigns and covert operations. The only real debate within the power structure is when and how to accelerate -- or "surge" -- this war into a broader, more overt campaign. "Moderates" opt for continuing the gradualist approach until such time as the bond markets -- and other financial arbiters of our fate -- signal their relative comfort with the move; "hawks" -- many of whom have vested interests in the "security industry" which reaps such vast profit from war and rumors of war -- press relentlessly for immediate action.

But whatever their stripe, there is no third way among our elites on the question of Iran, nothing beyond the notion that Iran must be "dealt with" -- harshly, stringently -- until it is once more under Western sway. And it is this latter recalcitrance -- which is shared both by the present Tehran regime and its dissidents -- that makes Iran a "rogue" nation, not its internal political repression (which is less severe than some staunch American allies) nor its reputed "support for terrorism" (an oft-used tool of the United States and its allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia), nor even Ahmadinejad's non-existent calls for Israel to be "destroyed" or his Holocaust revisionism (both of which have long been propagated in far more virulent forms among staunch American allies such as Saudi Arabia, or America's favorite partner for Middle East peace talks, the unelected Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a vile Holocaust revisionist for decades -- but now regarded as the most "genuine and serious" partner imaginable for the Jewish state, according to no less than Tom "Suck On This" Friedman).

But these facts do not matter in the slightest. The American media -- corporatized and homogenized to a fare-thee-well -- simply regurgitate whatever fantasy scenario our masters come up with to keep the domination agenda careening drunkenly down the road. These scenarios don't have to be plausible; they don't even have to make sense or have the slightest bit of internal consistency. And they can change literally overnight -- as we all remember when Saddam Hussein went from staunch American ally, bulwark against the rabid Shiite menace, to "the new Hitler," bent on world domination, the day after he attacked the American elite's business partners, the repressive, anti-Semitic Kuwaiti royals.

This very interesting -- and very crucial -- passage in American history is now almost forgotten. But as we careen deeper into conflict with Iran, it is a history well worth remembering. Here is just a bit of it, from a piece I wrote a few years ago. Take special note of one bit player, whose significance I was not aware of at the time: Jay Bybee, a longtime factotum who first helped facilitate Daddy Bush's covert arming of Saddam Hussein, then later, as we now know, helped L'il Georgie perpetrate the capital crime of torture:

Bush [Senior] also used the global criminal network of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) to secretly funnel cash and weaponry to Saddam – then intervened to quash federal investigations of the scam. What was BCCI? Only "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history," according to the United States Senate. What did BCCI do? "It engaged in pandemic bribery of officials in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas," says journalist Christopher Bryon, who first exposed the operation. "It laundered money on a global scale, intimidated witnesses and law officers, engaged in extortion and blackmail. It supplied the financing for illegal arms trafficking and global terrorism. It financed and facilitated income tax evasion, smuggling and prostitution." Sort of an early version of the Bush Regime, then.

The Italian bank BNL was one of BCCI's main tentacles. BNL's Atlanta branch was the primary funnel used to send millions of secret dollars to Saddam for arms purchases, including deadly chemicals and other WMD materials supplied by the Chilean arms dealer Cardoen and various politically-connected operators in the United States like, weapons merchant Matrix Churchill.

As soon as the BNL case broke, Bush moved to throttle the investigation. He appointed lawyers from both Cardoen and Matrix to top Justice Department posts – where they supervised the officials investigating their old companies. The overall probe was directed by Justice Department investigator Robert Mueller. Meanwhile, White House aides applied heavy pressure on other prosecutors to restrict the range of the probe – especially the fact that Bush cabinet officials Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger had served as consultants for BNL during their pre-White House days as spear-carriers for yet another secretive international front that profits from war, weapons, and the avid greasing of highly-placed palms: Kissinger Associates. The U.S. Senate later found that the probe had been unaccountably "botched" – witnesses went missing, CIA records got "lost," all sorts of bad luck. Most of the big BCCI players went unpunished or got off with wrist-slap fines and sanctions.

One of the White House aides who unlawfully intervened in the BNL prosecution was a certain factotum named Jay S. Bybee. In 2004, said factotum was appointed by George W. Bush to a place on the federal appeals court – a lifetime sinecure of perks and power. Mueller, meanwhile wound up as head of the FBI, appointed to the post in by George W. in July 2001. Well done, thou good and faithful servants!

Then came Bush's "Gulf War," when he turned on his protégé after Saddam made the foolish move of threatening the Kuwaiti royals – Bush's long-time business partners, going back to the early 1960s. Saddam's conflict with Kuwait centered on two main issues: first, his claim that the billions of dollars Kuwait had given Iraq during the war with Iran was simply straightforward aid to the nation that was defending the Sunni Arab world from the aggressive onslaught of the Shiite Persians. The Kuwaitis insisted the money had been a loan, and demanded that Saddam pay off. There was also Saddam's claim that Kuwait was "slant-drilling" into Iraqi oilfields, siphoning off underground reserves from across the border. These disputes raged for months; a deal to resolve them was brokered by the Arab League, but fell apart at the last minute when Kuwait suddenly rejected the agreement, saying, "We will call in the Americans."

How worried was Bush about the situation? Let's look at the historical record. In the two weeks before the invasion of Kuwait, Bush approved the sale of an additional $4.8 million in "dual-use" technology to factories identified by the CIA as linchpins of Hussein's illicit nuclear and biochemical programs, the Los Angeles Times reports. The day before Saddam sent his tanks across the border, Bush obligingly sold him more than $600 million worth of advanced communications technology. A week later, he was declaring that his long-time ally was "worse than Hitler."

Yes, the Kuwaitis had called in their marker. Like a warlord of old, Bush used the US military as a private army to help his business partners. After an extensive bombing campaign that openly – even gleefully – mocked international law in its targeting of civilian infrastructure (a tactic repeated in Serbia by Bill Clinton – now regarded as an "adopted son" by Bush), the brief 100-hour ground war slaughtered fleeing Iraqi conscripts by the thousands – while, curiously, allowing Saddam's crack troops, the aptly-named Republican Guard, to escape unharmed. Later, these troops were used to kill tens of thousands of Shiites who had risen in rebellion against Saddam – at the specific instigation of George Bush, who not only abandoned them to their fate, but specifically allowed Saddam to use his attack helicopters against the rebels, and also ordered US troops to block Shiites from gaining access to arms caches.

Think the Texas Board of Education will put that in their textbooks?

Now Barack Obama and his "Justice" Department are working overtime to protect Bybee -- and the rest of the war-and-torture fomenters -- from even the slightest mussing of their hair for their facilitation of acts that are clearly war crimes under United States law, the Geneva Conventions and the Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Obama will not acknowledge these atrocities for what they are; he will not investigate these atrocities; he will not prosecute these atrocities. And the reason for this inaction is simple: he approves of these atrocities, and is himself facilitating their continuation and expansion. And why does he do this? Because that is why he came to power: to direct the empire toward its traditional ends of geopolitical domination and oligarchic enrichment. His actual policies give ample demonstration of this fact. (Alexander Cockburn lays out the case here.)

But as we noted, facts are stupid things. No one much wants to hear them; and fewer and fewer people can even recognize them when they float up, in broken bits and jagged pieces, from the rancid swill of our political "discourse." And even though the Obama Administration is employing the exact same tactics in demonizing Iran that the Bush Administration employed with Iraq -- right down to the use of the highly respected, internationally renowned New York Times as a "stovepipe" for warmongering propaganda -- no one seems able to grasp what is happening. We still get earnest debates and fretful questions about the "direction" and "intentions" of the current administration's policies toward Iran.

The intention is this: domination, by any means necessary. This is the bedrock, bipartisan consensus of the American ruling class and its outriders, sycophants, courtiers and toadies. It was spelled out with crystal clarity by two years ago by Admiral William Fallon, the predecessor of General David Petraeus in the very cockpit of the war machine, Central Command. Fallon, as you may recall, enjoyed a brief frisson among progressives for an erroneous report that he had declared there would be no military action against Iran on his watch. And while it was true that he was skeptical about immediate action -- putting him in the "moderate" camp described above -- he left no doubt about his adherence to the imperial consensus. As I noted at the time:

Fallon himself has long denied the hearsay evidence that he had declared, upon taking over Central Command, that a war on Iran "isn't going to happen on my watch." And in fact, the article itself depicts Fallon's true attitude toward the idea of an attack on Iran right up front, in his own words. After noting Fallon's concerns about focusing too much on Iran to the exclusion of the other "pots boiling over" in the region, Barnett presses the point and asks: And if it comes to war? Fallon replies with stark, brutal clarity:

"'Get serious,' the admiral says. 'These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.'"

When the time comes, you crush the ants. If anyone asks you to define the "American Way" in the 21st century, just quote them that one sentence.
**
UPDATE: The eagle eye of Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com caught this story on the wing: the Obama administration is moving a massive amount of weaponry, including hundreds of bunker buster bombs, to Diego Garcia. As Ditz notes:

The Sunday Herald report also cites numerous experts as saying that the lack of publicity for the move, just one of several examples of the Obama Administration adding major amounts of weaponry to the area around Iran, suggests they believe a confrontation is more likely.

Diego Garcia, you may recall, is one of the more sinister jewels in the imperial crown. As we reported here back in 2008:

Britain and America cut a secret deal: land for nukes. London sliced off a sliver of its imperial dominions and gave it to Washington, in exchange for a price reduction on some sleek new nuclear missiles. Together, the two great democracies then drove the inhabitants of the sliver from their homes by force, dumping them into poverty-ridden exile hundreds of miles away. Washington built an imperial outpost on the stolen land, a military base which it used to "project dominance" over strategic regions in Central Asia and the Middle East. Later, the outpost became yet another link in Washington's chain of "black sites" -- secret prisons where captives snatched without charges or due process could be hidden from the world and tortured.

This is the story of the Chagos Archipelago, a chain of small islands in the Indian Ocean whose inhabitants were forced from their land forty years ago to make way for a military base on the island of Diego Garcia. The base, built and staffed largely by the Americans but operated jointly with the British, has been the launching pad for countless air strikes against Iraq (in two wars) and Afghanistan. It has also served as one of the sinister way stations in America's global gulag. In return for its use of the ethnically cleansed land, Washington graciously knocked off $14 million from the price tag of some Polaris nuclear missiles that Britain craved, in its never-ending struggle to retain some crumbs of its own, now-faded "projection of dominance" on the world stage.

As John Pilger reported after the British high court rejected the Islanders' appeal to return to their homes:

"To get us out of our homes," Lizette told me, "they spread rumors we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs. The American soldiers who had arrived to build the base backed several of their big vehicles against a brick shed, and hundreds of dogs were rounded up and imprisoned there, and they gassed them through a tube from the trucks' exhaust. You could hear them crying. Then they burned them on a pyre, many still alive."

Lizette and her family were finally forced on to a rusting freighter and made to lie on a cargo of bird fertilizer during a voyage, through stormy seas, to the slums of Port Louis, Mauritius. Within months, she had lost Jollice, aged eight, and Regis, aged ten months. "They died of sadness," she said. "The eight-year-old had seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. The doctor said he could not treat sadness."

***
NOTE: No one has covered America's slide toward war with Iran -- and indeed, the accelerating moral rot of militarist empire in general -- with more depth and insight than Arthur Silber. He is in extremely low water right now, suffering from severe health problems. He has been able to post only a small handful of articles since the first of December -- and nothing at all for several weeks now. Yet his blog is his sole means of support. I don't know what his precise situation is at the moment, but it is certain to be dire. If you are able to contribute anything to help him out, I would urge you to go to his site and drop something in the donation jar.

[David Guyatt]

This is an excellent and penetrating essay. Just on the Saddam Hussein, BCCI, BNL and funneling of money to Saddam via US Farm Credits see HERE.

[Peter Lemkin]

[quote=Jan Klimkowski]

In passing, I note that the phrase "smart bunker-busting bomb" is an oxymoron.

Ah, but it does make SUCH good newspeak!

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Octopus has attempted to remove all copies of the piece below from the net.

US Congress Quietly Approves Fast Tracking Super Bunker Buster Bomb

Congress has quietly approved to fast track the deployment of the BGU-57A/B or Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). The Pentagon plans to rush the deployment of 10 BGU-57A/B "bunker buster" bombs by June 2010. The MOP is so enormous that it can only be delivered by a B-52 or a B-2A. In fact, the B-2 bombers will need to be refitted in order to carry two MOPs.

The MOP weighs in at a whopping 30,000 pounds, it's warhead weighs in at 5,300 pounds and it can penetrate 200 ft (61 m) of 5,000 psi (34 MPa) reinforced concrete, 26 ft (8 m) of 10,000 psi (69 MPa) reinforced concrete, or 130 ft (40 m) of moderately hard rock.

The bell tolls for thee Ahmadinejad. Energy Publisher

The Pentagon is accelerating by three years plans for a super bunker buster, the GBU-57A/B or Massive Ordnance Penetrator or MOP, a powerful new bomb aimed squarely at the underground nuclear facilities of Iran and North Korea. The gargantuan bomb—longer than 11 persons standing shoulder-to-shoulder or more than 20 feet base to nose, weighs 30,000 pounds. Some 18 percent of its total weight is comprised of explosives.

Guided by a precision GPS system, the MOP can penetrate an unprecedented 200 feet down before exploding with devastation into an underground bunker, such as those buried in Iran and North Korea currently used to shield rogue nuclear programs. Now Congress has quietly advanced $68 million into the 2009 budget to accelerate the purchase and deployment of ten such super bunker busters making clear they are for possible use against the regimes in Iran or North Korea. Pentagon planners are rushing to beat by months the latest June 2010 deadline for just four such bombs, and have been subsequently directed to increase the number of MOPs to at least ten.

In early July 2009, the Defense Department told a Congressional committee that the MOP was the "weapon of choice" for an “urgent operational need” enunciated by both the U.S. Pacific Command, tasked with North Korea, and the Central Command, tasked with Iran. In doing so, the Pentagon accelerated the program by three years.

The GBU-57A/B MOP is so immense it can only be carried by either a B-52 or a B2a Stealth bomber. The weapon’s explosive power is 10 times greater than its predecessor, the BLU-109. Moreover, the GBU-57A/B MOP is one third heavier than the MOAB dubbed the Mother of All Bombs.

The remaining traces of information about the GBU-57A/B MOP, the Strangelovian "Mother of All Bombs", are as footnotes in pieces like the one below from UPI, with their Hezbollah and Hamas as proxies of Iran focus:

Targeting Iran's tunnel builders
Published: March. 9, 2010 at 1:21 PM

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, March 9 (UPI) -- Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, are building underground tunnel and bunker systems for their war against Israel.

The United States noted the strategic importance of the military complexes when it imposed sanctions Feb. 10 on four companies run by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that specialize in underground engineering projects.

These little-known companies -- the Fater Engineering Institute, Imensazen Consultant Engineers' Institute, the Makin Institute and the Rahab Institute -- are subsidiaries of Khatam al-Anbia.

This is a sprawling construction empire that has been under U.S. Treasury sanctions since 2007. It is owned by the Revolutionary Guards, which has become a vast military-based conglomerate that controls much of Iran's economy.

Iran is using these firms in its efforts to provide hardened underground complexes for its nuclear facilities, such as the new uranium enrichment center near the holy city of Qom that is being built inside a mountain.

According to Arab sources, engineers from Khatam al-Anbia helped Syrian build several underground bunker complexes. They also acted as consultants to Hezbollah, which has built an elaborate network of bunker complexes containing missile storage and launching facilities, command and communications centers and linking tunnels in south Lebanon following the 2006 war with Israel.

Similar underground networks have been built in the Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah's heartland in northeastern Lebanon along the border with Syria, which supplies much of the movement's weaponry.

An earlier system built in the south, and largely undetected by Israeli intelligence, gave Hezbollah a decisive advantage in fighting Israeli ground forces during the second half of the 34-day war in 2006.

Hamas, the militant Palestinian Islamic group that controls Gaza, is also reported to have benefited from Iran's engineering outfits in the construction of underground arms dumps and supply tunnels linking southern Gaza to Egypt's Sinai region.

These networks provide Iran and its allies with underground facilities that are difficult to destroy from the air. The Rafah tunnel system has been repeatedly attacked in Israeli airstrikes but continues to function.

The difficulties in knocking out Iranian underground targets is causing considerable concern in Israel, which has threatened to mount pre-emptive airstrikes -- and possibly ballistic missiles as well -- in a bid to destroy or cripple Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

In February, Defense Minister Ehud Barak suggested to the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Security Committee that the West had found itself in an awkward position because of the Iranian focus on underground facilities.

The Qom plant, he stressed, was "located in bunkers that cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack."

Israel wants to get its hands on the most advanced of the large bunker-buster bombs being developed by the Americans.

The Jewish state's air force is believed to have received 100 5,000-pound GBU-28 penetrating bombs from the United States in 2005. This weapon, the first of the current generation of massive bunker-busters, was developed by the U.S. Air Force during the 1990-91 Gulf War against Iraq.

The laser-guided, 19-foot-long weapons, designed specifically to destroy Saddam Hussein's command centers, were built by Lockheed Martin. They can penetrate 100 feet of earth or 20 feet of concrete.

The Americans have refused to supply Israel with more powerful variants, apparently to prevent it launching a unilateral assault on Iran.

The most powerful bunker-buster in service with the U.S. Air Force is the GBU-57A/B, known as MOP, for massive ordnance penetrator.

This 20.5-foot, 30,000-pound bomb can penetrate 200 feet of reinforced concrete before its warhead of 5,300 pounds of high explosive detonates. In October 2009, the U.S. Department of Defense secured congressional approval to divert funds to accelerate production of this pulverizing weapon.

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Securit...268158866/