I started this with the idea of showing my differences with the estimable Nimmo, from whom I learned so much, and then I recalled that I'm reading Walter Karp at the moment (indispensable is his Indispensable Enemies) and he says the same thing (or would if he were alive) that McCain is put there to lose to Hillary. Hmmm.
We're facing, as they say, a lot of challenges, but I'm not sure it quite works that way.
Well, this is fun, but duty calls and I'll have to leave it to the dedicated reader. --RB
Coulter: Hillary is “Our Girl”
by Kurt Nimmo
Truth News
http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1867
February 2, 2008
Case closed. You don’t need any more evidence there is little substantive difference between “conservatives” (neocons) and “liberals” (neolibs) than the pronouncements of the Queen of Hateful Shrill, Ann Coulter, the “author” who registers to vote in multiple jurisdictions and gets away with it.
Hillary is “more conservative” than John McCain, the Manchurian candidate who hates “gooks,” mostly because the Bilderberg Queen and selectee of preference by the Rothschilds and the elite is more on track with the neocon and neoliberal plan to kill recalcitrant Muslims, break their countries into manageable pieces along tribal and ethnic lines, and impose IMF and World Bank schemes on them and thus steal their natural resources and reduce them to slave labor gulag inmates à la “communist” China.
Coulter “absolutely” believes Queen Hillary will be “stronger on the war on terrorism,” that is to say not only killing people who have the misfortune of living in “rogue nations,” but decimating what remains of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Obviously, for Coulter and the neocons, who will soon enough throw their support behind Clinton, McCain’s crude forever war pronouncements are not enough. But then, of course, McCain is but window dressing for the stampede to “elect” Hillary, an expensive circus sideshow designed to make the American people think there is a “democratic” process in the United States and that they actually have a say in who will be the next decider-commander. Not explained is why the elite feel compelled to continue this transparent charade. Nostalgia, maybe?
In order to pretend there is a difference of opinion in regard to Hillary Clinton’s impending anointment as president, Sean Hannity tells us Hillary will “nationalize health care” and “pull the troops out of Iraq,” never mind Clinton is an unabashed warmonger who voted to kill a million plus Iraqis and has repeatedly stated her desire to do likewise to grandmothers and toddlers in Iran. Coulter disagrees and actually tells the truth: the positions of Republicans and Democrats, she avers, are “about that far apart,” and she makes the point by showing us a very small space between her thumb and forefinger.
Hannity’s role as straight man to Coulter’s snake oil dance is obvious enough on its face and his supposed protestation is entirely theatrical as his boss, Rupert Murdoch, has hosted Clinton fundraisers in the not too distant past. This “interfaith ménage,” opines Forbes, redraws “America’s political lines” and is nothing if not Bismarckian realpolitik.
Oh, please. It should be obvious by now to an astute grade school student of current events that the whole thing is rigged and choreographed — albeit rather shoddily — and Coulter is nothing if not a well-paid shill who is tasked with promoting whatever candidate our rulers want. Hillary Clinton and her VP, Barack Obama, will rule the roost in politically correct fashion — as brainwashed liberals are locked in the gender and race vice and dare not complain, lest they be expelled from the herd — and the so-called conservatives, actually GWB bumper sticker neocons, will be brought into the fold by the likes of Coulter, the Queen of Mean.
Of course, Hannity and Limbaugh will play the part of the disgruntled opposition, as Clinton hatred smolders fiercely at the root of the base, and they will be paid handsomely for their petty and operatic disagreement, which is less than meaningless, to say the least, but necessary to assuage the hurt feelings of the aforementioned GWB neocon followers.
John McCain will be selected as the Republican nominee for one reason above all others — to drive an appreciable number of “conservatives” into Camp Hillary. McCain, the Manchurian candidate and Keating Five associate, is ugly and unpalatable enough to accomplish this and the neocon flag-waving base is stupid enough to buy into it and remain none the wiser for the next eight years.
Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Kurt Nimmo: Bush’s State of the Union: Mandate for Iran Attack
This is good standard Nimmo, honing in on the important stuff. I would only disagree: Bush is not a sock puppet: he's a full partner, and if you think about it a good CEO for
destruction, doing what he does best, lying, and leaving the rest to Cheney to do the enforcing. --RB
Kurt Nimmo
Truth News
http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1824
January 29, 2008
If it is true Bush — or rather the neocons, using the sock puppet Bush — plan to attack Iran before the decider-commander leaves office in a little less than a year, then the State of Union address seems to send up a couple red flags in that direction.
Consider the following:
When we met last year, militia extremists — some armed and trained by Iran — were wreaking havoc in large areas of Iraq.
Of course, there is no evidence of this, same as there was no evidence Saddam and Osama hung out together and plotted to attack the United States, as the neocons insisted prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was all bull feathers, same as this claim is a calculated lie.
As should be expected with this clan of traitors and warmongers, the lies must go on, or maybe that should be “catapulted”:
Iran is funding and training militia groups in Iraq, supporting Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, and backing Hamas’s efforts to undermine peace in the Holy Land. Tehran is also developing ballistic missiles of increasing range and continues to develop its capability to enrich uranium, which could be used to create a nuclear weapon.
Again, there is a complete paucity of evidence Iran is “training militia groups in Iraq,” a fact underscored by both Def. Sec Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace last year.
Even Anthony Cordesman, a former director of Intelligence Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, believes the neocons are full of it. “I’m not sure they understand how little credibility these statements have,” Cordesman told USA Today. “The great risk is that what may be a real issue will not be seen as real outside the United States.” Added USA Today: “Such claims, however, are being met with denials from Iran and skepticism at home. Faulty U.S. intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which Bush used to justify in part the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has eroded much of the administration’s credibility.”
Not that it matters in the United States, where the population, tuned in and mesmerized by Faux News and the like, buy whatever transparent tripe the neocons trot out as evidence there are big bad terrorists on the hunt, hungry to slaughter grade school girls.
Since Hamas was duly elected by the Palestinian people, much to the chagrin of Israel and the United States, we can only assume Bush the neocon sock puppet is declaring the Palestinians as a whole are undermining “peace in the Holy Land” from inside their open-air prison — hemmed in by a massive “security fence,” i.e., prison wall, and surrounded by thousands of troops and a vast array of military hardware provided by the U.S. — in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Maybe this collective plot to undermine peace is why Israel has slaughtered and tortured Palestinians for more than fifty years.
Bush tells you Iran is developing “ballistic missiles,” but this is a canard. As it now stands, Iran’s missiles can reach Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Armenia, Syria, that is to say neighboring states, none posing a threat to the regime in Tehran. It is estimated, if Iran acquires missiles from North Korea, it will be able to extend this range significantly, including Israel (see this map, provided by the Federation of American Scientists).
However, even with the Taepo Dong 2 missile, Iran will not be able to threaten the United States. In 2005, according to the authoritative Jane’s, Iran “acquired medium/ intermediate-range ballistic missiles” from North Korea with a range of approximately 2,500 kilometers.
In 2006, Iran’s army chief General Rahim Safavi declared on Iranian television that the “first and main goal” of a test of the Shahab-2 and Shahab-3 was “to demonstrate power and national determination to defend the country against any possible threat.” Of course, for Israel and the Bush neocons, this means Iran will nuke Israel, never mind this would be suicidal mental illness manifest.
In August, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna reported that “while Iran continues to enrich uranium in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, its fuel enrichment plant has produced ‘well below the expected quantity for a facility of this design.’ The quality of the uranium also was lower than expected, the IAEA said.” The report “praised Iran for taking ‘a significant step forward’ by agreeing to a new work plan and timelines for resolving numerous questions about the history of its nuclear program. Separately, U.N. officials said that Iran had slowed construction of a new plutonium-fuel reactor in Arak.”
It should be noted that the Security Council resolution — UNSC Resolution 1696 — contradicts the Non-Proliferation Treaty, allowing signatories to enrich uranium. The IAEA’s El-Baradei confirmed in Paragraph 52 of his November, 2003 report that “to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities referred to [in the report] were related to a nuclear weapons program.” Moreover, after extensive inspections, El-Baradei wrote Paragraph 112 of his November 2004 report that “all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities” (see Iran Affairs, January 22, 2008).
Michael Spies of the Lawyer’s Committee on Nuclear Policy (see previous link) notes:
The conclusion that no diversion has occurred certifies that the state in question is in compliance with its undertaking, under its safeguards agreement and Article III of the NPT, to not divert material to non-peaceful purposes. In the case of Iran, the IAEA was able to conclude in its November 2004 report that that all declared nuclear materials had been accounted for and therefore none had been diverted to military purposes. The IAEA reached this same conclusion in September 2005.
And yet Israel, stockpiling around 200 nuclear weapons, has not signed the NPT. Israel’s nuclear program is truly secret although, thanks to Mordechai Vanunu, we have an idea of its dimension. Kenneth S. Brower has estimated Israel has as many as 400 nuclear weapons, that is to say 400 more than Iran has. In 2004, Louis René Beres, a professor of Political Science at Purdue University and a one-time advisor for the now comatose Ariel Sharon, suggested Israel, under the Samson Option, use its nukes to “support conventional preemptions” against its Arab neighbors. Israel has a sordid history of launching numerous “conventional preemptions” against these neighbors, a fact revealed in a study of former Israeli PM Moshe Sharett’s personal diary by Livia Rokach (see Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, AAUG Press, Third Edition, 1986).
But never mind. Bush and the perfidious neocons are way behind schedule and they realize even flimsily crafted lies work well enough on millions of Americans who, like well-trained monkeys, jump when they are told there’s a turbaned Muslim lighting a fire under their posteriors.
Our message to the people of Iran is clear: We have no quarrel with you. We respect your traditions and your history. We look forward to the day when you have your freedom.
Sure they do, sort of like they respected the traditions of the Iraqi people by blowing them away with depleted uranium. So compassionate are the neocons, as I write this millions of Iraqis live under the internationally accepted standard of living of less than a dollar a day, a situation that did not exist until Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser imposed medieval sanctions, resulting in the premeditated murder of more than 500,000 Iraqi children.
As Bush reiterated in his neocon manufactured speech, Iran is next on the target list and should expect the same treatment from Bush’s Arab and Muslim hating handlers.
Considering such, if I lived in Iran I’d want a few “ballistic missiles” as well, and the sooner the better to stave off Armageddon delivered by way of countless cruise missiles, bunker busters, depleted uranium, and possibly even “min-nukes.”
***
Kurt Nimmo on TruthNews.
destruction, doing what he does best, lying, and leaving the rest to Cheney to do the enforcing. --RB
Kurt Nimmo
Truth News
http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1824
January 29, 2008
If it is true Bush — or rather the neocons, using the sock puppet Bush — plan to attack Iran before the decider-commander leaves office in a little less than a year, then the State of Union address seems to send up a couple red flags in that direction.
Consider the following:
When we met last year, militia extremists — some armed and trained by Iran — were wreaking havoc in large areas of Iraq.
Of course, there is no evidence of this, same as there was no evidence Saddam and Osama hung out together and plotted to attack the United States, as the neocons insisted prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was all bull feathers, same as this claim is a calculated lie.
As should be expected with this clan of traitors and warmongers, the lies must go on, or maybe that should be “catapulted”:
Iran is funding and training militia groups in Iraq, supporting Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, and backing Hamas’s efforts to undermine peace in the Holy Land. Tehran is also developing ballistic missiles of increasing range and continues to develop its capability to enrich uranium, which could be used to create a nuclear weapon.
Again, there is a complete paucity of evidence Iran is “training militia groups in Iraq,” a fact underscored by both Def. Sec Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace last year.
Even Anthony Cordesman, a former director of Intelligence Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, believes the neocons are full of it. “I’m not sure they understand how little credibility these statements have,” Cordesman told USA Today. “The great risk is that what may be a real issue will not be seen as real outside the United States.” Added USA Today: “Such claims, however, are being met with denials from Iran and skepticism at home. Faulty U.S. intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which Bush used to justify in part the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has eroded much of the administration’s credibility.”
Not that it matters in the United States, where the population, tuned in and mesmerized by Faux News and the like, buy whatever transparent tripe the neocons trot out as evidence there are big bad terrorists on the hunt, hungry to slaughter grade school girls.
Since Hamas was duly elected by the Palestinian people, much to the chagrin of Israel and the United States, we can only assume Bush the neocon sock puppet is declaring the Palestinians as a whole are undermining “peace in the Holy Land” from inside their open-air prison — hemmed in by a massive “security fence,” i.e., prison wall, and surrounded by thousands of troops and a vast array of military hardware provided by the U.S. — in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Maybe this collective plot to undermine peace is why Israel has slaughtered and tortured Palestinians for more than fifty years.
Bush tells you Iran is developing “ballistic missiles,” but this is a canard. As it now stands, Iran’s missiles can reach Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Armenia, Syria, that is to say neighboring states, none posing a threat to the regime in Tehran. It is estimated, if Iran acquires missiles from North Korea, it will be able to extend this range significantly, including Israel (see this map, provided by the Federation of American Scientists).
However, even with the Taepo Dong 2 missile, Iran will not be able to threaten the United States. In 2005, according to the authoritative Jane’s, Iran “acquired medium/ intermediate-range ballistic missiles” from North Korea with a range of approximately 2,500 kilometers.
In 2006, Iran’s army chief General Rahim Safavi declared on Iranian television that the “first and main goal” of a test of the Shahab-2 and Shahab-3 was “to demonstrate power and national determination to defend the country against any possible threat.” Of course, for Israel and the Bush neocons, this means Iran will nuke Israel, never mind this would be suicidal mental illness manifest.
In August, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna reported that “while Iran continues to enrich uranium in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, its fuel enrichment plant has produced ‘well below the expected quantity for a facility of this design.’ The quality of the uranium also was lower than expected, the IAEA said.” The report “praised Iran for taking ‘a significant step forward’ by agreeing to a new work plan and timelines for resolving numerous questions about the history of its nuclear program. Separately, U.N. officials said that Iran had slowed construction of a new plutonium-fuel reactor in Arak.”
It should be noted that the Security Council resolution — UNSC Resolution 1696 — contradicts the Non-Proliferation Treaty, allowing signatories to enrich uranium. The IAEA’s El-Baradei confirmed in Paragraph 52 of his November, 2003 report that “to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities referred to [in the report] were related to a nuclear weapons program.” Moreover, after extensive inspections, El-Baradei wrote Paragraph 112 of his November 2004 report that “all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities” (see Iran Affairs, January 22, 2008).
Michael Spies of the Lawyer’s Committee on Nuclear Policy (see previous link) notes:
The conclusion that no diversion has occurred certifies that the state in question is in compliance with its undertaking, under its safeguards agreement and Article III of the NPT, to not divert material to non-peaceful purposes. In the case of Iran, the IAEA was able to conclude in its November 2004 report that that all declared nuclear materials had been accounted for and therefore none had been diverted to military purposes. The IAEA reached this same conclusion in September 2005.
And yet Israel, stockpiling around 200 nuclear weapons, has not signed the NPT. Israel’s nuclear program is truly secret although, thanks to Mordechai Vanunu, we have an idea of its dimension. Kenneth S. Brower has estimated Israel has as many as 400 nuclear weapons, that is to say 400 more than Iran has. In 2004, Louis René Beres, a professor of Political Science at Purdue University and a one-time advisor for the now comatose Ariel Sharon, suggested Israel, under the Samson Option, use its nukes to “support conventional preemptions” against its Arab neighbors. Israel has a sordid history of launching numerous “conventional preemptions” against these neighbors, a fact revealed in a study of former Israeli PM Moshe Sharett’s personal diary by Livia Rokach (see Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, AAUG Press, Third Edition, 1986).
But never mind. Bush and the perfidious neocons are way behind schedule and they realize even flimsily crafted lies work well enough on millions of Americans who, like well-trained monkeys, jump when they are told there’s a turbaned Muslim lighting a fire under their posteriors.
Our message to the people of Iran is clear: We have no quarrel with you. We respect your traditions and your history. We look forward to the day when you have your freedom.
Sure they do, sort of like they respected the traditions of the Iraqi people by blowing them away with depleted uranium. So compassionate are the neocons, as I write this millions of Iraqis live under the internationally accepted standard of living of less than a dollar a day, a situation that did not exist until Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser imposed medieval sanctions, resulting in the premeditated murder of more than 500,000 Iraqi children.
As Bush reiterated in his neocon manufactured speech, Iran is next on the target list and should expect the same treatment from Bush’s Arab and Muslim hating handlers.
Considering such, if I lived in Iran I’d want a few “ballistic missiles” as well, and the sooner the better to stave off Armageddon delivered by way of countless cruise missiles, bunker busters, depleted uranium, and possibly even “min-nukes.”
***
Kurt Nimmo on TruthNews.
Friday, February 1, 2008
The Nation: Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up
Thanks to Xymphora for finding this. It was always dubious that the Iranians did this. So who did? I hate to sound like a naif, but while the the Mossad has done some wicked things, did they actually go this far? --RB
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/porter
Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up
by GARETH PORTER
[posted online on January 18, 2008]
Research for this article was supported by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.
Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration's pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush's latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city's Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina "serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies."
This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by the General Assembly of Interpol, which voted to put five former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader on the international police organization's "red list" for allegedly having planned the July 1994 bombing. But the Wall Street Journal reports that it was pressure from the Bush Administration, along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the Interpol vote. In fact, the Bush Administration's manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly in line with its long practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case against its geopolitical enemies.
After spending several months interviewing officials at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires familiar with the Argentine investigation, the head of the FBI team that assisted it and the most knowledgeable independent Argentine investigator of the case, I found that no real evidence has ever been found to implicate Iran in the bombing. Based on these interviews and the documentary record of the investigation, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the case against Iran over the AMIA bombing has been driven from the beginning by US enmity toward Iran, not by a desire to find the real perpetrators.
A 'Wall of Assumptions'
US policy toward the bombing was skewed from the beginning by a Clinton Administration strategy of isolating Iran, adopted in 1993 as part of an understanding with Israel on peace negotiations with the Palestinians. On the very day of the crime, before anything could have been known about who was responsible, Secretary of State Warren Christopher blamed "those who want to stop the peace process in the Middle East"--an obvious reference to Iran.
William Brencick, then chief of the political section at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires and the primary Embassy contact for the investigation, recalled in an interview with me last June that a "wall of assumptions" guided the US approach to the case. The primary assumptions, Brencick said, were that the explosion was a suicide bombing and that use of a suicide bomb was prima facie evidence of involvement by Hezbollah--and therefore Iran.
But the suicide-bomber thesis quickly encountered serious problems. In the wake of the explosion, the Menem government asked the United States to send a team to assist in the investigation, and two days after the bombing, experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arrived in Buenos Aires along with three FBI agents. According to an interview the head of the team, ATF explosives expert Charles Hunter, gave to a team of independent investigators headed by US journalist Joe Goldman and Argentine investigative journalist Jorge Lanata, as soon as the team arrived the federal police put forward a thesis that a white Renault Trafic van had carried the bomb that destroyed the AMIA.
Hunter quickly identified major discrepancies between the car-bomb thesis and the blast pattern recorded in photos. He wrote a report two weeks later noting that in the wake of the bombing, merchandise in a store immediately to the right of the AMIA was tightly packed against its front windows and merchandise in another shop had been blown out onto the street--suggesting that the blast came from inside rather than outside. Hunter also said he did not understand how the building across the street could still be standing if the bomb had exploded in front of the AMIA, as suggested by the car-bomb thesis.
The lack of eyewitness evidence supporting the thesis was just as striking. Of some 200 witnesses on the scene, only one claimed to have seen a white Renault Trafic. Several testified they were looking at the spot where the Trafic should have been when the explosion occurred and saw nothing. Nicolasa Romero, the wife of a Buenos Aires policeman, was that lone witness. She said she saw a white Renault Trafic approach the corner where she was standing with her sister and her 4-year-old son. But Romero's sister testified that the vehicle that passed them was not a white Trafic but rather a black-and-yellow taxi. Other witnesses reported seeing a black-and-yellow taxi seconds before the explosion.
Argentine prosecutors argued that pieces of a white Trafic imbedded in the flesh of many of the victims of the explosion proved their case for a suicide bomb. But that evidence was discredited by Gabriel Levinas, a researcher for AMIA's own legal team. Levinas is a member of a leading Jewish family in Buenos Aires who had published a human rights magazine during the dictatorship (his uncle's car was used to kidnap war criminal Adolf Eichmann and spirit him off to Israel for trial in 1961.)
He discovered that the manufacturer of the white Trafic had been sent fragments of the vehicle recovered by the police for analysis and had found that none of the pieces had ever been put under high temperature. That meant that these car fragments could not have come from the particular white Trafic that police had identified as the suicide bomb car--since that vehicle was known to have once caught fire before having been recycled and repaired.
Yet despite the lack of eyewitness testimony and the weakness of the forensic evidence, the State Department publicly embraced the suicide-bomb story in 1994 and 1995.
The Problem of Motive
Independent investigators have also long puzzled over why Iran would have carried out an action against Argentine Jews while its Hezbollah allies were embroiled in armed struggle with the Israeli military in Lebanon. In their 2006 indictment of several Iranian nationals in the bombing, Argentine prosecutors argued that Iran planned the AMIA attack because Carlos Menem's administration had abruptly canceled two contracts for the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran.
But the indictment actually provides excerpts from key documents that undermine that conclusion. According to a February 10, 1992, cable from Argentina's ambassador in Iran, the director of the American Department of Iran's foreign ministry had "emphasized the need to reach a solution to the problem [of nuclear technology transfer] that would avoid damage to other contracts." Iran thus clearly signaled its hope of finding a negotiated solution that could reactivate the suspended contracts and maintain other deals with Argentina as well.
On March 17, 1992, a bomb blast destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires--an incident for which the Argentine prosecutors also held Iran responsible. The indictment, however, quotes a top official of INVAP, an Argentine nuclear firm that dominated the National Commission on Atomic Energy, as saying that during 1992 there were "contacts" between INVAP and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran "in the expectation that the decision of the national government would be revised, allowing the tasks in the contracts to be resumed." The same official confirmed that negotiations surrounding the two canceled projects continued from 1993 to 1995--before and after the AMIA explosion. Those revelations suggest that the Iranian attitude toward Argentina at the time of the bombing was exactly the opposite of the one claimed in the indictment.
The Hezbollah motive for involvement in the AMIA bombing, according to the indictment, was revenge against the Israeli bombing of a Hezbollah training camp in the Bekaa Valley in early 1994 and the Israeli kidnapping of Shiite leader Mustapha Dirani in May. That theory fails to explain, however, why Hezbollah would choose to retaliate against Jews in Argentina. It was already at war with the Israeli forces in Lebanon, where the group was employing suicide bomb attacks in an effort to pressure Israel to end its occupation. Hezbollah had a second easy retaliatory option available, which was to launch Katyusha rockets across the border into Israeli territory.
That is exactly what Hezbollah did to retaliate for the Israeli killing of some 100 Lebanese civilians in the town of Qana in 1996. That episode inspired greater anger toward Israel among Hezbollah militants than any other event in the 1990s, according to Boston University Hezbollah specialist Augustus Richard Norton. If Hezbollah responded to this Israeli provocation with Katyusha rockets on Israeli territory, it hardly makes sense that it would have responded to a lesser Israeli offense by designing an ambitious international attack on Argentine Jews with no connection to the Israeli occupation.
The Frame-up
The keystone of the Argentine case was Carlos Alberto Telleldin, a used-car salesman with a record of shady dealings with both criminals and the police--and a Shiite last name. On July 10, 1994, Telleldin sold the white Trafic the police claimed was the suicide car to a man he described as having a Central American accent. Nine days after the bombing Telleldin was arrested on suspicion of being an accomplice to the crime.
The police claimed they were led to Telleldin by the serial number on the van's engine block, which was found in the rubble. But it would have been a remarkable lapse for the organizers of what was otherwise a very professional bombing to have left intact such a visible identification mark, one that any car thief knows how to erase. That should have been a clue that the attack was likely not orchestrated by Hezbollah, whose bomb experts were well-known by US intelligence analysts to have been clever enough, in blowing up the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983, to avoid leaving behind any forensic evidence that would lead back to them. It should also have raised questions about whether that evidence was planted by the police themselves.
It is now clear that the Menem government's real purpose in arresting Telleldin was to get him to finger those they wanted to blame for the bombing. In January 1995, Telleldin was visited by retired army Capt. Hector Pedro Vergez, a part-time agent for SIDE, the Argentine intelligence agency, who offered him $1 million and his freedom if he would identify one of five Lebanese nationals detained in Paraguay in September 2004--men the CIA said might be Hezbollah militants--as the person to whom he had sold the van. After Telleldin refused to go along with the scheme, an Argentine judge found that there was no evidence on which to detain the alleged militants.
The Buenos Aires court, which threw out the case against Telleldin in 2004, determined that a federal judge, Luisa Riva Aramayo, met with Telleldin in 1995 to discuss another possibility--paying him to testify that he had sold the van to several high-ranking figures in the Buenos Aires provincial police who were allies of Menem's political rival, Eduardo Duhalde. In July 1996, Judge Juan Jose Galeano, who was overseeing the investigation, offered Telleldin $400,000 to implicate those police officers as accomplices in the bombing. (A videotape made secretly by SIDE agents and aired on television in April 1997 showed Galeano negotiating the bribe.) A month after making the offer to Telleldin, Galeano charged three senior Buenos Aires police officials with having involvement in the bombing, based on Telleldin's testimony.
"The Whole Iran Thing Seemed Kind of Flimsy"
In an interview last May James Cheek, Clinton's Ambassador to Argentina at the time of the bombing, told me, "To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with anything." The hottest lead in the case, he recalled, was an Iranian defector named Manoucher Moatamer, who "supposedly had all this information." But Moatamer turned out to be only a dissatisfied low-ranking official without the knowledge of government decision-making that he had claimed. "We finally decided that he wasn't credible," Cheek recalled. Ron Goddard, then deputy chief of the US Mission in Buenos Aires, confirmed Cheek's account. He recalled that investigators found nothing linking Iran to the bombing. "The whole Iran thing seemed kind of flimsy," Goddard said.
James Bernazzani, then the head of the FBI's Hezbollah office, was directed in October 1997 to assemble a team of specialists to go to Buenos Aires and put the AMIA case to rest. Bernazzani, now head of the agency's New Orleans office, recalled in a November 2006 interview how he arrived to find that the Argentine investigation of the AMIA bombing had found no real evidence of Iranian or Hezbollah involvement. The only clues suggesting an Iranian link to the bombing at that time, according to Bernazzani, were a surveillance tape of Iranian cultural attache Mohsen Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic van and an analysis of telephone calls made in the weeks before the bombing.
Shortly after the bombing, the biggest Buenos Aires daily newspaper, Clarin, published a story, leaked to it by Judge Galeano, that Argentine intelligence had taped Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic "months" before the bombing. A summary of the warrants for the arrest of Rabbani and six other Iranians in 2006 continued to refer to "indisputable documents" proving that Rabbani had visited car dealers to look for a van like the one allegedly used in the bombing. In fact, the intelligence report on the surveillance of Rabbani submitted to Galeano ten days after the bombing shows that the day Rabbani looked at a car dealer's white Trafic was May 1, 1993--fifteen months before the bombing and long before Argentine prosecutors have claimed Iran decided to target AMIA.
In the absence of any concrete evidence, SIDE turned to "link analysis" of telephone records to make a circumstantial case for Iranian guilt. The SIDE analysts argued that a series of telephone calls made between July 1 and July 18, 1994, to a mobile phone in the Brazilian border city of Foz de Iguazu must have been made by the "operational group" for the bombing--and that a call allegedly made on a cellphone belonging to Rabbani could be connected to this same group. The FBI's Bernazzani told me he was appalled by SIDE's use of link analysis to establish responsibility. "It can be very dangerous," he told me. "Using that analysis, you could link my telephone to bin Laden's." Bernazzani said the conclusions reached by the Argentine investigators were merely "speculation" and said that neither he nor officials in Washington had taken it seriously as evidence pointing to Iran.
Then, in 2000, one more defector surfaced with a new tale of Iranian responsibility. Abdolghassem Mesbahi, who claimed he was once the third-ranking man in Iran's intelligence services, told Galeano the decision to bomb the AMIA had been made at a meeting of senior Iranian officials, including President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, on August 14, 1993. But Mesbahi was soon discredited. Bernazzani told me American intelligence officials believed that by 2000, Mesbahi had long since lost his access to Iranian intelligence, that he was "poor, even broke" and ready to "provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran."
A Questionable Informant
Bernazzani admitted to me that until 2003, the case against Iran was merely "circumstantial." But he claimed a breakthrough came that year, with the identification of the alleged suicide bomber as Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Lebanese Hezbollah militant, who, according to a Lebanese radio broadcast, was killed in a military operation against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon in September 1984, two months after the AMIA bombing. "We are satisfied that we have identified the bomber based on the totality of the data streams," Bernazzani told me, citing "a combination of physical and witness evidence." But the Berro identification, too, was marked by evidence of fabrication and manipulation.
The official story is that Berro's name was passed on to SIDE and the CIA by a Lebanese informant in June 2001. The informant claimed he had befriended a former Hezbollah chauffeur and assistant to top Hezbollah leaders named Abu Mohamad Yassin, who told him that a Hezbollah militant named "Brru" was the suicide bomber. That story is suspicious on several counts, the most obvious being that intelligence agencies almost never reveal the name, or even the former position, of an actual informant.
The September 2003 court testimony of Patricio Pfinnen, the SIDE official in charge of the AMIA bombing investigation until he was fired in January 2002, casts serious doubt on the informant's credibility. Pfinnen testified that when he and his colleagues went back to the informant with more questions, "something went wrong with the information, or they were lying to us." Pfinnen said his team ultimately discarded the Berro theory because the sources in Lebanon had "failed and were not certain." He concluded, "I have my doubts about [Berro] being the person who was immolated."
After Pfinnen was fired in a power struggle within the intelligence agency, SIDE named Berro as the suicide bomber in a secret report. In March 2003, just after that report was completed, Ha'aretz reported that the Mossad had not only identified the bomber as Berro but possessed a transcript of Berro's farewell telephone call to Lebanon before the bombing, during which he told his parents that he was going to "join" his brother, who had been killed in a suicide bombing in Lebanon. When the 2006 indictment was released, however, it became clear that no evidence of such a call existed.
In September 2004, a Buenos Aires court acquitted Telleldin and the police officials who had been jailed years earlier, and in August 2005 Judge Galeano was impeached and removed from office. But Galeano's successors, prosecutors Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martinez Burgos, pressed on, hoping to convince the world that they could identify Berro as the bomber. They visited Detroit, Michigan, where they interviewed two brothers of Berro and obtained photos of Berro from them. They then turned to the only witness who claimed she had seen the white Trafic at the scene of the crime--Nicolasa Romero.
In November 2005, Nisman and Burgos announced that Romero had identified Berro from the Detroit photos as the same person she had seen just before the bombing. Romero, on the other hand, said she "could not be completely certain" that Berro was the man at the scene. In court testimony, in fact, she had said she had not recognized Berro from the first set of set of four photographs she had been shown or even from a second set. She finally saw some "similarity in the face" in one of the Berro photographs, but only after she was shown a police sketch based on her description after the bombing.
Bernazzani told me that the FBI team in Buenos Aires had discovered DNA evidence that was assumed to have come from the suicide bomber in an evidence locker, and Nisman took a DNA sample from one of Berro's brothers during his visit in September 2005. "I would assume, though I don't know, that once we got the brother's DNA, they compared them," he said. But Nisman claimed to a reporter in 2006 that samples had been contaminated. Significantly, the Argentine indictment of the Iranians makes no mention of the DNA evidence.
Despite a case against Iran that lacked credible forensic or eyewitness evidence and relied heavily on dubious intelligence and a discredited defector's testimony, Nisman and Burgos drafted their indictment against six former Iranian officials in 2006. However, the government of Néstor Kirchner displayed doubts about going forward with a legal case. According to the Forward newspaper, when American Jewish groups pressed Kirchner's wife, Christina, about the indictments at a UN General Assembly in New York in September 2006, she indicated that there was no firm date for any further judicial action against Iran. Yet the indictment was released the following month.
Both the main lawyer representing the AMIA, Miguel Bronfman, and Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, who later issued the arrest warrants for the Iranians, told the BBC last May that pressure from Washington was instrumental in the sudden decision to issue the indictments the following month. Corral indicated that he had no doubt that the Argentine authorities had been urged to "join in international attempts to isolate the regime in Tehran."
A senior White House official just called the AMIA case a "very clear definition of what Iranian state sponsorship of terrorism means." In fact, the US insistence on pinning that crime on Iran in order to isolate the Tehran regime, even though it had no evidence to support that accusation, is a perfect definition of cynical creation of an accusation in the service of power interests.
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/porter
Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up
by GARETH PORTER
[posted online on January 18, 2008]
Research for this article was supported by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.
Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration's pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush's latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city's Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina "serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies."
This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by the General Assembly of Interpol, which voted to put five former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader on the international police organization's "red list" for allegedly having planned the July 1994 bombing. But the Wall Street Journal reports that it was pressure from the Bush Administration, along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the Interpol vote. In fact, the Bush Administration's manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly in line with its long practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case against its geopolitical enemies.
After spending several months interviewing officials at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires familiar with the Argentine investigation, the head of the FBI team that assisted it and the most knowledgeable independent Argentine investigator of the case, I found that no real evidence has ever been found to implicate Iran in the bombing. Based on these interviews and the documentary record of the investigation, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the case against Iran over the AMIA bombing has been driven from the beginning by US enmity toward Iran, not by a desire to find the real perpetrators.
A 'Wall of Assumptions'
US policy toward the bombing was skewed from the beginning by a Clinton Administration strategy of isolating Iran, adopted in 1993 as part of an understanding with Israel on peace negotiations with the Palestinians. On the very day of the crime, before anything could have been known about who was responsible, Secretary of State Warren Christopher blamed "those who want to stop the peace process in the Middle East"--an obvious reference to Iran.
William Brencick, then chief of the political section at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires and the primary Embassy contact for the investigation, recalled in an interview with me last June that a "wall of assumptions" guided the US approach to the case. The primary assumptions, Brencick said, were that the explosion was a suicide bombing and that use of a suicide bomb was prima facie evidence of involvement by Hezbollah--and therefore Iran.
But the suicide-bomber thesis quickly encountered serious problems. In the wake of the explosion, the Menem government asked the United States to send a team to assist in the investigation, and two days after the bombing, experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arrived in Buenos Aires along with three FBI agents. According to an interview the head of the team, ATF explosives expert Charles Hunter, gave to a team of independent investigators headed by US journalist Joe Goldman and Argentine investigative journalist Jorge Lanata, as soon as the team arrived the federal police put forward a thesis that a white Renault Trafic van had carried the bomb that destroyed the AMIA.
Hunter quickly identified major discrepancies between the car-bomb thesis and the blast pattern recorded in photos. He wrote a report two weeks later noting that in the wake of the bombing, merchandise in a store immediately to the right of the AMIA was tightly packed against its front windows and merchandise in another shop had been blown out onto the street--suggesting that the blast came from inside rather than outside. Hunter also said he did not understand how the building across the street could still be standing if the bomb had exploded in front of the AMIA, as suggested by the car-bomb thesis.
The lack of eyewitness evidence supporting the thesis was just as striking. Of some 200 witnesses on the scene, only one claimed to have seen a white Renault Trafic. Several testified they were looking at the spot where the Trafic should have been when the explosion occurred and saw nothing. Nicolasa Romero, the wife of a Buenos Aires policeman, was that lone witness. She said she saw a white Renault Trafic approach the corner where she was standing with her sister and her 4-year-old son. But Romero's sister testified that the vehicle that passed them was not a white Trafic but rather a black-and-yellow taxi. Other witnesses reported seeing a black-and-yellow taxi seconds before the explosion.
Argentine prosecutors argued that pieces of a white Trafic imbedded in the flesh of many of the victims of the explosion proved their case for a suicide bomb. But that evidence was discredited by Gabriel Levinas, a researcher for AMIA's own legal team. Levinas is a member of a leading Jewish family in Buenos Aires who had published a human rights magazine during the dictatorship (his uncle's car was used to kidnap war criminal Adolf Eichmann and spirit him off to Israel for trial in 1961.)
He discovered that the manufacturer of the white Trafic had been sent fragments of the vehicle recovered by the police for analysis and had found that none of the pieces had ever been put under high temperature. That meant that these car fragments could not have come from the particular white Trafic that police had identified as the suicide bomb car--since that vehicle was known to have once caught fire before having been recycled and repaired.
Yet despite the lack of eyewitness testimony and the weakness of the forensic evidence, the State Department publicly embraced the suicide-bomb story in 1994 and 1995.
The Problem of Motive
Independent investigators have also long puzzled over why Iran would have carried out an action against Argentine Jews while its Hezbollah allies were embroiled in armed struggle with the Israeli military in Lebanon. In their 2006 indictment of several Iranian nationals in the bombing, Argentine prosecutors argued that Iran planned the AMIA attack because Carlos Menem's administration had abruptly canceled two contracts for the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran.
But the indictment actually provides excerpts from key documents that undermine that conclusion. According to a February 10, 1992, cable from Argentina's ambassador in Iran, the director of the American Department of Iran's foreign ministry had "emphasized the need to reach a solution to the problem [of nuclear technology transfer] that would avoid damage to other contracts." Iran thus clearly signaled its hope of finding a negotiated solution that could reactivate the suspended contracts and maintain other deals with Argentina as well.
On March 17, 1992, a bomb blast destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires--an incident for which the Argentine prosecutors also held Iran responsible. The indictment, however, quotes a top official of INVAP, an Argentine nuclear firm that dominated the National Commission on Atomic Energy, as saying that during 1992 there were "contacts" between INVAP and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran "in the expectation that the decision of the national government would be revised, allowing the tasks in the contracts to be resumed." The same official confirmed that negotiations surrounding the two canceled projects continued from 1993 to 1995--before and after the AMIA explosion. Those revelations suggest that the Iranian attitude toward Argentina at the time of the bombing was exactly the opposite of the one claimed in the indictment.
The Hezbollah motive for involvement in the AMIA bombing, according to the indictment, was revenge against the Israeli bombing of a Hezbollah training camp in the Bekaa Valley in early 1994 and the Israeli kidnapping of Shiite leader Mustapha Dirani in May. That theory fails to explain, however, why Hezbollah would choose to retaliate against Jews in Argentina. It was already at war with the Israeli forces in Lebanon, where the group was employing suicide bomb attacks in an effort to pressure Israel to end its occupation. Hezbollah had a second easy retaliatory option available, which was to launch Katyusha rockets across the border into Israeli territory.
That is exactly what Hezbollah did to retaliate for the Israeli killing of some 100 Lebanese civilians in the town of Qana in 1996. That episode inspired greater anger toward Israel among Hezbollah militants than any other event in the 1990s, according to Boston University Hezbollah specialist Augustus Richard Norton. If Hezbollah responded to this Israeli provocation with Katyusha rockets on Israeli territory, it hardly makes sense that it would have responded to a lesser Israeli offense by designing an ambitious international attack on Argentine Jews with no connection to the Israeli occupation.
The Frame-up
The keystone of the Argentine case was Carlos Alberto Telleldin, a used-car salesman with a record of shady dealings with both criminals and the police--and a Shiite last name. On July 10, 1994, Telleldin sold the white Trafic the police claimed was the suicide car to a man he described as having a Central American accent. Nine days after the bombing Telleldin was arrested on suspicion of being an accomplice to the crime.
The police claimed they were led to Telleldin by the serial number on the van's engine block, which was found in the rubble. But it would have been a remarkable lapse for the organizers of what was otherwise a very professional bombing to have left intact such a visible identification mark, one that any car thief knows how to erase. That should have been a clue that the attack was likely not orchestrated by Hezbollah, whose bomb experts were well-known by US intelligence analysts to have been clever enough, in blowing up the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983, to avoid leaving behind any forensic evidence that would lead back to them. It should also have raised questions about whether that evidence was planted by the police themselves.
It is now clear that the Menem government's real purpose in arresting Telleldin was to get him to finger those they wanted to blame for the bombing. In January 1995, Telleldin was visited by retired army Capt. Hector Pedro Vergez, a part-time agent for SIDE, the Argentine intelligence agency, who offered him $1 million and his freedom if he would identify one of five Lebanese nationals detained in Paraguay in September 2004--men the CIA said might be Hezbollah militants--as the person to whom he had sold the van. After Telleldin refused to go along with the scheme, an Argentine judge found that there was no evidence on which to detain the alleged militants.
The Buenos Aires court, which threw out the case against Telleldin in 2004, determined that a federal judge, Luisa Riva Aramayo, met with Telleldin in 1995 to discuss another possibility--paying him to testify that he had sold the van to several high-ranking figures in the Buenos Aires provincial police who were allies of Menem's political rival, Eduardo Duhalde. In July 1996, Judge Juan Jose Galeano, who was overseeing the investigation, offered Telleldin $400,000 to implicate those police officers as accomplices in the bombing. (A videotape made secretly by SIDE agents and aired on television in April 1997 showed Galeano negotiating the bribe.) A month after making the offer to Telleldin, Galeano charged three senior Buenos Aires police officials with having involvement in the bombing, based on Telleldin's testimony.
"The Whole Iran Thing Seemed Kind of Flimsy"
In an interview last May James Cheek, Clinton's Ambassador to Argentina at the time of the bombing, told me, "To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with anything." The hottest lead in the case, he recalled, was an Iranian defector named Manoucher Moatamer, who "supposedly had all this information." But Moatamer turned out to be only a dissatisfied low-ranking official without the knowledge of government decision-making that he had claimed. "We finally decided that he wasn't credible," Cheek recalled. Ron Goddard, then deputy chief of the US Mission in Buenos Aires, confirmed Cheek's account. He recalled that investigators found nothing linking Iran to the bombing. "The whole Iran thing seemed kind of flimsy," Goddard said.
James Bernazzani, then the head of the FBI's Hezbollah office, was directed in October 1997 to assemble a team of specialists to go to Buenos Aires and put the AMIA case to rest. Bernazzani, now head of the agency's New Orleans office, recalled in a November 2006 interview how he arrived to find that the Argentine investigation of the AMIA bombing had found no real evidence of Iranian or Hezbollah involvement. The only clues suggesting an Iranian link to the bombing at that time, according to Bernazzani, were a surveillance tape of Iranian cultural attache Mohsen Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic van and an analysis of telephone calls made in the weeks before the bombing.
Shortly after the bombing, the biggest Buenos Aires daily newspaper, Clarin, published a story, leaked to it by Judge Galeano, that Argentine intelligence had taped Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic "months" before the bombing. A summary of the warrants for the arrest of Rabbani and six other Iranians in 2006 continued to refer to "indisputable documents" proving that Rabbani had visited car dealers to look for a van like the one allegedly used in the bombing. In fact, the intelligence report on the surveillance of Rabbani submitted to Galeano ten days after the bombing shows that the day Rabbani looked at a car dealer's white Trafic was May 1, 1993--fifteen months before the bombing and long before Argentine prosecutors have claimed Iran decided to target AMIA.
In the absence of any concrete evidence, SIDE turned to "link analysis" of telephone records to make a circumstantial case for Iranian guilt. The SIDE analysts argued that a series of telephone calls made between July 1 and July 18, 1994, to a mobile phone in the Brazilian border city of Foz de Iguazu must have been made by the "operational group" for the bombing--and that a call allegedly made on a cellphone belonging to Rabbani could be connected to this same group. The FBI's Bernazzani told me he was appalled by SIDE's use of link analysis to establish responsibility. "It can be very dangerous," he told me. "Using that analysis, you could link my telephone to bin Laden's." Bernazzani said the conclusions reached by the Argentine investigators were merely "speculation" and said that neither he nor officials in Washington had taken it seriously as evidence pointing to Iran.
Then, in 2000, one more defector surfaced with a new tale of Iranian responsibility. Abdolghassem Mesbahi, who claimed he was once the third-ranking man in Iran's intelligence services, told Galeano the decision to bomb the AMIA had been made at a meeting of senior Iranian officials, including President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, on August 14, 1993. But Mesbahi was soon discredited. Bernazzani told me American intelligence officials believed that by 2000, Mesbahi had long since lost his access to Iranian intelligence, that he was "poor, even broke" and ready to "provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran."
A Questionable Informant
Bernazzani admitted to me that until 2003, the case against Iran was merely "circumstantial." But he claimed a breakthrough came that year, with the identification of the alleged suicide bomber as Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Lebanese Hezbollah militant, who, according to a Lebanese radio broadcast, was killed in a military operation against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon in September 1984, two months after the AMIA bombing. "We are satisfied that we have identified the bomber based on the totality of the data streams," Bernazzani told me, citing "a combination of physical and witness evidence." But the Berro identification, too, was marked by evidence of fabrication and manipulation.
The official story is that Berro's name was passed on to SIDE and the CIA by a Lebanese informant in June 2001. The informant claimed he had befriended a former Hezbollah chauffeur and assistant to top Hezbollah leaders named Abu Mohamad Yassin, who told him that a Hezbollah militant named "Brru" was the suicide bomber. That story is suspicious on several counts, the most obvious being that intelligence agencies almost never reveal the name, or even the former position, of an actual informant.
The September 2003 court testimony of Patricio Pfinnen, the SIDE official in charge of the AMIA bombing investigation until he was fired in January 2002, casts serious doubt on the informant's credibility. Pfinnen testified that when he and his colleagues went back to the informant with more questions, "something went wrong with the information, or they were lying to us." Pfinnen said his team ultimately discarded the Berro theory because the sources in Lebanon had "failed and were not certain." He concluded, "I have my doubts about [Berro] being the person who was immolated."
After Pfinnen was fired in a power struggle within the intelligence agency, SIDE named Berro as the suicide bomber in a secret report. In March 2003, just after that report was completed, Ha'aretz reported that the Mossad had not only identified the bomber as Berro but possessed a transcript of Berro's farewell telephone call to Lebanon before the bombing, during which he told his parents that he was going to "join" his brother, who had been killed in a suicide bombing in Lebanon. When the 2006 indictment was released, however, it became clear that no evidence of such a call existed.
In September 2004, a Buenos Aires court acquitted Telleldin and the police officials who had been jailed years earlier, and in August 2005 Judge Galeano was impeached and removed from office. But Galeano's successors, prosecutors Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martinez Burgos, pressed on, hoping to convince the world that they could identify Berro as the bomber. They visited Detroit, Michigan, where they interviewed two brothers of Berro and obtained photos of Berro from them. They then turned to the only witness who claimed she had seen the white Trafic at the scene of the crime--Nicolasa Romero.
In November 2005, Nisman and Burgos announced that Romero had identified Berro from the Detroit photos as the same person she had seen just before the bombing. Romero, on the other hand, said she "could not be completely certain" that Berro was the man at the scene. In court testimony, in fact, she had said she had not recognized Berro from the first set of set of four photographs she had been shown or even from a second set. She finally saw some "similarity in the face" in one of the Berro photographs, but only after she was shown a police sketch based on her description after the bombing.
Bernazzani told me that the FBI team in Buenos Aires had discovered DNA evidence that was assumed to have come from the suicide bomber in an evidence locker, and Nisman took a DNA sample from one of Berro's brothers during his visit in September 2005. "I would assume, though I don't know, that once we got the brother's DNA, they compared them," he said. But Nisman claimed to a reporter in 2006 that samples had been contaminated. Significantly, the Argentine indictment of the Iranians makes no mention of the DNA evidence.
Despite a case against Iran that lacked credible forensic or eyewitness evidence and relied heavily on dubious intelligence and a discredited defector's testimony, Nisman and Burgos drafted their indictment against six former Iranian officials in 2006. However, the government of Néstor Kirchner displayed doubts about going forward with a legal case. According to the Forward newspaper, when American Jewish groups pressed Kirchner's wife, Christina, about the indictments at a UN General Assembly in New York in September 2006, she indicated that there was no firm date for any further judicial action against Iran. Yet the indictment was released the following month.
Both the main lawyer representing the AMIA, Miguel Bronfman, and Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, who later issued the arrest warrants for the Iranians, told the BBC last May that pressure from Washington was instrumental in the sudden decision to issue the indictments the following month. Corral indicated that he had no doubt that the Argentine authorities had been urged to "join in international attempts to isolate the regime in Tehran."
A senior White House official just called the AMIA case a "very clear definition of what Iranian state sponsorship of terrorism means." In fact, the US insistence on pinning that crime on Iran in order to isolate the Tehran regime, even though it had no evidence to support that accusation, is a perfect definition of cynical creation of an accusation in the service of power interests.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents - Christians, Jews and Muslims alike," Gates said in a keynote address at an international security conference in Bahrain. "There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing." -- Secretary Robert Gates
Gates, despite his more laid back demeanor is clearly Rumsfeld redux. Iran has launched no war against its neighbors as has Israel or across the oceans as has the US, and both Hizbollah and Hamas are, as we know, genuine grass roots movements fighting for their respective people's liberation from Israel's chronic invasions in the first instance and six decades of occupation in the second. Neither group has attacked the US and the accusation that Hizbollah, than in its infancy, was responsible for the attack on the US Marine barracks in 1983, has never been proved. Gates's audience must have rolled its collective eyes when he had the nerve to say, "Israel is not training terrorists to subvert its neighbors. It has not shipped weapons into a place like Iraq to kill thousands of innocent civilians covertly. It has not threatened to destroy any of its neighbors. It is not trying to destabilize the government of Lebanon." If any two countries hands are soiled with the blood of innocents, it is the US and Israel and since when lobbying for Israel part of the "Defense" Secretary's job description? Another rhetorical question, of course. Jeff
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=932361
U.S. Defense Sec.: Gulf nations must band together to counter IranBy News Agencies
December 9, 2007
Persian Gulf nations must demand that Iran come clean about its past nuclear ambitions and openly vow to not develop such weapons in the future, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Saturday.
In a broad call to diplomatic arms, Gates exhorted leaders from the Gulf to band together to force Iran to stop its uranium enrichment program and to help the fragile Iraqi government.
"Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents - Christians, Jews and Muslims alike," Gates said in a keynote address at an international security conference in Bahrain. "There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing."
And in a sarcastic riff, he goaded Iran to acknowledge its bad behavior - from arming terrorists in Iraq to its support for militant organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.
Asked if the United States would be willing to sit down and talk with Iran, Gates said the behavior of the "new leadership of Iran has not given one confidence that a dialogue would be productive."
Noting that Iran embraced the recent U.S. intelligence estimate that concluded it had actually stopped atomic weapons development in 2003, Gates said Iran should accept that all other intelligence conclusions about its conduct are true. When the report came out earlier this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hailed it as a declaration of victory for his country.
"In reality, you cannot pick and choose only the conclusions you like of this National Intelligence Estimate," Gates said. "Since that government now acknowledges the quality of American intelligence assessments, I assume that it also will embrace as valid American intelligence assessments of its funding and training of militia groups in Iraq."
Gates said Iran should also acknowledge it delivers weapons to terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, supports terror groups and continues to develop ballistic missiles that could be used to carry weapons of mass destruction.
Gates' rebukes didn't reach any Iranian ears directly, since Iran decided at the last moment not to attend the gathering, organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
While Gates used the intelligence estimate as a hammer against Iran here, the report has bruised the Bush administration. The findings were in stark contrast to a 2005 estimate that said Tehran was continuing its weapons development.
And it flies in the face of U.S. President George W. Bush's rhetoric on Iran, such as when he said in October that people interested in avoiding World War III should be working to prevent Iran from having the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The administration has acknowledged that the report may make it harder to build international support to persuade Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program.
Gates defended Israel's nuclear policy, saying that Israel did not seek to destroy its neighbors or support terrorism, unlike Iran.
Asked whether he thought Israel's nuclear program posed a threat to the region, Gates replied: "No, I do not."
The statement was greeted by laughter from a room filled with government officials from Middle Eastern countries.
Israel is widely assumed to have the region's only atomic arsenal, but declines to confirm or deny it.
Gates dismissed the allegation that the United States applied a double standard on the nuclear issue by supporting Israel while calling for Iran to abandon its enrichment activities, which Tehran says are for peaceful purposes.
"Israel is not training terrorists to subvert its neighbors. It has not shipped weapons into a place like Iraq to kill thousands of innocent civilians covertly," Gates said.
"It has not threatened to destroy any of its neighbors. It is not trying to destabilize the government of Lebanon.
"So I think there are significant differences in terms of both the history and the behavior of the Iranian and Israeli governments. I understand there is a difference of view on that," he said.
Gates' speech followed efforts by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to press for new sanctions against Iran.
Rice asserted Friday in Brussels, Belgium, that Washington would continue pressing for new sanctions against Iran while holding talks to convince Tehran to come clean about its nuclear program.
But Russia ignored her calls to punish Iran. Despite continued support from NATO and other European allies, Rice was unable to convince Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that fresh sanctions were urgently needed.
Rice said her talks with Lavrov were an extension of other conversations we have had, suggesting the two didn't see eye to eye.
Gates, in his speech, pressed Gulf nations to back sanctions to force Iran to suspend enrichment, and to demand that Iran openly affirm that it does not intend to develop nuclear weapons in the future.
"In a complex region where partnerships do not come easy," Gates said the countries need to pull together and develop regional air and missile defense systems.
Gates ended his speech with a grim warning against underestimating the United States.
"Some countries," he said, may believe our resolve has been corroded by the challenges we face at home and abroad. This would be a grave misconception."
"Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and the former Soviet Union all made that miscalculation," Gates said. "All paid the price. All are on the ash heap of history."
Gates' stop in Bahrain is the last stop on a frenetic, weeklong tour of the region, which included meetings with military commanders on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran sends protest letter over U.S. nuclear "espionage"
Iran has sent a protest letter to the United States accusing it of spying on the Islamic state's nuclear activities, the official IRNA news reported on Saturday, citing the country's foreign minister.
The letter, submitted to the Swiss embassy in Tehran which handles U.S. interests in the country, was in reaction to the U.S. intelligence report published last Monday.
"The ministry submitted a letter to the Swiss embassy in Tehran ... demanding explanations over America's espionage on Iran's nuclear case," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted as saying by IRNA.
Bolton: U.S. intelligence report influenced by politics
U.S. intelligence services were seeking to influence political policy-making with their assessment Iran had halted its nuclear arms program in 2003, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said.
Der Spiegel magazine quoted Bolton on Saturday as saying the aim of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), contradicting his and President George W. Bush's own oft-stated position, was not to provide the latest intelligence on Iran.
"This is politics disguised as intelligence," Bolton was quoted as saying in an article appearing in next week's edition.
Bolton described the NIE, released on Monday, as a "quasi-putsch" by the agencies, Der Spiegel said.
Bolton has long criticized Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for refusing to declare that there was hard evidence Tehran was trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Earlier this year Bolton said: "Regime change or the use of force are the only available options to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapons
capability, if they want it."
Gates, despite his more laid back demeanor is clearly Rumsfeld redux. Iran has launched no war against its neighbors as has Israel or across the oceans as has the US, and both Hizbollah and Hamas are, as we know, genuine grass roots movements fighting for their respective people's liberation from Israel's chronic invasions in the first instance and six decades of occupation in the second. Neither group has attacked the US and the accusation that Hizbollah, than in its infancy, was responsible for the attack on the US Marine barracks in 1983, has never been proved. Gates's audience must have rolled its collective eyes when he had the nerve to say, "Israel is not training terrorists to subvert its neighbors. It has not shipped weapons into a place like Iraq to kill thousands of innocent civilians covertly. It has not threatened to destroy any of its neighbors. It is not trying to destabilize the government of Lebanon." If any two countries hands are soiled with the blood of innocents, it is the US and Israel and since when lobbying for Israel part of the "Defense" Secretary's job description? Another rhetorical question, of course. Jeff
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=932361
U.S. Defense Sec.: Gulf nations must band together to counter IranBy News Agencies
December 9, 2007
Persian Gulf nations must demand that Iran come clean about its past nuclear ambitions and openly vow to not develop such weapons in the future, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Saturday.
In a broad call to diplomatic arms, Gates exhorted leaders from the Gulf to band together to force Iran to stop its uranium enrichment program and to help the fragile Iraqi government.
"Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents - Christians, Jews and Muslims alike," Gates said in a keynote address at an international security conference in Bahrain. "There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing."
And in a sarcastic riff, he goaded Iran to acknowledge its bad behavior - from arming terrorists in Iraq to its support for militant organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.
Asked if the United States would be willing to sit down and talk with Iran, Gates said the behavior of the "new leadership of Iran has not given one confidence that a dialogue would be productive."
Noting that Iran embraced the recent U.S. intelligence estimate that concluded it had actually stopped atomic weapons development in 2003, Gates said Iran should accept that all other intelligence conclusions about its conduct are true. When the report came out earlier this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hailed it as a declaration of victory for his country.
"In reality, you cannot pick and choose only the conclusions you like of this National Intelligence Estimate," Gates said. "Since that government now acknowledges the quality of American intelligence assessments, I assume that it also will embrace as valid American intelligence assessments of its funding and training of militia groups in Iraq."
Gates said Iran should also acknowledge it delivers weapons to terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, supports terror groups and continues to develop ballistic missiles that could be used to carry weapons of mass destruction.
Gates' rebukes didn't reach any Iranian ears directly, since Iran decided at the last moment not to attend the gathering, organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
While Gates used the intelligence estimate as a hammer against Iran here, the report has bruised the Bush administration. The findings were in stark contrast to a 2005 estimate that said Tehran was continuing its weapons development.
And it flies in the face of U.S. President George W. Bush's rhetoric on Iran, such as when he said in October that people interested in avoiding World War III should be working to prevent Iran from having the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The administration has acknowledged that the report may make it harder to build international support to persuade Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program.
Gates defended Israel's nuclear policy, saying that Israel did not seek to destroy its neighbors or support terrorism, unlike Iran.
Asked whether he thought Israel's nuclear program posed a threat to the region, Gates replied: "No, I do not."
The statement was greeted by laughter from a room filled with government officials from Middle Eastern countries.
Israel is widely assumed to have the region's only atomic arsenal, but declines to confirm or deny it.
Gates dismissed the allegation that the United States applied a double standard on the nuclear issue by supporting Israel while calling for Iran to abandon its enrichment activities, which Tehran says are for peaceful purposes.
"Israel is not training terrorists to subvert its neighbors. It has not shipped weapons into a place like Iraq to kill thousands of innocent civilians covertly," Gates said.
"It has not threatened to destroy any of its neighbors. It is not trying to destabilize the government of Lebanon.
"So I think there are significant differences in terms of both the history and the behavior of the Iranian and Israeli governments. I understand there is a difference of view on that," he said.
Gates' speech followed efforts by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to press for new sanctions against Iran.
Rice asserted Friday in Brussels, Belgium, that Washington would continue pressing for new sanctions against Iran while holding talks to convince Tehran to come clean about its nuclear program.
But Russia ignored her calls to punish Iran. Despite continued support from NATO and other European allies, Rice was unable to convince Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that fresh sanctions were urgently needed.
Rice said her talks with Lavrov were an extension of other conversations we have had, suggesting the two didn't see eye to eye.
Gates, in his speech, pressed Gulf nations to back sanctions to force Iran to suspend enrichment, and to demand that Iran openly affirm that it does not intend to develop nuclear weapons in the future.
"In a complex region where partnerships do not come easy," Gates said the countries need to pull together and develop regional air and missile defense systems.
Gates ended his speech with a grim warning against underestimating the United States.
"Some countries," he said, may believe our resolve has been corroded by the challenges we face at home and abroad. This would be a grave misconception."
"Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and the former Soviet Union all made that miscalculation," Gates said. "All paid the price. All are on the ash heap of history."
Gates' stop in Bahrain is the last stop on a frenetic, weeklong tour of the region, which included meetings with military commanders on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran sends protest letter over U.S. nuclear "espionage"
Iran has sent a protest letter to the United States accusing it of spying on the Islamic state's nuclear activities, the official IRNA news reported on Saturday, citing the country's foreign minister.
The letter, submitted to the Swiss embassy in Tehran which handles U.S. interests in the country, was in reaction to the U.S. intelligence report published last Monday.
"The ministry submitted a letter to the Swiss embassy in Tehran ... demanding explanations over America's espionage on Iran's nuclear case," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted as saying by IRNA.
Bolton: U.S. intelligence report influenced by politics
U.S. intelligence services were seeking to influence political policy-making with their assessment Iran had halted its nuclear arms program in 2003, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said.
Der Spiegel magazine quoted Bolton on Saturday as saying the aim of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), contradicting his and President George W. Bush's own oft-stated position, was not to provide the latest intelligence on Iran.
"This is politics disguised as intelligence," Bolton was quoted as saying in an article appearing in next week's edition.
Bolton described the NIE, released on Monday, as a "quasi-putsch" by the agencies, Der Spiegel said.
Bolton has long criticized Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for refusing to declare that there was hard evidence Tehran was trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Earlier this year Bolton said: "Regime change or the use of force are the only available options to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapons
capability, if they want it."
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