Patrick Cockburn: This bizarre plot goes against all that is known of Iran's intelligence service
The claim that Iran employed a used-car salesman with a conviction for cheque fraud to hire Mexican gangsters to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington goes against all that is known of Iran's highly sophisticated intelligence service. The confident announcement of this bizarre plot by the US Attorney General Eric Holder sounds alarmingly similar to Secretary of State Colin Powell's notorious claim before the UN in 2003 that the US possessed irrefutable evidence Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. The problem is that the US government has very publicly committed itself to a version of events, however unlikely, that, if true, would be a case for war against Iran. It will be difficult for the US to back away from such allegations now. Could the accusations be true? The plot as described in court was puerile, easy to discover and unlikely to succeed. A Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant in Corpus Christi, Texas, with supposed links to Los Zetas gangsters in Mexico, said he had been approached by an Iranian friend of his aunt called Mansour Arbabsiar to hire the Zetas to make attacks. A link is established with the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). None of this makes sense. The IRGC is famous for making sure that responsibility for its actions can never be traced to Iran. It usually operates through proxies. Yet suddenly here it is sending $100,000 (£63,000) from a known IRGC bank account to hire assassins in Mexico. The beneficiaries from such a plot are evident. There will be those on the neo-con right and extreme supporters of Israel who have long been pressing for a war with Iran. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have been vociferously asserting that Iran is orchestrating Shia pro-democracy protests, but without finding many believers in the rest of the world. Their claims are now likely to be taken more seriously in Washington. There will be less pressure on countries like Bahrain to accommodate their Shia populations. In Iraq, the US and Britain were always seeing Iran's hidden hand supporting their opponents, but they could never quite prove it. It was also true, to a degree never appreciated in the US, that Washington and Tehran were at one in getting rid of Saddam Hussein and installing a Shia government. There were points in common and a struggle for influence. The same has been true in Afghanistan, where Iran was delighted to see the anti-Shia Taliban overthrown in 2001. Some Iran specialists suggest there might be a "rogue faction" within the Revolutionary Guard, but there is no evidence such a body exists or of a convincing motive for it to be associating with Mexican gangsters. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-this-bizarre-plot-goes-against-all-that-is-known-of-irans-intelligence-service-2369657.html Questions over Alleged Islamic Republic Assassination Plot in US by MUHAMMAD SAHIMI in Los Angeles 12 Oct 2011 05:00 >From motive to method, elements of purported plan don't readily add up. [ comment ] On Tuesday afternoon, ABC News reported that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration had succeeding in disrupting a plot to commit a "significant terrorist act in the United States" tied to Iran. According to the report, the plot aimed to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir (pictured), with a bomb and then to carry out bomb attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington, D.C. Bombings of the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires, the Argentinian capital, were also supposedly discussed. The report soon became official when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder declared in a press conference that the plan was "conceived, sponsored and was directed from Iran" and called it a "flagrant" violation of U.S. and international law. "The U.S. is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions," Holder said, adding that the White House will be meeting with federal agencies before announcing "further action" in regards to Iran. FBI Director Robert Mueller said the arrest of a suspect in the plot demonstrates that the United States will "bring the full weight of law to bear on those responsible," and that any attempts to kill foreign officials "on American soil will not be tolerated." That one suspect currently under arrest is Mansour Arbabsiar, an Iranian American who resides in Corpus Christi, Texas. Arbabsiar approached a DEA informant who he thought was a member of the Zetas Mexican drug organization to ask the cartel to carry out the assassination of the Saudi ambassador. Arbabsiar claimed he was being "directed by high-ranking members of the Iranian government," including a cousin who was "a member of the Iranian army but did not wear a uniform," who counter-terrorism officials believe may be part of the Quds force, the special operations unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Arbabsiar and Gohlam Shakuri, supposedly an Iranian official, were named in a five-count criminal complaint filed Tuesday afternoon in federal court in New York. Shakuri is in Iran. The indictment mentions another Iranian official, but his name has not been revealed. Iran quickly rejected the claim. Ramin Mehmanparast, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said, "The false claim for the assassination of Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S. [by Iranian agents] is devoid of any truth." Condemning all terrorist acts, Mehmanparast called the claim a "ridiculous show" that is intended to create divisions, "pursued by the enemies of Islam in the region," with the goal of "helping Israel to exit from its present isolation." The question now is: Can the claim possibly be true? Before addressing the question, let me first emphasize that there is almost nothing that the Tehran hardliners might do that could surprise me. This perspective is based on their long track record, both within and outside Iran. Therefore, if the claim turns out to be true -- if it is shown that Iranian agents did want to carry out the alleged plot -- I would not be deeply surprised. Having said that, however, I must state that at this point, I am highly skeptical about the entire episode. In fact, the more I learn about the claim and the indictment, the more I think this may be a classic case of entrapment on the part of the FBI/DEA agents, of the kind that has happened too many times in the past in the United States to be ignored. But let us analyze the claim carefully to see whether it is plausible at all. Hence, for the sake of argument, let us assume that the claim is true. The question is, What would the hardliners have gained, had they succeeded? As I see it, nothing but more trouble and intense international pressure, not to mention the further wrath of the United States and Saudi Arabia. One may argue that such a line of thinking assumes that the hardliners are rational people, and what have done in Iran indicates that they are not. But, in fact, despite its repressive domestic policy, when it comes to dealing with the outside world, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has followed a pragmatic approach, based first and foremost on protecting itself from external physical attacks, and then on expanding its influence when and where possible. We can see this from how it dealt with and received weapons from Israel in the 1980s during the notorious Iran-Contra affair, from the pragmatic way it sat out the conflict when the U.S. and its allies attacked Iraq to expel it from Kuwait in 1990 (despite many internal voices demanding that Iran assist Saddam Hussein's regime against the Western forces), from its arming of the Bosnian Muslims with U.S. consent during the war with the Serbs, and from the significant assistance it provided to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Based on a purely cost-benefit analysis, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that the IRI could have benefited from such a plot as is alleged. At a time when (a) international pressure on Iran is mounting in response to its gross human rights violations, (b) the sanctions that have been imposed on Iran are showing signs of working, (c) the IRI is deeply worried about the fate of its strategic partner in Syria, the government of Bashar al-Assad, (d) tensions with Turkey are increasing over its hostile policy toward the Assad regime, and (e) a fierce power struggle is underway within Iran between the supporters of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it is essentially impossible to believe that the IRI would act in such a way as to open a major new front against itself. Moreover, although the IRI has carried out assassination operations beyond Iranian borders, some of which I have described here and here, they targeted Iranian dissidents, not foreign diplomats. Even at the height of the assassination wave, the IRI did not go after non-Iranians. It is keenly aware that it is under the American microscope. It is thus hard to believe that the IRI would actually embark on such a useless assassination involving a low-level, non-player individual, dealing with people that they do not know. Furthermore, the IRI ended its foreign assassinations in the mid-1990s. And, with a single exception more than 30 years ago, the IRI avoided carrying out any such plots on U.S. soil. The first and last such act occurred in July 1980, when Ali Tabatabaei was murdered at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, by Dawud Salahuddin, an American sympathetic to the 1979 Revolution. Tabatabaei, press attaché in the Iranian Embassy in the United States under the Shah, had joined the opposition after the Revolution. Salahuddin, who was paid $5,000 to kill Tabatabaei, currently lives in Iran. One may argue that the targets of the operation were Saudi Arabia and Israel. But this seems even more absurd. If the IRI really intends to harm Saudi Arabia, due to the increasing tension with the Riyadh government, why should it try to do it here in the United States and in Washington? Why not attack the Saudis embassies in, for example, chaotic locations in the Middle East, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen? Why not carry out a sabotage operation against Saudi Arabia's oil fields in the eastern part of the country, where the Shia population is centered? That would increase the price of oil dramatically, which would benefit the IRI and hurt the fragile economies of the West. Aside from all such considerations, assassinating Saudi Arabia's ambassador just when the annual Haj pilgrimage is approaching makes no sense. As for attacking the Israeli Embassy in Washington, that appears even more absurd, given the extent of the fortification and security measures that protect it. Would it not be easier, for example, to agitate a crowd in Egypt, Jordan, or Turkey to attack Israel's embassies there, rather than in Washington? It just happened in Egypt. There are also other considerations. First, the indictment refers to Shakuri as an "Iranian official." I could not find any information on this "official," nor have I ever heard of him. Second, it would be only a minor exaggeration, if at all, to say that every Iranian who enters the United States is viewed suspiciously. Even grandmothers and grandfathers are finger-printed when they arrive here. Every time that I -- a U.S. citizen, academic, and a highly public person -- travel abroad, I am questioned and grilled thoroughly when I return home. So, how was it possible for Arbabsiar -- supposedly connected to the Quds force -- to repeatedly cross the border between the United States and Mexico without raising any suspicions? Have there not been mandatory passport scans at the Mexican border for several years now? That should have created a database of all the border crossings. A Revolutionary Guard operative, supposedly involved in such a plot, would surely not risk raising suspicion by repeated trips to Mexico coupled with travel to Iran. Call the Guard officers and operatives anything you want, but they have proven to be shrewd and smart. Despite years of work and numerous claims, the United States has not been able to trace Iran's fingerprint in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, or in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia. There is a small chance that some rogue elements in the Revolutionary Guards decided to carry out such a plot. There is precedence for such an operation. During Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's second term as president, rogue elements of the Ministry of Intelligence led by Saeed Emami -- leader of the gang that assassinated numerous dissidents in what is now known as the infamous Chain Murders -- tried to smuggle missiles out of Iran to Brussels to attack the NATO headquarters. The plot was discovered, and Rafsanjani later acknowledged it. Its discovery set back relations between Iran and the European Union for several years. Given the power struggle pitting Khamenei and his supporters against Ahmadinejad and his camp, and given the extreme hostility that some former Ahmadinejad supporters have toward him and their fear that he might be able to establish some form of diplomatic relations with the United States, the possibility of such a rogue operation cannot be discarded. But the indictment against Arbabsiar and Shakuri claims that they are members of the Quds force, and given the discipline that the Quds force has demonstrated in its operations throughout the Middle East, I still find it difficult to believe that they would embark on what seems to be a useless, dangerous, and relatively easy-to-discover operation. Thus, at this point, I find the claim that the IRI was involved in the plot highly unlikely. The more information that becomes available, the more it appears like a frame-up of Mansour Arbabsiar, a classic case of entrapment. But, once again, there is nothing the IRI might do that would surprise me. Copyright © 2011 Tehran Bureau http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/10/post-6.html#ixzz1b6HOnARK Significant Holes in U.S. Legal Case Against Alleged Iran PlotterBy Marcy Wheeler Oct 17 2011, 8:36 AM ET 34 The criminal complaint against Manssor Arbabsiar, who is said to have targeted the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. for assassination on behalf of the Iranian government, has several conspicuous gaps in its most pivotal and controversial arguments Courtroom sketch of Manssor Arbabsiar / Reuters In the wake of the Obama Administration's announcement that an Iranian-American used car salesman had set up a plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., a number of Iran and intelligence experts have raised questions about the plausibility of the alleged Iranian plot. But few have commented on problems in the legal case presented against the used car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, and his alleged co-conspirators from Iran's Quds Force, a branch of its special forces. There is a handful of what appear to be holes in the complaint. Though individually they are small, taken together they raise difficult questions about the government's case. The apparent holes also seem to match up with some of the same concerns raised by skeptical Iran analysts, such as Arbabsiar's rationale in confessing and the extent of his connection to the Quds Force. The government claims that Arbabsiar sought out someone he thought was a Mexican drug cartel member in May; he was actually a Drug Enforcement Agency confidential informant. Over a series of meetings, the government alleges, Arbabsiar arranged to forward $100,000 to the informant as down payment for the attack, promised $1.5 million more, and agreed that the informant should kill Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir with a bomb blast at a DC restaurant, one that would possibly be full of civilians and U.S. members of Congress. In the complaint against Arbabsiar, the government has described four pieces of evidence to support its allegations (it undoubtedly has more intelligence that it doesn't describe in the complaint): * Taped conversations and phone calls between the informant and Arbabsiar * Details about a $100,000 bank transfer described as a down payment for the assassination * Taped conversations Arbabsiar had with his alleged co-conspirator, Quds Force member Gholam Shakuri, while Arbabsiar was in FBI custody * A confession Arbabsiar made after he was arrested on September 29 Two of the conversations between Arbabsiar and the informant, on July 14 and July 17, include very damning comments. Arbabsiar tells the informant, "he wants you to kill this guy" and goes on to say that it is "no big deal" if the informant kills hundreds of civilians and some Senators in the course of the assassination. But there is a problem with each of these four key pieces of evidence. Take the recorded calls between Arbabsiar and the informant. Whenever the government uses confidential informants, it is a good idea to pay attention to which conversations get taped and which don't (in one terror case in Oregon, for example, the FBI had a recorder malfunction on precisely the day when, their informant claims, the accused person first agreed to participate in a terror plot). If no tape is made, then the only evidence to the substance of a conversation comes from someone paid by the government to produce evidence of criminal activity. In this case, the complaint first describes the informant taping conversations with Arbabsiar on July 14, 2011, the first of the two really damning conversations. It admits that the informant taped neither the initial meeting between them on May 24 nor a later series of meetings in June and July. This means, among other things, that the tapes do not include an account of how the plot was first initiated and how it evolved from the kidnapping plot, which Arbabsiar said in his confession that he was he first instructed to set up, to an assassination. Who first raised the idea of using explosives in the assassination? Arbabsiar is charged with intent to use weapons of mass destruction -- in this case, the bombing. But with these key conversations never recorded, it's difficult or impossible to prove who first suggested the most damning details that legally turned a kidnapping plot into a terrorism plot. The taped conversations start after the $100,000 down payment, which government sources have told reporters was the first convincing piece of evidence in this case, got transferred to a middleman. So the government doesn't provide quoted conversations describing what agreement the parties had about that down payment. In short, there were a number of critical conversations the government chose not to record (or at least, not to have the informant record). Particularly given the complaint's revelation that a number of other crimes were discussed, and reports that the parties also discussed an opium deal, the government's choice not to record these earlier conversations raises significant questions about what Arbabsiar set out to do and what the down payment represented. The details provided about the $100,000 in the complaint also do not implicate Quds Force as strongly as they might. The complaint describes an unnamed person calling Arbabsiar to tell him the money would be transferred to "Individual #1." And it describes Arbabsiar telling the informant that Individual #1 had received the money the morning before the first taped July 14 conversation. Then, it describes the money being sent from two different "foreign entities" through a Manhattan bank into an FBI account. The complaint doesn't even specify that these two foreign entities were Iranian, much less tied to Quds Force. Furthermore, the complaint doesn't describe who Individual #1 is, though the way that the complaint is written suggests that he or she was not a member of Quds Force: three Quds Force members are described as "Iranian Officials" in the complaint and Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani is named explicitly. More curiously, Individual #1, who allegedly served as middleman for the down payment on the planned assassination, was neither charged for his role nor was he among the five people sanctioned for this operation by the Treasury Department. What the complaint describes about this key piece of evidence, in other words, is money being transferred from someone not even charged in this case to the FBI. But if the plot began with the Quds Force hatching it in Iran and extended to Arbabsiar acting on their behalf in the U.S., and if the U.S. government appears to be either charging or sanctioning everyone involved, why would this middleman, Individual #1, go unnamed and untouched? Two other pieces of evidence described in the complaint do tie the transfer to Arbabsiar's alleged Quds Force collaborators. First, a footnote states that Arbabsiar confessed that Individual #1 told him the money came from Gholam Shakuri. The criminal complaint named Shakuri, who is at large and believed to be in Iran, as the Iranian official working as Arbabsiar's case officer of sorts. Second, the taped conversations between Arbabsiar and Shakuri show that Shakuri was aware money had been transferred. But there are two significant problems with those conversations between Arbabsiar and Shakuri. First, they're all in code, so Shakuri never describes the assassination directly. They appear to use two codes -- "Chevrolet" and cars generally, and "the building." While Arbabsiar confessed "Chevrolet" signified the assassination, the complaint mentions no such confession explaining the meaning of the "building" code. Furthermore, Shakuri claims someone -- the name is inaudible -- has "brought [him] another car." If car is code for assassination, then who got killed or targeted for assassination? Shakuri also makes an odd reference to paying $50,000 or $100,000 to someone if the informant (whom Arbabsiar was attempting to hire) doesn't carry out the agreed job. "You guaranteed this yourself ... of course, if we give it, we'll give it to you. Okay? If he gives it, fine; if not we must provide the 100 [or] 50. Tell him [unintelligible]." Perhaps Shakuri was telling Arbabsiar that, if the informant refused to carry out the job without more money, they'll have to pay it. But there are other possibilities as well -- perhaps Shakuri believed they'd have to pay back the down payment if the crime never got committed. Ultimately, though the government tried, they didn't get Shakuri to send any more money. All of these problems might be less troublesome if the terms of Arbabsiar's cooperation were explained. Arbabsiar did confess he tried to set up the assassination at the direction of the Quds Force, but under what circumstances? But we don't yet understand why a man arrested -- purportedly for an assassination attempt -- waived his right to a lawyer and within hours started to give the government all the evidence it needed to fill in any gaps in their case. His cooperation is all the more curious given that four of the five charges against him (the fifth is using interstate commerce to arrange a murder for hire) are conspiracy charges that probably couldn't have been charged before Arbabsiar implicated Shakuri. The government surely could have charged him with other things, such as wire fraud, without the conspiracy charges. So why would Arbabsiar provide the evidence for four new charges against him that could put himself in prison for life? One document that might explain Arbabsiar's motives for cooperating is the original complaint in this case. The document that's been publicly released is actually an amended complaint written 12 days after his arrest, presumably written to incorporate Shakuri in the charges based on Arbabsiar's cooperation. But in a rather unusual move, the first complaint against Arbabsiar remains sealed -- meaning we don't know when the government first charged him or for what -- with the approval of the Chief Judge in Manhattan, possibly in an entirely different docket (the amended complaint is entry number 1 in this docket). Thus, it is possible that Arbabsiar was originally charged for a completely unrelated crime -- perhaps the opium deal. And it is possible Arbabsiar was charged much earlier than his arrest on September 29. As a result, we don't know what kind of incentives the government might have offered Arbabsiar for his testimony. Most of the problems with the legal case against Arbabsiar could be fixed. The government could -- and should -- unseal the original complaint against Arbabsiar. The government could describe the complete chain of transfer from Quds Force custody through Individual #1 to the FBI account. And while the government implies it doesn't have recordings of these conversations, it could at least provide explanations of the earlier discussions between Arbabsiar and the informant that led to the $100,000 down payment and that led a kidnapping plot to evolve into an assassination plot. In addition, it could provide more background that distinguishes this assassination plot from the several other plans discussed, including the opium deal. But until the government does those things, it has offered not just a plot that appears implausible to a number of Iran experts, but one with significant weaknesses in the legal case. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/10/significant-holes-in-us-legal-case-against-alleged-iran-plotter/24678 .............................................................................. U.S. Officials Peddle False Intel to Support Terror Plot Claims How to Spin a Plot by GARETH PORTER Officials of the Barack Obama administration have aggressively leaked information supposedly based on classified intelligence in recent days to bolster its allegation that two higher- ranking officials from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were involved in a plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in Washington, D.C. The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the broad claim being made by the administration. But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a former senior intelligence and counterterrorism official in the other. The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was identified publicly by the Obama administration as a “deputy commander in the Quds Force” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shahlai had long been regarded by U.S. officials as a key figure in the Quds Force’s relationship to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq. The primary objective of the FBI sting operation involving Iranian- American Manssor Arbabsiar and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant that was started last June now appears to have been to use Arbabsiar to implicate Shahlai in a terror plot. U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar claimed that Shahlai was his cousin. In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an individual “providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq” and thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said Shahlai had provided “material support” to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and that he had “planned the Jan. 20, 2007 attack” by Mahdi Army “Special Groups” on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq. Arbabsiar’s confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early spring 2011 and asked him to find “someone in the narcotics business” to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with thousands of dollars for his expenses. But Arbabsiar’s charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar had become the cornerstone of the administration’s case against Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him. There is no indication in the FBI account of the investigation that there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar’s claim of Shahlai’s involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador. The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a terrorist past, and that it was therefore credible that he could be part of an assassination plot. Laying the foundation for press stories on the theme, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it was sanctioning Shahlai, along with Arbabsiar and three other Quds Force officials, including the head of the organisation, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, for being “connected to” the assassination plot. But Michael Issikof of NBC News reported the same day that Shahlai “had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government officials and documents made public Tuesday afternoon”. Isikoff, who is called “National Investigative Correspondent” at NBC News, reported that the Treasury Department had designated Shahlai as a “terrorist” in 2008, despite the fact that the Treasury announcement of the designation had not used the term “terrorist”. On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report closely paralleling the Issikof story but going even further in claiming documentary proof of Shahlai’s responsibility for the January 2007 attack in Karbala. Post reporter Peter Finn wrote that Shahlai “was known as the guiding hand behind an elite militia of the cleric Moqtada al Sadr”, which had carried out an attack on U.S. troops in Karbala in January 2007. Finn cited the fact that the Treasury Department named Shahlai as the “final approving and coordinating authority” for training Sadr’s militiamen in Iran. That fact would not in itself be evidence of involvement in a specific attack on U.S. forces. On the contrary, it would suggest that he was not involved in operational aspects of the Mahdi Army in Iraq. Finn then referred to a “22-page memo that detailed preparations for the operation and tied it to the Quds Force….” But he didn’t refer to any evidence that Shahlai personally had anything to do with the operation. In fact, U.S. officials acknowledged in the months after the Karbala attack that they had found no evidence of any Iranian involvement in the operation. Talking with reporters about the memo on Apr. 26, 2007, several weeks after it had been captured, Gen. David Petraeus conceded that it did not show that any Iranian official was linked to the planning of the Karbala operation. When a journalist asked him whether there was evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala operation, Petraeus responded, “No. No. No… [W]e do not have a direct link to Iran involvement in that particular case.” In a news briefing in Baghdad Jul. 2, 2007, Gen. Kevin Bergner confirmed that the attack in Karbala had been authorised by the Iraqi chief of the militia in question, Kais Khazali, not by any Iranian official. Col. Michael X. Garrett, who had been commander of the U.S. Fourth Brigade combat team in Karbala, confirmed to this writer in December 2008 that the Karbala attack “was definitely an inside job”. Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is on the list of those Iranian officials “linked” to the alleged terror plot, because he “oversees the IRGC-QF officers who were involved in this plot” , as the Treasury Department announcement explained. But a Reuters story on Friday reported a claim of U.S. intelligence that two wire transfers totaling 100,000 dollars at the behest of Arbabsiar to a bank account controlled by the FBI implicates Soleimani in the assassination plot. “While details are still classified,” wrote Mark Hosenball and Caren Bohan, “one official said the wire transfers apparently had some kind of hallmark indicating they were personally approved” by Soleimani. But the suggestion that forensic examination of the wire transfers could somehow show who had approved them is misleading. The wire transfers were from two separate non-Iranian banks in a foreign country, according to the FBI’s account. It would be impossible to deduce who approved the transfer by looking at the documents. “I have no idea what such a ‘hallmark’ could be,” said Paul Pillar, a former head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center who was also National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East until his retirement in 2005. Pillar told IPS that the “hallmark” notion “pops up frequently in commentary after actual terrorist attacks,”, but the concept is usually invoked “along the lines of ‘the method used in this attack had the hallmark of group such and such’.” That “hallmark” idea “assumes exclusive ownership of a method of attack which does not really exist,” said Pillar. “I expect the same could be said of methods of transferring money.” GARETH PORTER is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006. http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/17/how-to-spin-a-plot/ U.S. Officials Peddle False Intel to Support Terror Plot Claims By Gareth Porter October 17, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --- - Officials of the Barack Obama administration have aggressively leaked information supposedly based on classified intelligence in recent days to bolster its allegation that two higher- ranking officials from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were involved in a plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in Washington, D.C. The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the broad claim being made by the administration. But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a former senior intelligence and counterterrorism official in the other. The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was identified publicly by the Obama administration as a "deputy commander in the Quds Force" of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shahlai had long been regarded by U.S. officials as a key figure in the Quds Force's relationship to Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq. The primary objective of the FBI sting operation involving Iranian- American Manssor Arbabsiar and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant that was started last June now appears to have been to use Arbabsiar to implicate Shahlai in a terror plot. U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar claimed that Shahlai was his cousin. In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an individual "providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq" and thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said Shahlai had provided "material support" to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and that he had "planned the Jan. 20, 2007 attack" by Mahdi Army "Special Groups" on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq. Arbabsiar's confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early spring 2011 and asked him to find "someone in the narcotics business" to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with thousands of dollars for his expenses. But Arbabsiar's charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar had become the cornerstone of the administration's case against Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him. There is no indication in the FBI account of the investigation that there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar's claim of Shahlai's involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador. The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a terrorist past, and that it was therefore credible that he could be part of an assassination plot. Laying the foundation for press stories on the theme, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it was sanctioning Shahlai, along with Arbabsiar and three other Quds Force officials, including the head of the organisation, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, for being "connected to" the assassination plot. But Michael Issikof of NBC News reported the same day that Shahlai "had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government officials and documents made public Tuesday afternoon". Isikoff, who is called "National Investigative Correspondent" at NBC News, reported that the Treasury Department had designated Shahlai as a "terrorist" in 2008, despite the fact that the Treasury announcement of the designation had not used the term "terrorist". On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report closely paralleling the Issikof story but going even further in claiming documentary proof of Shahlai's responsibility for the January 2007 attack in Karbala. Post reporter Peter Finn wrote that Shahlai "was known as the guiding hand behind an elite militia of the cleric Moqtada al Sadr", which had carried out an attack on U.S. troops in Karbala in January 2007. Finn cited the fact that the Treasury Department named Shahlai as the "final approving and coordinating authority" for training Sadr's militiamen in Iran. That fact would not in itself be evidence of involvement in a specific attack on U.S. forces. On the contrary, it would suggest that he was not involved in operational aspects of the Mahdi Army in Iraq. Finn then referred to a "22-page memo that detailed preparations for the operation and tied it to the Quds Force…." But he didn't refer to any evidence that Shahlai personally had anything to do with the operation. In fact, U.S. officials acknowledged in the months after the Karbala attack that they had found no evidence of any Iranian involvement in the operation. Talking with reporters about the memo on Apr. 26, 2007, several weeks after it had been captured, Gen. David Petraeus conceded that it did not show that any Iranian official was linked to the planning of the Karbala operation. When a journalist asked him whether there was evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala operation, Petraeus responded, "No. No. No… [W]e do not have a direct link to Iran involvement in that particular case." In a news briefing in Baghdad Jul. 2, 2007, Gen. Kevin Bergner confirmed that the attack in Karbala had been authorised by the Iraqi chief of the militia in question, Kais Khazali, not by any Iranian official. Col. Michael X. Garrett, who had been commander of the U.S. Fourth Brigade combat team in Karbala, confirmed to this writer in December 2008 that the Karbala attack "was definitely an inside job". Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is on the list of those Iranian officials "linked" to the alleged terror plot, because he "oversees the IRGC-QF officers who were involved in this plot" , as the Treasury Department announcement explained. But a Reuters story on Friday reported a claim of U.S. intelligence that two wire transfers totaling 100,000 dollars at the behest of Arbabsiar to a bank account controlled by the FBI implicates Soleimani in the assassination plot. "While details are still classified," wrote Mark Hosenball and Caren Bohan, "one official said the wire transfers apparently had some kind of hallmark indicating they were personally approved" by Soleimani. But the suggestion that forensic examination of the wire transfers could somehow show who had approved them is misleading. The wire transfers were from two separate non-Iranian banks in a foreign country, according to the FBI's account. It would be impossible to deduce who approved the transfer by looking at the documents. "I have no idea what such a 'hallmark' could be," said Paul Pillar, a former head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center who was also National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East until his retirement in 2005. Pillar told IPS that the "hallmark" notion "pops up frequently in commentary after actual terrorist attacks,", but the concept is usually invoked "along the lines of 'the method used in this attack had the hallmark of group such and such'." That "hallmark" idea "assumes exclusive ownership of a method of attack which does not really exist," said Pillar. "I expect the same could be said of methods of transferring money." Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006. 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