The Fall Guy
Fake Iranian terror plot wouldn't convince a child
by
<http://original.antiwar.com/author/justin/>Justin Raimondo, October 31, 2012
The setup and railroading of
<http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/10/13/the-terrorist-who-couldnt-think-straight/>Mansoor
Arbabsiar, a mentally ill Iranian emigrant, in
the alleged “terror plot” to kill the Saudi
ambassador was completed last week when he
entered a
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/nyregion/mansour-arbabsiar-expected-to-plead-guilty-in-bomb-plot.html>guilty
plea. The 57-year-old Iranian-American, a
naturalized citizen, was charged with plotting to
bomb the <http://www.cafemilano.net/>Café Milano,
in Washington DC, a favorite haunt of diplomats
and other bigwigs. Faced with a possible life
sentence, Arbabsiar, a former used car salesman,
made his last deal: a 25-year sentence in return
for a propaganda victory for the Israel lobby.
The facts of this case will never be known: no
trial means no evidence will be presented
purportedly “proving” his guilt. What we do know
is that in the spring of 2011 just as the war
propaganda targeting Iran was reaching a fever
pitch Arbabsiar met with a DEA drug informant
posing as a member of a Mexican drug cartel.
Of course, it was just a “coincidence” that he
chose this particular person as his contact or
was it?
<http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/mansour-arbabsiars-twisted-plot-kill-saudi-us-ambassador/story?id=17533527>According
to ABC News, the delusional Arbabsiar told a court appointed psychiatrist:
“’I have had so many girls. So many that you
couldn’t count them. I never had one girl more
than once…. Girls love money and cars. That was my weakness.’
“It was, in fact, one of these women who put
Arbabsiar in touch with a man in May 2011 who
said he was a member of the Mexican drug gang Los
Zetas. Arbabsiar went on to ask this cartel
associate actually a Drug Enforcement Agency
informant to kill the ambassador of Saudi
Arabia in Washington D.C. using explosives.”
Oh please if that doesn’t smell like a set-up,
then your nose is on backwards. Here is an
informant, who has had drug charges dropped in
return for his cooperation, and who is being paid
to provide “intelligence” to law enforcement, clearly entrapping Arbabsiar.
The
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/68392163/Complaint-amended-finaL>complaint,
by the way, never quotes Arbabsiar as explicitly
saying he wanted to carry out an assassination:
this was no doubt suggested by the informant, who
says the deluded car dealer was “interested” in
such a plot “among other things.”
<http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2011/10/13/fbi-account-of-terror-plot-suggests-sting-operation/>Gareth
Porter has suggested these “other things” might
well have been a drug deal involving opium, a
product the Iranian Revolutionary Guards the
supposed co-plotters are said to have a large
supply of: Arbabsiar reportedly told associates,
prior to his bust, that he was about to make some
“big money.” How he expected to do that by
bombing the Café Milano is a bit of a mystery,
one that will never be cleared up because this
case will never come to trial.
At the plea appearance, Arbabsiar
<http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-17/iranian-american-pleads-guilty-to-saudi-murder-plot>told
the judge:
“In Mexico, we hired a person named ‘Junior,’ who
turned out to be an FBI agent, to kidnap the
ambassador. Junior said it would be easier to
kill the ambassador. I and others agreed to go
along with this new plan. We agreed to pay
Junior, and to do that we transferred money to the United States from Iran.”
It was the FBI’s idea to blow up the Café Milano,
not Arbabsiar’s. There never was any murder plot:
the FBI was manipulating Arbabsiar from the start
not a hard task to accomplish, given his mental state.
After his arrest, a thorough
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/457623-dr-morgans-declaration.html>examination
of Arbabsiar, including extensive psychological
testing, indicated he suffers from mania,
bi-polar disorder, and paranoia: an MRI indicated
“abnormalities of the brain.” This was
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/457624-dr-firsts-declaration.html>confirmed
by Dr. Michael B. Frist, editor of the definitive
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, who extensively interviewed not only
the accused but also his family and friends.
Arbabsiar would lock himself in his bedroom,
smoking cigarettes and pacing up and down, for
weeks at a time: other times he would engage in
grandiose gestures, and imagine himself a
“playboy” with “important” connections. He
habitually lost his keys, the titles to cars, and
could barely function: he eventually went broke,
and couldn’t even afford to go to a dentist when
his teeth were practically falling out of his head.
In short, Arbabsiar is the perfect fall guy.
The supposed “cousin” working with Arbabsiar,
Abdul Reza Shahlai, is reportedly a top official
in the Revolutionary Guards alleged to have been
involved in several terrorist attacks against
American targets in Iraq, a sophisticated
operative with plenty of experience in this sort
of thing. Yet in a Washington Post
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/notorious-iranian-militant-has-a-connection-to-alleged-assassination-plot-against-saudi-envoy/2011/10/14/gIQAJ3E6kL_story.html>piece
on Arbabsiar’s alleged connection to the Revolutionary Guards, we are told:
“It is unclear how much Shahlai understood about
his cousin’s life in the United States and if he
understood how unlikely it was that a struggling
used-car salesman in Corpus Christi, Tex., could
successfully orchestrate a high-profile international plot.”
It’s not just “unclear” the whole proposition
portraying Arbabsiar as some kind of
international assassin is utterly outlandish.
Which is why, when the government announced their
“<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/10/significant-holes-in-us-legal-case-alleged-iran-plotter/246780/>case”
against Arbabsiar, it was
<http://garysick.tumblr.com/post/11357778864/did-iran-launch-a-plot-against-the-us>met
<http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/13/opinion/iranianplotsamerican-hubris/index.html?hpt=hp_c1>with
<http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-12/ex-cia-warns-us-dangerously-wrong-on-iran/3553704?section=world>widespread
<http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2011/10/13/petraeuss-cia-fuels-iran-murder-plot/>skepticism
and
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJbOaVAbg6s>outright
mockery from analysts
<http://www.raceforiran.com/leverett-on-al-jazeera-thin-u-s-charges-of-terror-plot-escalate-tension-with-iran>familiar
with Iranian intelligence operations.
The lack of evidence against Arbabsiar hasn’t
stopped the Israel lobby from cashing in on this
propaganda bonanza: Foreign Policy has published
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/29/why_iran_wants_to_attack_the_united_states>a
screed by AIPAC-affiliated “scholar” Matthew
Levitt, affiliated with the “Washington Institute
for Near East Policy,” an
<http://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/2012/10/05/spy-crisis-launched-aipacs-think-tank/>AIPAC
front. Entitled “Why Iran Wants to Attack the
United States,” the piece never tells us why
Tehran would take such a suicidal course.
Instead, Levitt avers that the plot was
“discovered” early on by US law enforcement, who
then “built an airtight case.” What did this
“airtight” case consist of? Writes Levitt:
“At the direction of law enforcement, he then
called his cousin and Quds Force handler, Gholam
Shakuri. With agents listening, Shakuri insisted
Arbabsiar go ahead with the plot. ‘Just do it quickly. It’s late.’”
For
<http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2011/10/19/how-to-kill-an-ambassador/>all
we know, that was Bibi Netanyahu on the line.
Levitt is at pains to explain what baffled
analysts in the wake of US government
allegations: “What was the Quds force thinking?”
Such an attack on a well-trafficked watering hole
in Washington DC would have killed hundreds, and
surely provoked instant and
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phzRY0DdRXk>deadly
retaliation from the US. So what’s in it for the Iranians?
Well, you see, says Levitt, the Iranians have
come up with “a new calculus,” which involves
overseas attacks on US and Israeli targets.
Giving it a scientific-sounding appellation
“<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f2/Integral_as_region_under_curve.svg/280px-Integral_as_region_under_curve.svg.png>calculus”
is supposed to give Levitt’s argument some sort
of ersatz credibility, but he cites no evidence
of Iranian intentions to go after targets on
American soil. Instead, he catalogues a series of
“foiled” plots, allegedly launched by the
Iranians in collaboration with Lebanon’s
Hezbollah none of which involved American
targets, and all of which have been denied by
Tehran. His source for this?: “Israeli intelligence.”
However, even Levitt, hardly an unbiased analyst,
has to admit that “in some cases, Iranian agents
employed laughable operational security; in
others, the agents, like Arbabsiar, were kooky.”
“Kooky” describes not only every jot and tittle
of Levitt’s piece, but also this entire phony
“plot” to kill the Saudi ambassador, which was
manufactured, from the very beginning, by the US
Justice Department. Whether this was done in
collusion with the Israelis, or Holder & Co.
thought up this brilliant idea all on their own,
I’ll leave to my readers to speculate.
Levitt leaves the best for last, concluding his piece with this cliffhanger:
“The Quds Force is sure to recover from its
operational sloppiness, and Iranian leaders
appear committed to a policy of targeting Western
interests. Arbabsiar’s guilty plea ends one
chapter in Iran’s shadow war against the West,
but authorities must remain vigilant for the plots yet to come.”
What we really need to be vigilant about is the
endless stream of
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/201222985228671645.html>phony
“plots” and Israeli-fed
“<http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/09/us-israel-iran-usa-idUSBRE8781GS20120809>intelligence”
designed to drag the United States into another
war in the Middle East on Israel’s behalf. As for
the “operational sloppiness” of the Quds Force:
if I were the Israelis, and their American amen
corner, I’d concentrate on the “operational
sloppiness” of their own war propaganda. The
Arbabsiar “plot” to kill the Saudi ambassador is
such a transparently phony conspiracy theory that
not even
<http://www.prisonplanet.com/lyndon-larouche-exposes-the-face-of-evil.html>Lyndon
LaRouche would touch it with a ten foot pole.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
And why, in the name of all that’s holy, did
Foreign Policy magazine publish this bilge? Ask
<https://twitter.com/blakehounshell>this horse’s ass.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/10/30/the-fall-guy/
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