Iranian ‘terrorist’ plot unravels
Would Iran recruit a used car salesman with a memory problem to conduct assassinations in the US?
This is a question you have to ask yourself when evaluating the alleged Iranian “terrorist” plot supposedly uncovered by Attorney General Eric Holder the other day. The arrest of Mansour Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old Iranian immigrant who came to this country as a college student, was the occasion for a trumpet blast of anti-Iranian propaganda and belligerent declarations by US officials, who vowed to “hold Iran accountable” for purportedly mounting a plot [.pdf] to kill the Saudi ambassador, bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington, and strike at the Jewish community in Argentina.
The alleged plot was supposed to have been carried out by a member of the Zetas drug cartel, who was to be paid up to $1.5 million to implement the plan. US officials, even while acknowledging the “B-movie” aspect of the story, reportedly “fanned out” to convince our allies the plot was real and – with Congress already demanding new sanctions on Iran – that the economic vise be tightened. Not only are the more hysterical neocons calling for military action against Iran – no surprise there — but the headlines had the normally staid and relatively reserved Steve Clemons, a prominent Obama shill, babbling that “this is a serious situation” and “the U.S. has reached a point where it must take action,” and Sen. Carl Levin calling the plot “an act of war.”
Less than 24 hours after Holder’s press conference, the whole fantasy began to unravel under closer scrutiny. Gary Sick, of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, averred that the alleged plot “departs from all known Iranian policies and procedures,” and went on to write:
“It is difficult to believe that they would rely on a non-Islamic criminal gang to carry out this most sensitive of all possible missions. In this instance, they allegedly relied on at least one amateur and a Mexican criminal drug gang that is known to be riddled with both Mexican and U.S. intelligence agents.
“Whatever else may be Iran’s failings, they are not noted for utter disregard of the most basic intelligence tradecraft, e.g. discussing an ultra-covert operation on an open international line between Iran and the U.S. Yet that is what happened here.”
Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East analyst with the Congressional Research Office, concurs:
“There is simply no precedent — or even reasonable rationale — for Iran working any plot, no matter where located, through a non-Muslim proxy such as Mexican drug gangs. No one high up in the Quds, the I.R.G.C. command, the Supreme National Security Committee, or anywhere else in the Iranian chain of command would possibly trust that such a plot could be kept secret or carried out properly by the Mexican drug people. They absolutely would not trust such a thing to them, given Iran’s undoubted assumption that the Mexicans are penetrated by the D.E.A. and F.B.I. and A.T.F., etc — and indeed this plot was revealed by just such a U.S. informant….
“Are we to believe that this Texas car seller was a Quds sleeper agent for many years resident in the U.S.? Ridiculous. They (the Iranian command system) never ever use such has-beens or loosely connected people for sensitive plots such as this.”
Ridiculous – that just about says it all.
But as Ayn Rand once said: “Don’t bother to question a fallacy, ask yourself only what it accomplishes.” The idea is to target Iran as the next al-Qaeda: with the late unlamented Osama bin Laden out of the picture, the US has to find a replacement – and quick! – in order to justify its decade-long post-9/11 rampage across the Middle East and much of the rest of the world. What’s a war without an enemy? Iran has always been the War Party’s ultimate Middle Eastern target, and now they are making their move.
As an opening shot in a propaganda war, Holder’s startling announcement had high impact – but low credibility, as the excitement died down and the details came into focus. The problem with the narrative woven by the Justice Department is that the supposed fulcrum of this heinous plot, Senor Arbabsiar, is hardly the sort of character who makes a convincing terrorist/foreign agent. Longtime associate Tom Hosseini, a fellow Iranian-American who has known Arbabsiar for over 30 years, wondered aloud to a Washington Post reporter “how anyone – but most especially an elite military organization such as Iran’s Quds force — would get involved with Arbabsiar in the first place.”
“Maybe,” says Hosseini, “somebody offered him some money. He doesn’t have the brain to say no.”
Arbabsiar certainly had a lot of money on him when he and Hosseini met in Iranian Kurdistan last August: the Post reports he was “waving around crisp $100 bills” and declaring that there was a lot more where that came from. Yet Arbabsiar’s many businesses – “from used cars to kebabs” – had all failed. Perhaps this lack of business acumen was tied to his general inability to think straight, or, as the Post puts it:
“Within the small Iranian American community in this Gulf Coast city, Arbabsiar, 56, was well known and well liked. But he was also renowned for being almost comically absent-minded, perpetually losing keys, cellphones, briefcases, anything that wasn’t tied down.”
The Post profile is headlined “Mansour Arbabsiar recalled as upbeat about finances during summer encounter,” but the actual story deserves a title more along the lines of “The ‘terrorist’ who couldn’t think straight”:
“’He was just not organized,’ said David Tomscha, who once owned a car lot with Arbabsiar. ‘He would lose the titles to cars. Or he’d say it was a 1989 Grand Marquis when it was an ’82. And when you’d call him on it, he’d say, ‘What’s the difference?’ Eventually, I bought him out.’”
“There is a certain bewilderment in Corpus Christi that anyone as apparently hapless as Arbabsiar could get involved in an international conspiracy. ‘A goofy guy who always had a smile on his face,’ said Mitchel Hamauei, also a store owner. ‘Let me put it this way: He’s no mastermind.’”
Either the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have lowered their standards considerably, or Arbabsiar wasn’t working for them, but for someone else. The question is: who are the real masterminds? Whoever they are, their intent was clear: this was a plot designed to be discovered.
The sheer implausibility of the position taken by both the US Justice Department and the State Department – that the Iranian government was behind the plot – necessitates a more subtle spin, such as the view taken by Meir Javadenfar, of the Israel-based Middle East Economic and Political Analysis Company. Javadenfar speculates that the whole thing was a “set up” of the Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei by a dissident faction within the Iranian national security apparatus. This assumes, of course, that the patently ridiculous Official Story is true, and even heightens its impact: for if there is a “rogue” element at work within Iranian ruling circles, then the danger is even more extreme. After all, here are presumed radicals who wouldn’t hesitate to bring destruction – in the form of US bombs falling on Tehran – on their own country, and certainly wouldn’t hesitate to inflict the same and worse on American soil.
This view, however, is fatally flawed, in that it assumes the veracity of the Justice Department’s narrative, which, as we have seen, is a fiction that fails – and fails badly – in the realm of character development. It is just not credible that the goofy Arbabsiar, who may have sustained brain damage as the result of a brutal beating he received in his student years, was the mastermind behind a plot that might have proved to be a twenty-first century Sarajevo.
More interesting, and much more credible, is the view of Hamid Serri, an Iran expert at Florida International University, who is cited in the New York Times as suggesting “another alternate explanation for the plot”:
“That it could have been the work of a non-Iranian intelligence agency or even a terrorist organization with an interest in creating ‘a confrontation that involves the U.S., Iran and Saudi Arabia.’ Referring to the fact that the only money that apparently changed hands before the alleged plot was exposed was $100,000 wired from what was said to be an Iranian-controlled bank account to a man posing as a member of the Mexican cartel Los Zetas (who turned out to be an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency), Mr. Serri observed that this would be a ‘cheap price’ for an enemy of Iran to pay for the damning headlines that have appeared since the alleged plot was exposed.”
Which non-Iranian intelligence agencies and/or terrorist organizations would stand to gain from such a confrontation? I can think of two: the Israelis and al-Qaeda. The former, after all, have been agitating for war quite openly; and as for al-Qaeda, those vultures are likely to be found circling over any Middle Eastern battlefield.
In choosing between these two as the likely culprit, I’ll await fresh evidence before making a final judgment. I would note, however, that al-Qaeda isn’t in very good shape these days, with their top leadership mostly dead, and their ranks scattered and demoralized.
The Israelis, on the other hand, have both the means and the motivation: they are desperate to provoke a war between the US and Iran, and have been for years. Moreover, there are elements of Netanyahu’s government who would stop at nothing to achieve this end. Remember that Avigdor Lieberman is the Foreign Minister, and controls a good chunk of the Israeli national security bureaucracy: his extremist party, the successor to the infamous Kach movement, which wants to deport all Arabs and create a “Greater Israel,” is the electoral expression of the radical “settler” movement, which is now defying the Israeli army and carrying out terrorist attacks within Israel. In Weimar Israel, the extremists are on the rise – and they have their supporters within the establishment and the government itself, including the intelligence services.
Analysts often point, almost by default, to the option of attributing the alleged plot to a “rogue faction” of the Iranian government, but it’s just as likely – if not more likely – that this “rogue faction” is Israeli. It wouldn’t be the first time the Israelis have been strongly suspected of carrying out extensive covert activities in the US.
If, indeed, this is the case, then the question arises: has Holder’s Justice Department been duped, or are they complicit in the deception? In this scenario, no doubt evidence of both will rise to the surface, but I’m betting on the former. These are the same people who were duped by the cartels into replenishing their arsenals, and it looks to me like that same undercover operation has been duped — by an unknown third party — into provoking an incident that could lead to World War III.
Another possibility is that the Justice Department thought this up all by themselves, as a way to curry favor within an administration where they’re no doubt on the outs, and also to justify their Mexican operation, of which “Fast and Furious” is but a small part. The Law of Bureaucratic Self-Justification applies here, and that could well be the full explanation – although it may have played a complementary role to Serri’s thesis.
In any case, what you need to know about this case is that it’s one-hundred percent baloney, from start to finish. It’s the crudest sort of war propaganda, the kind that insults the intelligence of the audience it is supposed to convince – and that, too, is a clue to its provenance.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
Julian Borger makes an important point in the Guardian:
“The key evidence that the alleged plot was serious was the $100,000 wire transfer. It came from a foreign bank account, but that cannot be an Iranian account because such transfers are impossible under US law. The money must have come from a third country, but which? And how can the US authorities be so sure the foreign accounts were under the control of the Quds force?”
I have a feeling this case will never come to an open and extended trial, at which the details of this absurdly fishy case would spill out and stink up the courtroom.
Pamela Geller, an activist speaking in Sugar Land Tuesday, has raised controversy over her approach to Islam in America. (AP
The Sugar Land Tea Party was forced to move an event featuring a prominent critic of radical Islam after Hyatt Place learned of opponents’ plans to protest it.
The hotel, where activist Pamela Geller was going to address the crowd and sign copies of her new book Stop the Islamization of America, cancelled their meeting space, forcing the Tea Party to reserve a nearby community center.
“In light of the business disruptions affiliated with this event, it has been moved to an alternate location,” said a Hyatt Place manager, who declined to give further details on the decision.
Geller is known for her views on Islam, including strong opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque (which she is said to have nicknamed), dismissal of liberal politicians for “giving in” to American Muslims and continued belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.
On her right-wing blog Atlas Shrugs, Geller urged readers to boycott the hotel for cancelling the event, calling it a setback to free speech and “a stunning surrender to Islamic supremacism.”
The Sugar Land Democrats Club announced their protest on Sunday and still plans to hold a peaceful demonstration at the event’s new location, the Sugar Land Community Center.
“Let’s send a message to the fear mongers and haters in Sugar Land and Fort Bend County that the likes of Ms. Pamela Geller and her bigoted ideology are not welcome here in the 4th most racially diverse county in the USA,” residents Deron Patterson and Q Imam said in a press release.
The community center can be rented out for public or private events, like tonight’s book signing, said Doug Adolph, Sugar Land city spokesman.
All attendees and protestors must follow the law, but the community center does not place any further restrictions on First Amendment rights, he said.
Like Geller, two-thirds of Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement say that Islam is at odds with the American way of life, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. The survey also showed Tea Party members are nearly twice as likely as the general public to believe that American Muslims want to establish sharia law. They are less comfortable with mosques in their communities, Muslims praying in airports and Muslim women wearing niqab.
The Sugar Land Tea Party event isn’t the first time Geller has come to the Houston area. The local chapter of Act! For America hosted Geller and fellow anti-Jihadist Robert Spencer in June, when they showed their film, The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 911 Attacks.
“We believe presentations such as this also provide an opportunity for citizens to learn more about how Islamic Law (Sharia) contradicts the U.S. Constitution– an excellent example of which we are seeing played out right before us at this event, in that Shariah Law prohibits Freedom of Speech if the speech can be considered to be ‘offensive’ to Muslims,” said Susan Watts, of Act! For America Houston, by email.
Fear, Inc. – a recent report by the Center for American Progress—labels Geller one of the main players in the country’s Islamophobia network and says her blog incites Muslim fear-mongering among the right-wing blogosphere, including some politically conservative Christians.
“She writes about Muslims in the most reductive and offensive way imaginable,” said Matt Duss, an analyst on national security policy at the center. Geller, he said, has been able to strike an emotional chord with her readers and followers by orchestrating controversy and fear over Islam, as she did with the Ground Zero mosque incident.
Geller and Spencer’s organization – Stop Islamization of America—was founded in 2010 to fight radical Islam and terrorism, but their opponents insist the organization’s scope extends far beyond that.
The Anti-Defamation League wrote Sugar Land city officials and religious leaders ahead of the upcoming event, warning them of Geller’s vilification of Islam. The ADL said her group “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda,” and the Southern Poverty Law Association has labeled it a hate group.
Geller’s supporters, who continue to see radical Islam as a dangerous, real and urgent threat, disagree with these characterizations.
“We see value in presentations like (hers) as one of the tools available in learning more about the creep of Sharia Law and it’s customs, as well as an opportunity to understand the impact of Cultural (or Stealth) Jihad which is usually aided by a complicit media paralyzed by Political Correctness,” Watts said.
Posted in RADICAL ISLAM
Tagged http://blog.chron.com/believeitornot/2011/10/sugar-land-hotel-forces-tea-party-to-move-controversial-event/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+houstonchronicle/topheadlin, http://www.colonel6.com/Tea-Party’s-event-on-Islam-booted-from-Sugar-Land-hotel.html
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
October 19, 2011
According to email sent to Infowars.com, Brookfield Properties recently posted an ad on the New York Craigslist calling for “able-bodied men” to evict the OWS demonstrators from Zuccotti Park on Friday. Brookfield Properties is the company that owns Zuccotti Park where the OWS is encamped on Manhattan.
A search of Craigslist returns a page indicating the ad has been removed.
The ad allegedly posted reads as follows:
Brookfield Properties has recently received a 2.4 million dollar grant to clear out their Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) at Zucotti (sic) Park. NYPD doesn’t want to be involved for PR reasons, so Brookfield has contracted Hazell Security LTD to remove the protesters.
We need two teams of 20-24 to help with the job. We’re looking for able-bodied men ages 22-45 with experience in dealing with crowds/riots/insurgencies. Prior criminal convictions are not a problem. Pay is 1200 under the table for the whole job plus a 200 dollar equipment/clothing stipend. Facemasks to be provided. Please no labels visible on anything. No talking to the press.
Thursday night we meet for a quick runthrough, then Friday night we do a clean sweep. Automatic assumption of resistance is in effect, so feel free to throw your weight around a bit. None of them are going to miss a tooth, BUT PLEASE NO PUNCTURE WOUNDS.
Please message ASAP. Include age, weight, specific experience, and material/equipment requests.
At present, there is no way to verify if the above was in fact posted on Craigslist or if it is legitimate or a hoax.
A search for Hazell Security LTD does not produce a match, which is suspicious. In addition, rampaging security goons unleashed in the park would produce a legal and public relations nightmare. It is also suspicious that the supposed security company says it will pay security contractors “under the table.”
Brookfield has attempted to remove the protesters from its property. On October 11, Ric Clark of Brookfield sent a letter to Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly stating because of “the ongoing trespassing of the protesters we are … requesting the assistance of the New York City Police Department to help clear the Park.”
The NYPD has yet said if it intends to clear the park of the OWS, who are legally trespassing.
Mayor Bloomberg and the government of New York, however, would love to get rid of the protesters and return to business as usual on Wall Street. All attempts by Bloomberg to evict the demonstrators have failed.
Instead of waiting for cold weather to thin out the OWS ranks, Brookfield Properties may hire private goons to intimidate largely peaceful protesters and possibly use violence to run them off.
On the other hand, the alleged ad may be a ruse designed to scare off protesters afraid they may become victims of violence.
The above listed incongruities point toward this being a ruse, although it is not clear who might have initiated it. Is it possible members of the OWS did it simply to portray New York and Brookfield as thugs?
@ColonelSixx |
Every normal man must be tempted,at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H. L. Mencken
Taiwan Sun
Wednesday 19th October, 2011
• Report singles out US, UK and others for weapons sales
• Western nations sold weapons to regimes with questionable human rights
• Those weapons used against civilians in Arab Spring uprisings
In a new report, the UK-based human rights group says that weapons sold by the United States, Russia, the UK and other European countries, were used to repress popular uprisings in the Arab World that western countries have supported.
“To the extent that arms transfers are knowingly engaged in and result in the perpetration of crimes against humanity, the transferring state also becomes responsible under international law,” Sanjeev Bery, the group’s Washington-based advocacy director for Middle East and North Africa, told The Associated Press.
The release of the report comes as Amnesty International lobbies the US Congress to block a US $53 million deal that will see the United States sell a range of weaponry to the government of Bahrain, where more than 30 people have been killed.
Bahrain was rocked by protests earlier in the year when majority Shiite Muslims demanded greater democracy and social freedoms from the minority Sunni Muslim monarchy.
The government of the tiny island nation, backed by troops from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, implemented a crackdown that was widely condemned by the international community.
In compiling the report, Amnesty looked at arms transfers since 2005 to key countries rocked by protests this year.
The report studies Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain and alleges that the main suppliers of arms since 2005 were the US, Britain, Russia, Germany, Italy, France, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.
Interestingly, four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are included in that list.
“It’s precisely the wrong signal to send for the Obama administration to be on the verge of sending US $53 million in weapons to a Bahrani king whose security forces have already been opening fire on peaceful protesters this year,” an Amnesty spokesperson said.
In response, the US State Department has said the human rights situation in Bahrain will be considered before final approval is given for the arms sale.
“We’re going to continue to look at all the elements on the ground, including the human rights situation,” spokesperson Mark Toner told reporters.
The report comes just days after the United Kingdom announced plans to change arms export rules to include a mechanism allowing the immediate suspension of licenses to countries experiencing a sharp deterioration in security or stability.
“The Government is determined to learn the wider lessons of events in the Middle East and North Africa,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a written statement.
The British government has said it reviewed and revoked dozens of licenses approving weapons sales to Libya, Bahrain, Tunisia and Egypt following protests in those countries.
Amnesty argues that the United States, United Kingdom and others supplying weapons have long ignored the human rights violations under many of the regimes and shouldn’t have sold them in the first place.
“The international community needs to know exactly what’s being given to whom and exactly how it’s being used,” says a spokesperson for Amnesty International. “If not, the US government should not be in the business of providing those specific weapons to begin with.”
Taiwan Sun
Tuesday 18th October, 2011
• Kids as young as 11 and 12 being recruited
• Drug cartels have command centres in every major city in Texas
• Intimidating US land owners on Rio Grande
The United States is the primary market for Mexico’s drug cartels, feeding the cycle of violence in the country as the state tries to suppress the violent gangs, but now Mexico’s war on the drug cartels may be spilling over into the United States.
Texas law enforcement officials have revealed that several Mexican cartels, including the extremely violent and ruthless Zetas, are recruiting teenagers on the US side of the border to help them in their smuggling operations.
“They call them ‘the expendables’,” said Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
According to McCraw, at least six major Mexican drug gangs have set up “command and control centres” in almost every major city in Texas and are actively recruiting children for their operations.
The kids, some as young as 11 and 12-years-old, are lured by the prospect of “easy money”, says McCraw. They’re paid US $50 for simple tasks, such as acting as lookouts, moving vehicles and running drugs.
Texas officials are extremely concerned by the developments and the state has joined the US Customs and Border Protection agency’s ‘Operation Detour’, which seeks to use community engagement to undermine the cartels.
Law enforcement officers meet with children and their parents in schools and at community centres to warn them about the dangers of what appear to be the easy money the Mexican drug gangs offer.
Texas officials have also warned that Mexico-based drug gangs are “intimidating landowners” in south Texas into allowing them to use their property as “permanent bases” for drug smuggling activity.
The cartels reportedly want to establish a “sanitary zone” on the US side of the Rio Grande, suggesting the Mexican drug war may be spilling over the border.