Bush’s Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up
by GARETH PORTER
posted online on January 18, 2008 here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/porter
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.
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Listen to the interview of Gareth Porter with Scott Horton for Antiwar Radio here: http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_01_21_porter.mp3
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Commentary: I would like to add a few words here to all that Gareth Porter has written and said. Argentina, a country I know very well, is one of the few countries in the world were real, genuine, Nazis lived. There has always been a large German colony in Argentina and, after World War II many Nazis were welcomed as refugees by Juan Peron who had many personal friends amongst them.
These Nazis had a great deal of influence on the right wing politics of Argentina and one could even purchase reprint copies of the Völkischer Beobachter in the subway of Buenos-Aires.
Argentina also used to be one of the countries with the highest percentage of Jew anywhere in the world, most of them concentrated in the capital Buenos-Aires. Many of them were very active in Argentinian politics including quite a few in the various Marxist guerilla movements such as “Montoneros”, the “Tupamaros” or the infamous “ERP” (People’s Revolutionary Army). Jews were also active in the unions, the student movements and the left-wing press. As a result, the Nazi-influenced right wing political parties absolutely hated the Jews and their propaganda constantly spoke of defending the ‘Raza Criolla’ (the ‘real’ Argentinians) against the ‘Judeo-Masonic conspiracy’ to destroy the country.
The Argentinian military used to be heavily infiltrated by such right-wing anti-Jewish elements and after the end of the military rule and the coming to power of Raul Alfonsin many blamed “the Jews” for all that had happened.
There was never any doubt in my mind that the Argentinian bombings were the result of a local, home-grown, anti-Jewish terrorist group, possibly liked with the elite “Carapintadas” commandos of the armed forces. As Gareth Porter mentions it in his interview with Scott Horton, these were the people who had motive and opportunity and, most importantly, the means to cover it all up.
The Israelis, who always had a strong network of agents in Argentina, could not have been unaware of all this. What they, and the Americans, did is blame it all on Hezbollah and Iran for political propaganda purposes. Under such circumstances it is not unreasonable to assume that the US and Israel might have had prior knowledge of what was about to happen. That would explain the quasi-instantaneous finger pointing at Iran and Hezbollah without any signs pointing in that direction (even indirectly).
Lastly, the Argentinian judicial system is corrupt beyond belief and heavily penetrated by pro-Israeli elements. To get some politically motivated indictments would have been just about the easiest thing for the Israelis or the CIA.
Thanks to Gareth Porter, one of the biggest propaganda myths against Hezbollah and Iran is finally biting the dust.
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.
The US is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.
Do you believe that the perpetuators could have been Takfiri (which you refer to as Salafi extremists), rather than Shia extremists (Hezbollah and Iran)?
Regarding motivation:
Khamenei and Hezbollah’s IRGC controlled leadership (versus the rank and file) frequently do things that make no sense and are against their own interests. They don’t behave the way other people around the world behave.
Do you believe that the perpetuators could have been Takfiri (which you refer to as Salafi extremists), rather than Shia extremists (Hezbollah and Iran)?
No, I have no reason the believe this. For one thing, the Salafis do not have the kind of influence in Argentina which could result in political cover for them. There is a large Druze and Lebanese emigration in Argentina, but it has never been a basis for Islamism. There is not even a small indication that Salafists would be involved.
Regarding motivation:
Khamenei and Hezbollah’s IRGC controlled leadership (versus the rank and file) frequently do things that make no sense and are against their own interests.
First, Hezbollah does not control the IRGC. Second, I consider the Iranian and Hezbollah leader the most intelligence, shrewed and strategically thinking political leaders on the planet. Just the fact that Iran has managed not to ever give an excuse for war to the Americans is nothing short of a feat of genius. I have no words to express my admiration for the way the Iranians used the US Neocons to get rid of their two most formidable enemies: the Taliban and Saddam. The Iranians and Hezbollah are, in my opinion, master tacticians and master strategists and when you speak of decisions which make no sense you are just showing your lack of understanding, not their lack of undertanding.
They don’t behave the way other people around the world behave
Agreed. They are way, waaay, smarter and they are truly dedicated to their beliefs. In a world of crass ignorance, stupidity and hypocrisy this is, indeed, sadly very rare.
As Palestinian Pundit said it recently “we need more Nasrallahs”…
The IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp Kuds force)—which reports to Supreme Leader Khamenei—created Hezbollah from scratch and remains its primary source of funding. The IRGC controls Hezbollah. Because Hezbollah has done such a poor job improving the Lebanese economy (by improving education for the jobs of tomorrow, encouraging foreign trade, investment and business, facilitating business development of all kinds—foreign and domestic, deregulation and simplification of regulation to facilitate private sector economic growth), Hezbollah doesn’t collect nearly enough tax revenue to fund its aggressive social spending programs. Hezbollah remains immensely reliant on Khamenei’s funding.
In fact Khamenei and his IRGC conducts its international policies to a large degree using Hezbollah operatives and cadre.
Hezbollah’s biggest weakness inside Lebanon derives from the perception shared by the vast majority of non-Shia Lebanese that Hezbollah is Khamenei’s paw. For its own credibility and future inside Lebanon, Hezbollah has to wean itself off Iranian funding over time. Or else it will continue to be viewed with great suspicion and hostility by non-Shia Lebonese.
This is one reason why I think Hezbollah should reinvent itself as a free market pro-business party. An alliance with Israel and other countries to facilitate much greater prosperity among Lebanese Shia (and Lebanese more generally) would enormously boost Hezbollah over time.
My 2 cents anyway.
Vineyard, consider using the term Takfiri instead of Salafi for the following reasons:
1) There have been many devout Salafi saints who I greatly admire and respect. The Salafi path is one that has offered significant spiritual benefit to many muslims.
2) You are really against Salafi extremists, not Salafis.
3) Using the term Salafi extremists might be misunderstood by some muslims in a negative light. It is important to emphasize that this is a struggle by the large majority of muslims and the world’s 5.5 billion non-muslims against an extreme minority faction within Islam.
4) The large majority of muslims around the world strongly detest Takfiris. A strong and deep coalition of muslims and nonmuslims can be inspired to work together to defeat the Takfiri.
All your article does for me is suggest that there is great uncertainty regarding who organized the 1992 and 1994 terrorist attacks. It could have been Takfiri, Shia extremists, or Neo-nazi groups. This piece does not provide evidence for any particular conclusion.
I view the Takfiri as a much greater threat to the world than Shia extremists (not only because I admire the twelver Imams), although Shia extremism is also a significant global ill and threat. So, one might say, I am predisposed to believe that it could be the work of Takfiri (which I use to encompass all sunni salafi extremists) rather than Shia extremists.
Still, I have yet to see significant evidence that Shia extremists were not involved. {Very different from proof of guilt, however.}
What we have learnt is that Takfiri terrorists do not need to have local roots, operatives and support to operate effectively. See 9/11, and the Dec 13, 2001 attacks on India’s parliament. (The vast majority of Delhi Muslims detest AQ, LET, JEM which organized the attack, India has very capable intelligent operations in Delhi; therefore it is extremely difficult for the IIF to conduct complex operations in Delhi.)
AQ very nearly pulled off the WTC attack of 1993 (without significant local support), which coincided with an AQ linked terrorist attack that blew up a couple sky-scrapers in Bombay that killed hundreds (again with limited local operatives, support and infrastructure given the hostility the vast majority of Bombay muslims harbor toward Takfiri groups.)
I think the Takfiris had the capability and the motives to carry out the 1992 and 1994 terrorist attacks. But I have no evidence that they actually conducted the attack.
Some questions:
1) Why would President Carlos Menon-whom I respect—lie about these attacks?
2) Why would the Argentine political class go along with it?
3) Would neo-nazis really organize attacks as large and blatant as this? If there role were ever exposed, their entire organization would be uprooted by the Argentine people, government and the international community?
4) Why would the Neo-Nazis risk carrying out the second 1994 attack, after the strong international reaction to the 1992 attacks?
5) Domestic groups (Takfiris excluded) rarely directly carry out massive terrorist attacks against population centers inside their home countries. It is too risky. May innocents die, and they risk turning local supporters and locals who tolerate them off. Both 1992 and 1994 were huge attacks that were designed to kill large numbers of Jewish and non-Jewish civilians. (Notice how the vast majority of suicide bombers in Iraq–that have murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in terrorist attacks against Iraqi population centers—are not Iraqi. It is hard to persuade actual Iraqis to be suicide bombers.)
6) It is very hard to keep secrets, and private conspiracies in free democracies such as Argentina (or America, Japan, Malaysia etc.) I doubt any domestic group would have confidence that it would be able to keep its own complicity secret for long.
7) I am not as convinced about Khamenei’s rationality or sanity as you are.
These are the reasons I am suspicious that there was a foreign hand. Whether Shia extremist, Takfiri, foreign neo-nazi I am still unsure.
It is true that Iran used America and many other countries to eliminate its mortal enemies, the Taliban and Saddam. But its activities after that in both countries have not always been rational. This accounts for surging anti-Iranian sentiment in Iraq (Muqtada, who is enormously reliant on Iranian support, has publicly accused Iran of backing AQ while in Iranian soil), and in Afghanistan (see the most recent public opinion polls.) Iran simultaneously back the GoI, Karzai’s government, popular political parties in both countries, and armed groups that target their putative allies. Part of this is different Iranian factions backing rival factions inside Iraq and Afghanistan; part is Khamenei’s irrationality. Note that in recent months, Khamenei has been playing a much more positive role in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Other irrational Khamenei policies:
1) Bad big government high regulation socialist policies that keep Iran much poorer than it should be. A more sluggish Iranian economy undermines Khamenei’s grip on power.
2) Khamenei’s failure to respond to several American olive branches. Better relations between Iran and America means reduced sanctions and significant economic improvements for most Iranians + many other benefits. {America and other countries such as India and China are likely to emphasize their relationship with Iran, over KSA—which the world is deeply wary about.}
3) The latest olive branch is the nuclear weapons report which was facilitated by the ‘reaching out to Iran’ faction.
4) Many neo-conservatives (Wolfowitz, Hitchens, Ajami) are more concerned about KSA, Egypt and Pakistan than Iran. Hitchens and Ajami have openly advocated a tactical alliance with Iran to fight AQ linked networks, the Taliban, and the Baathists. However, the neo-conservatives are much less influential now than they once were.
5) Stupid statements by Iranian leaders unnerve a lot of people around the world. Notice how low Iran scores everywhere in the world. America also ranks low, but that is another story. Iran’s policy on Rushdie scared people everywhere. Would it really hurt to say that Iran is pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli? To say that Iran supports friendship between Palestinians and Israelis, and good relations between Iran and Palestine, and between Israel and Iran. Iran has a close ancient relationship with the Jewish people. Why can’t Iran speak proudly about that relationship, and seek renewed friendship with their Israeli and Jewish brothers.
6) I know Iranian Jews, and other Iranian minorities that were terribly mistreated after the 1979 revolution. (they describe pre-1979 Iran as an idyllic place that respected minorities.) Khamenei has a very poor record in reaching out to Iranian minorities. This further unnerves people around the world.
“Real Nazis” can be found in Tehran too…
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/11/world/main2244765.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_2244765