by Aurélie M. Daher
In Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, Matthew Levitt, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and a former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, attempts to illustrate the threat posed to the West or its friends by Hezbollah, whose commitment [...]]]>
by Aurélie M. Daher
In Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, Matthew Levitt, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and a former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, attempts to illustrate the threat posed to the West or its friends by Hezbollah, whose commitment to violence constitutes, in the author’s view, its very essence. A compilation of the various attacks attributed to the group since the early 1980s, the book consists essentially of a review of the various reports and investigations undertaken by the U.S. CIA and FBI, Israel’s Mossad, and a long list of other western security, intelligence, and counter-terrorism agencies.
An initial problem, which is widely shared by most of this genre, is raised at the outset by the way the thesis is supposedly substantiated. Levitt in effect commits the methodological error of covering what is a highly interactive process from only one point of view; in this case, Hezbollah is detached from its environment, its culture and from the contexts in which it has developed since its creation. It is detached above all from the actors with which it has interacted over its 30-year history.
Thus, Hezbollah’s violence is approached as if it took place in a vacuum, presented as relevant to its own ethos, and practiced according to a logic comparable to “art for art’s sake.” As was noted a few years ago by the sociologist Didier Bigo, however, “terrorism” as an analytical category “doesn’t exist”. In other words, terrorism approached as a study frankly doesn’t permit any understanding of the organization that is responsible for it, nor does it even provide a real understanding of the phenomenon of the violence itself. By extension, to study an organization by cataloguing the violent acts of which it stands accused explains nothing at all.
Indeed, terrorism, a form of violence, is never practiced for its own sake; it is rather undertaken as a means or as an expression of an idea or a message that requires identification. The intellectual challenge is not to look at the violence itself, but to identify the reasons for such a choice, the objectives the actor intends to achieve, the contexts and conditions for success of the chosen strategy, and the response that it provokes from the target. In that sense, Levitt’s book offers no clue, leaving us completely bereft of such enlightening elements.
Not a word, for example, regarding the realities of Israel’s second invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the factor of social history that stands at the origin of Hezbollah. Nor does the book have anything to say about the realities of Israel’s military occupation of southern Lebanon, an occupation that lasted a not insubstantial 22 years in the course of which checkpoints, curfews, threats, and even violence, abductions, mass deportations and torture became daily concerns for some 200,000 Lebanese of whom nearly half ended up leaving — or being forced out of — their homes in the occupied zone. Not to mention the 11,000 Lebanese — that is, more than 15 percent of the remaining population — who, without any form of due process, spent time in Israeli prisons, some of them for more than ten years, still others until the end of their lives that were lost as a result of the abuses they suffered. This first category of very real sociological facts contextualizes Hezbollah’s violence, less as an essential trait of its nature than as a strategy of war carried out in response to another kind of violence inflicted on the larger community of which it is a part. Without seeking to justify Hezbollah’s violence, it would have seemed appropriate, both for the sake of intellectual integrity and analytic coherence, for the author to offer us explanatory details of a phenomenon that he claims to decipher.
A second problem is posed by the book’s very subject. Given the difficulty of gaining access to empirical material, cataloguing the malign acts of a clandestine organization as secretive as Hezbollah does not lend itself to strictly academic research, which must necessarily rely almost entirely on documents and sources from the murky world of international intelligence and espionage. Thus, one would have preferred that Levitt would have avoided unattributed assertions or affirmations — Hezbollah is this, Hezbollah does that — and instead referred back to the source on which his account relies — the CIA says that Hezbollah is this, the Mossad believes that Hezbollah does that. The presentation of Hezbollah in the book is thus less a factual and objective depiction as it is more a subjective recitation among similar works, especially when one considers the highly questionable record for reliability of western intelligence agencies regarding the Middle East in the past (including very recently) — a record upon which Levitt’s book unfortunately fails to improve. The fact is that the text abounds with vague, questionable, and uncontextualized assertions; that is, when they are not simply false.
At the same time, the author — who speaks no Arabic — fails to understand Hezbollah’s nature, as well as its aims. Nor does he have a grip on its internal organization or modus vivendi, just as he lacks familiarity with its history or environment and remains a stranger to the culture of its popular base. A number of events in the history of the region, and in particular, of Lebanon, are grossly distorted, leading at best to concerns about Levitt’s ignorance; at worst, about his intellectual honesty. His analysis of Hezbollah’s discourse is also literal; he thus interprets both ad hoc statements and lyrical flights of rhetoric by Hezbollah officials on ceremonial occasions as serious, well-planned strategies. For example, when, on the anniversary of the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniye, which was very likely carried out by the Mossad, Hezbollah officials declare, “We haven’t revenged him yet but we will,” that hardly means, as Levitt appears to believe, that Hezbollah is preparing to attack Israel or Israelis imminently. It is a mandatory slogan, just as Iranians have chanted (albeit with diminishing conviction) “Death to America” at Friday Prayer rallies over the past 34 years.
This lack of context is pervasive, as are important omissions, intended or not. Like Saudi anti-Shiite propaganda, Levitt depicts Lebanese Hezbollah and several other organizations based in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq with the same name as one and the same, thus attributing to the Lebanese group the acts of the others when the latter are not only products of their own distinct national histories, contexts, and aims, but also maintain no links or coordination with their Lebanese homonym.
Indeed, contrary to Levitt’s assertion, Hezbollah wasn’t created in 1982. The Israeli invasion initially provoked the formation of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon (IRL), a paramilitary group that first appeared in July of that same year. It wasn’t until several months later that the IRL chose to associate with a network of social and civic institutions that didn’t take definitive form as Hezbollah until the spring of 1984. The armed organization thus isn’t a branch, among others, of Hezbollah’s structure, but the inverse: Hezbollah is the civil extension of the IRL.
Moreover, Levitt’s attempts to describe the organization’s structure are replete with irrefutable errors of fact. Thus, the head of the Council of Jihad wasn’t Mughniye, nor even, after his 2008 assassination, Mustafa Badreddine, but rather Hassan Nasrallah himself, according to the group’s governing rules, which provide that the head of the IRL presides over the Central Decision Council under the secretary general. The mass media run by the party, similarly, are not responsible to the Political Council, as Levitt asserts, but to the Executive Council. These are just a few of the many simple errors in the book that naturally erode confidence in Levitt’s understanding of the most basic features of the organization.
Levitt’s own all-too-certain confidence in the reliability of reports by the CIA and its friendly counterparts leads him to a poor understanding of the socio-political contexts and developments that have taken place in the region during the past 30 years. For example, he notes, quoting from the CIA, that in the Bekaa Valley in 1987, “strict Islamic rule was implemented: Sale or transport of liquor are prohibited, women are forbidden from interacting with men in public and must adhere to a strict dress code, civil crimes are punished according to the Koran, and Western education and influences are prohibited.” Having myself grown up in Baalbek, the capital of the purported “Hezbollah State” in the Bekaa, I can attest without reservation that this description is a total fantasy: women wearing Bermuda shorts and short-sleeved and sleeveless t-shirts vastly outnumbered those donning chadors, however seductive, on the city’s streets. I also recall very clearly barbecues and other informal parties in our neighbours’ homes where orange juice was by no means the only beverage served for the thirsty. As in previous years, Hezbollah cadres lined up with other parents at the beginning of the academic year to enrol their kids in schools where Roman Catholic nuns taught classes in French. And in the courts, cases that applied Sharia law were not only extremely rare, but confined to those in which the families of criminal or tort victims specifically requested it.
In yet another example where Levitt’s sources have misinformed him, Israel did not withdraw from southern Lebanon in 2000 for the sake of upholding international law — such as UN Security Council Resolution 425 — as asserted by the author. Rather, it followed the Israeli government’s recognition of its army’s total defeat faced with the determination, tenacity, and effectiveness of IRL attacks in the region. Another example in the recent past that the author doesn’t get quite right is his confident assertion that Hezbollah organized in 2006 an attack and abduction of Israeli soldiers on Israeli territory “and dragged both Israel and Lebanon into a war neither State wanted.” Aside from the fact that the alleged violation by the IRL of Israeli sovereignty remains a source of debate — only Israel maintains that the attack took place on its territory; Hezbollah, the Lebanese army and the UN peacekeeping force there (UNIFIL) have maintained it took place within Lebanon’s borders — Israel had made plans for a large-scale offensive against its northern neighbor four months before and had meanwhile been waiting for a pretext to launch it under a claim of self-defense, as admitted by the then-Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, in March 2007.[1]
In the same way, one can’t simply take at face value Levitt’s version of the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires’ Jewish cultural center. At that time, the Argentine government maintained close relations with Tel Aviv; the Mossad indeed participated in the investigation that ultimately blamed Hezbollah, a conclusion embraced by Levitt. But the book unfortunately overlooks the fact that 18 years later, the Argentine government, having altered its foreign policy, agreed with Tehran to conduct a joint investigation. Nor does he note a more recent wrinkle from just last July when the former Argentine Interior Minister, Carlos Corach was accused of having supplied the explosives used in the attack, as reported by the World Jewish Congress. In other words, Levitt fails to take account of the flexibility that can sometimes influence judicial processes according to the political preferences of governments. Nor does he cite any serious critiques of the initial and subsequent investigations of the bombing by journalists, including Gareth Porter as in his 2008 Nation article or his more recent discovery that the 2006 indictment of top Iranian leaders for allegedly ordering the bombing relied virtually entirely on the testimony of the formerly-armed Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-E-Khalq (MEK). None of this means that Hezbollah is innocent of the bombing; it only demonstrates Levitt’s uncritical acceptance of and lack of curiosity about the “official” version, as recounted to him by his preferred intelligence sources.
The same selectivity brings him to place too much confidence in journalistic accounts about Hezbollah and Lebanese politics — some of which are susceptible to a number of interpretations or hypotheses, while others lack coherence. For example, media stories based on alleged leaks from the international commission investigating the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, as presented in 2009 by the German weekly, Der Spiegel, and in 2010 by the Canadian television channel, CBC, were widely criticized — even by anti-Hezbollah forces who were in the majority at the time — for inconsistencies and inaccuracies. The indictment filed in 2011, which charged four alleged members of Hezbollah with the crime, is, according to the prosecutor himself, Daniel Bellemare, based on inferences and circumstantial — rather than direct — evidence. With the trial now getting underway, moreover, it appears that the SIM cards which, according to the commission, were used to plan and organize the assassination and subsequently to identify the perpetrators, belonged at the time — and still even today — to ordinary citizens who obtained them before the assassination.
While recognizing that Hezbollah is an organization that considers violence part of its strategic “toolbox,” one can’t but regret Levitt’s lack of basic knowledge and analytic rigor, not to mention his sensationalism and apparent ignorance of nearly 30 years of important studies that have focused on the modus operandi of this key actor on the Middle Eastern geo-political stage. If the book had been written by a seasoned and experienced regional specialist fluent in Arabic and fully conversant in the region’s culture, habits and customs, its basic thesis — that Hezbollah has been responsible for dozens of actual and planned attacks against western targets and remains today one of the West’s major threats — might be more convincing.
[1] See L’Orient-Le Jour, 9 March, 2007, a version of which is unfortunately unavailable online. See also this article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, 21 August, 2006.
]]>by Gareth Porter
[While the terrible events in Egypt have delayed my plans to reply to ProPublica’s response to my critique of Sebastian Rotella’s report on the alleged build-up of Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in the Americas, Gareth Porter has written the following essay [...]]]>
by Gareth Porter
[While the terrible events in Egypt have delayed my plans to reply to ProPublica’s response to my critique of Sebastian Rotella’s report on the alleged build-up of Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in the Americas, Gareth Porter has written the following essay on a 2009 article by Rotella for the Los Angeles Times about an alleged bomb plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2008. It offers a very good illustration of some of the problems raised in my original critique of Rotella’s most recent work, notably the virtually exclusive reliance on sources that are clearly hostile to Iran with an interest in depicting it in the most negative light possible. But you be the judge. -- Jim Lobe]
It happened in Baku, transforming the capital of Azerbaijan into a battleground in a global shadow war.
Police intercepted a fleeing car and captured two suspected Hezbollah militants from Lebanon. The car contained explosives, binoculars, cameras, pistols with silencers and reconnaissance photos. Raiding alleged safe houses, police foiled what authorities say was a plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic that borders Iran.
Thus begins the only detailed English-language press account of an alleged Iranian terror plot in Azerbaijan in 2008: a May 2009 article, written with a Paris dateline, by Sebastian Rotella for the Los Angeles Times.
But despite the sense of immediacy conveyed by his lede, Rotella’s sources for his account were not Azerbaijanis. Rather, the sources Rotella quoted on the details of the alleged plot, the investigation and apprehension of the suspects consisted of an unnamed “Israeli security official”, and Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the author of a constant stream of articles, op-eds, and Congressional testimony reflecting the Israeli government’s interest in promoting the perception of a growing Iranian terrorist threat around the world.[1]
It was Levitt who described the alleged plot in Baku to Rotella as having been “in the advanced stages” when it was supposedly broken up by Azerbaijani security forces, an assertion echoed by the anonymous Israeli security official cited in the article:
”[Iran] had reached the stage where they had a network in place to do an operation,” said an Israeli security official, who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “We are seeing it all over the world. They are working very hard at it.”
So readers of the LA Times received a version of the plot that was filtered primarily, if not exclusively, through an Israeli lens.[2] Relying on Israeli officials and a close ally at a pro-Israel US think tank for a story on an alleged Iranian bomb plot against an Israeli Embassy is bound to produce a predictable story line where the accuracy can hardly be assumed at face value. Indeed, in this case, there were and remain many reasons for skepticism.
Yet, three years later, in a July 2012 article for ProPublica, he referred to the plot as though it was established fact.
Had Rotella sought an independent source in Azerbaijan, he would have learned, for example, that such alleged plots had been a virtual perennial in Baku for years. That is what a leading scholar of Azerbaijan’s external relations, Anar Valiyev, told me in an interview last November. “It’s always the same plot year after year,” said Valiyev, Dean of the School of International Affairs of the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in Baku.
In fact, security officials in Azerbaijan had claimed the existence of a similar plot in October 2007 and January 2012 and only two months later, authorities arrested Azerbaijani suspects in two different allegedly Iranian-initiated plots to carry out terrorist actions against Western embassies, the Israeli Embassy and/or Jewish targets. In early 2013, prison sentences were announced in yet another alleged terrorist plot to attack the Eurovision song contest in Baku in 2012. Valiyev told me that those detained by Azerbaijani security officials are always charged with wanting to kill Israeli or US officials and subsequently tried for plots to overthrow the government, which carries the maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
In a 2007 article in Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Focus, Valiyev observed that plots, assassination and coup-attempts were “thwarted” with regularity in Azerbaijan. “Periodically the government finds a scapegoat,” he wrote, to justify attacks on domestic critics, including “Wahabbis”, followers of Kurdish-Sunni scholar Said Nursi and/or Shiite radicals. Valiyev suggested that security officials might be “trying to show that radical Islamists could come to power…should the incumbent government lose the election.”
The Azerbaijani government and its security forces are not known for their devotion to the rule of law. The current president, Ilham Aliyev, is the son of Azerbaijan’s first president, Heydar Aliyev, who, in turn, was the head of the Soviet KGB before Azerbaijan’s independence. According to Jim Lobe, who visited Baku last year, dissidents regard the first Aliyev’s tenure as relatively liberal compared that of his son. A 2009 State Department cable described Ilham Aliyev as a “mafia-like” figure, likening him to a combination of Michael and Sonny Corleone in the “The Godfather”.
Valiyev observed that virtually nothing about the alleged plot made sense, beginning with the targets. According to Rotella’s story, the alleged Hezbollah operatives and their Azerbaijani confederates had planned to set off three or four car bombs at the Israeli Embassy simultaneously, using explosives they “intended to accumulate” in addition to the “hundreds of pounds of explosives” they had allegedly already acquired from “Iranian spies.”
But the Israeli Embassy is located in the seven-story Hyatt Tower office complex along with other foreign embassies, and no automobiles are allowed to park in close proximity to the complex, according to Valiyev. So the alleged plotters would have needed a prodigious amount of explosives to accomplish such a plan.
For example, the bomb that destroyed the eight-story US Air Force barracks at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 was estimated at 23,000 pounds of explosives detonated less than 100 feet away from the building. Valiyev told me that it is “practically impossible to find such components in Azerbaijan” because “Even a few kilograms of explosives would be tracked down by the ministry of national security.”
In his article, Rotella also referred — though only in passing — to the prosecutor’s charge that the alleged conspirators were planning to attack a Russian radar installation at Gabala (sometimes spelled Qabala) in northern Azerbaijan. But that part of the plot was also highly suspect, according to Valiyev. No reason was ever given for such a target, and it would have made no sense for either Hezbollah’s or Iran’s interests.
Built in 1984, the Gabala radar station was leased to the Russians until 2012, and 900 troops from the Russian Space Forces were stationed there. An attack on the station by Hezbollah or its supposed proxies in Azerbaijan would have represented a major provocation against Russia by Iran and Hezbollah, and was therefore hard to believe, as Valiyev pointed out in a July 2009 report for the Jamestown Foundation. Valiyev said it was far more plausible that the alleged plotters were simply carrying out surveillance on the station which, according to some reports, was being considered for possible integration into a regional US missile defense system.
Rotella failed to mention yet another aspect of the prosecution’s case that should arouse additional skepticism. The indictment included the charge that the leader of the alleged terrorist cell plotting these attacks was working simultaneously for Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Even though it has been long been discredited, the idea of an Iran-al-Qaeda collaboration on terrorism has been a favorite Israeli theme for some time and one that continues to be propagated by Levitt.
Rotella’s account of how the suspects were apprehended also appears implausible. In May 2008, when the bombings were supposedly still weeks away, according to his story, the suspects realized they were under surveillance and tried to flee.
But instead of hiding or destroying incriminating evidence of their terrorist plot — such as the reconnaissance photos, the explosives, the cameras and the pistols with silencers — as might be expected under those circumstances, the two suspects allegedly packed all that equipment in their car and fled toward the border with Iran, whereupon they were intercepted, according to the official line reported by Rotella.
Somehow, despite the surveillance, according to anonymous “anti-terrorist officials” cited by Rotella, “a number of Lebanese, Iranian and Azerbaijani suspects escaped by car into Iran.” Only those with the incriminating evidence — including, most implausibly, hundreds of pounds of explosives — in their car were caught, according to the account given to Rotella.
Even Rotella’s description of the two Lebanese suspects, Ali Karaki and Ali Najem Aladine, as a veteran Hezbollah external operations officer and an explosives expert, respectively, should not be taken at face value, according to Valiyev. It is more likely, he said, that the two were simply spies working for Iranian intelligence.
Even the US Embassy report on the trial of the suspects suggested it also had doubts about the alleged plot. “In early October after a closed trial,” the reporting cable said, “an Azerbaijani court sentenced a group of alleged terrorists arrested the previous Spring and supposedly connected to Lebanese Hezbollah plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Baku AND the Qabala radar station in northern Azerbaijan” (emphasis in the original). It added, “In a public statement the state prosecutor repeated earlier claims that the entire plot was an operation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”
Yet another striking anomaly about the alleged plot was the fact that nothing was published about it for an entire year. No explanation for the silence was ever made public. This silence is all the more significant because during 2009 and 2010, the Israeli government either publicly alleged or leaked stories of Iranian or Hezbollah plots in Turkey and Jordan about which the host country authorities either did not comment on or offered a different explanation. But despite the extremely close relationship between Azebaijani and Israeli intelligence services (confirmed by this US Embassy cable), neither the Israeli media nor foreign journalists were tipped off to the plot until the Israelis leaked the story to Rotella a year later.[3]
The complete absence of any leak by the Israelis for an entire year about an alleged Iranian plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Baku casts some circumstantial doubt on whether such a plot had indeed been uncovered in 2008, as claimed in the article.
Despite the multiple anomalies surrounding this story — the complete lack of any publicly available corroborating evidence; the well-established penchant for the Aliyev government for using such alleged plots to justify rounding up domestic critics; the US Embassy’s apparent skepticism, his failure to consult independent sources; and the 2009 publication by the Jamestown Foundation of Valiyev’s own critique of the “official” version of the case — Rotella has shown no interest in clarifying what actually happened. In fact, as noted above, he referred to the plot again in a July 2012 article for ProPublica as if there was not the slightest doubt with regard to its actual occurrence, identifying it, as he did in the original article, as an attempted retaliation for the assassination of a senior Hezbollah operative three months before:
Conflict with Israel intensified in February 2008 after a car bomb in the heart of Damascus killed Imad Mughniyah, a notorious Hezbollah military leader and ally of Iranian intelligence. Iranian Hezbollah publicly accused Israel and vowed revenge.
Within weeks, a plot was under way against the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan. Police broke up the cell in May 2008. The suspects included Azeri accomplices, a senior Hezbollah field operative and a Hezbollah explosives expert. Police also arrested two Iranian spies, but they were released within weeks because of pressure from Tehran, Western anti-terror officials say.[4] The other suspects were convicted.
As narrowly sourced as it was, Rotella’s original 2009 story thus helped make a dubious tale of a bomb plot in Baku part of the media narrative. More recently, he continued that pattern by promoting the unsubstantiated charge by Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman and various pro-Israel groups and right-wing members of Congress, such as Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, that Iran poses a growing terrorist threat to the US in the Americas. While Jim Lobe has helped deconstruct that story line, I have recently marshaled evidence showing that Nisman’s charges about alleged Iranian involvement in the 1994 AMIA bombing and the 2007 JFK airport plot were tendentious and highly questionable.
Photo: Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a dinner hosted by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in November 2010.
[1] In one illustration of Rotella’s and Levitt’s long-time symbiosis, Levitt cited Rotella’s account of the alleged Baku plot as his main source about the incident in a 2013 article on alleged Hezbollah terrorism published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC).
[2] Rotella referred twice to “anti-terrorism officials” as sources for describing the surveillance of the alleged perpetrators that preceded their arrest and past work for Hezbollah. Of course, the phrase “anti-terrorism officials” does not exclude the possibility that they, too, were Israeli.)
[3] The first time the alleged plot’s details appeared in the Anglophone Israeli press was when Haaretz published a several hundred-word piece based virtually exclusively on Rotella’s account with the added detail, citing “Israeli sources,” that the “plotters also planned to kidnap the Israeli ambassador in Baku…”
[4] This account, incidentally, was the first to report the arrest in the case of “two Iranian spies”, another anomaly that may be explained by a flurry of media reports in 2010 that it was the two Lebanese who were released as part of a larger prisoner exchange that also included an Azerbaijani nuclear scientist arrested as a spy by Iran.
Immediately after the terror bombing of a busload of Israeli youth in Burgas, Bulgaria, both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a “senior U.S. official” expressed certainty about Iran’s responsibility. Since then, the White House has backed away from that position, after Bulgarian investigators warned against that assumption [...]]]>
Immediately after the terror bombing of a busload of Israeli youth in Burgas, Bulgaria, both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a “senior U.S. official” expressed certainty about Iran’s responsibility. Since then, the White House has backed away from that position, after Bulgarian investigators warned against that assumption before the investigation is complete.
Similary, it is generally assumed that Iran and Hezbollah were responsible for the terrorist bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, because US and Israeli officials, journalists and commentators have repeated that conclusion so often. It was the first reference made by those who were most eager to blame the Burgas bombing on Iran, such as Matthew Levitt and Jeffrey Goldberg.
But that terrorist bombing 18 years ago was not what it has come to appear by the constant drip of unsubstantiated journalistic and political references to it. The identification of that bombing as an Iranian operation should be regarded as a cautionary tale about the consequences of politics determining the results of a terrorist investigation.
The case made by the Argentine prosecutors that Iran and Hezbollah committed that 1994 terrorist bombing has long been cited as evidence that Iran is the world’s premier terrorist state.
But the Argentine case was fraudulent in its origins and produced a trail of false evidence in service of a frame-up. There is every reason to believe that the entire Argentine investigation was essentially a cover-up that protected the real perpetrators.
That is what I learned from my ten-month investigation in 2006-07 of the case, the results of which were published in early 2008.
William Brencick, who was then chief of the political section at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires and the primary Embassy contact for the investigation of the AMIA bombing, told me in an interview in June 2007 that the US conviction about Iranian culpability was based on what he called a “wall of assumptions” — a wall that obstructed an objective analysis of the case. The first assumption was that it was a suicide bombing, and that such an operation pointed to Hezbollah, and therefore Iran.
But the evidence produced to support that assumption was highly suspect. Of 200 initial eyewitnesses to the bombing, only one claimed to have seen the white Renault van that was supposed to have been the suicide car. And the testimony of that lone witness was contradicted by her sister, who said that she had seen only a black and yellow taxicab.
That is only the first of many indications that the official version of how the bombing went down was a tissue of lies. For example:
- The US explosives expert sent soon after the bombing to analyze the crime scene found evidence suggesting that at least some of the explosives had been placed inside the community center, not in a car outside.
- The engine block of the alleged suicide car which Police said led them to the arrest of the Shi’a used car salesman and chop shop owner who sold the car, was supposedly found in the rubble with its identification number clearly visible — something any serious bombing team, including Hezbollah, would have erased, unless it was intentionally left to lead to the desired result.
- Representatives of the Menem government twice offered large bribes to the used car dealer in custody to get him to finger others, including three police officials linked to a political rival of Menem. The judge whose bribe was videotaped and shown on Argentine television was eventually impeached.
Apart from an Argentine investigation that led down a false trail, there were serious problems with the motives attributed to Iran and Hezbollah for killing large numbers of Jewish citizens of Argentina. The official explanation was that Iran was taking revenge on the Menem government for having reneged, under pressure from the Clinton administration, on its agreements with Iran on nuclear cooperation.
But in fact, Argentina had only halted two of the three agreements reached in 1987 and 1988, as was revealed, ironically, in documents cited by the Argentine prosecutor’s report on the arrest warrant for Iranian officials dated October 2006 (unfortunately never made available in electronic form). The documents showed that the Menem government was continuing to send 20 percent enriched uranium to Iran under the third agreement, and there were negotiations continuing both before and after the bombing to resume full nuclear cooperation.
As for Hezbollah, it was generally assumed that it wanted to avenge the Israeli killing of its “ally” Mustafa Dirani in May 1994. But when Hezbollah really wanted to take revenge against Israel, as it did after the Israeli massacre in Qana in 1996, it did not target civilians in a distant country with no relationship to the conflict with Israel; it openly attacked Israel with Katyusha rockets.
It is not clear yet who committed the latest terrorist bombing against Jewish civilians in Burgas, Bulgaria. But the sorry history of that Buenos Aires investigation should not be used to draw a premature conclusion about this matter or any other terrorist action.
]]>Almost immediately after the bombing of a Bulgarian bus filled with Israeli tourists in the resort city of Burgas that killed at least 5 Israelis and injured dozens of people, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified the perpetrator(s) as having carried out the attack at the behest of Iran.
[...]]]>
Almost immediately after the bombing of a Bulgarian bus filled with Israeli tourists in the resort city of Burgas that killed at least 5 Israelis and injured dozens of people, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified the perpetrator(s) as having carried out the attack at the behest of Iran.
“All signs point to Iran,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “In just the past few months we’ve seen Iran try to target Israelis in Thailand, Indian [sic], Georgia, Cyprus and more. The murderous Iranian terror continues to target innocent people. This is a global Iranian terror onslaught and Israel will react forcefully to it.” The accusation was echoed by Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, and other Israeli officials.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry and the Iranian Embassy in Sofia have denied that Iran was involved in a statement issued on Thursday that said, “The groundless statements of different statesmen from the Zionist regime accusing Iran for participating in the incident with the blown up bus with Israeli tourists is a well-known method of the Zionist regime pursuing its own political goals.” Iran also identified itself in the statement as a “victim of the Zionist regime’s terrorism, including the murder of nuclear scientists,” while stressing “the long-lasting friendship between the Islamic Republic and Bulgaria, which is based on mutual respect for their interests.” Hezbollah also denied involvement, claiming that it would not have targeted tourists.
Bulgaria, which maintains embassies in both Tel Aviv and Teheran and hosts embassies from both Iran and Israel in Sofia, has thus far abstained from casting blame on Iran. Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov was quoted in Haaretz today saying that “it is wrong and a mistake to point fingers at this stage of the investigation at any country or organization”, adding that “We are only in the beginning of the investigation and it is wrong to jump to conclusions.” Mladenov emphasized that Bulgaria had “excellent cooperation with the Israeli security forces in matters pertaining to the investigation.”
The Israeli Line
Mainstream newswire coverage has largely followed the logic of the Israeli narrative, which situates the bombing in the context of a timeline of attacks on Israelis, many of them thwarted, that have been attributed to Iran over the past several months and go back years and even decades. Proof of direct Iranian responsibility in any of these attacks is scarce and speculative, although many, at one point or another, were blamed on Iran or its proxies.
Yesterday Andrew MacDowell of the Christian Science Monitor asked, “Why in Bulgaria, and Why Look to Iran?” without answering either part of the question satisfactorily. Following the Israeli line of reasoning, most media have suggested that the motive for the attack was the 18th anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Argentina, for which Israeli sources insist Iran was implicated. Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near Easy Policy (aka WINEP or “the Washington Institute”), writing for Peter Beinert’s recently launched Open Zion website, opens with the question “Did Hezbollah Do It?” and bases his unequivocally affirmative conclusion on the AMIA anniversary. On the same website, Trita Parsi, President of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) writes that although no evidence has yet been presented, the Iranian government “is a very likely suspect.”
Other terrorism experts are more cautious, however, telling Lobelog, “It’s too soon to know.”
What gives Israel’s accusation against Iran both punch and pungency is the apparent lack of alternative explanatory variables for journalists covering the unfolding story. But such variables do exist. What follows are some relevant aspects of the Bulgarian bombing case that have been largely overlooked or ignored in news reports thus far. None of these exculpate Iran or Hezbollah. Nor should the claim made by a jihadist group that Bulgaria is a “legitimate target” for terrorists be mistaken for the opinion of the author, who, does not “blame the victims,” be they Israeli, Bulgarian, or American. The only intent here is to shed light on the possibility that responsibility might li elsewhere and ought to be investigated before hasty retaliatory action is taken.
Where Israeli and US anti-terrorism priorities diverge
Since 9/11, there has been an inherent tension between US and Israeli anti-terrorism priorities. As Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman point out in their book Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, while the focus of US anti-terrorism has been on Al Qaeda, Israeli leaders and intelligence analysts don’t consider Al Qaeda to be particularly interested in Israel, and regard Iran as far more worrisome to the Jewish state.
In the days after the horrific events that took down the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon and took over 3,000 lives, Israeli leaders called for retribution against Iran, even though Al Qaeda’s responsibility was quickly established and almost universally accepted. In most of the recent efforts to carry out attacks on Israelis abroad, Israeli insistence that Iran was responsible has distracted attention from the very real possibility that Sunni Islamic extremists linked to Al Qaeda might be behind the attack.
Why Bulgaria?
The collapse of the former Soviet Union and the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact offered numerous countries in Eastern Europe the opportunity to ally with the West. Bulgaria, which was part of the Multinational Force in Iraq from from December 2003 until May 2008, was granted NATO membership in April 2004, ten years after it had initiated the admissions process in March 1994. Bulgaria also applied for EU membership late in 1995 and was only admitted on Jan. 1, 2007. Bulgaria signed a Defense Cooperation Agreement with the US in 2006, agreeing to host American military bases and training exercises. The deal attracted relatively little publicity, remaining under the global radar until February 2011 when Wikileaks exposed the pressure on Bulgaria to modernize its military by purchasing advance aircraft and naval vessels from Western countries for NATO deployments. Attention was also drawn to US-Bulgarian military cooperation this past April, when a Bulgarian MIG 29 fighter jet crashed during joint drills with the US Air Force.
According to Ivan Dikov, writing for Sofia Speaking:
Ever since a decade ago Bulgaria became an unconditional ally of the USA and even enlisted in the first “Coalition of Willing”[sic] of George W Bush in Iraq, joining in Afghanistan shortly before that, and the Bulgarian medics were jailed in Libya as scapegoats in an affair with HIV-infected blood, numerous experts started warning that Bulgaria was threatened with terrorist attacks…this was a warning about a potential transfer of global and regional conflicts on Bulgarian soil. On July 18, 2012, this threat materialized…
In October 2010, Bulgaria’s Minister of Defense Anyu Angelov announced that in 2013, Bulgaria would send 700 combat troops to Afghanistan, supplementing its current 500 plus troops who largely do guard duty. Not long after the announcement, in an interview with the Bulgarian daily “24 Hours,” Sheikh Abu Sharif, speaking on behalf of the Al Qaeda-linked Sunni Islamist group Asbat al-Ansar, demanded that the Bulgarian government remove its troops from Afghanistan “before it is too late.” Sharif declared that Bulgaria was considered a legitimate target of Al Qaeda because it has sent its soldiers to support the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Sofia News Agency reported on Oct. 22, 2010:
Asbat al-Ansar is featured in the United States’ list of terrorist organizations for alleged connections with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. The leader of the group is Ahmad Abdel Karim al-Saadi, aka Abu Mahjan. After he went underground in 1999, his brother, Abu Tariq, has fronted the group.
The organization believes in a strict interpretation of Islam. It employs a “defensive jihad” to fight perceived attacks on Islam. As such, the group seeks to purge any Western influences or anything deemed un-Islamic from Lebanon.
In 2004, Asbat al-Ansar voiced vocal condemnation of the US presence in Iraq and urged insurgents to kill US personnel.
The group has also cooperated with another organization, al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, which was responsible for the beheading of the Bulgarian truck drivers Ivaylo Kepov and Georgi Lazov in July 2004.
Although Asbat al-Ansar is based in Lebanon and might not be considered much of a threat to a European NATO member, the Director of Bulgaria’s National Intelligence Service (NRS), Kircho Kirov, apparently took the threat seriously: “We have to be very vigilant when receiving a warning, coming from an extremist organization like this one.” Mohd Abuasi, an expert from the Bulgarian Center for Middle East Studies, also responded to the threat, noting that Bulgaria was not yet a priority for Al Qaeda or other Jihadist organizations because they did not know much about it, but that there is a “real possibility” that they might start paying attention to it:
“Some officials’ make statements that sound anti-Islam, like the statements by the minister of defense that Syria and Iran are a threat to the country. Also, the ridiculous police operations against Muslims in the Rhodopes are absolutely groundless and only create tension. If this continues, terrorist organizations will start looking at Bulgaria as a target,” Abuasi said.
A shortfall of Israeli intelligence agencies?
That Israelis visiting Bulgaria might be the target of terrorists was apparently recognized earlier this year when, according to Al Jazeera English, Israeli public television reported in January that Bulgarian authorities had foiled a bomb attack after they discovered an explosive device on a chartered bus that was to have taken Israeli tourists to a ski resort. Nonetheless, after the attack on the Israelis in Burgas on Wednesday, Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev said that the authorities had met with Israel’s Mossad a month earlier, during which there was no warning of an expected attack. Plevneliev stressed that Bulgarian and Israeli authorities were in close communication with one another and would have taken serious action had Bulgaria received any advance intelligence warning from Israel.
Considering the enormous resources that Israel devotes to the “Iranian threat,” the Israeli Mossad likely would have uncovered some clues that Iran or Hezbollah were planning an attack in Bulgaria, particularly on Israelis. Undoubtedly they would have shared the information with the highest levels of the Bulgarian government. That they did neither raises the question of whether Israel’s intelligence services might be too focused on the threat posed by Iran, while underestimating the threat posed by Al Qaeda-linked jihadist groups.
Allegations published earlier today on the Bulgarian website News.bg that identified the man believed to be the perpetrator — a long-haired Caucasian male (possibly in a wig) shown pacing in security footage one hour before the attack — as a former inmate of Guantanamo Bay, are being dismissed as false by the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior. It is not yet clear whether any elements of the report, which was picked up by the Times of Israel, Atlantic Wire and the Canadian National Post, are accurate. Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov claims that the “ring around the perpetrator is tightening up,” adding that no details will be available until the investigation of the attack has been concluded.
The latest update we have at the time of this posting is that an unidentified “senior American official” has confirmed “Israel’s assertions” to the New York Times. These are the relevant half quotes and information attributed to the unnamed official:
- The official said the current American intelligence assessment is that the bomber was “acting under broad guidance” to hit Israeli targets when the opportunity presented itself. That guidance was given to Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group, by its primary sponsor, Iran, he said.
- The attacks, the official said, were in retaliation for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists by Israeli agents, something that Israel has neither confirmed nor denied. “This was tit for tat,” said the American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the investigation was still underway.
- The bomber was carrying a fake Michigan driver’s license, but there are no indications that he had any connections to the United States, the American official said, adding that there were no details yet about the bomber — his name, age or nationality. He also declined to describe what specific intelligence — intercepted communications, analysis of the bomber’s body parts and other details — that led analysts to conclude that the suicide bomber belonged to Hezbollah.
Is that enough to make the content of this post irrelevant? You be the judge.
]]>Keane repeated his claim that Iran is “our number one strategic enemy in the world” and called the alleged plot a “stunning rebuke to the Obama administration’s policy of negotiation and isolation with the Iranians.” His recommendations included conducting “covert operations led by the CIA” and providing “money, information and encouragement to the dissident leaders inside Iran to use their population to put pressure on the regime.”
Keane stopped short of recommending military strikes, but another panelist, Reuel Marc Gerecht of the uber-hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies did.
In response to a question directed at the entire panel about what should be done to counter the “threat” posed to the U.S. by Iran, Gerecht pushed the standard neo-con argument that the Islamic Republic is led by irrational actors who “do not respond in the same rational economic ways that we do.” He also echoed the preemptive war rhetoric that the Bush administration used in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
I don’t think that you’re really going to really intimidate these people, get their attention, unless you shoot someone…I think you have to send a pretty powerful message to those who have undertaken this or I think down the road you’re asking for it.
Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, added that sanctions against Iran have been “tremendously effective,” but they have to be used in tandem with other options “aggressively enough to make Iran care.” His list of other options included “military options,” “covert actions” and “diplomatic options.”
The hearing did include a few brief moments of reason. At one point Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said that while
Iran’s leaders must be held accountable for their action…we cannot take any reckless actions which may lead to opening another front in the ‘War on Terror,’ which the American people do not want and cannot afford.
Note on Keane: Keane has close ties with U.S. neoconservatives and was one of the main architects of George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq. In 2006, Gen. George Casey and the chief of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid recommended reducing troop levels in Iraq, but Keane and his neoconservative allies started looking for someone that would support escalation instead–ultimately General David Petraeus. As documented by Bob Woodward in the War Within (though not in the fashion I write here), Keane ignored the chain of command while heavily promoting Petraeus. He also helped persuade Bush to reject the Iraq Study Group’s findings and recommendations by aggressively pushing an alternative strategy he wrote with Frederick Kagan at the American Enterprise Institute called “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq.” That report led to the military buildup that followed. He’s also criticizing Obama’s announcement last week that the U.S. will withdraw all its troops from Iraq by Christmas. “I think it’s an absolute disaster,” he told the Washington Times last weekend. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”
]]>Foreign Policy: Marc Lynch blogs that while the White House is considering “talk[ing] more openly about military options [against Iran],” according to The New York Times’ David Sanger, such rhetoric would be counterproductive and dangerous. Lynch warns that if the Iranians return [...]]]>
Foreign Policy: Marc Lynch blogs that while the White House is considering “talk[ing] more openly about military options [against Iran],” according to The New York Times’ David Sanger, such rhetoric would be counterproductive and dangerous. Lynch warns that if the Iranians return to the P5+1 nuclear talks, “Iran will quite reasonably refuse to bargain under the threat of military force, and will view American offers under such conditions as manifestly insincere,” and won’t find a military threat credible. More importantly, such threats would destroy any confidence building measures and widen existing divisions. “The greatest danger of introducing open war talk by the administration is that it would represent the next step in the ‘ratcheting’ of which I’ve been warning for months and pave the way either to the 1990s Iraq scenario or to an actual war,” says Lynch.
The Jerusalem Post: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (FDD) Benjamin Weinthal writes that new EU sanctions will have an impact on EU-Iranian gas deals but unlike the U.S. sanctions the new EU sanctions will not place sanctions on individual Iranian officials because of human rights violations. Weinthal interviews FDD’s Mark Dubowitz who tells him, “A fragile political consensus exists in favor of sanctions in Europe. If the Obama administration doesn’t provide determined leadership by either sanctioning foreign companies which are violating US law, or persuading these companies to terminate their Iranian ties, European governments will not enforce their own sanctions.” Weinthal repeats his Dubowitz’s calls for Swiss energy company Elektrizitätsgesellschaft Laufenburg (EGL) to cancel its €18 billion-€20 billion gas deal with Iran.
Tehran Bureau: Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the hawkish Washington Institute for Near east Policy (WINEP) writes that while the Treasury Department’s decision to sanction 37 German, Maltese and Cypriot companies for being controlled by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) but “the latest U.S. actions are not likely to put sufficient pressure on Tehran to change the regime’s calculus.” The Iranian shipping line is alleged to participate in arms smuggling and, according to Levitt is “one of the central players in Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons capabilities.”
]]>- The Washington Post: Glenn Kessler reports that Iran is increasingly unable to conduct “normal banking” activities due to the sanctions, and is attempting to set up banking operations in such Muslim countries as Iraq and Malaysia “using dummy names and opaque ownership structures.” For their alleged support of Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. Treasury has blacklisted 16 Iranian banks. Matthew Levitt, director of the counterterrorism and intelligence program at the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) told Kessler that “the banking operations, even if successfully created in other countries, are likely to be small-scale and insufficient to make up for the volume of banking activity Iran has lost.”
- The National Interest: Ken Pollack, the director of Brookings’s Mid East Center, reviews the Obama administration’s Iran policy and concludes that “it is working, but it probably isn’t going to work.” He says an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear program — “and launching air strikes will be war” — will rally people to the government, justify an Iranian nuclear deterrent to further attack, cause Iran to withdraw from the NPT (meaning the world will be in the dark), and bring condemnations of the U.S. from the world. Following a lengthy analysis of U.S. policy options, he ends with thoughts on containment. He writes that given Iran belief that it can outlast sanctions, the United States and the international community needs to build “an aggressive new containment regime that Iran cannot possibly outlast. Like North Korea, Iran would not be allowed to enjoy any benefit from its acquisition of a nuclear capability or even a nuclear arsenal.”
- The National Interest: Georgetown professor and former CIA officer Paul Pillar responds to Pollack’s article and disagrees that “pressure and more pressure” is the best way of dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. Pillar raises the question of why the Iranian nuclear program is such a preoccupation for the United States and whether assumptions about Iranian irrationality have any grounding in reality or are reflected in Iran’s record of behavior. Pillar also disputes the argument that a strategy of deterrence has “no guarantees of success” and “failure is invariably catastrophic” is reason enough to pressure Iran. “…[T]o make that observation as an argument for not tolerating someone else’s nuclear force would mean not only dismissing a lot of Cold War history but also throwing up our arms in despair over nuclear deterrence relationships that we continue to have to this day with the likes of Russia and China,” he contends.