U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar claimed that Shahlai was his cousin.
In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an individual “providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq” and thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said Shahlai had provided “material support” to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and that he had “planned the Jan. 20, 2007 attack” by Mahdi Army “Special Groups” on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq.
Arbabsiar’s confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early spring 2011 and asked him to find “someone in the narcotics business” to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with thousands of dollars for his expenses.
But Arbabsiar’s charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar had become the cornerstone of the administration’s case against Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him.
There is no indication in the FBI account of the investigation that there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar’s claim of Shahlai’s involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador.
The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a terrorist past, and that it was therefore credible that he could be part of an assassination plot.
Read more.
]]>Just consider the elaborateness of these allegations: not only did the conspiracy allegedly involve an Iranian assassination plot against a diplomat from Saudi Arabia on U.S. soil, it’s also being tied to the unrest in Bahrain and U.S. losses in Iraq. Thus, the unnamed “cousin,” who Arbabsiar described as a “big general in [the] army,” according to the complaint, is identified in a press release about new OFAC sanctions as Abdul Reza Shahlai — the same man who, as reported by Laura Rozen, was previously designated as the Qods Force deputy commander behind the 2007 raid in southern Iraq by a Shiite militant group that killed five U.S. soldiers. Robert Mackey of the New York Time’s blog The Lede also informs us that Saudi scholar and former royal family adviser Nawaf Obeid told McClatchy that Gholam Shakuri, the other Qods officer behind the alleged plot, was suspected by Saudi intelligence of “fomenting unrest in Bahrain on behalf of Iran’s government.”
So the first conspirator named by Arbabsiar is said to have harmed the U.S. in Iraq, and the second is allegedly behind the protest movement in Bahrain which is ongoing despite the crackdown by Bahrain’s ruling family with the help of some 1,500 Saudi and Emirati troops. Could this really be possible? Always. Is it likely or even plausible? Not really.
Some questions in addition to the ones I asked on the day the accusations were made public:
1) The first mention of Arbabsiar’s “cousin” in the FBI complaint is made by the DEA informant, CS-1: “During their July 14 meeting, CS-l asked ARBABSIAR about ARBABSIAR’s cousin…” This means that the initial conversation about Arbabsiar’s cousin was not documented. Why is that and what did it involve?
2) Since the DEA informant is a “paid confidential source”, how are we to assess his role in the plot, considering his incentives (not necessarily restricted to financial ones) to bring Arbabsiar in? (Also read Stephen Walt’s comments about the FBI’s track record with these kinds of conspiracies.)
3) Would a high-level Qods force member not be able to assess Arbabsiar’s shady and shaky character before asking him to carry out an extremely risky assassination attempt with his own reputation on the line? Was the Iranian Mr. Bean his only option?
4) Even if Arbabsiar’s cousin is indeed Shahlai, and Shahlai is who the U.S. claims he is, does he represent the Iranian government? What if Shahlai, for various possible reasons, acted on his own accord? In other words, was this an Iranian plot or an Iranian cousin’s plot?
Again, the question is not whether Iran is capable of terrorism (because it is) or about Arbabsiar’s guilt, but whether the Iranian government was behind an act of international terrorism on U.S. soil. When the media headlines pieces on this case using phrases like “Iran plot” it is going to be remembered by readers as such regardless of the facts presented. The long-term effects of this on the U.S. psyche remain to be seen, but is there enough evidence to even make that claim at this point? This question is particularly important when prominent pundits such as those that pushed for the invasion of Iraq are pushing for a military response to Iran. Consider the recent words of well-known neoconservative Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Wall Street Journal:
The White House needs to respond militarily to this outrage. If we don’t, we are asking for it.
Until hard evidence is offered by the Obama administration to back up its far-reaching allegations, more questions need to be asked. It’s disconcerting that while the U.S. is gearing up to respond with further punitive measures against Iran, the most important question hasn’t even been adequately answered yet.
]]>“Fishy, fishy, fishy,” Bruce Riedel, a CIA veteran who was formerly in charge of the Near East and South Asia on the White House National Security Council, told IPS. “That Iran engages in assassinations is old news. That it would use a Mexican drug cartel would be new.”
And:
“Nothing about this adds up,” said Kenneth Katzman, author of a book on the IRGC and expert on Iran at the Congressional Research Service.
“Iran does not use non-Muslim groups or people who are not trusted members or associates of the Quds force,” Katzman said. “Iran does not blow up buildings in Washington that invites retaliation against the Iranian homeland.”
And:
]]>It is possible that the Iranian cousin “agreed to support him in some way but was doubtful he could pull it off”, Katzman said. “This was not a thoroughly vetted and approved terrorist plot.”
Several U.S. intelligence experts expressed skepticism about the expertise of the DEA in evaluating such a sensitive case.
Riedel noted that the complaint refers to “elements” of the Iranian government, “which suggests that the administration doesn’t think that all elements of the Iranian government were involved”.
An Iranian source, speaking with IPS on condition he not be named, said that the Quds force would investigate the Iranian alleged to have participated in the plot “to find out if there is any personal interest” involved, suggesting an element of freelancing.
Details of the alleged plot by an Iranian-American to hire Mexican drug cartels to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington remain few and far between. But that hasn’t stopped analysts at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) [...]]]>
Details of the alleged plot by an Iranian-American to hire Mexican drug cartels to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington remain few and far between. But that hasn’t stopped analysts at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Heritage Foundation from calling for a military response.
The Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano weighed in with a blog post promoted at the top of the center’s website. Carafano lists actions “required” in response to the Justice Department’s allegations against Texas used car dealer Manssor Arbabsiar. The first action is:
Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at AEI, called for an end to diplomatic outreach to Tehran, colorfully writing in the New York Daily News:
The time for talk has ended.
And FDD executive director Mark Dubowitz taunted the White House for what he anticipates will be an indecisive reponse to a “brazen attack” — albeit ineptly planned and nowhere near a point of execution — in Washington. While coming up short of explicitly endorsing military action, he writes in the Huffington Post:
Under Obama’s watch the U.S. has imposed tighter sanctions on Iran than those implemented during the George W. Bush administration. Perhaps more importantly, assuming the Attorney General’s indictment holds up, federal law enforcement agencies were highly effective at breaking up a terrorist plot well before it was operational or posed an immediate threat to the U.S. or diplomatic targets in Washington.
Now, with analysts and the media still scratching their heads over what to make of a convoluted plot alleged to have been hatched by an Iranian American in collusion with Mexican drug cartels, FDD, AEI and Heritage analysts — along with their friends in Congress — are quickly declaring the end of diplomatic strategies to curb Iran’s nuclear program and regional ambitions.
]]>But Rubin’s reporting on Iran issues often [...]]]>
But Rubin’s reporting on Iran issues often reflects the same sort of sloppy disregard for facts we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War: Neoconservative pundits and journalists pass speculation off as fact, ignoring context and mitigating factors that might cast doubt on their pronouncements.
Take, for example, Rubin’s Dec. 27 story about “the unchecked Iranian menace.” She draws all kinds of conclusions from a post by Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard. (The link to Hayes’s piece in Rubin’s post takes one to the login page for the Post‘s content management system.) Hayes’s post is itself based on an article from the Long War Journal, a project of the neoconservative think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The LWJ piece said that a Taliban member captured by ISAF (international forces in Afghanistan) was also a member of Iran’s elite Qods Force, a branch of the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guards. But the article had been updated from the original version (before either Hayes or Rubin picked it up).
The older version (reprinted here), as the newer one acknowledges, said that the claim about the Qods Force came from ISAF. The updated version noted that ISAF has since retracted the claim (here is the ISAF press release), but that an unnamed “senior U.S. intelligence official” corroborated the earlier version of events.
The story that the Taliban fighter was a member of the Qods force may well be true. (On the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television channel on Dec. 27, a London-based expert on Arab-Iranian relations said the fighter was indeed a Qods member.) But LWJ, to its credit, noted the ISAF retraction. Steven Hayes, writing at the Standard, did the same, albeit in a back-handed way:
Interestingly, ISAF officially confirmed the dual role of the captured operative, but later reversed itself. But Long War Journal’s Bill Roggio has a source that stands by the original claim.
Let’s hope we’re not muzzling the military now, too.
Then Jennifer Rubin picked up Hayes and… nada on the ISAF retraction.
Honest journalists feel the need to include critical context in their stories, even if that context can cast doubt on their report. While backed up by other sources, that’s exactly what this ISAF retraction did to the Taliban-Qods story — official Western military pronouncements tend to carry that kind of weight.
But Rubin, when it comes to Iran, seems incapable of honesty, let alone acknowledging facts that might cast doubt on her narrative of an ‘evil’ Iran. The fact that a writer at the ideological Weekly Standard felt the need to include the context that Rubin chose to leave out does not bode well for journalistic standards at the Washington Post.
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