by Jim Lobe
Eli has a new blog post on The Nation’s website today that provides additional details about the curious — one is tempted to say incestuous — relationship between the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the corporate interests of billionaire gold and silver investor, Thomas Kaplan. [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Eli has a new blog post on The Nation’s website today that provides additional details about the curious — one is tempted to say incestuous — relationship between the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the corporate interests of billionaire gold and silver investor, Thomas Kaplan. It also provides more details about the relationship between UANI and Harvard’s Belfer Center, a major beneficiary of Kaplan’s largesse, which hired UANI’s president, Gary Samore, shortly after he stepped down as a top proliferation adviser to Obama in 2012 (some prominent faculty members also serve on the group’s advisory board). We excerpted Eli’s original Salon piece on UANI’s ties to Kaplan last Friday.
Eli’s latest is based on a recent filing by the plaintiff, Greek shipowner Victor Restis, in his pending defamation case against UANI. It adds new layers of intrigue to the alleged connections between UANI and Kaplan:
[Kaplan] got his start with help from the family of Leon Recanati, a Greek-Israeli entrepreneur whose family owns and still operates Overseas Shipholding Group (“OSG”), a rival shipping company to Enterprises Shipping and Trading. See Exs. 4, 5. OSG operates oil tankers that compete directly with Mr. Restis’ tanker company, Golden Energy Maritime Corp., whose initial public offering had to be abandoned in 2013 when Defendants launched their defamation campaign that is at the heart of this litigation. See Am. Compl. ¶ 97. OSG would stand to profit if Mr. Restis and his companies were no longer able to operate. Kaplan married Leon Recanati’s daughter Dafna Recanati and was introduced to Israeli investor Avi Tiomkin, by Dafna Recanati’s mother.
If this allegation is true — that Kaplan and/or the Recanati family stood to gain a competitive advantage by publicly charging (through UANI) that Restis and his companies were violating sanctions against Iran — then UANI’s failure to publicly disclose any and all of its ties to Kaplan would obviously constitute a serious ethical breach.
(This is not the only example of billionaire financiers allegedly trying to benefit from Iranophobia. As Charles Davis wrote for IPS a year ago, when the fight between Argentina and Paul Singer and other hold-out, or “vulture” bondholders of the country’s debt was getting relatively little media notice, Singer and his fellow-holdouts founded the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), which has led a lavishly funded public relations and lobbying campaign against the Kirchner government, including a host of full-page ads in national and Capitol Hill newspapers, at least two of which assailed Argentina’s ties to Iran and suggested that Kirchner was engaged in a cover-up of Tehran’s alleged — and highly doubtful — role in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. One even showed a photo of Kirchner alongside then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the headline, “A Pact with the Devil?” Singer, who has given millions of dollars to the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), stands to make tens of million dollars of dollars in profit if he and his other hedge-fund holdouts prevail in the case.)
In addition to the connections between Kaplan and UANI, which Eli had previously documented in his Salon article, the plaintiff’s filing alleges that UANI operates out of offices at Rockefeller Center. Those offices are provided rent-free by Continental Properties, whose managing director, Mark Fisch, co-funds an NYU fellowship with Kaplan, and whose staff member, Kim Hillman, has served as an UANI director. The filing also notes that UANI’s CEO, Mark Wallace, serves not only as CEO of Kaplan’s Tigris Financial Group as Eli reported last week, but also as an officer and/or director of at least five other Kaplan enterprises, as well. It concludes:
Wallace has not drawn a salary from UANI since 2009, so Wallace appears to be getting his financial benefit indirectly through UANI supporter Kaplan.
Read the rest of Eli’s piece here.
]]>by Djavad Salehi-Isfahani
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was elected to office largely on his promise to lift the economy out if its deepest recession since the Iran-Iraq war. One year later, evidence of a recovery is hard to find, but he has achieved a few significant accomplishments.
Rouhani’s most visible accomplishment [...]]]>
by Djavad Salehi-Isfahani
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was elected to office largely on his promise to lift the economy out if its deepest recession since the Iran-Iraq war. One year later, evidence of a recovery is hard to find, but he has achieved a few significant accomplishments.
Rouhani’s most visible accomplishment is lower inflation, down by more than half from over 40 percent a year ago. The runaway inflation of the last three years that alienated the middle class and even many conservatives from former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now back to a level that Iranians consider normal.
Containing inflation was achieved at considerable cost, though, by keeping government expenditures to a minimum and forgoing any kind of fiscal or monetary stimulus. Rouhani even managed to increase energy prices last April without any protest, indicating that his popularity has so far survived austerity. The energy price hikes were substantial enough to close the budget gap left by Ahmadinejad’s generous — some would say irresponsible — cash transfers. The price of gasoline was increased by 75 percent, diesel by 67 percent, and other energy prices by about 30 percent.
Rouhani’s second economic achievement was restoring the business confidence lost to the erratic economic management of the Ahmadinejad years. He did this by simply getting elected and by appointing a competent team. His election stopped or at least slowed down the hemorrhaging of Iran’s economy, which has been hit by draconian international sanctions and bad domestic policies.
Rouhani’s greatest economic success came in the form of a political victory. He overcame substantial domestic opposition to rapprochement with the West to sign the Joint Plan of Action (JPA) with world powers last November. The economic impact of the JPA has been underwhelming, but without it the economy would have continued to slide.
The agreement can be credited with the strengthening of Iran’s currency, the rial, which is a good indication of rising business confidence. Since November, Iran’s oil exports have also increased by 30 percent, about $7 billion of Iran’s frozen funds have been released, and petrochemical exports, which received specific sanctions relief, have increased.
This spring, auto production (also marked for sanctions relief in the JPA) was up by a whopping 90 percent compared to a year ago according to Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh, the minister for industry, mines and commerce. He also mentioned increases in petrochemicals production by 9 percent and durable goods by 30 percent.
These improvements are most likely lost on the average Iranian, whose job prospects and income has not increased since Rouhani took office. The obvious culprit is, of course, the financial and shipping sanctions that limit Iran’s access to its foreign exchange earnings and continue to choke large sections of its industries. Manufacturers are still using cumbersome and costly channels to procure their raw materials and parts. For them, the optimistic official statements and newspaper headlines proclaiming the imminent “collapse of the sanctions regime,” is just talk. Indeed, while Western critics of Iran’s limited sanctions relief, particularly in Washington, point to the flood of foreign business missions to Tehran, no actual investment has occurred due to the continued uncertainty about the future of the sanctions.
The latest disappointing jobs report shows the limited impact of the JPA so far. Industry as a whole continued to lose jobs last spring, more than 6 months after the signing of the agreement.
There were 700,000 fewer industry workers employed in spring 2014 than when Rouhani took office. These numbers cast doubt on the claim made in a recent report published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Roubini Global Economics that the economic benefit of the JPA “is reflected in increased economic output and improvements in employment within Iran.” National accounts data published last week shows that industrial output for 2013/14 as a whole was down by 4.5 percent and industrial employment has been falling through spring 2014.
Data on personal incomes and consumption published by the Statistical Center of Iran also indicates that economic recovery is yet to come. For the Iranian year that ended on March 20, 2014, real household consumption fell by 5 percent for urban households and 12 percent for rural ones. Their real food expenditures meanwhile fell by 14 percent.
So does the anemic economic recovery weaken Rouhani’s hand in the nuclear negotiations and should the West therefore toughen its position now in order to extract further concessions from Iran?
Sanctions have no doubt increased Iran’s willingness to negotiate, but it would be a mistake to think that more sanctions always brings more concessions. Most Iranians believe their government has held its part of the bargain since last November, so they would see more sanctions now as bad faith on the part of the P5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia, China plus Germany) and blame the failure of the negotiations on them. This would reduce pressure on Rouhani to make further concessions.
Furthermore, the Iranian middle class, after having survived eight years of Ahmadinejad, still regards Rouhani as the best leader to champion its interests. The poor, who, despite years of sanctions are decreasing as a proportion of the total population, are meanwhile relatively well protected. Thanks to the cash assistance program instituted by Ahmadinejad (about $40 per person per month in international dollars) in 2012/13, when average real incomes and expenditures were falling, poverty rates actually fell. At the time, only 5 percent of the population was counted as poor, based on a $5 per day poverty line (in international dollars). Iran’s effective income assistance programs can be adjusted to protect them against further economic deterioration.
The more interesting question is how the course of the talks could affect Rouhani’s presidency beyond its first year.
As they stand now, Rouhani’s plans are helping the private sector lead the economic recovery and letting markets form the basis of economic life in the Islamic Republic. If the talks succeed in the next four months and sanctions are gradually lifted, Iranian businesses are sure to spring into action, as they do when oil money starts to flow. Rouhani will be then be well on his way to a second term.
But Rouhani has reservations about this scenario. In the past, oil-induced booms have deepened Iran’s dependence on the outside world, something that runs counter to the vision of a “Resistance Economy” identified with the Supreme Leader.
If the talks fail, as the Washington hawks seem to wish, Rouhani would have to reverse course; instead of re-integrating Iran into the global economy with the private sector in the lead, he would promote economic self-reliance and resistance to outside pressures, a strategy that fits much better with the state and its para-statals at the helm.
In the narrow, security-focused discussion of Iran that passes for analysis these days in the US, the broader issues of importance to Western leaders are easily lost. But for those interested in longer-term relations with Iran, it helps to bear in mind that the current negotiations are not just about Iran’s nuclear activities; they are also about the direction that Iran’s economy will take in the coming decade, and who could benefit from it.
Photo: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visits the Shahid Rajai Port Complex port in Hormozgan Province on Feb. 25, 2014.
]]>With the rumored extension of the negotiations in Vienna on Iran’s nuclear program hanging in the air, a group of legislators and right-wing thinkers gathered on Capitol Hill yesterday to talk about what they believe a comprehensive deal with Iran should entail.
Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) told the assembled crowd that he was there [...]]]>
With the rumored extension of the negotiations in Vienna on Iran’s nuclear program hanging in the air, a group of legislators and right-wing thinkers gathered on Capitol Hill yesterday to talk about what they believe a comprehensive deal with Iran should entail.
Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) told the assembled crowd that he was there to “ring the alarm” about the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran, and, indeed, that alarm rang over and over again throughout the event. The afternoon’s speakers were clear on one thing: nothing short of total Iranian capitulation would be an acceptable outcome to the talks, and even that would really only be acceptable if it came in the aftermath of regime change in Tehran. They were decidedly less clear as to how that outcome might be achieved.
The forum, “High Standards and High Stakes: Defining Terms of an Acceptable Iran Nuclear Deal,” was sponsored by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) (successor to the now-defunct Project for the New American Century), the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), which specializes in finding Democrats who agree with the neoconservative agenda when it comes to Iran. The speakers broadly agreed on the need to maintain and even increase sanctions to encourage the Iranians to negotiate, which seemingly ignores the fact that the Iranians are already negotiating and that the sanctions are in place precisely so that they can be traded away in exchange for Iranian concessions.
Among the materials distributed at the session was a paper by a group called the “Iran Task Force,” which has a few members in common with the “Iran Task Force” formed within the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs but nonetheless seems to be a different group. The paper was titled, “Parameters of an Acceptable Agreement,” though it might better have been called “Parameters of a Deal That Would Certainly Be Rejected by Iran.”
The task force’s “acceptable agreement” requires, among other items, the complete dismantling of Iran’s enrichment capabilities and extraordinary monitoring requirements that would remain in place permanently. Again, this would not be a deal so much as it would be unconditional surrender by the Iranians, and would impose restrictions on Iran that even retired Israeli generals don’t seem to believe are necessary. If this is how the “Iran Task Force” defines an “acceptable agreement,” it seems fair to ask if they want any agreement at all.
One of the legislators who spoke at the forum was Brad Sherman (D-CA), who has endorsed the Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, (aka MEK, MKO, PMOI and NCRI), which lobbied itself off the US terrorist organizations list in 2012, and whose desire for regime change is quite explicit.
Congressman Sherman offered some of the most colorful (or maybe terrifying) remarks. For example, he declared that Iran’s “breakout” period must be “years,” which would presumably involve subjecting all of Iran’s nuclear scientists to some kind of amnesia ray to make them unlearn what they already know about enriching uranium. He then argued that Iran’s ultimate goal was not a nuclear missile, but a device that could be smuggled into a major city and detonated without directly implicating Tehran. Most Iran hawks assume (based on questionable evidence) that Iran’s nuclear program is ipso facto a nuclear weapons program. But Sherman apparently believes that Iran doesn’t only crave a nuclear weapon, but will obviously use that weapon once it’s built to bring destruction upon the world. Sherman closed by proposing that the United States arm Israel with advanced “bunker buster” bombs and surplus B-52 bombers, which would surely ensure peace in that region.
After the legislators had their say, it was time for the expert panel, featuring FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, Ray Takeyh from the Council on Foreign Relations, and Stephen Rademaker from the BPC. Gerecht argued that Iran has a “religious” need to acquire nuclear weapons, which might come as a shock to the Iranian religious establishment, and criticized the Obama administration’s unwillingness to apply “real” economic pressure to force Iranian concessions. He never got around to describing what “real” economic pressure looks like, or how much different it could be from what Iran is currently experiencing. It was also unclear why, if Iran does have such a strong need to develop a nuclear weapon, and if it hasn’t yet felt any “real” economic pressure, it agreed to, and has by all accounts complied with, the terms of the interim Joint Plan of Action reached in Geneva last year.
But it was Rademaker who came closest to openly admitting the theme that underpins the hawks’ entire approach to these talks: that no nuclear deal will ever be acceptable without regime change. He criticized last year’s historic deal for its promise that a comprehensive deal would remain in place for a specified, limited duration, and that Iran would be treated as any other Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signatory at the conclusion of the deal. Rademaker later compared Iran to Brazil and Argentina, whose nuclear programs were both abandoned after their military regimes gave way to democratic governments. At that point the suggestion that regime change, which didn’t exactly work out the way the US envisioned in Iran (1953) and Iraq (2003), must precede any normalization of Iran’s nuclear program was obvious.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Anyone who has followed the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) knows it’s a neoconservative organization whose central purpose since its founding in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 has less to do with democracy than with promoting the views of Israel as defined, in particular, by [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Anyone who has followed the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) knows it’s a neoconservative organization whose central purpose since its founding in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 has less to do with democracy than with promoting the views of Israel as defined, in particular, by Bibi Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party. It is no wonder that Sheldon Adelson, who casually called this week for the nuking of Tehran if Iran doesn’t abandon its nuclear program, provided the group with more than $1.5 million in donations between 2008 and 2011, as we reported yesterday.
Now, it just so happened that was in the news this week on another front: Jofi Joseph, the White House staffer who worked on the proliferation file on the National Security Council and who was outed as the tweeter known as @NatSecWonk, served as a fellow at FDD in 2011. Here’s how the New York Times first reported his association and characterized FDD:
According to Mr. Joseph’s biography on the Web site of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative group where he was a fellow for 2011, “between his stints on Capitol Hill, Jofi was a senior consultant with a professional services firm, facilitating strategic planning and policy analysis for the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts on critical infrastructure protection.” (Emphasis added.)
The succeeding paragraph named FDD associates, including John Hannah, former national security adviser to Dick Cheney, House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (whose SuperPac, incidentally, received at least $5 million from Adelson in the last election cycle), Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, and Gary Bauer, the Christian Zionist leader who serves on the boards of the Christians United for Israel and the Emergency Committee for Israel — all neoconservatives.
One day later, the Times published a follow-up article on Joseph, but this time, the characterization of FDD changed rather remarkably. Here’s the new paragraph:
In 2011, Mr. Joseph also held a national security fellowship with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, which has a generally conservative bent. “Clearly, he had risen up through the Democratic ranks,” said Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the foundation, where fellowships are designed for “young and upcoming national security people in D.C.” of all views, Mr. Dubowitz said.
Well, all one can say is that the Times nailed it on the first go-round, but really blew it the second time. What does “a generally conservative bent” mean when attached to an organization whose principal purpose is the advocacy of the Likud Party’s foreign-policy views in the U.S.? I understand “generally conservative” as meaning someone like Brent Scowcroft or Robert Gates. Moreover, “neoconservative” as a description of FDD is not only accurate, it’s also very concise in contrast to “has a generally conservative bent,” which is quite vague and verbose in a way that newspapers try to avoid.
We can, of course, speculate as to why the change occurred. It could have been the decision of a copy editor who may have felt uncomfortable with “neoconservative” and thought that “generally conservative” sounded better. Or it could’ve been that Dubowitz strongly objected to the word “neoconservative” attached to his organization because it has taken on a rather pejorative meaning in popular parlance due to the critical role the neoconservatives played in promoting the Iraq war (which FDD actively promoted from the “get-go” after 9/11, running a TV ad produced by a former Israeli Embassy press official, for example, that suggested that Yasser Arafat, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were all part of the same threat.)
Indeed, I suspect that’s one very good reason why some readily identifiable neoconservatives who featured so prominently in promoting the Iraq war — people like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, and Doug Feith — have been keeping such a low profile on Iran over the past year. They’re the ones who gave neocons a bad name, while Dubowitz wasn’t even on the scene back then.
]]>by Jim Lobe and Eli Clifton
Following on David’s post about Sheldon Adelson’s nuclear strategy for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, it might be useful to recall some of the casino magnate’s favorite Israel-related organizational beneficiaries. Perhaps they should be asked if they, too, believe that Tehran and its [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe and Eli Clifton
Following on David’s post about Sheldon Adelson’s nuclear strategy for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, it might be useful to recall some of the casino magnate’s favorite Israel-related organizational beneficiaries. Perhaps they should be asked if they, too, believe that Tehran and its inhabitants should be nuked if Iran doesn’t bow to the demands of Bibi Netanyahu (another beneficiary of Adelson’s largesse) after a demonstration bombing in the middle of some Iranian desert. Eli has compiled a list of recent contributions by both the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Charitable Trust, the Adelson Family Foundation, Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Charitable Trust,and Sheldon Adelson himself, based on U.S. government tax records. While these two channels may not be the only ones Adelson uses to supply funding for his favored organizations, they are the most transparent.
It turns out that the biggest beneficiary over the last six or seven years has been the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which has received a total of $1.704 million, followed closely by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), at $1.510 million between 2008 and 2011.
Next on the list is the American Israel Education Fund, the arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that sponsors tours for U.S. lawmakers and other influential elites to Israel. It received $1.048 million in 2007.
Two organizations received $1 million each: the One Jerusalem Charitable and Educational Fund in 2007, and the Friends of Israel Initiative, which was founded in 2010, is headed by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, and did almost nothing, so far as I can tell, in 2012. John Bolton, however, is one of its charter members.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) received $530,000 between 2001 and 2007, while the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI) received $500,000 between 2007 and 2012, according to the tax records.
Close behind was the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), which received $400,000 during that same period of time.
Lesser beneficiaries included the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America ($321,000 in 2007-08); the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces ($236,000 between 2007 and 2012); and the American Islamic Congress ($195,500) in 2008-09. These channels also provided token amounts to Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), and the American Friends of UN Watch.
(A spreadsheet detailing all of these grants can be viewed here.)
Again, given the fact that Adelson spent at least $98 million on the 2012 election cycle, and given his oft-stated devotion to Israel, I suspect this represents a fraction of his actual pro-Israel-related philanthropy. But we do know that he has given significant amounts of funding to these groups whose leaders will hopefully clarify whether they share Adelson’s rejection of sincere negotiations with Iran and his possibly genocidal strategy for dealing with its nuclear program.
]]>by Eli Clifton
Washington’s premiere hawkish think tank is funded by a small handful of Republican mega donors, according to a just-published tax filing. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which employs some of the most consistent advocates of crippling sanctions and hyping threats of military action against Iran, receives [...]]]>
by Eli Clifton
Washington’s premiere hawkish think tank is funded by a small handful of Republican mega donors, according to a just-published tax filing. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which employs some of the most consistent advocates of crippling sanctions and hyping threats of military action against Iran, receives the majority of its funding from Home Depot funder Bernard Marcus, hedge funder Paul Singer and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
FDD’s President Clifford May tells me his organization has “both Republicans and Democrats among its donors and we are proud of our work with policymakers on both sides of the aisle.”
That might be true. But the fact remains that as of 2011, the FDD has been highly dependent on some of the Republican party’s most committed donors.
My full write up on the FDD’s hyper-partisan underwriters can be read at Salon.com. The FDD’s 2011 “Schedule A”, which shows the organization’s largest donors from 2008 to 2011, can be viewed below.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Last Thursday, the highly respected, non-profit investigative news agency ProPublica featured a 2,400-word article, “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America”, by its award-winning senior reporter, Sebastian Rotella, who has long specialized in terrorism and national-security coverage. In support of its main thesis that Iran [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Last Thursday, the highly respected, non-profit investigative news agency ProPublica featured a 2,400-word article, “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America”, by its award-winning senior reporter, Sebastian Rotella, who has long specialized in terrorism and national-security coverage. In support of its main thesis that Iran appears to be expanding its alleged criminal and terrorist infrastructure in Venezuela and other “leftist, populist, anti-U.S. governments throughout the region,” Rotella quotes the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Lt. Gen. James Clapper (ret.), as telling a Senate hearing last year that Iran’s alliances with Venezuela and other “leftist, populist, anti-U.S. government” could pose
…an immediate threat by giving Iran – directly through the IRGC, the Quds Force [an external unit of the IRGC] or its proxies like Hezbollah – a platform in the region to carry out attacks against the United States, our interests, and allies.
Now, there is a serious problem with that quotation: Clapper never said any such thing. Indeed, the exact words attributed to the DNI were first spoken at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing entitled “Ahmadinejad’s Tour of Tyrants and Iran’s Agenda in the Western Hemisphere” (page 2) by none other than the Committee’s then-chair, Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, whose hostility toward Iran is exceeded only by her views on Cuba and Venezuela.* It is, after all, one thing to have the head of the U.S. intelligence community tell Congress that the threat of an attack against the United States from various “platforms” in Latin America is “immediate.” It’s quite another for a far-right Cuban-American congresswomen from Miami to offer that assessment, particularly given her past record of championing Luis Posada Carriles and the late Orlando Bosch, both of whom, according to declassified CIA and FBI documents, were almost certainly involved in the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner, among other terrorist acts.
I personally have no doubt that the misattribution was unintentional and merely the product of sloppiness or negligence. But negligence matters, particularly when it is committed in pursuit of a thesis that Rotella has long propagated (more on that in upcoming posts) and that comes amid an ongoing and well-orchestrated campaign against Iran that could eventually result in war, as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reminded us yet again Sunday. Of course, such a glaring mistake also detracts from the credibility of the rest of the article, much of which is based on anonymous sources whose own credibility is very difficult to assess.
The Iranian threat and anonymous sourcing
Most of the article concerns a hearing with the rather suggestive title, “Threat to the Homeland: Iran’s Extending Influence in the Western Hemisphere”, which was held July 9 by the Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency of the Republican-led House Homeland Security Committee with the apparent purpose of rebutting a still-classified State Department report, which included a two-page unclassified appendix concluding that Iran’s influence in the region is actually on the wane. In addition to reporting on the hearing, however, Rotella provides some original reporting of his own in the lede paragraphs, setting an appropriately dark and menacing tone for the rest of his story:
Last year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited his ally President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, where the firebrand leaders unleashed defiant rhetoric at the United States.
There was a quieter aspect to Ahmadinejad’s visit in January 2012, according to Western intelligence officials. A senior officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) traveled secretly with the presidential delegation and met with Venezuelan military and security chiefs. His mission: to set up a joint intelligence program between Iranian and Venezuelan spy agencies, according to the Western officials.
At the secret meeting, Venezuelan spymasters agreed to provide systematic help to Iran with intelligence infrastructure such as arms, identification documents, bank accounts and pipelines for moving operatives and equipment between Iran and Latin America, according to Western intelligence officials. Although suffering from cancer, Chavez took interest in the secret talks as part of his energetic embrace of Iran, an intelligence official told ProPublica.
The senior IRGC officer’s meeting in Caracas has not been previously reported.
The aim is to enable the IRGC to be able to distance itself from the criminal activities it is conducting in the region, removing the Iranian fingerprint,” said the intelligence official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. “Since Chavez’s early days in power, Iran and Venezuela have grown consistently closer, with Venezuela serving as a gateway to South America for the Iranians.”
The bold face, added for emphasis, is designed to illustrate Rotella’s heavy reliance on anonymous “intelligence officials”, none of whose nationalities are specified. In the context of an investigative report, that failure begs a series of questions that bear on the credibility of the account.
For example, does he include Israelis in his definition of “Western officials” or “Western intelligence officials?” After all, it would be one thing to cite a Swedish intelligence official who may tend to be somewhat more objective in describing Iranian-Venezuelan intelligence cooperation; it’s quite another to quote an Israeli “official” responsible to a government that has been aggressively promoting a policy of confrontation with Iran for many years now. And if his sources agreed to talk to Rotella only on the condition of being identified as “Western officials” or “Western intelligence officials”, why did they do so? (Indeed, the only identified “Western intelligence official” quoted — or misquoted — by Rotella in the entire article is Clapper.) Identifying at least the nationality of the officials with whom Rotella spoke with would help readers assess their credibility, but he offers no help in that regard.
Moreover, given the details about the meeting provided by Rotella’s sources, why was the senior IRGC officer who set up the purported joint intelligence program with the Venezuelans not named? That omission sticks out like a sore thumb.
But the problems in Rotella’s article go beyond the misattribution of the Ros-Lehtinen quote or his heavy reliance on anonymous sources. Indeed, it took all of about 30 minutes of Googling (most of which was devoted to tracking down the alleged Clapper quote) to discover that the story also includes distortions of the record in relevant criminal proceedings and a major error of fact in reporting the testimony of at least one of the hearing’s four witnesses — all of whom, incidentally, share well-established records of hostility toward Iran.
But before going into the results of my Google foray, let’s hear what a former top U.S. intelligence analyst had to say about Rotella’s article. I asked Paul Pillar, a 28-year CIA veteran who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 (which means he was in charge of the analysis of those regions for the CIA and all other U.S. intelligence agencies), if he could read it. This was his emailed reply:
The article certainly seems to be an effort to go out of the way to raise suspicions about Iranian activities in the hemisphere, by dumping together material that is either old news or not really nefarious, and stringing it together with innuendo. Almost all of the specifics that get into anything like possible terrorist activities are old. The Iranian efforts to make diplomatic friends in Latin America by cozying up with the regimes in Venezuela and elsewhere that have an anti-U.S. streak is all well known, but none of that adds up to an increase in clandestine networks or a terrorist threat. The closest the article gets in that regard is with very vague references to Venezuela being used by “suspected Middle Eastern operatives” and the like, which of course demonstrates nothing as far as Iran specifically is concerned. Sourcing to an unnamed “intelligence officer” is pretty meaningless.
As we will try to show in subsequent posts by Marsha Cohen and Gareth Porter (who both contributed substantially to this post), Pillar’s assessment could apply to a number of Rotella’s articles, especially about the Middle East and alleged Iranian or Hezbollah terrorism, going back to his years at the Los Angeles Times. What virtually all of them have in common is the heavy reliance on anonymous intelligence sources; a mixture of limited original reporting combined with lots of recycled news; a proclivity for citing highly ideological, often staunchly hawkish neoconservative “experts” on Middle East issues from such think tanks as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) without identifying them as such; a surprising deference (considering his status as a investigative reporter) toward “official” accounts or reports by friendly security agencies, some of which work very closely with their Israeli counterparts (see, for example, this 2009 story about an alleged plot against the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan about which Gareth plans to write a post); and a general failure to offer critical analysis or alternative explanations about specific terrorist incidents or groups that are often readily available from academic or other more independent and disinterested regional or local specialists.
Iran in Latin America
In the meantime, it’s also important to set the context for Rotella’s latest article. It came amid an intense campaign over the past couple of years by Iran hawks, including individuals from the various neoconservative think tanks cited above, to highlight the purported terrorist threat posed by Iran and Hezbollah from their Latin American “platforms,” as Ros-Lehtinen put it. Those efforts culminated in legislation, the “Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act of 2012,” approved overwhelmingly by Congress last December. Among other provisions, it required the State Department to report to Congress on Iran’s “growing hostile presence and activity in the Western Hemisphere,” along with a strategy for neutralizing it, within six months. That report, only a two-page annex of which were publicly released, was submitted at the end of last month.
To the disappointment of the bill’s chief sponsors, notably the Republican chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. Jeff Duncan, the report concluded that, despite an increase in Tehran’s “outreach to the region working to strengthen its political, economic, cultural and military ties, …Iranian influence in Latin America and the Caribbean is waning.” And while the rest of the report remains classified, its contents reportedly were consistent with those of the State Department’s 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism, also released last month, which found no evidence of Iranian or Hezbollah terrorist plotting or operations in the Americas, in contrast to what it described as a sharp increase of such activity in Europe, the Middle East and Asia during the past year.
Duncan, who, incidentally, spoke on a panel on Evangelical Christian support for Israel at AIPAC’s annual conference last year, and who in 2011 became the only member of Congress given a 100-percent rating on the Heritage Action for America legislative scorecard, expressed outrage at these conclusions, accusing the State Department of failing to “consider all the facts.” In particular, he charged that the State Department had not taken into account new evidence “documenting Iran’s [ongoing] terrorism activities and operations in the Western Hemisphere” compiled by an Argentine prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, in a 502-page report released (perhaps not entirely coincidentally) just one month before the State Department was due to submit its study.
The Nisman Report and the AMIA bombing
In 2006, Nisman, the chief prosecutor in the case of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) building, released an even longer controversial report on that case in which he concluded that the bombing had been ordered by Iran’s top leadership and carried out by Hezbollah operatives under the direction of Iran’s cultural attaché at its Argentine embassy, Mohsen Rabbani. (Gareth wrote his own critique of the 2006 report for the The Nation in 2008, joining many Argentine journalists and researchers in questioning Nisman’s theory of the case. Last week he published a related story for IPS that noted the diminished credibility of Nisman’s primary source, a former Iranian intelligence operative named Abdolghassem Mesbahi. He plans a new series on the subject to begin later this month.) The State Department report, Duncan said at the hearing, “directly contradicts the findings from Mr. Nisman’s three-year investigation, which showed clear infiltration of the Iranian regime within countries in Latin America using embassies, mosques, and cultural centers.”
Indeed, according to Nisman’s new report, Iran, through Rabbani and other operatives, has established “clandestine intelligence stations and operative agents” throughout Latin America, including in Guyana, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago and Uruguay and, most especially in the Tri-Border Area (TBA) of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, a region about which Rotella wrote rather darkly when he was Buenos Aires bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in the late 1990’s. (In fact, a 15-year-old article on the TBA as a “Jungle Hub for World’s Outlaws” and a refuge for terrorists was cited by WINEP’s Matthew Levitt in written testimony submitted at last week’s hearing. Long one of Rotella’s favorite sources, Levitt, the subject of a rather devastating (pay-walled) profile by Ken Silverstein in Harper’s Magazine last year, has been a major figure in the U.S.- and Israeli-led campaign to persuade the European Union to list Hezbollah as a terrorist entity, a campaign that has been boosted by Rotella’s work, as reflected in this article published by ProPublica last April. (The symbiotic relationship between the two men may be the subject of a subsequent LobeLog post.)
Nisman, whose new report has been promoted heavily by neoconservative media and institutions over the past six weeks (see, for example, here, here, here, and here), had been invited by the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, to testify at last week’s hearing. But, as noted by Rotella in the article, “his government abruptly barred him from traveling to Washington”, a development which, according to McCaul, constituted a “slap in the face of this committee and the U.S. Congress” and was an indication that Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner had no intention to “pursue justice and truth on Iranian involvement in the AMIA bombing.”
(In his message to me, Pillar noted that there were other good reasons why Kirchner would not want to see Nisman “being used as a prop in Duncan’s hearing …[given] other equities …regarding relations with Washington,” including the ongoing lawsuit against Argentina by a group of hedge funds — led by Paul Singer, a billionaire and major funder of hard-line pro-Israel organizations — that have sponsored full-page ads in the Washington Post and other publications highlighting, among other things, Argentina’s allegedly cozy relationship with Iran.)
In his article, Rotella, who appears to have accepted without question the conclusions of Nisman’s 2006 report on the AMIA bombing, also offers an uncritical account of the prosecutor’s latest report, quoting affirmations by Duncan, McCaul, as well as the four witnesses who testified at the hearing that the report’s main contentions were true — Iran and Hezbollah are indeed building up their terrorist infrastructure in the region. “The attacks in Buenos Aires in the 1990s revealed the existence of Iranian operational networks in the Americas,” Rotella’s writes. “The Argentine investigation connected the plots to hubs of criminal activity and Hezbollah operational and financing cells in lawless zones, such as the triple border of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay and the border between Colombia and Venezuela.”
The Nisman Report and the JFK Bomb Plot
After noting U.S. Treasury designations in 2008 of two Venezuelans as terrorists “for allegedly raising funds for Hezbollah, discussing terrorist operations with Hezbollah operatives, and aiding travel of militants from Venezuela to training sessions in Iran”, Rotella provides the purported Clapper quote about Venezuela and its allies offering “a platform in the region to carry out attacks against the United States, our interests, and allies”, suggesting (falsely) that the DNI himself endorsed Nisman’s view that Iran was behind a plot to attack JFK airport six years ago:
The aborted 2007 plot to attack JFK (airport) was an attempt to use that platform, according to the Argentine special prosecutor. A Guyanese-American Muslim who had once worked as a cargo handler conceived an idea to blow up jet fuel tanks at the airport. He formed a homegrown cell that first sought aid from al Qaida, then coalesced around Abdul Kadir, a Guyanese politician and Shiite Muslim leader.
The trial in New York federal court revealed that Kadir was a longtime intelligence operative for Iran, reporting to the Iranian ambassador in Caracas and communicating also with Rabbani, the accused AMIA plotter.
‘Kadir agreed to participate in the conspiracy, committing himself to reach out to his contacts in Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran,’ Nisman’s report says. ‘The entry of Kadir into the conspiracy brought the involvement and the support of the intelligence station established in Guyana by the Islamic regime.’
Police arrested Kadir as he prepared to fly to Iran to discuss the New York plot with Iranian officials. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
But this account of the case is tendentious, to say the least, and here I am relying on Gareth’s research into the case, which he covered in an IPS story last week. While Rotella claimed that the would-be terrorist “cell” had “coalesced around” Kadir, the original criminal complaint that was submitted to the U.S. district court in New York on which the arrests of the four men accused in the plot were based makes clear that Kadir was a secondary participant at the time the arrest was made. In addition, the complaint made no mention of any ties between Kadir and Iran.
Moreover, Rotella’s assertion that the trial revealed Kadir to have been “longtime intelligence operative for Iran” is unfounded, apparently based on nothing more than a set of personal letters Kadir had sent by ordinary mail to Rabbani and the Iranian ambassador to Venezuela and the fact that some contact information for Rabbani was found in Kadir’s address book.
But Kadir’s letters to Rabbani were clearly not the work of an Iranian intelligence operative. They consisted of publicly available information about the political, social and economic situation in Guyana, where Kadir was a member of parliament. Indeed, the fact that they were sent by regular mail — and the lack of any known replies by the addressees — suggests that Kadir’s relationship to Iranian intelligence was even more distant and less interactive than that of George Zimmerman’s to the Seminole County sheriff’s office in Florida.
During the subsequent trial in 2010, the prosecution tried to play up the letters and even asked Kadir if he was a spy for Iran, which he denied strongly. No other evidence implicating Iran in the plot was introduced. Even the U.S. Attorney’s press release issued after Kadir’s sentencing (and discoverable within mini-seconds on Google) offers no indication that Iran had any knowledge of the plot at the time of his arrest. Finally, if indeed the U.S. government had acquired any evidence that Rabbani or any other Iranian official had a role in the plot, as asserted by Nisman, it seems reasonable to ask why he wasn’t indicted along with Kadir and the three others? Yet, in spite of all these factors, Rotella appears to accept Nisman’s argument that the Iranian government had a role in the case and that Kadir was its “long-time intelligence operative” presumably in charge of its “intelligence station” in Guyana.
Rotella next cites the purported testimony (of unknown origin) of Fernando Tabares, the former director of Colombia’s intelligence agency who
…described a mission by an Iranian operative to Colombia via Venezuela in 2008 or 2009. Working with Iranian officials based at the embassy in Bogota, the operative, according to Nisman’s report, ‘was looking at targets in order to carry out possible attacks here in Colombia,’ Tabares testified.
Apart from the vagueness of this account about the unidentified Iranian operative and his mission — as well as the absence of any corroborating evidence — Rotella omitted the easily discoverable fact (via Google) that Tabares himself was sentenced in 2010 to eight years in prison for abuse of trust and illegal wire-tapping, a detail that may reflect on the former intelligence chief’s credibility.
Iranian migrants (refugees?) to Canada
A couple of paragraphs later, Rotella cites the testimony of Joseph Humire, “a security expert” and one of the four witnesses who testified at last week’s hearing. According to Rotella, Humire, executive director at the Center for a Secure Free Society
…cited a report last year in which the Canadian Border Services Agency described Iran as the top source of illegal migrants to Canada, most of them coming through Latin America. Between 2009 and 2011, the majority of those Iranian migrants passed through Caracas, where airport and airline personnel were implicated in providing them with fraudulent documents, according to the Canadian border agency.
But Rotella misreports Humire’s testimony. Humire did not say that Iran was the top source of illegal migrants to Canada; he said Iran was the top source country of improperly documented migrants who make refugee claims in Canada — a not insignificant difference, particularly because the number of Iranian asylum-seekers who come to Canada each year averages only at about 300, according to the CSBA report, which noted that 86% won their asylum claims. In addition, the report, a heavily redacted copy of which was graciously provided to me by Humire, indicates that, between 2009 and 2012, more of these migrants flew into Canada from Mexico City and London than from Caracas.
Moreover, the picture painted by the redacted CSBA report is considerably less frightening than that offered by either Rotella or, for that matter, Humire’s testimony.
Many of these migrants use “facilitators” to enter Canada, according to the report. “…Information provided by the migrants on their smugglers suggest possible links to organized criminal elements both within and outside of Canada…Many people seeking refuge in Canada use fake documents and rely on middlemen to help them flee persecution in their homelands.“
“While Iranian irregular migrants mainly enter Canada to make refugee claims, it is possible that certain individuals may enter with more sinister motives”, the report cautioned, observing that 19 Iranian immigrants had been denied entry on security grounds since 2008.
So, instead of the flood of Iranian operatives pouring into Canada, as suggested by Rotella, what we are talking about is a relatively small number of Iranians who are seeking asylum from a repressive regime. And, like hundreds of thousands of other refugees around the world, they rely on traffickers who provide them with forged or otherwise questionable documents. A few of these may be entering Canada for “more sinister motives”, but Rotella offers no concrete evidence that they have done so.
Yet Rotella follows his brief — if fundamentally flawed — summary of Humire’s remarks about Iranian asylum-seekers in Canada with his own riff, going “out of the way to raise suspicions about Iranian activities,” as Pillar notes, and returning once again to those anonymous “security officials” as his sources.
Humire’s allegations are consistent with interviews in recent years in which U.S., Latin America and Israeli security officials have told ProPublica about suspected Middle Eastern operatives and Latin American drug lords obtaining Venezuelan documents through corruption or ideological complicity.
“There seems to be an effort by the Venezuelan government to make sure that Iranians have a full set of credentials,” a U.S. law enforcement official said.
Last year’s secret talks between Iranian and Venezuelan spies intensified such cooperation, according to Western intelligence officials who described the meetings to ProPublica. The senior Iranian officer who traveled with the presidential entourage asked Venezuelan counterparts to ensure access to key officials in the airport police, customs and other agencies and “permits for transferring cargo through airports and swiftly arranging various bureaucratic matters,” the intelligence official said.
Venezuelan leaders have denied that their alliance with Iran has hostile intent. They have rejected concerns about flights that operated for years between Caracas and Tehran. The State Department and other U.S. agencies criticized Venezuela for failing to make public passenger and cargo manifests and other information about secretive flights to Iran, raising the fear of a pipeline for clandestine movement of people and goods.
The flights have been discontinued, U.S. officials say.
ProPublica’s high standards
I personally believe that ProPublica, since it launched its operations in 2008, has performed an invaluable public service in providing high-quality investigative journalism at a time when the genre risked (and still risks) becoming virtually extinct. As a result, readers of the agency have come to expect its articles not only to compile existing information that is already publicly available in ways that connect the dots, but also provide important, previously unpublished material with important insights into the events of the day in ways that seriously challenge conventional wisdom as defined by mainstream media and, as ProPublica’s mission statement puts it, “those with power.” The question posed by Rotella’s latest article — as well as other work he has published on alleged Iranian and Hezbollah terrorism — is whether it meets the mission and high standards that ProPublica readers expect.
Given the misattribution of a quotation critical to the story’s thesis; the prolific use of anonymous “Western intelligence sources” and the like; the citation of sources with a clear ideological or political axe to grind; the omission of information that could bear on those sources’ credibility; the more or less uncritical acceptance of official reports that are known to be controversial but that generally reflect the interests of the axe-grinders; and the failure to confirm misinformation that can be quickly searched and verified, one can’t help but ask whether Rotella’s work meets ProPublica’s standards.
That question takes on additional and urgent importance given the subject — alleged terrorist activities by Iran and Hezbollah — Rotella specializes in. All of us remember the media’s deplorable failure to critically challenge the Bush administration’s allegations — and those of anonymous “Western intelligence sources”, etc. — about Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, as well as his vast and fast-growing arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including a supposedly advanced nuclear-weapons program. We now have, in many respects, a comparable situation with respect to Iran. Bearing that history in mind, any media organization — but especially one of ProPublica’s stature and mission — should be expected to make extraordinary efforts not only to verify its information, reduce its reliance on anonymous sources and avoid innuendo, but also to aggressively challenge “official” narratives or those that are quite obviously being promoted as part of a campaign by parties with a clear interest in confrontation — even war — with Iran. The stakes are unusually high.
Gareth Porter and Marsha Cohen contributed substantially to this report.
*Today, shortly before this blog post was published and one day after I contacted the DNI press office to confirm that the quotation had been misattributed to DNI Clapper, ProPublica issued the following correction: “Due to an error in testimony by a congressional witness, this story initially misattributed a statement made by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., to James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence. The story has been revised to correct the attribution and incorporate Clapper’s actual statement to a Senate committee.” In my view, the wording of the correction, suggesting that the misattribution was the fault of a witness, underlines the importance of scrupulous fact-checking when dealing with such a charged issue. As noted above, Clapper was the only identified Western intelligence official cited in the article, and his quotation — or non-quotation — is critical to the overall credibility of the underlying thesis: that Iran and Hezbollah are building a terrorist infrastructure in the Americas aimed at the U.S.
UPDATE: Apparently, the witness who misattributed the Ros-Lehtinen/Clapper quote was the AFPC’s Ilan Berman (who most recently misattributed the quote in a usnews.com op-ed co-authored by Netanel Levitt on July 15). Berman, a leading figure in the sanctions campaign against Iran, suggested shortly after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq that Washington should pursue regime change in Iran.
Photo Credit: Prensa Miraflores
]]>by Jasmin Ramsey and Jim Lobe
The election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new president surprised many here, even though at least one expert perceptively argued, more than once, that it was a distinct possibility. What were the all-knowing basing their predictions on? Certainly not polls, which never showed Dennis Ross’ [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey and Jim Lobe
The election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new president surprised many here, even though at least one expert perceptively argued, more than once, that it was a distinct possibility. What were the all-knowing basing their predictions on? Certainly not polls, which never showed Dennis Ross’ declared frontrunner, Saeed Jalili, in the lead. It seems that people like Ross (who, remember, was Obama’s top Iran adviser for most of the President’s first term) fell for Jalili’s own campaign strategy aimed at making it appear that he was Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s preferred candidate and, as such, certain to win. To be sure, Iranian public opinion polls are often considered unreliable, but they aren’t necessarily entirely insignificant either, especially those conducted by well-known Iranian pollsters who’ve been arrested for releasing data that’s angered the authorities.
In any case, while serious analysts had already pointed out the importance of Iran’s swing vote and a potential centrist/reformist rallying behind one candidate (which is exactly what happened), the Washington Post declared with seemingly absolute confidence two days before the official vote began that, “Mr. Rouhani, who has emerged as the default candidate of Iran’s reformists, will not be allowed to win.”
Of course, the Post’s editorial writers, whose certainty on so many things Middle Eastern has become a hallmark of their page, were absolutely wrong. Rouhani did win, and by quite a large margin in a field of six. Iran reported that the 64-year-old cleric, known as the “diplomatic sheik“, garnered more than 50-percent of the vote — that’s 18.6 million votes of the 36,704,156 votes cast. But neither those high numbers nor the still-flowing images of Iranians celebrating throughout the country were enough to sway some Iran-focused analysts here, including the Post’s unchastened editorial writers, to withhold or at least restrain their dismissive reactions — not even this once. LobeLog alumnus Ali Gharib has examined some of this commentary, including from the influential sanctions-advocate, Mark Dubowitz (of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies), a long-time promoter of, among other things, “economic warfare” on Iran.
Dubowitz does not work alone. His FDD colleague Reuel Marc Gerecht, who co-authored an op-ed with Dubowitz in 2012 declaring that the real goal of the crippling sanctions and threats of war they have promoted (all the while insisting that they care deeply about the human rights of Iran) should be “regime change” (regardless of how violent it may be), is another go-to expert on Iran. He is the same man who argued from his perch at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) before and immediately after the invasion of Iraq that the liberation of the Shi’a majority there would constitute “a threat worse than Saddam Hussein” to the “ruling mullahs” in Tehran. The mullahs may still be laughing.
Gerecht, a former officer in the CIA’s clandestine service, prides himself on his purported expertise on Shia Islam and the various schools, hierarchies, and personalities that animate it — from Qom to Najaf and beyond. Which makes it even more surprising that this week he publicly mocked reports that Rouhani, a Shia cleric, had received a doctor of philosophy at a Scottish University. Of course, Rouhani actually does have a Scottish PhD. No matter.
And while we’re exposing some of these blatantly wrong assertions, someone may want to alert the Wall Street Journal that its profile of Rouhani by its assistant books editor, Sohrab Ahmari, actually leads with an highly tendentious — not to say false — accusation by Ahmari’s major source, Reza Mohajerinejad; to wit: “Hassan Rohani unleashed attacks on pro-democracy student protesters in 1999.” According to journalist Bahman Kalbasi:
The [Sohrab Amari] piece in the WSJ says:
Mr. Mohajerinejad recalled how after Mr. Rohani’s statement in 1999 security forces “poured into the dorm rooms and murdered students right in front of our eyes.”
As I recall, Rouhani’s speech came on the 23rd of the month of Tir in the Government-sponsored rally. The attack on the dorms came on the 18th of Tir and most of the protests happened in the 5 days in-between. I have confirmed this with a few Tahkim (main student body of the time) leaders. While there were arrests made after Rouhani’s speech (myself included) no one could recall any attack on the dorms after the 23rd of Tir. And certainly this is the first time I hear any of those being arrested were killed in front of anyone’s eyes. Again he may be talking about 18th of Tir, but that was 5 days before the speech by Rouhani not “after”.
This same article is being quoted all over the place by the neoconservative echo chamber as the must-read profile on Rouhani. The AEI’s Michael Rubin calls it the “best summary of Rouhani’s rise and record”. In an interview with the National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, Rubin, an erstwhile champion of confidence man supremo and possible Iranian agent Ahmad Chalabi, also declared that describing Rouhani as “a moderate would be like calling Attila the Hun a moderate because he reduced prison overcrowding and was, relatively speaking, to the left of Genghis Khan.” This is what passes for Iran expertise in Washington, D.C.
The question all this raises is whether being proven totally wrong about your facts, predictions, and assessments of character (such as the Post’s editorial board on Rouhani’s election chances; Gerecht on the impact of Iraqi Shi’a liberation on Iran and on advanced degrees of key Iranian leaders; Rubin on Chalabi and historical similes) might inspire even a little humility? Or at least a willingness to reexamine your own guiding assumptions and prejudices before spouting off yet again?
Evidently not for Gerecht, Congress, or the Washington Post editorial writers, who followed up their utterly embarrassing prediction with the excuse that they simply hadn’t anticipated just how cunning those Iranian mullahs really are! In Rouhani (“a reliable follower of the supreme leader”), according to the Post, Khamenei has a “moderate face” that will be used to lull the West into making dangerous compromises on Iran’s nuclear program. Everything now makes sense. Khamenei continues to be in complete control. There’s no need to revise our assessment. We understand Iranian politics — and what’s best for its people — perfectly.
]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey and Jim Lobe
The election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new president surprised many here, even though at least one expert perceptively argued, more than once, that it was a distinct possibility. What were the naysayers basing their predictions on? Certainly not polls, which never showed Dennis [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey and Jim Lobe
The election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new president surprised many here, even though at least one expert perceptively argued, more than once, that it was a distinct possibility. What were the naysayers basing their predictions on? Certainly not polls, which never showed Dennis Ross’ declared frontrunner, Saeed Jalili, in the lead. It seems that people like Ross (who, remember, was Obama’s top Iran adviser for most of the President’s first term) fell for Jalili’s own campaign strategy aimed at making it appear that he was Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s preferred candidate and, as such, certain to win. To be sure, Iranian public opinion polls are often considered unreliable, but they aren’t necessarily entirely insignificant either, especially those conducted by well-known Iranian pollsters who’ve been arrested for releasing data that’s angered the authorities…
Indeed, though polling from the US-based IPOS, run by Hossein Ghazian, showed Rouhani gaining on the then-frontrunner, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a week before the vote, and leading by a few percentage points on June 12 (though a large number of voters were still undecided), the Washington Post declared with seemingly absolute confidence on that same day — two days before the official vote began – that Rouhani “will not be allowed to win.”
Of course, the Post’s editorial writers, whose certainty on so many things Middle Eastern has become a hallmark of their page, were absolutely wrong. Rouhani did win, and by quite a large margin in a field of six. Iran reported that the 64-year-old cleric, known as the “diplomatic sheik“, garnered more than 50-percent of the vote — that’s 18.6 million votes of the 36,704,156 votes cast. But neither those high numbers nor the still-flowing images of Iranians celebrating throughout the country were enough to sway some Iran-focused analysts here, including the Post’s unchastened editorial writers, to withhold or at least restrain their dismissive reactions — not even this once. LobeLog alumnus Ali Gharib has examined some of this commentary, including from the influential sanctions-advocate, Mark Dubowitz (of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies), a long-time promoter of, among other things, “economic warfare” on Iran.
Dubowitz does not work alone. His FDD colleague Reuel Marc Gerecht, who co-authored an op-ed with Dubowitz in 2012 declaring that the real goal of the crippling sanctions and threats of war they have promoted (all the while insisting that they care deeply about the human rights of Iran) should be “regime change” (regardless of how violent it may be), is another go-to expert on Iran. He is the same man who argued from his perch at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) before and immediately after the invasion of Iraq that the liberation of the Shi’a majority there would constitute “a threat worse than Saddam Hussein” to the “ruling mullahs” in Tehran. The mullahs may still be laughing.
Gerecht, a former officer in the CIA’s clandestine service, prides himself on his purported expertise on Shia Islam and the various schools, hierarchies, and personalities that animate it — from Qom to Najaf and beyond. Which makes it even more surprising that this week he publicly mocked reports that Rouhani, a Shia cleric, had received a doctor of philosophy at a Scottish University. Of course, Rouhani actually does have a Scottish PhD. No matter.
And while we’re exposing some of these blatantly wrong assertions, someone may want to alert the Wall Street Journal that its profile of Rouhani by its assistant books editor, Sohrab Ahmari, actually leads with an highly tendentious — not to say false — accusation by Ahmari’s major source, Reza Mohajerinejad; to wit: “Hassan Rohani unleashed attacks on pro-democracy student protesters in 1999.” According to journalist Bahman Kalbasi:
The [Sohrab Amari] piece in the WSJ says:
Mr. Mohajerinejad recalled how after Mr. Rohani’s statement in 1999 security forces “poured into the dorm rooms and murdered students right in front of our eyes.”
As I recall, Rouhani’s speech came on the 23rd of the month of Tir in the Government-sponsored rally. The attack on the dorms came on the 18th of Tir and most of the protests happened in the 5 days in-between. I have confirmed this with a few Tahkim (main student body of the time) leaders. While there were arrests made after Rouhani’s speech (myself included) no one could recall any attack on the dorms after the 23rd of Tir. And certainly this is the first time I hear any of those being arrested were killed in front of anyone’s eyes. Again he may be talking about 18th of Tir, but that was 5 days before the speech by Rouhani not “after”.
This same article is being quoted all over the place by the neoconservative echo chamber as the must-read profile on Rouhani. The AEI’s Michael Rubin calls it the “best summary of Rouhani’s rise and record”. In an interview with the National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, Rubin, an erstwhile champion of confidence man supremo and possible Iranian agent Ahmad Chalabi, also declared that describing Rouhani as “a moderate would be like calling Attila the Hun a moderate because he reduced prison overcrowding and was, relatively speaking, to the left of Genghis Khan.” This is what passes for Iran expertise in Washington, D.C.
The question all this raises is whether being proven totally wrong about your facts, predictions, and assessments of character (such as the Post’s editorial board on Rouhani’s election chances; Gerecht on the impact of Iraqi Shi’a liberation on Iran and on advanced degrees of key Iranian leaders; Rubin on Chalabi and historical similes) might inspire even a little humility? Or at least a willingness to reexamine your own guiding assumptions and prejudices before spouting off yet again?
Evidently not for Gerecht, Congress, or the Washington Post editorial writers, who followed up their utterly embarrassing prediction with the excuse that they simply hadn’t anticipated just how cunning those Iranian mullahs really are! In Rouhani (“a reliable follower of the supreme leader”), according to the Post, Khamenei has a “moderate face” that will be used to lull the West into making dangerous compromises on Iran’s nuclear program. Everything now makes sense. Khamenei continues to be in complete control. There’s no need to revise our assessment. We understand Iranian politics — and what’s best for its people — perfectly.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
Outside of Iran, there is no doubt that the biggest losers in Iran’s election this past weekend were the Likud government in Israel and its supporters, especially neoconservatives, in the United States.
The response of Israel’s Prime Minister to the election of centrist candidate Hassan Rouhani as [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
Outside of Iran, there is no doubt that the biggest losers in Iran’s election this past weekend were the Likud government in Israel and its supporters, especially neoconservatives, in the United States.
The response of Israel’s Prime Minister to the election of centrist candidate Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s next President was almost comical in its sharp reversal from the rhetoric of the past eight years. As was widely reported, Benjamin Netanyahu said that it was Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and not the president who set nuclear policy.
That is, of course, true, and it is precisely what opponents of an attack on Iran have been saying for the past eight years. Netanyahu and his neocon allies, on the other hand, were repeatedly pointing to outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the fearsome specter, the man who wanted to “wipe Israel off the map” and must be prevented from acquiring the means to do so. With Ahmadinejad gone, and, much to the surprise of many observers, not replaced by someone from the arch-conservative (or, in Iranian political terms, principlist) camp, the hawks have lost their best tool for frightening people and getting them behind the idea of attacking Iran.
So, Netanyahu has stepped up his push for a hard line on Iran, saying, “The international community must not become caught up in wishful thinking and be tempted to relax the pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear program.” Netanyahu is admitting that all the rhetoric around Ahemdinejad was insincere, and that the Iranian president is only relevant insofar as his visage can be used to whip people into a frenzy behind his call for war.
He has plenty of support in the United States. As the Iranian election results were coming in on Saturday, the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Josh Block of The Israel Project and other, similar sources tweeted incessantly about how meaningless the elections were. Ahmadinejad was exactly what the hawks wanted, an Iranian leader who displayed fiery rhetoric, was confrontational with the West and expressed hostility toward Israel and even Jews more broadly (though his frequently cited statement about wiping Israel off the map was fabricated, he did host a conference of leading Holocaust deniers, for instance, among other incidents). Rouhani, a man determined to project an air of reasonableness, makes the drumbeat for war harder to sustain.
Recognizing this, Netanyahu, his friends at Commentary Magazine, and similar extremists have warned against getting “caught up in wishful thinking” regarding Rouhani. Already, there have been declarations that Israel’s hoped-for attack on Iran has been set back by at least another year. And even the tentative, merely polite response from US President Barack Obama has been met with apoplexy from the radical hawks.
So, what does Rouhani mean for US and Israeli policy? Of course, it is very true, as opponents of war on Iran have been saying for years, that the Supreme Leader, not the President, makes the major decisions in Iran. But, just as the Likud/Neocon campaign to use Ahmadinejad as the face of Iran was disingenuous, so too is their current attempt to contend that the Iranian president, and this election is meaningless.
The Iranian President is not like the Israeli one or the British monarchy; that is, it is not a merely ceremonial role. As we have seen repeatedly, the President of Iran handles quite a bit of the public diplomacy of the Islamic Republic, and he has considerable influence over domestic issues, appointments and other facets of government. When the Iranian people made their choice, it was far from a meaningless one.
One event, prior to the election, was particularly telling. A few days before, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called on all Iranians to vote. This was not just a “get out the vote” pitch, as we see so often in the United States. After the events of 2009, there was, quite understandably, widespread cynicism among moderates and reformists in Iran. Khamenei drove the point home by encouraging even those who “do not support the Islamic system” to cast their ballots. The result was a fantastically high voter turnout: 72.7% according to the Iranian Interior Ministry, a figure that was supported by virtually all reports from the ground. Combined with the eleventh hour joining of forces behind Rouhani, this turned into a mandate for centrism over the hardline conservative views that Khamenei himself holds and that have dominated Iranian politics for most of the past decade.
While it’s a little much to assume that Khamenei’s call to vote would bring victory to a man who, while hardly a radical reformist, clearly sees things differently than Iran’s Supreme Leader, he surely knew it was a possibility. Why would he do that?
The events of 2009 are quite likely the answer. The contested presidential election of that year, and the protests, violence and national schism it produced did a lot of harm to Khamenei and Iran. The interior breech has not yet healed; more than that, the Green Movement and the Islamic Republic’s response damaged Iran in the international arena. It made it much easier to ratchet up the calls for war in the US (even if they have not reached the tipping point Netanyahu and his neocon friends hoped) and, with the subsequent events of the Arab Awakening, it undermined Iran’s efforts to usurp Saudi Arabia’s position in the region. Instead of the image Iran wants to portray — that of an Islamic Republic whose 1979 revolution threw off Western domination — it appeared more like the Arab regimes whose time seems to have finally run out.
There can be little doubt that Khamenei’s willingness to risk a new president who holds different views about Iran’s domestic politics and international strategy was meant to address those wounds from 2009. And therein lies the real opportunity.
Rouhani was elected by promising to fix the economy, improve Iran’s international standing, including with the West, and relaxing some social laws. Both of the first two are inseparable from the standoff with the US and Israel. How far is Khamenei willing to go to break that impasse?
On Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Iran was willing to stop its enrichment of uranium to 20% levels, if “substantial reciprocal steps” were forthcoming. No doubt, the hawks consider this more deception, but Rouhani has also called for greater transparency for the Iranian nuclear program as well.
This is a real opportunity, and one that the United States and Europe must explore to the fullest. If the hawks are right, then this is the easiest way to prove that. Which, conversely, makes it all the more encouraging that Iran seems to be making the first move toward accommodation.
This is not speculation that Khamenei has suddenly had a radical shift in outlook. After all, his call to vote came after the usual politicking, and political shenanigans, that trims the list of candidates to one that the Guardian Council, and by extension, Khamenei approves of. Still, that list included not only Rouhani, but also Mohammadreza Aref, a reform-minded candidate than Rouhani who withdrew voluntarily to increase Rouhani’s chances of winning.
And it is not at all difficult to believe that, after eight years of increasing tension, declining Iranian prestige in the Middle East and an economy reeling under the weight of Western sanctions, Khamenei may wish to pursue a new strategy, one which holds the possibility of reversing those trends and perhaps resolving, or at least significantly ameliorating, some of the vexing problems that Iran faces and which, eventually, could destabilize his regime.
It is perfectly sensible, politically. Now is the time for Barack Obama to close his ears to a Congress that frames the issue as an Iranian choice between war and total capitulation and ignores even the experts it calls to its hearings, in favor of Netanyahu’s paranoia, and his lunatic demands. Obama has an opportunity to test Iranian intentions right away, and very possibly, to march the region back from yet another bloody misadventure.
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