by Jim Lobe

As readers of this blog know, I’ve had a series of exchanges with editors at ProPublica regarding my critique of an article published July 11 and entitled “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America” by their award-winning national-security and terrorism reporter, Sebastian Rotella, as well as another [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jim Lobe

As readers of this blog know, I’ve had a series of exchanges with editors at ProPublica regarding my critique of an article published July 11 and entitled “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America” by their award-winning national-security and terrorism reporter, Sebastian Rotella, as well as another article he published in the Los Angeles Times in 2008 about an alleged Iranian bomb plot against the Israeli embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, on which Gareth Porter posted his own critique. The latter exchange took place August 22-23. The last exchange on the Iran-Latin America story, which included ProPublica editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg’s reply to my original critique, was posted on both LobeLog’s and ProPublica’s websites August 14. As I describe below, I regret that it’s taken me so much time to respond — my news-reporting responsibilities for IPS on the crises in Egypt and Syria are my excuse. But I felt that ProPublica’s response to my original critique deserved a thorough reply.

Dear Steve:

I’m sorry for responding so late to yours of August 4. Clearly, a combination of vacation, Egypt, and Syria intervened, and I had to give priority to reporting on the latter two for IPS. And then, amid all that, we had the contretemps over Mr. Rotella’s 2008 article on the alleged Iranian plot to bomb the Israeli embassy in Baku and Gareth Porter’s response.

But I would like to thank you for taking the time and effort to respond to both my critique of Mr. Rotella’s article and to my appeal that additional corrections to that article be made. As a daily subscriber, I know and respect the importance of ProPublica’s mission.

Unfortunately, however, I was disappointed by the substance of your response, especially the fact that you chose to ignore altogether the harsh assessment of the article by Dr. Pillar that was cited in both my message and the longer critique and to gloss over other key issues, such as the way in which the correction belatedly issued by you actually served to undermine the article’s central thesis expressed in its title, “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads to Latin America.” I would therefore like to take this opportunity to address both the specific points you raised in your response more or less in the order in which they were raised and to raise some more general questions about how you see ProPublica’s responsibilities as the nation’s premier non-profit investigative news agency in covering as fraught and consequential a subject as alleged Iranian terrorism against the U.S. and its allies in the Americas and beyond.

First, some caveats:

When I read an article about alleged Iranian skullduggery around the world, I pay particularly close attention to the sourcing. It is no secret that the government of Israel and its advocates here are particularly hostile to Iran which, at times, they have depicted as an “existential” threat to Israel’s survival. As a result, they have consistently opposed the possibility of any détente or rapprochement between Tehran and Washington. In pursuit of that aim, they have waged a public information or “perception management” campaign designed to promote fear of the Islamic Republic – both here in the U.S. and elsewhere – with respect not only to Iran’s nuclear program, but also to its alleged terrorist activities and other misdeeds; among them, its support for and close relationship with Hezbollah. This campaign has intensified over the past few years as a result of which reporters should, in my view, maintain a healthy degree of skepticism about claims by Israeli government sources (who, it is widely known, often insist on being referred to as “Western officials”) or staunchly pro-Israel individuals or organizations, such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its spin-off, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), among others, regarding alleged Iranian plots and conspiracies, just as they should with respect to Tehran’s denials. Extra efforts, I believe, should be made to critically scrutinize the veracity of such claims rather than to accept them at face value before passing them along to the reader. After all, the failure of mainstream media to adequately scrutinize claims made by the George W. Bush administration and its advocates regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction programs, links to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, etc. has to be considered a major contributing factor to the invasion of Iraq, a precedent that should weigh heavily on reporters covering intelligence regarding Iran and its alleged activities.

If such considerations should apply to daily news reporters like myself, they should apply in spades to investigative reporters. In my view, they have a special responsibility to use the time, expertise and resources available to them to go beneath the surface, to take nothing for granted, to probe deeply and carefully into the subject matter of a story or a source to determine its credibility and, ultimately, its veracity. Thus, for example, while I, as a news reporter, would cover a Congressional hearing by quoting the testimony of the witnesses, adding a little context and background and perhaps a contrary view here and there for balance, I would expect an investigative reporter covering that same hearing or its subject matter to take the time and effort necessary to assess as rigorously as possible the credibility of the witnesses, to carefully check the “facts” on which their testimony is based, their possible motivations, and anything else that could bear on the reliability of their assertions, particularly on a subject as sensitive as Iranian involvement in or direction of terrorist activities. It is in this respect that I believe Mr. Rotella fell short.

Why didn’t the misattributed Clapper quote raise suspicion?

As you note in your correction – and unfortunately gloss over (as if the opinions about alleged Iranian terrorism in the Americas by a virulently anti-Iranian Miami politician should be given the same weight as those of the Director of National Intelligence) — Mr. Rotella, apparently relying on the written testimony of AFPC’s Ilan Berman, quoted DNI Clapper as saying that Iran’s Latin American alliances could pose “an immediate threat” by offering it a “platform in the region to carry out attacks against the United States, our interests, and allies” when those words were actually spoken by Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Unlike Mr. Rotella, I am no expert on Latin America and Iran’s activities there, but I suspected immediately upon reading the misattributed quote that something was wrong, and that, if indeed Clapper had publicly made such a remarkable assertion in January 2012, I assumed I would have heard about it since then.

Moreover, the quote in question was clearly inconsistent with statements by “two senior administration officials” during a May 31 State Department background briefing on the topic of “Iran, the IRGC, and Hezbollah’s Increased Terrorist Activity Worldwide,” a briefing which apparently went completely ignored by Mr. Rotella. So I started Googling, and, within just a few minutes, I had reason to believe that it was Ros-Lehtinen’s quote, not Clapper’s. I then went to the DNI website to search if the relevant phrase appeared there. It did not. When I called the DNI’s office a few days later to make absolutely certain I had not missed something, the press officer went through the same process and, within a similarly short period of time, came to the same conclusion (and then, apparently, called ProPublica the following day to request a correction).

Given his own expertise on both Latin America and terrorism, how was it that Mr. Rotella didn’t also suspect something was wrong with the quote and take just the few minutes it would have required to ensure its provenance and accuracy? I assume that, as a matter of course, he would have closely followed whatever the DNI was saying about Iranian cover activities in Latin America, because the DNI obviously speaks for the entire U.S. intelligence community. Moreover, how could he have missed State’s background briefing (the transcript of which was available on the State Department’s website at the time his story was written) in which one of the two senior officials stated flatly:

“We don’t have evidence of an operational network – Hezbollah across South America, but it’s something that we watch for very, very, very closely. We know that Hezbollah as an organization does benefit from fundraising activity or commercial activity that ultimately benefits the organization back in Lebanon. But as for an operational link to activities in South America, Central America, or Mexico, we don’t have that. [Emphasis added].”[1]

Would the administration briefer have been so categorical if s/he didn’t have the backing of the intelligence community on this question? To me, these two oversights are simply incomprehensible under the circumstances.

If the misattribution of Clapper’s quote deserves a correction, why not the misinformation about undocumented Iranians seeking asylum in Canada?

As you note, however, ProPublica immediately issued its correction when informed by a government official about the misattribution. While I will address below why I think the correction itself clearly undercut the main thesis of the article, the fact that ProPublica felt obliged to make it raises a second question regarding your refusal to make a correction regarding Joseph Humire’s testimony about Iranian migrants going to Canada. It is true that Humire wrote what you said he wrote: that “Iran is the number one source of improperly documented migrants to Canada” and that most of these migrants apply for refugee status. But Mr. Rotella included only the first part of that sentence: “Witness Joseph Humire, a security expert, 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.” There’s nothing in his paragraph about refugees at all. Imagine what kinds of images his sentence conjures up in the minds of average American readers, especially in the present context: that there are more illegal immigrants coming to Canada from Iran than from any other country, including Mexico or Central America or the Caribbean (which is why I used the word “flood” to describe what Mr. Rotella’s words were suggesting). But if Mr. Rotella or his editors had stepped back for a moment and examined that assertion, would they not have questioned whether Iran could really be the top source of undocumented immigrants to Canada? The notion seems quite bizarre on its face. Would such an assertion not invite a little further investigation, such as by actually looking at the CBSA report cited by Mr. Humire to ensure that what he is quoted as saying was in fact true? Apparently, neither Mr. Rotella nor his editors believed that was necessary.

Of course, had he looked at the report, he would have realized that Mr. Humire’s statement was flat-out wrong and that Iran was the not Canada’s biggest source of undocumented migrants; it was Canada’s biggest source of undocumented migrants who were applying for refugee status (at the rate of only about 300 a year), a fact which casts an entirely different light on both the nature and scope of Iranian migration to Canada and on its consistency with the rather sinister context in which Mr. Rotella placed this bit of misinformation. Moreover, had he looked at the report, as you note, he would have found that most Iranian asylum-seekers since at least 2010 left for Canada from embarkation points in Western Europe, not Latin America – a very significant fact because it contradicts Mr. Rotella’s assertion (which he attributes to the Canadian report) that “most” of the illegal Iranian migrants were “coming through Latin America.”

That is why I requested a correction, and, frankly, I don’t see how why you would issue a correction on the Clapper/Ros-Lehtinen misattribution and not on Mssrs. Humire’s and  Rotella’s misstatements about the findings of the Canadian report. In both cases, Mr. Rotella relied on the questionable testimony of a hearing witness apparently without bothering to check its veracity. In both cases, the testimony turned out to be seriously flawed. In both cases, those flaws were easily discoverable with a few minutes’ research. In both cases, those flaws were brought to ProPublica’s attention by outside parties. Yet in only one case has a correction been made.

According to ProPublica’s code of ethics, “When mistakes are made, they need to be corrected — fully, quickly and ungrudgingly.” So why not publish a correction regarding the mistaken assertions made by Mr. Humire in his testimony and by Mr. Rotella’s account of the embarkation points for most undocumented Iranian migrants seeking asylum in Canada? Why leave your readers with mistaken information?

A second provision in the code of ethics provides that: “No story is fair if it omits facts of major importance or significance. Fairness includes completeness.” Obviously, a number of very important facts about Iranian flows of illegal migration into Canada were omitted in Mr. Rotella’s account, facts that I included in my critique. Those facts were, in my view, of major importance not only because their inclusion would have presented a much different picture of the actual situation regarding Iranian undocumented migrants going to Canada than that presented in the story. They were also important because Mr. Humire’s testimony is used by Mr. Rotella to set the stage for his closing argument about the crucial role allegedly played by Venezuela in providing documents to Iranians and other “suspected Middle Eastern operatives” to carry out their sinister designs, as he described them in his portentous introduction about last year’s secret meeting between the mysteriously unnamed senior IRGC official and his Venezuelan counterparts. It’s the kind of device that I think Dr. Pillar, who, in addition to his work as NIO for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, also served as chief of analysis and later deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) during the 1990s, was referring to when he described Mr. Rotella’s article as appearing “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” – a remarkably damning criticism considering the credentials of the source — that you failed to address seriously in your reply.

Kadir: Another Case of Innuendo Without Supporting Evidence

As to the Kadir case, Mr. Rotella’s and your contention that Kadir was indeed a “longtime intelligence operative for Iran” and constituted the kind of “platform in the region to carry out attacks against the U.S….” that Ros-Lehtinen – not the DNI — was apparently referring to rests on two major sources: the Justice Department press release about his sentencing and the Nisman report which also quotes the FBI investigator, Robert Addonizio as testifying that Kadir’s activity “were those of a spy.” In responding, I am at a disadvantage because I have only the DOJ’s press release and the 31-page summary of the Nisman report that FDD published on its website.[2]  The clear implication of this part of Mr. Rotella’s story and the context in which it was presented is that Iran was behind – or at least condoned — the JFK plot.

But what was the evidence for such an insinuation? No Iranian was indicted in the plot (as there was in the Arbabsiar case, for example). No testimony that Kadir was involved in the plot at the behest of any Iranian authority was presented at trial or mentioned in the Justice Department’s press release. (Indeed, the release alleged that Kadir was trying to travel to Iran apparently in hopes of “enlist[ing]” its support for the plot when he was arrested, which raises the question of why such a trip would be necessary if he was in such consistent contact with highers-up in the Iranian intelligence services.) Mr. Addonizio’s original complaint on which the arrest warrant was based did not even mention any ties between Kadir and Iran. And what precisely is the relevance of Kadir’s testimony that he felt “himself bound to follow fatwas from Iranian religious leaders,” unless there’s evidence that one of those leaders had issued a fatwa authorizing an attack on JFK airport? (Quoting one of the alleged conspirators, FDD’s summary of the Nisman report maintains that Kadir was travelling to Iran in hopes of obtaining a fatwa.) In any event, Mr. Rotella’s strong suggestion that Iran had endorsed Kadir’s involvement in the plot is yet another example of the story’s use of innuendo.[3]

Part of that innuendo, of course, is the use of the word “operative” by Mr. Rotella to describe Kadir’s relationship to Iran’s intelligence service(s). But was he really an “operative”? I took the liberty of sending to Dr. Pillar both Mr. Rotella’s original description of Kadir’s role and your description as provided to me in your response to my critique and asked him whether, given his 28-year career in the CIA, Kadir could be called an “operative.” This was his reply:

The description is that of a source.  This is so whether he was doing what he was doing on a totally voluntary basis, or he was blackmailed, or he was motivated by money, or whatever.  It also is true whether he was spying or was collecting openly available information.  And it is true whether the information he passed reflected his own selection or was in response to questions levied on him. Although “operative” is not part of an official lexicon, I think most people familiar with the lexicon would equate “operative” with what our services would call an operations officer or case officer.  That means a professional intelligence person who recruits and manages sources of information (including sources who are doing spying).  That is quite different from being one of the sources whom an operations officer might manage.

So, according to this definition, Kadir was a “source” which, of course, sounds a lot less menacing and sinister than “operative” and would thus have undermined the portentous nature of Mr. Rotella’s narrative.

Now, the 32-page summary of the Nisman report goes into much greater detail about Kadir’s alleged role and activities going back all the way to 1983 when Tehran allegedly “accepted Abdul Kadir as its agent in Guyana.” According to this account, Kadir was “trained and supported by Iran,” although it does not indicate how precisely he was supported and what he was trained to do besides “propagat[e] the fundamentalist vision emanated from Iran.” (If he was trained as an “operative,” the fact that he used the Guyanese postal service to transmit his letters to the Iranian ambassador in Caracas and Rabbani suggests that his training was less than professional.) Unlike the U.S. prosecution, which made no such allegation, Nisman’s report, quoting a confidential informant, maintains that Iranian intelligence was itself, coincidentally, already developing its own plans to attack JFK airport at the time but decided that the plot hatched by Kadir’s confederates was better. And yet despite Iran’s alleged approval of the plot and the “ideological, logistical and financial support” it allegedly provided to Kadir for this purpose, the report asserts that the plotters decided to use the funds “collected for charity by voluntary donations of Muslims, with the purpose of financing the passport expenses of the person sent to Iran to pitch the terrorist plot.” (Emphasis mine.)  So it appears that this “longtime Iranian operative” had been given no expense account with which to travel to Tehran. Perhaps not even a passport.

This is not an incidental point, because, at least insofar as the Nisman summary is concerned, the Kadir prosecution is the only concrete case, besides the AMIA bombing 13 years before, in which Nisman asserts Iranian responsibility for a specific terrorist plot and the only one in which the conspirators were arrested and actually convicted. However, if, in fact, the Iranians did not approve of, let alone provide support for, the JFK plot, the central thesis of Nisman’s latest report would seem deeply flawed.

Now, it may be that the report on which the FDD summary is based is far more coherent and provides a lot more detail. But frankly I found major parts of the narrative about Kadir presented in the summary rather difficult to believe. In fact, the entire summary aroused considerable scepticism in me, characterized as it was by breathtaking leaps of logic and history that leave yawning gaps in the analysis, highly tendentious argumentation, mind-numbing repetition of the major themes; and reliance on the testimony of discredited or highly questionable witnesses (see below) – all of which makes me wonder why Mr. Rotella throughout his article appears to accept the report’s allegations uncritically (just as he took at face value the testimonies of Mssrs. Berman and Humare).

The Nisman Report(s): a case of unreliable sources?

Indeed, there is strong reason to retain a high degree of scepticism regarding Nisman’s investigation. In that connection, I would like to draw your attention to the rather astonishing findings of my colleague, Gareth Porter, regarding Nisman’s 2006 indictment – an English copy of which has only recently become available — on the 1994 AMIA bombing. That report concluded that, at an August 1993 meeting in Mashad, top officials of the Iranian regime, including then-President Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the bombing (whose alleged mastermind, Mohsen Rabbani, was the same man, according to the second Nisman report, was Kadir’s superior). Having reviewed the nearly 700-page English version, Mr. Porter, who won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism and also wrote an investigative article about the AMIA bombings for The Nation in 2008, was shocked to find that all of the evidence cited by the report regarding the purported 1993 meeting was based[4] on the testimony of four members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political front for Mojahadin e-Khalq (MeK), the armed opposition group that allied itself with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war and that was listed by the State Department as a terrorist group until last year when its leadership promised to cooperate in the repatriation of its members from Iraq to third countries. Even more remarkably, Nisman insisted that the fact that these witnesses were members of a group that had tried for decades to violently overthrow the Islamic Republic did not in any way affect their credibility. “The fact that the individuals are opponents of the Iranian regime does not detract in the least from the significance of their statements,” Nisman declared in his report, adding that their testimony could be trusted as “completely truthful.”

In the absence of any other concrete evidence and given the MEK’s history and credibility, Mr. Nisman acceptance of the word of its activists or Mesbahi regarding the Iranian leadership’s alleged authorization of the AMIA bombing raises very serious questions about the integrity of his investigation. Yet, remarkably, in the summary of Nisman’s latest report, Mesbahi and the MEK witnesses again figure prominently as witnesses regarding Iran’s alleged terrorist activities in Latin America. Which again raises the question: why hasn’t Mr. Rotella demonstrated the kind of skepticism toward Nisman’s work and conclusions that he has with respect to, say, the State Department’s most recent report on the alleged terrorist threats posed by Iran and Hezbollah activities in the Americas, especially given his own expertise about the attack? After all, if Iran was not involved in the AMIA bombing, nor in the Kadir case, what is left of Nisman’s thesis that the Iranian regime has been establishing “clandestine intelligence stations and operative agents which are used to execute terrorist attacks when the Iranian regime decides so…”?

One other point about the latest Nisman report that bears mentioning: the identity and associations of its most enthusiastic promoters, aside from FDD which published the English-language summary. According to a Nexis search of “Nisman” and “Iran,” the first releases announcing publication of the report in late May were put out by the American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith, and Rep. Ros-Lehtinen (who put out two other press releases on the report over the following three months, as did Rep. Duncan). Op-ed writers who have devoted by far the most space to the report in U.S. publications have been strongly pro-Israel and neoconservative in their political orientation. They include Mary Anastasia O’Grady, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (“Uncovering Iran’s Latin Network”, June 3); WINEP’s Matthew Levitt[5] on foreignpolicy.com (“Exporting Terror in America’s Backyard: Is the United State Downplaying the Threat from Iranian Agents in Latin America?” June 13; Douglas Farah (who testified before the Subcommittee) and FDD’s Mark Dubowitz in the Miami Herald (“Terror and Foreign Policy: Iran in Latin America,” June 26); AFPC’s Berman and Netanel Levitt on USNEWS.com (“Terror Can Leak in Through America’s Borders,” July 15); the Hudson Institute’s Jaime Darenblum in the weeklystandard.com (“The Iranian Threat in Latin America”, July 15) and again in The Weekly Standard (“Terror Threat in Latin America,” Aug 15); and Aaron Sagui, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, in the Miami Herald (“AMIA Bombing: Truth Found, Stop Looking – Iran to Blame,” July 17). (Of course, Levitt, Farah, and Berman also testified at the subcommittee hearing.) In addition, an organization called the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), which was created by a group of hedge funds – or “vulture capitalists,” according to their critics – who bought heavily discounted Argentine bonds and have sued the Argentine government in U.S. federal court to collect the bonds’ full value, has also taken out full-page ads in The Washington Post and other newspapers denouncing Argentina’s ties to Iran and extolling the Nisman reports and their findings about alleged Iranian terrorism. The group is led by Elliott Management whose chief executive is Paul Singer who, according to a recent article in Salon, contributed nearly 11 million dollars to FDD between 2008 and 2011, the latest year for which tax records are available.

Fernando Tabares

Clearly, you are much better informed about Tabares’ testimony in “the Argentine investigation” and any statements by a “second Colombian intelligence official” since you have read the full version of Nisman’s report in the original Spanish, while I have seen only the English summary. So I must defer to your judgment. But I would like to make the following few points:

1)    Shouldn’t the reader have been informed that Tabares was either facing or serving an eight-year prison sentence for breach of trust and illegal wire-tapping at the time that he gave his testimony? Isn’t that relevant to assessing his credibility as a source – especially given the vagueness of his statement as reported in the article (if not in the Nisman report itself)? Your response failed to address this question.

2)    Tabares, according to Adam Isacson, the Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), was not “the former director of Colombia’s intelligence agency,” as claimed by Mr. Rotella. He was the chief of a division of the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), the country’s civilian intelligence agency which, according to Mr. Isacson, is dwarfed in size by the country’s police and military intelligence agencies. The suggestion in the story that he was Colombia’s equivalent of the DNI is “misleading,” he told me. It may also be worth noting that, according to Mr. Isacson, Israeli intelligence is known to have a particularly close relationship with its Colombian counterparts, closer than any other South America country’s intelligence service.

3)    As you note, Mr. Rotella’s story names “the Argentine investigation” as the source of Tabares’ testimony, but you can see from the FDD Summary paper (p. 30) that he also “informed” the Colombian Supreme Court of Justice about alleged Iranian and Hezbollah activity, so it’s unclear in the article what testimony Mr. Rotella was referring to.

4)    Again, the Nisman summary regarding Tabares’ testimony makes a series of leaps – such as the notion that funds transferred to both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda from a Colombian city where an alleged Hezbollah operative allegedly maintains a residence came from the same source (the Hezbollah operative?) — that appears to be based as much or more on speculation than real evidence. Presumably the actual report provides some additional evidence on this and related issues.

Balanced? Seriously?

In your response to my critique, you claim that Mr. Rotella’s story was “far more balanced and restrained” than I had described it, and, it is true that I did not cite his quotation of the two-sentence conclusion of the unclassified appendix to the State Department report that was the subject of the Subcommittee’s hearing; nor did I cite the unnamed senior U.S. government official who defended it; nor Rep. Thompson’s quote (which Mr. Rotella immediately cast into doubt in his concluding sentence). But, frankly, I find the notion that the story overall had even a modicum of balance to be rather bizarre, to say the least.

As I understand it, the basic issue raised by the story (and the hearing) was whether or not the terror threat deriving from Iran’s and Hezbollah’s activities in Latin America was on the rise or not. That certainly was the subject of the hearing in question, as it was the subject of the latest Nisman report whose clear message was set out in the very first sentence of the report: that Iran has built a formidable infrastructure in Latin America that is “used to execute terrorist attacks …both directly or through its proxy, the terrorist organization Hezbollah.” Indeed the Nisman report, the hearing’s witnesses and its Republican convenors all appeared dedicated to refuting the State Department report and its conclusions – that Iranian influence, including, presumably, its alleged terrorist infrastructure and activities, was on the wane in Latin America.

So, if the story was “balanced,” one would expect there to be roughly the same number of sources on each side of the question: Is the Iranian/Hezbollah terrorist threat from Latin America rising or diminishing? But if we count up the number of sources on each side of that question, the results are really indisputable: the story is tilted almost entirely in favor of the former position and against the conclusions of the State Department’s report. Consider, for example, all of the “on-the-record” quotes by identified sources in the story: I counted eight (including the Committee and Subcommittee chairs, the DNI/Ros-Lehtinen quote, and the Nisman report quotes, among others) in the “rise” category and only two – the two sentences from the State Department report’s appendix and Rep. Thompson’s quote — on the “wane” side.

If we carry that quantitative analysis further to include background quotes by unidentified individuals (like “Western officials”) or sentences whose substantive content is attributed to a source (like the “Argentine investigation”, or “critics,” or “Argentine, Israeli, and U.S. investigators”, or the hearing witnesses, including Humire and Berman, the proportion is about the same: 26 tend to confirm the notion that Iranian activity – and hence the threat — is on the rise; only five suggest this may not be so. And that doesn’t include the story’s headline: “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America” and Mr. Rotella’s unattributed assertion: “The attacks in Buenos Aires in the 1990s revealed the existence of Iranian terror networks in the Americas.”

But putting aside the sources, both the article’s portentous opening about the secret meeting between the unidentified senior IRGC officer and his Venezulean interlocutors, as well as the ending in which Mr. Rotella reminds the reader that Chavez’s successor was the “point man for the alliance with Iran” when he served as foreign minister, appear intended to convey not only a sense of threat to the average American reader. It also makes it clear that, on the basic question raised by the article, the State Department’s report is wrong – a conclusion that is naturally bolstered by the article’s uncritical treatment that Mr. Rotella gives to the testimony of the hearing’s Republican sponsors, its witnesses, and the Nisman report, not to mention the DNI/Ros-Lehtinen’s misquote.

Moreover, your citation of the article’s assertion that there is “considerable debate inside and outside the U.S. government” about the extent and nature of Iran’s activities in Latin America as evidence of the story’s balance seems especially bizarre (unless you include Republicans in Congress as part of the “U.S. government”). On this very question, Mr. Rotella clearly takes sides. He thus quotes Rep. Duncan as stating, “We know there is not consensus on this issue, but I seriously question the administration’s judgment to downplay the seriousness of Iran’s presence here at home.” And then, later in the story, he notes that “State Department officials say the[ir] Iran report reflected a consensus among U.S. government agencies.”

So when Mr. Rotella introduces the subject by asserting flatly that there is “considerable debate inside …the U.S. government,” he is clearly siding with Rep. Duncan and against the State Department officials with whom he spoke. And, remarkably, he provides no additional evidence – in the form, for example, of either on-the-record or background quotes by senior officials of other government agencies who take issue with the State Department report’s conclusions — to support his and Rep. Duncan’s assertion that indeed there is considerable debate within the government.

When I asked the State Department about whether other U.S. government agencies cleared the report, a spokesperson told me the following by email:

“A team of seasoned career Department of State employees, in cooperation with experts from other USG agencies, crafted the report which in turn was based on and is fully consistent with the analysis and conclusion of the longer classified report prepared by the intelligence community.

Those members of Congress who read the entire report will see a thorough, whole-of-government review that incorporates the most current information available to the intelligence community, as well as diplomatic and open source information, regarding Iran’s activities in the hemisphere. In writing the report, the Department of State consulted with the Departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security and Treasury, along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the United Trade Representative. We consulted extensively with regional and partner governments to obtain information contained in the report.” (Emphasis added.)”

I later asked an ODNI official who confirmed that his office had indeed been consulted.

Now, it may be that Mr. Rotella and Rep. Duncan are correct: that the extent and nature of Iran’s activities in Latin America are indeed the subject of considerable debate within the U.S. government. But where is the evidence that such a debate is taking place beyond the assertion of a highly partisan Republican congressman? Particularly when the State Department insists that its report is consistent with the conclusion of a longer classified report prepared by the intelligence community? I can’t find any in the article.

Anonymous Sources: Is it too much to ask that the nationality of sources be identified?

I agree with you that, in the field of intelligence – especially on an issue as sensitive as this – it is difficult to get officials to speak on the record, and I certainly agree that the recent leak investigations has contributed to a chilling effect that has made matters worse, at least insofar as the U.S. government is concerned. But my plea is for some precision in identifying who these officials are. I count six attributions or quotes in the article to “Western officials,” or “Western intelligence officials,” or “an intelligence official” who, in the context, is apparently one of the “Western officials” cited by Mr. Rotella. But, as noted above, Israeli officials, whose government clearly has an interest in promoting the specter of Iranian terrorism, often insist to reporters that they be described as “Western” officials. So the question arises: are these officials Israeli, American, French, British, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Canadian? In assessing the credibility of these assertions by “Western” officials, it’s clearly relevant to know what governments they work for. Given ProPublica’s and Mr. Rotella’s stature in investigative journalism, isn’t it possible to insist as a condition for quoting such officials or providing their accounts of alleged terrorist plotting that they be identified by their nationality? Particularly on an intelligence issue as fraught and politicized as this is? (I should note parenthetically, that, in his 2008 Nation article, Gareth Porter got two serving U.S. officials and one retired U.S. official – the ambassador to Argentina at the time of the AMIA bombing, James Cheek – not only to speak on the record, but also to publicly cast doubt on the theory that Iran was involved.) Of all news services, one would expect ProPublica to be particularly tough in dealing with sources who insist on anonymity as broad as “Western official.”

Your correction undermined the thesis of the article.

As I noted above, I was particularly disappointed by the way you glossed over the significance of the correction by simply referring to Mr. Berman’s gracious acknowledgment of responsibility. In doing so, you failed to address the fact that attributing to DNI Clapper what Rep. Ros-Lehtinen said about Iranian “platforms” for attacking the U.S. undermined the basic thesis of the article in important ways.

First, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, a politician with no known expertise in intelligence and who, after all, has been among the foremost champions the late Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles – both of whom were heavily implicated in the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner and other terrorist acts — has been probably the single-most aggressive promoter of the Nisman reports in the U.S. Congress. The ODNI, on the other hand, was consulted about the State Department report and presumably raised no serious objections to it. To suggest, as the corrected version of Mr. Rotella’s article does, that the views of DNI Clapper and Rep. Ros-Lehtinen on the question of Iranian terrorism in the Americas largely coincide is simply irresponsible.

Second, DNI Clapper is the only named “Western intelligence official” in the entire story, and his inclusion lends it a credibility that it would otherwise lack. But he never said anything about Iranian terrorist activities in Latin America; he confined his remarks to the Arbabsiar case about which, as I pointed out in my original critique, Mr. Rotella himself expressed considerable skepticism when the story first broke.

Third, if the thesis of the article, the Nisman report, and the witness testimony is correct – that Iran has built a formidable infrastructure for conducting terrorist attacks against the U.S. – why would the Quds Force feel it had to resort to recruiting a totally inexperienced, obviously unstable Iranian-American used-car salesman (whom the correction referred to as an “Iranian-American operative”) to make contact with the Zetas to arrange the assassination? It doesn’t make much sense on the face of it. And if Hezbollah, whose activists, according to a 2011 article by Mr. Rotella, have already been deeply involved with the Zeta cartel for years, why wouldn’t the IRGC have used its connections with its trusted ally/client (which carried out the AMIA bombing with such success) to make the appropriate arrangements either through its relationship with the Zetas or with its own “sleeper cells” which Mr. Nisman and others insist are already in place throughout the United States? As written, the correction clearly begs all of these questions.

Finally, as to whether I think Mr. Rotella is pushing an ideological agenda, I have no idea since it would take a serious  study of the entire corpus of his work to answer such a question. With respect to this particular article (or the corrected version, at least), however, he appears to have more or less accepted the narrative of the Republican sponsors of the July 9 hearing, the hearing’s witnesses, and Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, a right-wing politician who is not known for her neutrality relating to Iran, Venezuela, or terrorism. I think it also showed a surprising credulousness and lack of curiosity for an investigative journalist of Mr. Rotella’s experience and stature that, in my view, appeared inconsistent with ProPublica’s other work, but whether that is explained by ideological preferences or other factors I cannot say. Again, I would refer to Dr. Pillar’s critique of the article, since, as a former top-ranking professional intelligence analyst specialized in counter-terrorism and the Middle East, his critique would be far more informed than mine.

I have no doubt that I have tried your patience exceedingly, but I think your response to my original critique deserved a thorough reply, and I have tried to provide one. Again, I apologize for its delay but hope you will consider it seriously.

Best regards,

Jim

[1] Except for the Arbabsiar case, Iranian activities in the Americas were never mentioned in the briefing despite its “worldwide” scope.

by Jim Lobe

In critiquing Sebastian Rotella’s recent ProPublica report about alleged Iranian/Hezbollah activities in Latin America, I came across a surprising discovery. As readers of this blog know, Rotella had misattributed a quotation uttered by far-right Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in February last year to Director of National Intelligence [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jim Lobe

In critiquing Sebastian Rotella’s recent ProPublica report about alleged Iranian/Hezbollah activities in Latin America, I came across a surprising discovery. As readers of this blog know, Rotella had misattributed a quotation uttered by far-right Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in February last year to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper. According to Rotella’s original story, Clapper had told a Senate hearing that Iran’s alliances with Venezuela and other “leftist, populist, anti-U.S. governments” in Latin America 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.

After I tried to verify the quote with a press officer at the DNI’s office, he or a colleague apparently notified ProPublica about the misattribution, whereupon ProPublica promptly issued a correction, blaming the error on a July 9 testimony by Ilan Berman (the vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) who has seemingly made most of his career out of hyping the alleged threats posed by Iran to the U.S.) before the Oversight and Management Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee. In a subsequent note to me, ProPublica wrote that Mr. Berman had “graciously acknowledged responsibility for the error” after being contacted.

Well, he may have “graciously” acknowledged the error and indeed retroactively amended his written testimony to the Subcommittee, but, curiously, he apparently failed to follow up with a correction to the July 15 US News article he co-authored with AFPC researcher Netanel Levitt, entitled “Iran’s Operations in Latin America Are a Threat to the U.S.”, in which he also misattributed Ros-Lehtinen’s quote to DNI Clapper. The misattribution he made in testimony before the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 2012 hasn’t been corrected either. Nor has he corrected an article he published in Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Quarterly.

Briefly skimming the USNews op-ed, I also noted that in the same paragraph as the Clapper misquote, Berman and Levitt cite recent testimony by the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, to drive their point home:

Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the House Homeland Security Committee last week that Iran represents a threat to the U.S. through our porous borders, and that there are Hezbollah and Revolutionary Guard operatives active within the U.S. today.

So I went to the indicated link, which took me to the Homeland Security Committee’s website and agenda of a July 10 hearing on “Assessing Attacks on the Homeland: From Fort Hood to Boston”, which offered two video clips of Chairman McCaul from the hearing and copies of prepared testimony for the hearing, including Leiter’s. I then clicked on the link for the PDF version of Leiter’s prepared testimony and searched it for the magic words, “Iran”, “Hezbollah”, and “Revolutionary Guard” and could not find a single match in the text. I then read quickly over the text to ensure that the search function was not misbehaving. Same result. I then went back to the 10-minute video of McCaul asking witnesses questions but found that they were confined to a discussion of the Tsarnaev case.

Now, it may be that Leiter offered the quoted passage in response to questions posed by other members of Congress at that hearing. I haven’t seen a transcript. But whatever the link was supposed to show, it certainly didn’t include anything Leiter supposedly said about the threat posed by Iran, Hezbollah or Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Hopefully, Berman and Levitt can explain the Leiter citation and correct the past misattribution in all of the fora in which it has appeared.

by Jim Lobe

Following the publication last month of my post, “ProPublica and the Fear Campaign Against Iran”, I sent an email message to Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, drawing his attention to my critique of Sebastian’s Rotella’s article, “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America”, published by ProPublica on July [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jim Lobe

Following the publication last month of my post, “ProPublica and the Fear Campaign Against Iran”, I sent an email message to Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, drawing his attention to my critique of Sebastian’s Rotella’s article, “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America”, published by ProPublica on July 11 and corrected on July 18. The correction was apparently the result of my inquiry to the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) (which likely led the DNI to alert ProPublica in one way or another) regarding a key misattribution to DNI James Clapper of a quote by Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. I also asked Mr. Engelberg to consider issuing two other corrections of what I viewed as errors of fact contained in Mr. Rotella’s article.

The following is the exchange of messages between Mr. Engelberg and me (which has also been published in the Comments sections of both the original ProPublica article and my critique of it). Depending on time constraints and unforeseen events, such as today’s bloodshed and violence in Egypt, which require me to write articles for IPS, I also intend to respond to Mr. Engelberg’s reply both with respect to the specific points he makes and to the broader issues regarding Mr. Rotella’s coverage of alleged Iran/Hezbollah-related terrorism. Let me add that I am gratified that, given all of his responsibilities, Mr. Engelberg took the time and effort to respond to my comments, and I hope the dialogue will continue.

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 [...]]]> via LobeLog

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

via IPS News

Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar [...]]]> by Pratap Chaterjee

via IPS News

Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar intelligence budget.

Some commentators have pounced on Snowden’s disclosures to denounce the role of private contractors in the world of government and national security, arguing such spheres are best left to public servants. But their criticism misses the point.

It is no longer possible to determine the difference between the two: employees of the NSA – along with agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – and the employees of companies such as Booz Allen have integrated to the extent that they slip from one role in industry to another in government, cross-promoting each other and self-dealing in ways that make the fabled revolving door redundant, if not completely disorienting.

Snowden, a systems administrator at the NSA’s Threat Operations Centre in Hawaii, had worked for the CIA and Dell before joining Booz Allen. But his rather obscure role pales in comparison to those of others.

To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track “terrorists”.

One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9/11 national surveillance apparatus.

On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.

“The source of information about vulnerabilities of and potential attacks on the homeland will not be dominated by foreign intelligence, as was the case in the Cold War. The terrorists understood us well, and so they lived and planned where we did not spy (inside the U.S.),” said Woolsey in prepared remarks before the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security on Jun. 24, 2004.

In a prescient suggestion of what Snowden would later reveal, Woolsey went on to discuss expanding surveillance to cover domestic, as well as foreign sources.

“One source will be our vulnerability assessments, based on our own judgments about weak links in our society’s networks that can be exploited by terrorists,” he said. “A second source will be domestic intelligence. How to deal with such information is an extraordinarily difficult issue in our free society.”

One month later, Woolsey appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, a news-talk show hosted by Chris Matthews, and told Matthews that the federal government needed a new high-level office – a DNI, if you will – to straddle domestic and foreign intelligence. Until then, the director of the CIA served as the head of the entire intelligence community (IC).

“The problem is that the intelligence community has grown so much since 1947, when the position of director of central intelligence was created, that it’s [become] impossible to do both jobs, running the CIA and managing the community,” he said.

Both these suggestions would lead to influential jobs and lucrative sources of income for his employer and colleagues.

The Director of National Intelligence

Fast forward to 2007. Vice Admiral Michael McConnell (ret.), Booz Allen’s then-senior vice president of policy, transformation, homeland security and intelligence analytics, was hired as the second czar of the new “Office of the Director of National Intelligence”, a post that oversees the work of Washington’s 17 intelligence agencies, which was coincidentally located just three kilometres from the company’s corporate headquarters.

Upon retiring as DNI, McConnell returned to Booz Allen in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman to this day. In August 2010, Lieutenant General James Clapper (ret), Booz Allen’s former vice president for military intelligence from 1997 to 1998, was hired as the fourth intelligence czar, a job he has held ever since. Indeed, one-time Booz Allen executives have filled the position five of the eight years of its existence.

When these two men were put in charge of the national-security state, they helped expand and privatise it as never before.

McConnell, for example, asked Congress to alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the NSA to spy on foreigners without a warrant if they were using Internet technology that routed through the United States.

“The resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations (and the) new technologies created a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies – and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen,” wrote David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in a profile of McConnell published in the New York Times Jun. 15.

Last week, Snowden revealed to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had created a secret system called “Prism” that allowed the agency to spy on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, both within and outside the United States.

Snowden’s job at Booz Allen’s offices in Hawaii was to maintain the NSA’s information technology systems. While he did not specify his precise connection to Prism, he told the South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA hacked “network backbones – like huge Internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one”.

Woolsey had argued in favour of such surveillance following the disclosure of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005.

“Unlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas,” he told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA in February 2006. “Courts are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping in which an al Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of email addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly.”

Close ties

Exactly what Booz Allen does for the NSA’s electronic surveillance system revealed by Snowden is classified, but one can make an educated guess from similar contracts it has in this field – a quarter of the company’s 5.86 billion dollars in annual income comes from intelligence agencies.

The NSA, for example, hired Booz Allen in 2001 in an advisory role on the five-billion-dollar Project Groundbreaker to rebuild and operate the agency’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.

Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases – a controversial programme defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in the Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.

The CIA pays a Booz Allen team led by William Wansley, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, for “strategic and business planning” for its National Clandestine Service, which conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies.

The company also provides a 120-person team, headed by a former U.S. Navy cryptology lieutenant commander and Booz Allen senior executive adviser Pamela Lentz, to support the National Reconnaissance Organisation, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation’s military spy satellites.

In January, Booz Allen was one of 12 contractors to win a five-year contract with the Defence Intelligence Agency that could be worth up to 5.6 billion dollars to focus on “computer network operations, emerging and disruptive technologies, and exercise and training activity”.

Last month, the U.S. Navy picked Booz Allen as part of a consortium to work on yet another billion-dollar project for “a new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations”.

Booz Allen wins these contracts in several ways. In addition to its connections with the DNI, it boasts that half of its 25,000 employees are cleared for top secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence, one of the highest possible security ratings. (One third of the 1.4 million people with such clearances work for the private sector.)

A key figure at Booz Allen is Ralph Shrader, current chairman, CEO and president, who came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company’s government communications system division.

In the 1970s, Western Union and RCA both took part in a secret surveillance programme known as Minaret, where they agreed to give the NSA all their clients’ incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.

Minaret and similar snooping programmes led to an explosive series of Congressional hearings in the 1970s by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho in 1975.

* Jim Lobe contributed to this article.

by Mitchell Plitnick

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Mitchell Plitnick

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s pretty incredible that in the United States an enormous lobby exists to distort the Second Amendment to make people believe that citizens should have unfettered access to enormous firepower, but there is nothing similar to guard the right to privacy. And when someone comes along and reveals the massive extent to which the United States government is spying on private communication between ordinary citizens, the debate becomes about “national security.”

There are, to be sure, good reasons why any government must keep things secret, and why there are laws to punish those who break the confidence the government places in them when it trusts them with classified information. But even the most elementary definition of notions like liberty and democracy demands that such secrecy be restricted to absolute necessity. The PRISM program and the revelations Edward Snowden made about it don’t begin to meet that standard. And the responses from not only US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper but also President Barack Obama are extremely chilling.

Explaining why the program was classified, Clapper said, “Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a ‘playbook’ of how to avoid detection.” Put bluntly, that’s just nonsense. How many of us, before the revelations about PRISM, believed all of our electronic communications, including the telephone, were impervious to government spying? The only thing Edward Snowden revealed was the existence of the program. Does anyone seriously believe that al-Qaeda thought they could just send emails around the world with no risk of discovery by the US government? Please.

As Obama said, “There’s a reason these programs are classified.” That’s true, but it is not because of the false choice the President laid out that US citizens “can’t have 100 percent security, and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” No one is asking for that. Obama’s statement is meant to frighten us with the threat of terrorism into sacrificing more of our freedom. It speaks volumes that the PRISM program, though started by George W. Bush, has expanded exponentially under Obama. It says even more that the author of the Patriot Act (which first expanded the government’s power using the excuse of fighting terrorism after the 9/11 attacks), Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner Jr., a Republican, considers the program “an abuse” of the draconian law he wrote.

No, PRISM was not classified for security reasons, as the information it uncovered could be argued to have been. It was kept secret because US citizens would be angered by the breadth of the surveillance of their electronic communications. Again, many already assumed this was going on, though PRISM’s scope probably surprised them too. But the acquiescence of the internet corporations who own the servers being monitored — all the big ones, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, et al — is going to have a chilling effect on internet traffic and internet commerce. That is one reason it was kept secret. The other is that the Bush and Obama Administrations were concerned that if the breadth of the surveillance was known, the people of the United States just might object.

Can there be a clearer violation of the Constitution? Not only does PRISM directly violate the Fourth Amendment in as blatant a manner as could be conceived, it was intentionally hidden only to make sure the will of the people could not enter the conversation. Yet the streets are not filled with US citizens demanding accountability. This says a great deal about the post-9/11 US, and just how much freedom we are now willing to sacrifice for a “war on terror” that has availed us nothing.

But the issue speaks to much more than just the rights of US citizens to privacy. Almost all of the restrictions that are in place and even the more ephemeral ones that Obama and Clapper claim to be in place act only to protect some measure of US privacy. According to the leaked PowerPoint presentation on PRISM (which, it should be noted, no one has claimed is falsified), the program uses search terms to find out which of the trillions of pieces of data it has intercepted are “foreign.” That it has only a 51% level of certainty is troublesome for Americans, but the implication that every single person on the planet outside of US citizens is fair game should trouble us even more.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is the legal basis for this program, such spying on citizens of other countries can proceed virtually unencumbered. In olden times, before the internet, the limitations of access and prohibitive cost served as barriers to wanton surveillance. It simply was too much trouble and too costly to spy on random citizens of other countries.

But now, with a global data network, where every bit of information passes through numerous servers and where US corporations that own many of the biggest servers do a lot of their business globally as well, those restrictions are absent. Yet nothing in US law changes the playing field with the new technology.

Voices of outrage have already been heard in Great Britain, Germany, New Zealand and other US allies. But the main focus of the surveillance, of course, is countries like Pakistan and Iran. But what have we said to the citizens of those countries? That’s a question we might consider the next time we start thinking “they hate us for our freedoms,” which we in the US are sacrificing because of our own fear, rather than wondering if we are not enraging “them” with our hubris.

The scandal has been prominent, and the media fallout severe. Yet the US moves along with business as usual. The US government has violated the Constitution in the most egregious way, and we have established ourselves as a state that considers it perfectly acceptable to spy on everyone else, without any control or semblance of probable cause. You wonder what it would take to bring US citizens into the streets en masse. We could, perhaps, learn something from the Turks.

by Jasmin Ramsey

Two conversations are presently occurring in Washington about Iran. Hawks and hardliners are searching for new ways to force the Obama administration to tighten or impose further sanctions, and/or discussing when the US should strike the country. Meanwhile, doves and pragmatists have been pointing out the ineffectiveness of sanctions in [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Jasmin Ramsey

Two conversations are presently occurring in Washington about Iran. Hawks and hardliners are searching for new ways to force the Obama administration to tighten or impose further sanctions, and/or discussing when the US should strike the country. Meanwhile, doves and pragmatists have been pointing out the ineffectiveness of sanctions in changing Iran’s nuclear calculus (even though the majority of them initially pushed for these sanctions) as well as the many cons of military action. Although the hawks and hardliners tend to be Republican, the group is by no means partisan. And these conversations do converge and share points at times, for example, the hawks and hardliners also complain about the ineffectiveness of sanctions, but in the context of pushing for more pressure and punishment.

That said, both sides appear stuck — the hawks, while successful in getting US policy on Iran to become sanctions-centric, can’t get the administration or military leaders to buy their interventionist arguments, and the doves, having previously cheered sanctions as an alternative to military action, appear lost now that their chosen pressure tactic has proven ineffective.

Hawks and Doves Debate Iran Strike Option

On Wednesday, the McCain Institute hosted a live debate that showcased Washington positions on Iran, with the pro-military argument represented by neoconservative analyst Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute and Democrat Robert Wexler, a member of the US House of Representatives from 1997-2010, and two prominent US diplomats on the other side — Ambassadors Thomas R. Pickering, who David Sanger writes “is such a towering figure in the State Department that a major program to train young diplomats is named for him”, and James R. Dobbins, whose distinguished career includes service as envoy to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia.

Only the beginning of this recording (I can’t find any others) is hard to hear, and you won’t regret watching the entire lively discussion, particularly because of Amb. Pickering’s poignant responses to Pletka’s flimsy points — she inaccurately states IAEA findings on Iran’s nuclear program and claims that, even though she’s no military expert, a successful military operation against Iran wouldn’t necessarily include boots on the ground. In fact, experts assess that effective military action against Iran aimed at long-term positive results (cessation of its nuclear program and regime change) would be a long and arduous process, entailing more resources than Afghanistan and Iraq have taken combined, and almost certainly involving ground forces and occupation.

Consider some the characteristics of the pro-military side: Wexler repeatedly admits he made a mistake in supporting the war on Iraq, but says the decision to attack Iran should “presuppose” that event. Later on he says that considering what happened with Iraq, he “hopes” the same mistake about non-existent WMDs won’t happen again. Pletka, who endorsed fighting in Iraq until “victory” had been achieved (a garbled version of an AEI transcript can be found here), states in her opening remarks that the US needs to focus on ”what happens, when, if, negotiations fail” and leads from that premise, which she does not qualify with anything other than they’re taking too much time, with arguments about the threat Iran poses, even though she calls the Iranians “very rational actors”.

While Wexler’s support for a war launched on false premises seriously harms his side’s credibility, it was both his and Pletka’s inability to advance even one indisputable interventionist argument, coupled with their constant reminders that they don’t actually want military action, that left them looking uninformed and weak.

The diplomats, on the other hand, offered rhetorical questions and points that have come to characterize this debate more generally. Amb. Pickering: “Are we ready for another ground war in the Middle East?”, and, “we are not wonderful occupiers”. Then on the status of the diplomatic process: “we are closer to a solution in negotiations than we have been before”. Amb. Dobbins meanwhile listed some of the cons of a military operation — Hezbollah attacks against Israel and US allies, interruptions to the movement of oil through the vital Strait of Hormuz, a terror campaign orchestrated by the Iranians — and then surprised everyone by saying that these are “all things we can deal with”. A pause, then the real danger in Amb. Dobbins’ mind: that “Iran would respond cautiously”, play the aggrieved party, withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, kick out IAEA inspectors and accelerate its nuclear program at unknown sites. Then what, the audience was left to wonder. Neither Pletka nor Wexler offered an answer.

The Costs of War With Iran and the C-Word

While watching the McCain debate, I wondered if Pletka and Wexler would consider reading a recently published book by Geoffrey Kemp, an economist who served as a Gulf expert on Reagan’s National Security Council and John Allen Gay, entitled War With Iran: Political, Military, And Economic Consequences. This essay lays out the basis of the work, which mainly focuses on the high economic costs of war, so I won’t go into detail here, but yesterday during the book’s launch at the Center for National Interest (CNI), an interesting comment was made about the “C-Word”. Here’s what Kemp said during his opening remarks, to an audience that included everyone from prominent foreign policy experts and former government officials, to representatives from Chevron and AIPAC:

You certainly cannot, must not, underestimate the negative consequences if Iran does get the bomb…But I think on balance, unlike Senator McCain who said that the only thing worse than a war with Iran is an Iran with a nuclear weapon…the conclusion of this study is that war is worse than the options, and the options we have, are clearly based on something that we call deterrence and something that we are not allowed to call, but in fact, is something called containment. And to me this seems like the most difficult thing for the Obama administration, to walk back out of the box it’s gotten itself into over this issue of containment. But never fear. Successive American administrations have all walked back lines on Iran.

Interestingly, no one challenged him on this during the Q&A. And Kemp is not the only expert to utter the C-Word in Washington — he’s joined by Paul Pillar and more reluctant distinguished voices including Zbigniew Brzezinksi.

Diplomacy as the Best Effective Option

Of course, if more effort was concentrated on the diplomacy front, as opposed to mostly on sanctions and the military option, Iran could be persuaded against building a nuclear weapon. Consider, for example, US intelligence chief James Clapper’s statement on Thursday that Iran has not yet made the decision to develop a nuclear weapon but that if it chose to do so, it might be able to produce one in a matter of “months, not years.” Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “[Iran] has not yet made that decision, and that decision would be made singularly by the supreme leader.”

It follows from this that while the US would be hard pressed in permanently preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon (apart from adopting the costly and morally repulsive “mowing the lawn” option), it could certainly compel the Iranians to make the decision to rush for a bomb by finally making the military option credible — as Israel has pushed for — or following through on that threat.

So where to go from here? Enter the Iran Project, which has published a series of reports all signed and endorsed by high-level US foreign policy experts, and which just released it’s first report with policy advise: “Strategic Options for Iran: Balancing Pressure with Diplomacy”. There’s lots to be taken away from it, and Jim Lobe, as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have covered it, but it ultimately boils down to the notion that the US needs to rethink its policy with Iran and creatively use the leverage it has gotten from sanctions to bring about an agreement. Such an agreement will likely have to be preceded by bilateral talks and include some form of low-level uranium enrichment on Iranian soil and sanctions relief if Iran provides its own signifiant concessions. The report also argues for the US to engage with Iran on areas of mutual interest, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the Wilson Center report launch event, Amb. Pickering summed up the status of negotiations with Iran as follows: “Admittedly we should not expect miraculous moves to a rapid agreement, but we’re engaged enough now to have gone beyond the beginning of the beginning. We’re not at the end of the beginning yet, but we’re getting there.” Later, Jim Walsh, a member of the task force and nuclear expert at MIT pointed out that 20-percent Iranian uranium enrichment, which everyone is fixated on now, only became an issue after Iran stopped receiving fuel for its Tehran Research Reactor and began producing it itself. In other words, the longer the US takes to give Iran a deal it can stomach and sell at home, the more the Iranians can ask for as their nuclear program progresses. “The earlier we can get a deal, the better the deal is likely to be,” he said.

by Peter Jenkins

Last week, while visiting Israel and Jordan, President Barak Obama publicly emphasised that there is still time to resolve the nuclear dispute without resorting to force and that this is his preference. For peaceniks everywhere, those were encouraging words.

But, advertently or not, the President’s words also revealed [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Peter Jenkins

Last week, while visiting Israel and Jordan, President Barak Obama publicly emphasised that there is still time to resolve the nuclear dispute without resorting to force and that this is his preference. For peaceniks everywhere, those were encouraging words.

But, advertently or not, the President’s words also revealed two of the most perplexing aspects of his administration’s Iran policy: their insistence on making unique demands of Iran, and their reluctance to give weight to US intelligence findings.

Let me try first to explain what I mean by “unique demands”.

In Jordan the President said: “Now if in fact what the Supreme Leader has said is the case, which is that developing a nuclear weapon would be un-Islamic and that Iran has no interest in developing nuclear weapons, then there should be a practical, verifiable way to assure the international community that it’s not doing so”.

Since 1970 there has been an almost universally accepted “practical, verifiable way” of providing such an assurance. It is to adhere to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), submit all nuclear material to international monitoring, and convince international inspectors that nuclear material is not being diverted to non-peaceful purposes.

Since the late ‘90s, a supplementary measure, known as the Additional Protocol, has also gained acceptance. It enables international inspectors to satisfy themselves that a given state has placed all the material in its possession, and not just a part of it, under safeguards.

As it happens, Iran has been a party to the NPT since 1970, and for all but the years between 1991 and 2003 it has satisfied the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that the nuclear material in its possession has been in peaceful use.

For two years (late 2003 to the end of 2005) Iran also applied the Additional Protocol; and since 2005 it has reiterated a readiness to re-apply this instrument if sanctions introduced to coerce Iran into giving up the dual-use technology of uranium enrichment are lifted.

So there is no reason to think that Iran is unready to do what other states do to provide practical, verifiable grounds that they are not developing nuclear weapons. When, therefore, President Obama implies that this would not be enough, he also implies that a unique standard of confidence-provision is being set for Iran.

Some would say that this is reasonable. Iran’s failure to declare to the IAEA small quantities of nuclear material over a 12-year period, and their use in research apparently related to nuclear weapons acquisition, rightly provoked suspicions about Iranian intentions.

But neither the NPT nor IAEA rules provide for the imposition of unique standards on states that have been in non-compliance with their IAEA obligations; they simply require correction of the failures that gave rise to a non-compliance finding. For other states returning to conformity, by making the necessary corrections, has been enough.

Furthermore — to come to the second perplexity — since late 2007 the justification for suspecting that Iran has weaponization intentions has dwindled, thanks to the effectiveness of US intelligence operations. On several occasions, the Director of National Intelligence has reported a high probability that Iran has not decided to acquire nuclear weapons although it seeks the option to produce them (which it can be dissuaded from doing through intelligent diplomacy).

In other words, Iran is no longer suspected, by those whose job it is to know best, of being engaged in the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Additionally, Iran is ready to provide ongoing assurances to that effect in the same way that other states do. Yet the President of the United States is asking for more.

What form might “more” take? The President gave a hint when he alluded, in Israel, to Iran needing to meet its “international obligations”. In the past that phrase encompassed not just NPT and IAEA obligations, which Iran assumed voluntarily, but also the obligations imposed on Iran by the UN Security Council since 2006.

This is controversial because those obligations were imposed to force Iran into abandoning uranium enrichment at a time when suspicions about Iran’s nuclear intentions were still acute. Once the US intelligence community reported “with high confidence” that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program, to what extent has it been just or reasonable to demand that Iran meet these “obligations”?

A past head of US Strategic Command once remarked that when a threat assessment changes, the strategic posture should also change. This wise observation seems to have passed over the heads of those who are responsible for formulating US (and EU) policy towards Iran. The risk remains that one day most of us will come to regret that.