http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/10/11/bank-transfers-of-mass-destruction/
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[There is something extremely rotten about the "American dream" that it can only be obtained by picking fights and starting wars to take the things that are not ours. This is all bullshit, arranged by the covert American plotters, who have honed their art of false flag attacks since their crude beginnings in the "Gladio" terror attacks upon our European allies. Every top leader knows that this is a bad Hollywood plot transformed into another "act of war," yet they all play along, regardless of the consequences to the innocent people of the world. War with Iran cannot be contained to Iran, but then, the evil plotters like Sen. Levin and Biden don't want the conflagration contained, do they?, NO, they want to transform EURASIA, MENA and Africa into thousands of tribes with Flags....]
WASHINGTON—The alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States may be an act of war against the U.S., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Wednesday.....LOL
So now the low IQ POLISH Citizen dressed as a German soldier has been killed by Germans dressed as POLISH soldiers on the German side of the border?
Definitely grounds for invasions! ....LOL
Reports of these discussions have caused considerable alarm in Washington and in a number of European capitals. Some Western military experts have been quoted as saying that the window of opportunity for an Israeli air attack on Iran will close within two months, since the onset of winter would make such an assault more difficult.
Concern that Israel may decide to attack without giving the United States prior warning is thought to be the main reason for the visit to Tel Aviv on 3 October of the U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta. His aim seems to have been to rein in the Israeli hawks.
Amos Harel of the Israeli daily Haaretz summed up Panetta’s message as follows: America is standing by Israel, but an uncoordinated Israeli strike on Iran could spark a regional war. The United States will work to defend Israel, but Israel must behave responsibly.
At his joint press conference with Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak, Panetta said: The United States is “very concerned, and we will work together to do whatever is necessary” to keep Iran from posing “a threat to the region.” But doing so “depends on the countries working together.” He repeated the word “together” several times. In other words, Israel should not act without an American green light.
In recent years, Israel has often threatened to attack Iran. Why has the subject been revived this time? Is Israel worried that Iran is close to acquiring the capability to manufacture a nuclear bomb? Most intelligence experts agree that Iran has not yet made a decision to build nuclear weapons. A more likely Israeli motive is its concern that the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany -- the so-called P5+1 -- may accept an Iranian offer of renewed talks.
Israel’s greatest fear is that the P5+1 will reach a compromise with Iran which would allow it to continue enriching uranium for civilian purposes. This might then lead in due course to the world agreeing to co-exist with a nuclear Iran. If that were to happen, Israel’s monopoly of nuclear weapons -- a key asset in maintaining its regional military supremacy – would be lost.
Iran has, in fact, made several recent overtures to the United States and its allies. When he was in New York last month to attend the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the Washington Post that Iran would stop producing uranium enriched to 20 percent if foreign countries would provide the fuel needed for the Tehran Research Reactor, which makes medical isotopes. Some 850,000 Iranians are said to depend on such isotopes for cancer treatment.
Late last month, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, sent a letter to Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, requesting fresh talks with the P5+1 to try to resolve the longstanding dispute. Yet another overture was made by Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi when, in an interview with Asia Times on 29 September, he said that Iran was “prepared to undertake the necessary efforts to restore mutual confidence, and if there is a specific concern, it should be addressed in talks... We must look for innovative proposals.”
Fereydoun Abbasi, head of Iran’s Atomic Organisation, has invited Yukiya Amano, Secretary-General of the International Atomic Energy Agence (IAEA), to visit Iran and inspect its nuclear facilities. “Our recommendation is that Mr Amano accept this invitation... Today, the situation is that we are again read to consider the fuel swap,” he said. (This was the proposed swap of a large quantity of low-enriched uranium for a small quantity of 20 percent enriched uranium for medical purposes.) Mr Amano’s IAEA board is due to meet in Vienna on November 17-18, a meeting that is keenly awaited.
Several influential voices have been urging the United States to respond positively to Iran’s overtures. “Why not test Iran’s seriousness?” asked Reza Marashi in an article in the Huffington Post on 30 September. Marashi is a former Iran desk officer at the U.S. State Department and is now Director of Research at the National Iranian American Council,
In an article in the International Herald Tribune on 29 September, Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists, and Ali Vaez, director of the Federation’s Iran Project, urged the United States and its allies to take Ahmadinejad at his word. They even suggested that the Western powers should provide Iran with 50 kilograms of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor as a humanitarian gesture that would buy Washington goodwill with the Iranian people, while curtailing Iran’s enrichment activities.
None of these appeals is likely to be heard. President Barack Obama has collapsed in the face of pressure from powerful pro-Israeli lobbies and a fervently pro-Israeli U.S. Congress. As he is seeking re-election next year, we will hear nothing more of the call he made during his 2008 campaign for the need for diplomacy with Iran.
The danger is that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may now seek to break out of Israel’s current political isolation by mounting a spectacular attack on Iran. Having lost Turkey and Egypt, and facing a revolt by the international community against his “Greater Israel” ambitions, he may think that the time is ripe to seize the initiative. His calculation may be that a lethal blow against Iran would weaken an already deeply troubled Syria and leave Hizbullah orphaned. Israel would have killed three birds with one stone.
Will Israel seek an American green light if it decides to attack Iran or might Netanyahu believe that Obama, enslaved to Israeli interests, would have no choice but to follow suit?
According to the 6 October edition of TTU, a French intelligence bulletin, the United States and Israel are planning an unprecedented joint land forces exercise next May with the goal of establishing a common “intervention force” ready for action in the event of a major regional war. Admiral James Stavridis, head of Eurocom -- America’s European command -- paid a recent unpublicised visit to Israel for talks with General Benny Gantz, Israel’s chief of staff. According to TTU, the plan is to set up American command posts in Israel and Israeli command posts in Eurocom. Cooperation between the two powers has rarely been closer.
These are dangerous times in the Middle East....and the WORLD.....
By Pepe Escobar
That Mecca of counter-revolution and hatred for the Arab Spring - also known as the House of Saud - can hardly believe their luck. It's Christmas in October - as the United States government has just handed it the perfect gift; in the excited words of US Attorney General Eric Holder, "A deadly plot directed by factions of the Iranian government to assassinate a foreign ambassador on US soil with explosives."
Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to Washington, former head of Saudi intelligence, former great buddy of Osama bin Laden, took no time to tell a conference in London, "The burden of proof and the amount of evidence in the case is overwhelming, and clearly shows official Iranian responsibility for
this. This is unacceptable. Somebody in Iran will have to pay the price."
So "Iran" - the whole country - has already been delivered to the guillotine by the Washington/Riyadh axis, even as the Justice Department's murky Wag the Dog-style story - Operation Red Coalition (no, you can't make that stuff up) - requires increasing suspension of disbelief.
Operation Red Coalition centers on one Mansour Arabsiar, a 56-year-old car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas, holding both Iranian and US passports, and an Iran-based co-conspirator, Gholam Shakuri, an alleged member of the Qods force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller insisted the allegedly Iran-masterminded terror plot, in his own words, "reads like the pages of a Hollywood script". Yet this Fast and Furious spin-off would be hurled at the garbage can in any self-respecting Hollywood script conference.
Faster, muchachos - kill, kill
The US government expects an unsuspecting world to believe that a washed-up car salesman in Texas was tasked by a select intelligence arm of the Iranian government to fish for anyone who looked like a Mexican drug gangster and then order them a US$1.5 million hit on the Saudi ambassador in Washington - in the meantime promising them unfettered access to "tons of opium".
Yet in the Sealed Amended Complaint against Arabsiar and Shakuri, signed by FBI special agent Robert Woloszyn, there is absolutely nothing specifically stating the involvement of the Iranian government, at the highest or at any level.
According to the US government narrative, Arabsiar was foolish enough to trust an infiltrated Drug Enforcement Agency agent who posed as a member of the Zetas Mexican drug cartel. He told this agent and his buddies he was the nephew of a Tehran high official - and that he was acting on behalf of the highest echelons.
So we are asked to believe that an Iranian general asks a Dumb and Dumber relative in the US to go contract a drug cartel for a political hit - as if US intelligence would never be able to track the whole thing back to him, especially after the matter of $100,000 wired to the US, allegedly from Iran, to a guy convicted of check fraud, as the down payment for the hit.
Beyond any ideological bias, anyone who knows how professional the IRGC and the Qods force can be cannot but dismiss this as utter rubbish - especially as part of a complex international operation involving Iran, its mortal foe the US, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. By the way, Arabsiar "confessed" to all this after 12 days of non-stop interrogation (waterboarding, anyone?)
Then there's the target. According to the Department of Justice, the target was not the US. Thus attacking a House of Saud ambassador - a "precious" ally - on US soil can only be explained by a death wish exhibited by seriously deranged, suicidal Iranians bent on inviting a US strike, nuclear or otherwise.
To believe that a Mexican drug cartel would invest in a troublesome political hit in the US capital expecting to collect a bundle of opium (from "liberated" Afghanistan) is also a non-starter. But the picture changes if one considers the benefits for the Mujahideen-e-Kalq - the fundamentalist, terrorist organization that wants to bring down the Islamic Republic. Or the possible benefits for a ghostly al-Qaeda in terms of creating a three-way-war involving Washington, Tehran and Riyadh.
There's also the Israeli false flag option. Apart from the fact that the plot does look like an American Israel Public Affairs Committee wet dream delivered to Holder on a silver plate, the Israel lobby in Washington as well as assorted Zionists would love nothing better than to rally alongside a causus belli established in Washington itself, leading perhaps to a US strike of some sort against Iran without direct Israeli involvement.
According to the official mantra, Americans should always be reminded that Iran is an "existential threat" to the Jewish state. Targeting the Saudi ambassador is perfect in terms of involving the House of Saud in logistical support for such a strike.
Even assuming some sort of rogue Qods force faction with a drug smuggling connection might have been involved in this sloppy would-be operation, there's also the possibility this could have been construed as retaliation for the recent targeted assassination of senior Iranian nuclear scientists inside Iran. But still that does not explain the choice of a Saudi ambassador on US soil. (See Israel wages war on Iranian scientists Asia Times Online, August 27.)
Cui bono?
Once again; why now? The plot has allegedly been known for months. President Barack Obama was briefed about it in June. King Abdullah was briefed about it in mid-September. So why now? It's back to the usual suspects.
The neo-conservatives. Factions of the industrial-military complex. Right-wing, bat-shit crazy Republicans and their media shills. The Israel lobby. The House of Saud - now painted as a "victim" of the "evil" Iranians, when it has in fact been conducting the fierce counter-revolution that has destroyed any possibility of an Arab Spring in the Persian Gulf - the invasion and repression of Bahrain included.
The plot is very handy to divert attention from Saudi Arabia as the beneficiary of a multi-billionaire US weapons sale. And also very handy to divert attention from Holder himself - caught in yet another monstrous scandal, on whether he told lies regarding Operation Fast and Furious (no, you can't make this stuff up), a federal gun sting through which no less than 1,400 high-powered US weapons ended up, untracked, in the hands of - you guessed it - Mexican drug cartels. Seems like the Fast and the Furious franchise is the entertainment weapon of choice across all levels of the US government.
Washington wants to "unite the world" against Iran ("world" meaning the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - NATO) and is graphically threatening to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council - all over again.
So let's anxiously wait for a hushed R2P ("responsibility to protect") resolution ordering NATO to establish a no-fly zone over every House of Saud prince across the world. A resolution which would be interpreted as a NATO mandate to bomb Iran into regime change. Now that's a script you can believe in....
...Justin Raimondo Writes:
Fake, fake, fake – I’m talking about the latest anti-Iranian propaganda coming out of Washington, which claims the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were involved in a “plot” to take out the Saudi ambassador to the US and blow up both the Saudi and Israeli embassies. The narrative reads like a formulaic melodrama: two Iranians, one a naturalized US citizen, purportedly approached someone they thought was a member of a Mexican drug cartel – according to the indictment [.pdf], it was a “sophisticated” drug cartel, not the plebeian sort – and proposed paying him $1.5 million to murder Adel al Jubeir, the Kingdom’s ambassador in Washington – oh, and by the way, the Iranians supposedly said, “Are you guys any good with explosives?”
The key to understanding just how fake this story is can be found in the New York Times report, which informs us:
“For the entire operation, the government’s confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents, Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District, said in the news conference. ‘So no explosives were actually ever placed anywhere,’ he said, ‘and no one was actually in ever in any danger.’”
Translation: the whole thing is phony from beginning to end....
This is another one of US law enforcement’s manufactured “anti-terrorist” triumphs, where the feds set somebody up, fabricate a “crime” out of thin air, and then proceed to “solve” a case that never really existed to begin with. This has been the general pattern of our “anti-terrorist” operations in the US since the beginning – because finding and catching real terrorists is much too hard, at least for our Keystone Kops. Instead of going out and actually, you know, looking for the Bad Guys, and then apprehending them, they lure some unsuspecting Muslim immigrant into a trap, and spring it when the time is right.
The long narrative spun by the indictment tells us everything but what we really need to know, which is: how is it that these two Iranian “terrorists” just happened to meet up with a Mexican drug cartel assassin who just happened to be a longtime DEA informant? I guess that would be giving too much away: far better to spice up the story with scary details, such as the conversation between one of the alleged plotters and the informant, in the course of which the former says “If you have to blow up the restaurant and kill a hundred Americans, well then f*ck ‘em!”
The credibility rating of this story, taken on its face, is close to zero. Let’s say the Iranians really were plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador on American soil: would they contract it out to the Mexican Mafia, send all kinds of traceable money wires from Iran to the US, and not care if they killed a hundred Americans in the process of achieving their goal? Or would they send some fanatic, who would not only do it for free but also eliminate himself (or herself)? This flimsy cock-eyed tale is so transparently fake that it’s an embarrassment to the United States of America. Can’t our spooks do better than this?
This fabrication marks a new trend in the field of anti-Iranian war propaganda. Previously, the War Party was relying on the same technique they used in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: the old “weapons of mass destruction” gambit. The big problem with that is it’s old, and tired: no one believes it anymore [.pdf]. Once burned, twice shy, as the saying goes. This latest lie is a fresh angle on a continuing theme, merely substituting Iran for the traditional bogeyman known as al-Qaeda.
That this story involves the Mexican drug cartels, and Attorney General Eric Holder proclaiming that we’re going to “hold the Iranian government accountable,” has got to be some kind of sick joke: after all, here is a man who stood by and watched while US law enforcement agents let guns travel over the US border to arm those very same cartels. Is this “coup” for the Justice Department the pay-off for that harebrained scheme – and when is Holder going to be held accountable?
That our government would float a narrative like this without any apparent regard for the basic rules of fiction-writing – create believable characters who do believable things – is Washington’s way of showing contempt for the Iranians, the American people, and anyone else who stands in the way of their war agenda. They don’t care if it’s not believable. They think Americans will swallow anything, that we’re too busy trying to survive day-to-day, these days, to inquire much further than the “official” account. And of course our brain-dead media, which is reduced to a chiefly stenographic role, isn’t going to ask any inconvenient questions.
This story is very scary – not because it’s credible, or believable, because it is neither. However, it’s the most frightening story I’ve heard in quite a while because it shows that the US government is bound and determined to go to war with Iran, no matter what the consequences. Throwing caution to the winds, our rulers have decided to go all out against Tehran – all the better to mask our current economic malaise under the damage done by the tripling and quadrupling of oil prices. This way, Obama can blame our crashing economy on Tehran, rather than his own discredited policies – and sideline the Republicans, who have been criticizing him for being “soft” on Iran.
The making of American foreign policy is all about domestic politics. By preparing the country for war with Iran, Obama will not only defang the GOP, but also appease the all-important Israel lobby, which has been beating the war drums for years.
What Obama and his gang are hoping is that the American people are too tired, too beaten down, and too broke to care enough about this latest exercise in war propaganda to question it. Certainly the “mainstream” media, which is Obama’s loudest cheering section, isn’t about to question it.
Here is where the administration has probably miscalculated: people are just angry enough to wonder “why now?” They’re just broke enough to resent being asked to pay for yet another holy crusade overseas. And they’re just tired enough of the bullsh*t that gets reported as “news” day after day to start asking all kinds of uncomfortable questions about this latest offering by the Washington fable factory.
The Americans are already backing away from the assertion that the Iranian government is directly responsible for the actions of these two individuals, averring that top Iranian officials didn’t “necessarily” know what was going on. As the details of this case become known, Holder’s story is going to start unraveling like a substandard sweater....
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