The Iranian Plot Was An Inside Job

Iran's Plot -- And A U.S. Double-Standard

October 11, 2011 | 3:01 pm
Courtesy Of "The LA Times"

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Tuesday that federal authorities had foiled a plot backed by the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on American soil. Two men, one of whom is apparently a member of a special operations unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, were charged in federal court in New York on Tuesday. Holder called the bomb plot a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law. And Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said, "We will not let other countries use our soil as their battleground."

But wait a minute. Two weeks ago, the United States assassinated one of its enemies in Yemen, on Yemeni soil. If the U.S. believes it has the right to assassinate enemies like Anwar Awlaki anywhere in the world in the name of a "war on terror" that has no geographical limitation, how can it then argue that other nations don't have a similar right to track down their enemies and kill them wherever they're found?

It's true that the assassination of Awlaki was carried out with the cooperation of the government of Yemen. That makes a difference. But would the U.S. have hesitated to kill him if Yemen had not approved? Remember: There was no cooperation from the Pakistani government when Osama bin Laden was killed in May.

It's also true that there's a big difference between an Al Qaeda operative who, according to U.S. officials, had been deeply involved in planning terrorist activities, and a duly credited ambassador of a sovereign country. Still, the fact remains that all nations ought to think long and hard before gunning down their enemies in other countries.

As the United States continues down the path of state-sponsored assassination far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, all sorts of tricky moral questions are likely to arise. But this much is clear: The world is unlikely to accept that the United States has a right to behave as it wishes without accountability all around the globe and that other nations do not.

(Above Picture: The Rationale For The Iraq War, Colin Powell holding a model vial of anthrax while giving a presentation to the United Nations Security Council. Tthe Bush administration misrepresented the evidence that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction...Courtesy of Wikipedia")


The LA Times Notices The “Double Standard” On Iran

BY GLENN GREENWALD
THURSDAY, OCT 13, 2011 6:37 AM EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME
Courtesy Of "Salon Magazine"

(updated bel0w – Update II – Update III)

Today we have a pleasant and exceedingly rare surprise: a major media outlet noting that the very behavior which the U.S. Government and all Serious People are now righteously condemning is behavior in which the U.S. itself routinely engages. From The Los Angeles Times Editorial Page, entitled “Iran’s plot — and a U.S. double standard?”:

But wait a minute. Two weeks ago, the United States assassinated one of its enemies in Yemen, on Yemeni soil. If the U.S. believes it has the right to assassinate enemies like Anwar Awlaki anywhere in the world in the name of a “war on terror” that has no geographical limitation, how can it then argue that other nations don’t have a similar right to track down their enemies and kill them wherever they’re found?

It’s true that the assassination of Awlaki was carried out with the cooperation of the government of Yemen. That makes a difference. But would the U.S. have hesitated to kill him if Yemen had not approved? Remember: There was no cooperation from the Pakistani government when Osama bin Laden was killed in May.

It’s also true that there’s a big difference between an Al Qaeda operative who, according to U.S. officials, had been deeply involved in planning terrorist activities, and a duly credited ambassador of a sovereign country. Still, the fact remains that all nations ought to think long and hard before gunning down their enemies in other countries.

As the United States continues down the path of state-sponsored assassination far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, all sorts of tricky moral questions are likely to arise. But this much is clear: The world is unlikely to accept that the United States has a right to behave as it wishes without accountability all around the globe and that other nations do not.

Actually, a significant chunk of the world has long rejected the asserted American “right to behave as it wishes without accountability all around the globe and that other nations do not.” In fact, the only ones who still affirm that right — to the extent that they are even aware that it’s at the center of their worldview — are Brookings “scholars,” Washington Post Editorial Page Editors, the scam industry calling itself “Terrorism experts,” and other similar Washington hangers-on such as think tank and academic mavens of the Foreign Policy Community, Pentagon reporters, and assorted neocon and “liberal hawk” nationalists whose purpose in life (and careerist fuel) is to supply justifying theories for any and all U.S. Government conduct undertaken to sustain its crumbling imperial rule.

As As’ad AbuKhali says of this LA Times Editorial: “Notice how timid the US press is in criticizing the government: notice that with every criticism there is a qualification and defense of US actions embedded.” That’s definitely true, but given how rare it is to hear any relatively clear discussions of glaring American double standards in venues of this sort, I’m willing to emphasize the positive here.  As I noted yesterday, the Awlaki assassination is far from the only American action that directly violates the principles now being so righteously espoused in order to condemn (and vow recriminations for) the alleged Iranian Plot; much of what the U.S. does in the always-numerous nations in which it is bombing, droning, occupying, invading and assassinating as part of its The-Whole-World-is-a-Battlefield, Endless War squarely breaches those very precepts. There does come a point when propaganda is grounded in such blatant falsehoods that it may lose its efficacy; that the LA Times is pointing out — delicately but still clearly — that the U.S. claims the right to do that which it is now demonizing Iran for supposedly doing is a good sign that this day, under the right circumstances and with the right push, could be nearer than it may seem.

UPDATE: It seems this LA Times posting is not an actual Editorial of the newspaper which appears in the print edition, but rather merely a blog posting from one of the editors of the Editorial Page, Nicholas Goldberg. That dampens the surprise that something like this would appear as an Editorial of a major newspaper (since that did not actually happen), but it’s still being produced by one of that paper’s editorial writers, so that’s progress of a sort.

UPDATE II: Goldberg is not just an Editor at the LA Times, but the Editor of its Editorial Page, so while this wasn’t an official LAT Editorial, it is the next best thing.

Meanwhile, here is a profile of the Lex Luthor super-villain behind the dastardly Iranian Plot, compiled based on interviews with those who have long known him. He’s described variously as a “scatterbrained, hapless businessman,” “absentminded and shifty.” “a joke” who “was pretty disorganized, always losing things like keys, titles, probably a thousand cellphones,” who “never spoke ill of the United States”  and who wasn’t remotely religious — in other words, the pefect target for the FBI to transform into an “operative” by waving money and glory in front of his face, and exactly the kind of person the actual Quds Force would never use for a real plot.

UPDATE III: A New York Times article today on the Iranian Plot contains this passage:

One provocative theory that American officials are considering is that the assassination was intended as retaliation for the killing of several Iranian nuclear scientists during the past two years. Those deaths are widely believed to have been the work of Israel, with tacit American approval, to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon.

In a protest letter denying the American charges late Tuesday, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, referred pointedly to the assassination campaign. “Iran has been a victim of terrorism,” he wrote, “a clear recent example of which is the assassination of a number of Iranian nuclear scientists in the past two years carried out by the Zionist regime and supported by the United States.”

Note that the NYT article references these multiple assassinations of Iranian scientists in order to speculate about a possible motive for Iran to have plotted the attack in Washington (why Iran would target the Saudi Ambassador in order to avenge killings which it (and most others) believe are carried about by Israel and the U.S. is not explained). But what theNYT does not examine is whether this serial killing of Iran’s scientists is, in fact, the work of the U.S. and/or Israel and how that might relate to the American expression of outrage that an assassination would be carried out on American soil. Also worth considering: is Iran correct that whoever is murdering its civilian nuclear scientists is, in fact, engaged in an act of “terrorism”?

The same NYT article notes that “the Obama administration on Wednesday sought to reconcile what it said was solid evidence of an Iranian plot to murder Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States with a wave of puzzlement and skepticism from some foreign leaders and outside experts,” while a separate NYT article – further detailing what a hapless, inept loser is Mansour Arbabsiar – notes matter-of-factly notes:

On Wednesday, American officials, who say the plot was endorsed by top Iranian authorities, were exploring why the sophisticated Quds Force might have chosen to rely on so amateurish an agent as Mr. Arbabsiar.

Yes, that is indeed quite a mystery. One looks forward to the results of the “exploration” by American officials of this riveting question. Along those lines, Juan Cole has a great post on all of this which should be read in its entirety, but pay particular attention to the concluding paragraph.

The Supposed Iran Plot: Immunised By Neocons

Author Urges Skepticism About The Neoconservative Rush To War Against Iran.

By MJ Rosenberg
Last Modified: 14 Oct 2011 07:07
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"


A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, I attended a big holiday dinner with family and friends. Naturally much of the conversation revolved around the terrorist attacks and the rage and sorrow we all felt. There was also considerable discussion about President George W Bush's handling of the catastrophe and his decision to send troops to Afghanistan in pursuit of the perpetrators and to eliminate the Taliban regime that was hosting them.

Everyone at the table approved of the president's actions and believed that there was no alternative. Moreover, and this was somewhat surprising considering that none of us thought Bush had been legitimately elected, we all believed that he was being honest about the situation the United States faced and the options that were before him.

There was, however, one dissenter. My younger son, then in college, was absolutely opposed to going into Afghanistan. He said that there had to be a better way to respond than rushing into a war that, in his opinion, would likely expand and last "forever." Besides, he added, "I don't believe a word that comes out of Bush's mouth."

Naturally a brouhaha ensued with everyone (including me) telling the kid how utterly wrong and unpatriotic he was. There was a lot of yelling, but he would not back down. He just kept saying "you'll see."

Boy did we.

Prodded by his neoconservative advisers and outside cheerleaders eager to pick up where the first Gulf War ended, Bush quickly pivoted from Afghanistan to the calamitous invasion of Iraq. He justified that invasion by insisting that Iraq was implicated in the 9/11 attacks (it wasn't) and that it possessed weapons of mass destruction (it didn't).

Both the Bush administration and its faithful ally, the Tony Blair government in the United Kingdom, famously set out to "fix" the intelligence to deceive the people of both nations into an utterly unnecessary and unjustified war, the main accomplishment of which has been to turn Iraq into, of all things, a strong ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Along the way, of course, hundreds of thousands of Americans, Iraqis, Brits and others have died and Iraq has essentially been destroyed.

It is against this backdrop that I view the Iranian plot that was announced earlier this week by the Obama administration. At this point, it is impossible to say how serious the plot was and, more importantly, if it even had anything at all to do with the Iranian government. Are we ready to believe that the cold and calculating people who govern Iran are contracting out assassination plots with Mexican drug traffickers or that they would pick Washington as the best place to attack the Saudi ambassador (knowing that being found responsible for a major explosion in Washington would mean war with the Saudi Arabia and United States)?

This is not to dismiss the plot as phony or contrived. But after the Iraq war experience, it would be awfully stupid of Americans to simply accept without question anything we are told about nefarious Muslim states that must be stopped before a "mushroom cloud" appears over downtown Washington.

The only good news here is that we have past experience to guide us. But for the lies and manufactured evidenced that led us into Iraq we might not have reason to be skeptical about the case the government laid out yesterday and which the usual suspects are already joyously citing as reason to get tough with Iran (as if that country is not under onerous sanctions already). Here is Reuel Mark Gerecht, one of the leading cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, warning that the supposed plot justifies a US attack on Iran. "The White House needs to respond militarily to this outrage. If we don't, we are asking for it," he writes. (Not very different from what he wrote in 2002 when he said that "if President Bush follows his own logic and compels his administration to follow him against Iraq and Iran, then he will sow the seeds for a new, safer, more liberal order in the Middle East.")

But for the lies and manufactured evidence that led us into Iraq, we might actually accept the idea that the Iran plot is thoroughly genuine and in no way linked to the determination of so many inside our government and out of it who are hell-bent on war with Iran and who would do anything they can to achieve it.

Fortunately, however, and this may be the only fortunate thing about the Iraq war, the Iraq experience taught us to be skeptical, especially of anything and everything championed by the hawks.

So let's go slowly here. If the plot turns out to be both real and sanctioned by powerful people in Tehran, a strong response of some kind is warranted. But first let's make sure. The neocons' "drop bombs now and ask questions later" approach has been thoroughly discredited. How stupid would we have to be, then, to allow the same gang to lead us into yet another reckless war, one that would be infinitely more deadly?

Count me among the skeptics.

MJ Rosenberg is a Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at the Media Matters Action Network.