This latest fabricated tale is a doozy even for American standards. Interesting timing as always as it has the corrupt media pretty much ignoring the OccupyWallStreet protests again. Bonus points for serving to pump up the rotten to the core DOJ and its fixer Eric Holder. Holder did get slapped with subpoena for his role in the illicit little gun running scandal that is Fast and Furious. Granted the subpoena comes from that slimy partisan hack Darrell Issa but anything that gets Holder and his DOJ minions under oath is welcome. Perhaps there will be other questions that come up that will serve to open doors and let skeletons out just in time for Halloween but it's unlikely. Issa like the rest of the scum that run this lemming farm have to tread carefully if they want to continue to be sponsored by the military industrial-banking-drug money laundering-gun running cartels that own the government lock stock and smoking barrel.
I nearly pissed my pants laughing at the ludicrous details of the great Holder and the bogus Iran plot to assassinate diplomats and blow up embassies on U.S. soil, Jesus Fucking Christ, if I thought that the underpants bomber tale and the recent model airplane attack on the Pentagon was a mockery of the average Joe's intelligence this one was really over the top. Oops, here in America the average Joe is an angry jacked up on anti-Muslim propaganda dimwit like Joe the Plumber.
Life goes on as does the drumbeat for Obama's complicity in Israel's attack on Iran. The only thing that changes here are the names.
Ed Encho Wrote:I nearly pissed my pants laughing at the ludicrous details of the great Holder and the bogus Iran plot to assassinate diplomats and blow up embassies on U.S. soil, Jesus Fucking Christ, if I thought that the underpants bomber tale and the recent model airplane attack on the Pentagon was a mockery of the average Joe's intelligence this one was really over the top. Oops, here in America the average Joe is an angry jacked up on anti-Muslim propaganda dimwit like Joe the Plumber.
Normally, when he hear something like this, it takes me a while to say, "Hey, wait a minute." This time I was spewing coffee before the story was even done on NPR. What drama!!
On a serious note, the inclusion of a drug cartel cannot be ignored. A Mexican drug cartel now included in the trope of the War on Terror? That means that we can do anything we want because we are under attack. After all, we are at war. Now we have the justification to turn our attention toward Mexico and all that it means.
The Volkland Security Complex didn't hire Shakespeare.
They didn't even pitch their lies at the West Wing level.
This is just a crappy daytime soap opera plot, whose intended audience believe the Jeremy Kyle Show is real and X Factor antics constitute breaking news.
A preposterous plot starring B-movie Bogeymen delivered with contempt to a dumbed down nation.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
You Should Hope the Crazy Iranian Bomb Plot Is True (Danger Room) "The wild story put out by the Justice Department about an Iranian assassination plot smells suspiciously like something passed through a bull's digestive tract."
United States officials in the Obama administration and Justice Department have explicitly claimed that Iran's supreme leader and the Quds Force covert operations unit were likely aware of the so-called terror plot to kill Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States. But evidence of that is lacking and many officials have admitted there are gaps in their understanding of the plot.The Obama administration has combatively blamed the highest echelons of the Iranian government and promised impending consequences, despite the fact that there is no solid information about "exactly how high it goes," as one official put it.Anonymous government officials speaking to various media outlets have said that their belief that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, "more than likely" had prior knowledge of the plot is based on inference. The Quds Force operates, they reason, in accordance and obedience to Iran's supreme leadership, so a rogue actor is unlikely.But unlikely describes the plot itself, as even US officials admit it was very out of character. The Quds Force has a history of shrewd covert operations and calculated dealings with proxies. "The Iranian modus operandi is only to trust sensitive plots to their own employees, or to trusted proxies," wrote Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service on Gulf2000 on Wednesday.And the accused perpetrator Manssor Arbabsiar and a Mexican drug gang don't fit the protocol. "Are we to believe that this Texas car seller was a Qods sleeper agent for many years resident in the US? Ridiculous," said Mr. Katzman. "They never ever use such has-beens or loosely connected people for sensitive plots such as this.""It's a very strange case, it doesn't really fit Iran's mode of operation," Alireza Nader, an Iran analyst at the Rand Corporation told the Christian Science Monitor. "This [plot] doesn't seem to serve Iran's interests in any conceivable way," he added.Former CIA agent Robert Baer said the culpability of the Iranian leadership is not believable. "I don't think it's credible, not the central government, there may be a rogue element behind it," Baer said in an interview. "They wouldn't be sending money through an American bank, they wouldn't be going to the cartels in Mexico to do this. It's just not the way they work."Carrying out this kind of action, especially within the United States, would be against Iran's interests, by most expert accounts. It entails a lot of risk of retaliation and potential suffering, and no discernible gain.Another reason that top-level Iranian government coordination in this plot is unlikely is because the plot was developed for the most part by the FBI and the undercover DEA agent. Arbabsiar had originally planned to kidnap the Saudi ambassador, andonly after meeting with the undercover agent did kidnapping turn into assassinating, and it was the undercover agent who first suggested using explosives.That the leadership of the Iranian government would have foreknowledge of an assassination plot by a disgruntled Texas resident that was largely concocted by US law enforcement agents is very unlikely. Still, the Obama administration continues to blame the Ayatollah Khamenei and Iranian government for it, even as US officials admit they have no direct evidence for such a claim.
"...it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)
This suggests that this option might benefit from being held in abeyance until such time as the Iranians made an appropriately provocative move, as they do from time to time. In that case, it would be less a determined policy to employ airstrikes and instead more of an opportunistic hope that Iran would provide the United States with the kind of provocation that would justify airstrikes. However, that would mean that the use of airstrikes could not be the primary U.S. policy toward Iran (even if it were Washington's fervent preference), but merely an ancillary contingency to another option that would be the primary policy unless and until Iran provided the necessary pretext." -page 84-85 of "Which Path to Persia?" Brookings Institution, 2009.
Apparently, manufacturing such a "necessary pretext" to unilaterally bomb a nation of 70 million is now also a part of US foreign policy toward Iran.
An oafish fabrication announced this week by Attorney General Eric Holder, consisted of an Iranian-American used-car salesman that "allegedly" attempted to hire an undercover US DEA agent, posing as a Mexican Los Zetas gangster, to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would add "nobody could make that up, right?" Wrong.
The Fortune 500-funded US policy think-tank, Brookings Institution, in 2009 made it quite clear that the US would pursue its interests across the Middle East and would not tolerate a strong, assertive Iran standing in the way. Brookings would acknowledge in their report, however, that Iran sought neither to confront the United States militarily, nor desired to provoke the West into attacking the Islamic Republic, and even declared that Iran's nuclear threat was more the deterrence it would present toward future US acts of aggression rather than hyped claims of proliferation or unilateral first-strikes.
Below, Brookings clearly authored this policy now being fully executed:
"Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.
In contrast, the group's champions contend that the movement's long-standing opposition to the Iranian regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group's supporters in the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering intelligence. The MEK's greatest intelligence coup was the provision of intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran for enriching uranium.
Despite its defenders' claims, the MEK remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks, within the group celebrations were widespread.
Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacksoften excused by the MEK's advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership's main political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001. At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign terrorist organizations." page 117-118of "Which Path to Persia?"Brookings Institution, 2009
While Attorney General Eric Holder feigns outrage over Iran's "alleged" role in an "alleged" bombing plot, and its violation of "international norms," it turns out that the US has been in reality, carrying out just such a campaign of armed terror on Iranian soil for years. Adding insult to injury, Eric Holder is currently under investigation for his role in running thousands of military-grade weapons over the US-Mexican border, where they were used by mass-murdering drug gangs to terrorize people across Mexico and even to kill US agents. One might wonder how many "international norms" that has violated.
That the current "alleged" plot pinned on Iran revolves around yet another undercover federal agency conducting a long-term sting operation defies belief. That we are expected to believe one of Iran's most elite military forces left such a sensitive, potentially war-starting operation to a used-car salesman and a drug gang reported in the papers daily for its involvement with US government agencies (and who turns out to actually be undercover DEA agents) is so ridiculous it can only be "made up" as Secretary Clinton puts it. More accurately, it is the result of an impotent US intelligence community incapable of contriving anything more convincing in the face of an ever awakening American public, to bolster its morally destitute agenda. The cartoonish nature of the plot and the arms' length even its proponents treat it with to maintain plausible deniability is indicative of a dangerously out of control ruling elite and an utterly incompetent, criminally insane government.
It might be noted that this is yet another example of a "terrorist plot" conjured up by federal agencies, hyped by politicians and the media, and leveraged to propel foreign and domestic policy the public and the world at large have already soundly rejected. Two other notable examples include the Portland "Christmas Tree Bomber" used to terrorize the city into rejoining the FBI's Joint Terror Task Force, and the more recent "RC Plane Bomber" who was entrapped by FBI agents in order to keep the fraud that is the "War on Terror" alive.
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
Team Obama isn't exactly doing a great job of explaining this bonkers story about Iran's crack terror squad hiring a Mexican drug cartel to kill a Saudi diplomat in Washington. Faced with the challenge of articulating why the Qods Force would take such a bizarre step for such an extreme mission, officials are whispering to reporters that they themselves were skeptical, until super-secret intelligence that they of course won't divulge proved conclusive. As for why Iran would enlist the cartels, "they're very willing to use all kinds of proxies to achieve specific clandestine foreign-policy goals," some unknown official assured the Washington Post's David Ignatius. So there's that.
We think you can do better. Not with explaining the assassination plot it's the Obama administration's job to make that case. Rather, we think the distributed collective intelligence of our readership can accurately predict, Iarpa style, what the next insane Iranian plot will be. Use our Reddit widget [ http://reddit.wired.com/iran_plot/ ] to vote on the choices offered or submit your own. And please: nothing as implausible as the Qods Force turning to a used car salesman to link up with a Mexican drug cartel with whom it never previously worked to pull off an operation so dangerous it could have launched a new Mideast war. Show alleged terror plots that are: hot | new | top-rated or submit your own name Submit a terror plot
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I had to leave the ad in as it seemed so.....appropriate....
Quote: Alleged Iran Plot's WikiLeaks Link
Oct 14, 2011 1:24 AM EDT U.S. officials say a diplomatic cable disclosed by WikiLeaks may have provided one motive for Iran if it wanted to kill the Saudi ambassador to America, and that there's strong evidence of Tehran's involvement. Eli Lake reports exclusively.
In the April 20, 2008 cable, Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir relayed to America's No. 3 diplomat in Riyadh that the Saudi king wanted the U.S. to attack Iran's nuclear program. "He told you to cut off the head of the snake," the cable quotes al-Jubeir as saying.
The Justice Department on Tuesday released a criminal complaint accusing an Iranian-American man of acting on behalf of Iran's elite Quds Force to pay the Mexican drug gang Los Zetas to kill al-Jubeir. Iran has vehemently denied any involvement.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) told The Daily Beast on Thursday that the plot against the Saudi diplomat brought to light the threat Iran's Quds force posed to America and its allies. He also said the leaked cable was one of many reasons that the Iranians sought to kill the Saudi ambassador.
"I am sure it was one of many things," Rogers told The Daily Beast. "He (al-Jubeir) was seen as one of the most vocal critics of Iran too." Rogers added that Iran and Saudi Arabia have had tensions between them for a long time, but that Iran "thought the environment was ripe to put this together."
A federal law enforcement official told The Daily Beast that the government is still trying to determine what "prompted Quds Force to undertake this alleged plot," and that officials can't say for sure whether the cable itself was a factor.
Nonetheless, the administration has been escalating its pressure on Iran since the indictment. President Obama declared Thursday that the evidence that Iran was involved in the plot was strong, and he intends to seek sanctions against Tehran. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland also said Thursday that U.S. diplomats had made direct contact with Iranian diplomats to express Washington's displeasure. U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast that the communication was made in New York to Iran's United Nations mission.
Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Adel A. al-Jubeir. , Newscom
Rogers said the criminal complaint Tuesday "was the first public light of what the Quds Force has been up to for years." He added, "Other than al Qaeda, they have more American blood on their hands than any other terrorist group. They are very good, and they have nation-state backing, they have all the institutions and support, they have time to train, and they have the ability to move."
The case in many ways was the result of two agencies that often are not credited in the counterterrorism world: the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Department of Treasury. The DEA first learned of the scheme from an informant who was approached by Manssor Arbabsiar, the Iranian-American charged Tuesday in the murder-for-hire plot. The DEA then worked with Arbabsiar to set up more meetings, leading eventually in August to Arbabsiar arranging for nearly $100,000 to be wired into an account belonging to an undercover agent.
U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast that they knew the Quds Force was behind the plot when the money was transferred in part because the Treasury had monitored the overseas account and identified it long before as an account used by the Iranian organization for supporting operations overseas. "We believe the information is ironclad," one U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. This official added that other technical intelligence confirmed that this was a Quds Force plot, and that Arbabsiar was not working on his own.
On Thursday Rogers acknowledged that some observers looked at Arbabsiar, who had a reputation for smoking marijuana and was considered to be unreliable by many who knew him, and concluded the plot may be "amateurish."
"Call it amateurish, [but] if you look at the way they tried to do the cut-outs on this, it was sophisticated," he said. Cut-outs refer to third parties in the intelligence trade that obscure the responsibility of the nation's service in an operation. Rogers said the plot may have succeeded if Arbabsiar had not made the mistake of reaching out to an informant. "One of the best intelligence services in the world is the Russians, and the Iranians are not too far behind," Rogers said.
In some ways, the threat from the Quds Force and Iran is not entirely new.
Juan Zarate, who served as a deputy national security adviser dealing with counterterrorism under President George W. Bush, said, "We have been concerned about the Iranian reach into North and South America for some time now. In a certain way this is comforting, this is a very sloppy, poorly executed attack plan. On the other hand, I don't think this should lull us into a sense of security of what Iran is capable of."
Michael Leiter, who stepped down this year from his post as director of the national counterterrorism center, told the Senate last September that he believed Hizbullah, a group with strong backing from the Iranian government, had the capability to launch an attack in the United States.
When asked "Do you think if there's an escalation between Iran and Israel that we will see more of a threat here in the United States?" Leiter responded with one word, "yes."
This was the first public light of what Iran's Quds Force has been up to for years.
Hizbullah does not engage in military operations overseas unless there are representatives and advisers from Iran's Revolutionary Guard, which would coordinate the operation, said Ali Alfoneh, an expert on Iran's revolutionary guard corps at the American Enterprise Institute. The Quds Force is an elite external operational arm of the revolutionary guard corps.
Suspicions that Iran might try to strike on U.S. soil have been around for years. Between 2002 and 2006, the Bush administration expelled at least six Iranian diplomats from the United Nations for spying, on the ground that the diplomats were casing subway lines in New York City.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in 2004, "I can't think of a single good reason why anyone would be videotaping how the subway works in the middle of the nightnot one. If we are ever going to trust Iran's cooperation in the War on Terrorism, we need to get some answers to these questions right now."
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
Eli Lake is the senior national-security correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. He previously covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times. Lake has also been a contributing editor at The New Republic since 2008 and covered diplomacy, intelligence, and the military for the late New York Sun. He has lived in Cairo, Egypt, and traveled to war zones in Sudan, Iraq, and Gaza. He is one of the few journalists to report from all three members of President Bush's axis of evil: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...leaks.html
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
IRANIAN TERROR MASTERMIND LIKELY WANTED DRUG DEAL, NOT MURDER
Gareth Porter published an important story about the alleged Iran terror plot. In it he notes that nowhere in the Justice Department criminal complaint does it say that Arbabsiar ever agreed to assassinate anyone. In fact, it is the DEA agent who repeatedly attempts to introduce and re-introduce the notion of perpetrating an act of terror. At no point do the charges say the Iranian ever suggested this or agreed to it. Porter says that what's much more likely is that the alleged terror suspect was first drawn into the web by the prospect of doing a drug deal:
On May 24, when Arbabsiar first met with the DEA informant he thought was part of a Mexican drug cartel, it was not to hire a hit squad to kill the ambassador. Rather, there is reason to believe that the main purpose was to arrange a deal to sell large amounts of opium from Afghanistan. …Three Bloomberg reporters, citing a "federal law enforcement official", wrote that Arbabsiar told the DEA informant he represented Iranians who "controlled drug smuggling and could provide tons of opium".
In fact, in today's NY Times a reporter interviewed neighbors who noted that young people entered and exited the suspect's house at all hours of the day and night. It made them think that drugs were being dealt there. The IPS reporter notes that the IRG controls a huge volume of drug trafficking in nearby Afghanistan and that they have begun to ship heroin around the world including to Mexican drug cartels. It appears that the paid DEA informant, himself a drug dealer, first approached Arbabsiar not about an act of terror, but about a drug deal. The Iranian was only, as far as the records show, interested in doing a drug deal. He listened to the tales of the DEA agent only because he was being strung along to believe there was a drug deal in the making:
…The absence of any statement attributed to Arbabsiar imply that the Iranian- American said nothing about assassinating the Saudi ambassador except in response to suggestions by the informant, who was already part of an FBI undercover operation. …Not a single quote from Arbabsiar shows that he agreed to assassinating the ambassador, much less proposed it, suggest[ing] that he was either non-committal or linking the issue to something else, such as the prospect of a major drug deal with the cartel.
Interestingly, the FBI complaint doesn't mention any discussion about drugs. I wonder why? This is not only entrapment, it is the government lying about the basic nature of the case. Manssor Arbabsiar appears to be a wannabe Texas drug dealer who had connections holding product via his cousin, who may or may not be affiliated with the IRG. That the IRG deals in drugs I have no doubt. But the claim that the IRG plotted to kill the Saudi ambassador or anyone remains about the lamest claim ever to come out of the Obama administration. I feel a real sense of betrayal regarding Obama. I expected crap like this from Bush and Cheney. You knew they were going to cheat and lie to advance their political agenda. But Obama? Why? Why does he need to do this? What does he gain by this even if half of the charges are true (which I'm convinced they're not)? He gets new sanctions against Iran? Big deal? Maybe he even uses this to forestall an Israeli attack on Iran. But why risk a huge black eye if the case goes to s(^t as it appears it will? Where are those killer political instincts we thought we saw during the presidential election campaign? Abandoned him, it appears. http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_...ot-murder/
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
Quote:On May 24, when Arbabsiar first met with the DEA informant he thought was part of a Mexican drug cartel, it was not to hire a hit squad to kill the ambassador. Rather, there is reason to believe that the main purpose was to arrange a deal to sell large amounts of opium from Afghanistan.
…Three Bloomberg reporters, citing a "federal law enforcement official", wrote that Arbabsiar told the DEA informant he represented Iranians who "controlled drug smuggling and could provide tons of opium".
:hippy:
So, it was just the military-multinational-intelligence complex taking out the competition....
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
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Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Adel A. al-Jubeir. , Newscom