Posted on 10/17/2011 1:03:09 AM PDT by Watchdog85
The news that Holders DOJ had bagged a terrorist mastermind named Manssor J. Arbabsiar followed shortly on the heels of my last post about spin, and the ways stakeholders in the DOJ/ATF Fast and Furious story may be using it to sell their own POV, lack of culpability, or, in the case of the press, newspapers or their e-equivalents.
So the caller who woke me up way too early to tell me about US law enforcements latest tour de force, the discovery and preemption of an Iranian murder plot to assassinate the Ambassador of Saudi Arabia, really only had one question: Is this the kind of spin youve been talking about?
Well, gee. It took me a minute, but my initial impression is the one Im sticking withif it isnt spin, it should be, because the media ball is back in DOJs courtthe storys knocked the Fast and Furious scandal off the front page, replacing it, apparently, with a tale told by an idiot, a US national whos failed at every job hes ever had, from selling used cars to hawking luncheon fajitas.
On full display as well is an exceptional discharge of sound and furySecretary of State Hillary Clinton (the lady in charge of issuing exemptions to the Arms Export Control Act) and top dogs from the FBI, DOJ, ICE, DEA, and even the CIA, charging through the halls of the UN in Manhattan demanding further isolation of Iran. Brrrrr
And, of course, in the end, its a tale that signifies what?
That there are countless wannabe conspirators wandering the mean streets of LA, Dallas/Ft. Worthwherever USAheads filled with squeegee plots to rid the world of real or imaginary evils?
That when these hapless miscreants connect with law enforcement informers, whose own fates depend on helping agents build career-enhancing cases, the pot begins to boil?
That the best way to kill a story about the enemy within is to refocus attention on a bigger, badder enemy without?
Im not sure. . .
But heres a version of the Iran Plots Terrorist Strike on US Soil story (told to me) that Id like to share with you.
Lets start with the protagonist, Manssor J. Arbabsiar, who by dint of his ethnicity, may or may not have a beef against the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
But one thing we do know: he wants and needs to make moneyno easy task for the dumb-and-dumber, especially in a hard economy.
But theres a silver lining to this cloud: Arbabsiar has a relative, in Irans Quds Force, and this cousin wants to help both his kinsman in the US and their countrymen in Iran via a collection of touchdowns for the home team.
And what does that mean?
Maybe pushing back at the Great Satan, killing some Israelis down the road, and knocking off a Saudi sheik bold enough to refuel at an enemy watering hole in DC.
You can count on me, Arbabsiar tells his cousin back in Iran, who, according to the Criminal Complaint filed by DOJ, suggests that locating one of those cartel assassins south of the US border might be the way to go. (Can we tell these two guys are related?)
Arbabsiar, who has lived on the Tex-Mex border, agrees.
Manssor Arbabsiar-Terrorist Mastermind? But how to get it done? This is a man who cant keep track of his car keys or his cell phone. A small-time hustler slippin and slidin on the global stage .
Then Arbabsiar gets lucky. He puts out the word on the street that he has money and knows whos hiring, and lo and behold, Arbabsiar stumbles across a guy with Connections.
Someone who knows about these things.
Illicit trafficking, bribery, theft, bomb attacks, mayhem and murder. When the hustler manages to connect with the hit man (in reality, a trafficker turned DEA informant who has worked in Mexico), hes elated and, he thinks, in business.
The Confidential Informant
Sure, says Arbabsiars new Mexican friend, whose DEA code name is Confidential Source #1, or CS-1, for short . We do assassinations we do it all.
Now the informant really goes to work, teasing out his targets intentions, assessing just how far Arbabsiar and his Iranian contacts will go, how many crimes they may be willing to commit (how many counts could end up on the Criminal Complaint), and how much theyre willing to pay.
Its called a murder-for-hire sting, a standard law enforcement ploy designed to help the criminal find the very worst in his nature and act on it. But sting operations come with their own risks as well as rewardsand attorneys know that entrapment can be a strong defense.
Informants are like sharks, scouring the underworld for opportunities and targets the feds can use as springboards to career-making cases. Its the informants job to find two sticks (agent and opportunity), to rub them together vigorously, and to blow gently on the sparks of criminal enterprise.
So its the DEA informant, CS-1, who makes the pitch, polishing his credentials for Arbabsiar, a potential target. Its the informant who tells the Iranian he has ties with Los Zetas, guys who kill people every day for nickels and dimes, and whod be more than happy to do it better for better-paying customers. Its CS-1 whos making it up as he goes along.
And you know, this clears something up, something thats been bothering me. You see, immediately following DOJs announcement that the assassination plot had been foiled, a number of US intelligence liaisons in Mexico, people who work for ICE and for the CIA providing trafficking intel, were scrambling to identify the DEA informant whod partnered up with Arbabsiar.
He was an unknown.
Our guys in Mexico, whose job it is to know whos who in the world of cartel trafficking, should have had the skinny on the man Arbabsiar believed was a big player for Los Zetas. But they didnt.
They couldnt place him because Arbabsiars hired hand, although an actual DEA informant, may not have had any meaningful ties to Los Zetas or to any Mexican assassins. He may have created those associations as the need arose, to meet Arbabsiars expectations.
Yeah.
The informants job is to be whatever his target needs him to be. To be creative, adaptable, and opportunistic. Indeed, in a carefully worded statement embedded in DOJs Criminal Complaint, the FBI witness confirms that the informant, CS-1, posed as an associate of a DTO operating in Northern Mexico.
So what we have is roughly four months of fantasy and role-playing, during which time the plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States remains only a figment in the imaginations of a handful of would-be assailants: Arbabsiar, his cousin (a big general) in the Iranian military, Gholam Shakuri, a member of the Quds Force, and according to the Criminal Complaint, another Iranian belonging to the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Meanwhile, DEA is waiting for the kind of case they can take to a US Attorney, and that means their informant needs to move from make-believe to real-time crime. He needs to get paid.
How much?
It had to have been Arbabsiar asking this question, because at this point, CS-1 is calling the shots.
1.5 million with 100k on deposit. . .
The Iranians agree to the deal, and wire the 100k to the undercover bank account, routing and account numbers supplied by CS-1.
And heres where it gets interesting.
100k proves conspiracybut not involvement of Iranian government
Its illegal, a violation of OFAC, for any US bank, business or US citizen to accept funds wired from Iran or from an account anywhere belonging to an individual or entity using it to conduct commerce with Iran.
In a case like this, the 100k would have likely come from the United Arab Emirates, maybe Dubai, where Iranian interests established shell companies many years ago for the specific purpose of circumventing OFAC and the US embargo on Iran.
Its likely that the Iranian government, the Quds Force, have billions in UAE banks, money that at this point, could never be traced back to Iran. So this begs the questionwould Arbabsiars contacts send funds that might indeed be traced back to Iran to the undercover bank account in the US when big-time players intent on an assassination plot could just as easily route a transfer out of a corporate account in UAE?
I dont think so.
If Arbabsiars backers were high-level players working on behalf of the Iranian government, the 100k wired to the US would, almost certainly, have come out of a UAE corporate account, or via an account belonging to an international bank with correspondent branches/banks around the world.Its highly improbably that US authorities can prove the owner/s of that account have direct links to the Iranian government.
And thats a problem, isnt it?
US indulging in Wag the Dog foreign policy?
Yes, receipt of the 100k by US authorities is enough to make a conspiracy case against Arbabsiar and the Iranian cohorts hes implicated in the plot.
But that 100k in the US undercover bank account still does not prove that the Iranian government was driving the bus. To do that, US authorities must establish a link between the owner of the account in the UAE or the owner/s of an account held by an international financial institution with correspondent branches/banks around the world and the government of Iran.
This is a critical pointone that could defuse the Obama Administrations claim that senior officials at the highest levels of the Iranian government were tied to the assassination plot and challenge the call of senior US officials for alterations to current foreign policy, in the US and abroad, toward Iran. If US authorities cannot prove that this was something more than a plot formulated by a small group of non-state actors, the President, the Secretary of State, DEA and the FBI have some explaining to do.
But whats interesting is that, with the exception of The Guardian (which asks if the US may be indulging in a Wag the Dog type of foreign policy) the mainstream media doesnt seem to be picking up on this.
Maybe thats because Arbabsiars own statement in the Criminal Complaint seems to implicate the government of Iran:This isnt personalnot my moneyits the governments money.
Its important to note, however, that Arbabsiar made this statement to CS-1 in response to the informants request for more money: CS-1 told Arbabsiar that he needed at least a five man team to pull off the assassination, and that his people wanted half of the 1.5m as opposed to a measly 100k as downpayment for the hit. Arbabsiar wants to reassure CS-1 that its the Iranian government that backing him, not just a personal circle of contactsso how reliable Arbabsiars statement is remains to be proved.
What we do know at his point is that Arbabsiar appears to be under pressure, and, is, in turn, pressing CS-1 to get on with the scheme. By this time, were calling the proposed plot Operation Chevrolet, a sentimental nod, it seems, to Arbabsiars former career in used car sales, and his contacts back in Iran, Arbabsiar tells CS-1, want to take delivery of the vehicle.
This is all according to testimony provided by Arbabsiar to the FBI, the same outfit responsible for Ruby Ridge in 1992, a situation that began when an ATF informant convinced a white separatist named Randy Weaver to sell him what the government later alleged were two sawed-off shotguns (shortening the barrels of these weapons before selling them constitutes an illegal sale), and that ended a little more than a week after an FBI sniper killed Weavers wife with a shot to the head as she stood in her doorway holding a baby in her arms.
ATF and the FBI have a history
Weaver family-Ruby Ridge especially when it comes to making criminal mountains out of some pretty strange molehillsfocusing on small-time and sometimes delusional targets in an attempt to build a case authorities believe they can manage and bring, once its been parented into a full-blown crisis, to successful (and high profile) prosecution.
Randy Weaver was low-hanging fruit, as was David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidianscultural oddballs with spare educations and no clout, waiting with their off-the-grid religious beliefs and caches of canned food and long guns, for the apocalypse.
When it came, it was wearing a badge.
But this current murder-for-hire sting is differentunlike previous domestic stings run out of the FBI, the dynamic between Arbabsiar and his informant stand to affect global foreign policy, reshaping strategic relations between the US and the Mideast in ways that are difficult, unless maybe youre the Secretary of State or the cigarette man in the X-files, to envision.
Karen Greenberg, a journalist for the Guardian, puts it this way:
In the Arbabsiar case, the issue has immediately leapt from a matter of individuals to a matter of state and from a matter of non-state actors engaged in alleged criminal activity on behalf of al-Qaida (or another transnational terrorist group) to a matter of state actors (that is, the Quds Force). The US government is claiming that this case constitutes a diplomatic breach and an act of international violence planned by the Iranian authorities in the presidents words, a flagrant violation of US and international law.
This is important stuffread it again.
Then ask yourself this. . .
Is Arbabsiar just another screwballmore low-hanging fruitinvolved in a crank scheme engineered by a rogue faction (otherwise known as three more screwballs) in the Iranian military, or is he, as he seems to believe and the US government continues to insist, a henchman for powerful officials within the highest echelons of the Iranian government?
If hes small-time and delusional, a hook on which the feds and the Administration have managed to hang some very serious allegations, well then, Houston, weve got a problem. If hes the gateway player in an international terrorist plot, weve got a different problem.
You choose.
But first hear the rest of Arbabsiars story . . .
Its almost fall now, 2011. Arbabsiars contacts in Iran, he tells CS-1, are unwilling to invest more upfront money in the operation (he says they want to see how this first test pans out), so Arbabsiar agrees to go himself to Mexico and wait there as human collateral until the hit on the Saudi Ambassador in DC had gone down, and everyone, we assume, gets paid.
Now, according to the FBI report, Arbabsiar admits that his own contact in Iran told him this might be a bad idea and advised against it. But for some reason (crazy or broke?) Arbabsiar gets on a flight to Mexico City, expecting that he will be held as human ransom by Los Zetas (?????) until it is confirmed that the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, as well a room full of unsuspecting fellow-diners in DC, have been blown to smithereens via a wad of well-placed C4 plastique.
On or around September 28th, Arbabsiar flies to Mexico City, only to be denied entry, per the request of the US. DEA, with only 100k as a down payment for the proposed murder of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, arranges surveillance as Arbabsiar boards another flight out of Mexico to JFK in New York, and once this plane lands, US agents arrest the man who still cant do anything right.
The terrorist plot to bomb and murder foreign nationals on US soil remained, from start to finish, an imaginary plan, beyond any possible implementation and always under the control and management of CS-1 and US law enforcement.
Whether CS-1 did more than root out and manage the alleged plot is already a question the media is asking.
In other words, did US law enforcement, via the actions of CS-1, lend legal substantiality to a plot that may have existed only within the close confines of a few fevered minds?
Senior Iranians officials, of course, are saying just that, and more:
Irans ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Khazaee, told reporters that the U.S. accusation is a really big lie and it doesnt make sense. He also accused the U.S. of setting a dangerous precedent.
Another Iranian official accuses President Obama of spinning the story to divert attention away from the economic crisis in the US.
And from DOJs Fast and Furious?
What do you think?
Then there are the more than usual number of Euro-skeptics who also contend that Iranian operatives in charge of mounting terrorist attacks would never enlist the aid of an amateur like Arbabsiar, deal with non-Muslim players, or engage in what intelligence experts are diplomatically calling clumsy tradecraft.
They have a point, and its gratifying to see common sense and a call for verification weaving its way through the mainstream media. Trust but verify.
Of course, its small comfort to find oneself siding with the Iranian government. Iran is still the most dangerous (along with Pakistan) country in the world, and its interests and its behavior run counter to that of the United States and our allies.
In an earlier blog,Wikileads whos following up? I referenced a leak that struck me as amusing: Saudi Arabia had been lobbying the US to take on Iran at the same time that the US has been pressing Saudi Arabia to lean on that same country. Apparently, the Saudis havent let up, a clue, perhaps, as to why the US might want to distance itself and its allies further from Iran. Ok, fine. But lets not use the Keystone Kops to do it and call it strategic policy.
Listen, Im no diplomat and I dont have the inside scoop. I do, however, have some gut feelings about how we should conduct our law enforcement operations at home and our foreign policy abroadstraight up.
Thats not going to happen, is it? So lets just try this: respecting the laws of the United States.
Did the architects of Fast and Furious violate the Arms Export Control Act?
Ask Hillary Clinton, the same US official who just advised the UN Security Council to come down hard on Iran for the part (alleged, Hillary, alleged) its government played in this latest DOJ-revealed plot to blow up the Saudi Ambassador at a DC restaurant.
Diversion, diversion, diversion. Thy name is Spin.
Is the Iran Plots Terrorist Strike on US Soil story an attempt to divert attention from Fast and Furious, and maybe (a twofer), a strategic move toward Saudi Arabia, designed to seem motivated, not by shared US and Saudi interests, (and certainly NOT at the behest of the Saudis who cannot, under any circumstances, break ranks with the Arab world), but by justifiable outrage over the national security threat posed by Manssor J. Arbabsiar et al?
Wow. Consider the irony here. A man who couldnt sell fajitas to a hungry lunch mob could end up up altering History.
Is it spin? I dont know. But if it isnt, it should be.
Why?
Because it looks like it may work.
What do you all think?
Thanks Watchdog85.
Yeah. Explained this way, it does indeed seem like this plot was totally two-bit. Our neer-do-well didn’t even have a clue what D.C. restaurants Adel el Jubeir (aka “slicky boy”—former Saudi mouthpiece—now boy-ambassador) likes to eat at.
It won’t work, unless Obamba decides to go through with some big, military response that REALLY dominates the media for a while.
Rep. Darrell Issa is not going to back off because of a little obvious shucking and jiving. He’s got his teeth sunk into this like a pit bull. Remember, it seemed for months that Watergate was going nowhere.
However, I wouldn’t put it past Obama instigating something big. I think he’s terrified what happens when the implications of Gunwalker start to get out. FNC, talk radio, the internet and now CBS and CNN are on it like a loaded diaper. I personally think this thing could start to snowball once the rest of the MSM decides that Obama isn’t worth clinging to. I think it could explode once the Dems realize what a monstrous “high crime and misdemeanor” this constitutes, and how expediting an impeachment over this is the perfect way of getting rid of the Messiah for just cause. Anything to try and get away from the lethal whirlpool of his sinking ship of state.
Obama has been getting more and more practiced in swinging the big stick recently; what with the drone strikes, the Osama take-down, and now the Libya Intervention. Starting WWIII just to try and get his personal backside out of the wringer is something I would not put past him. His pathological callousness and indifference to human life have already been amply demonstrated with what we know about Gunwalker already. Hey! He was perfectly willing to get hundreds of Mexicans killed and who knows how many Americans simply in order to gin up favorable headlines to support his planned anti-gun offensive.
Think about it...
DON’T you dare go to sleep. Of you snooze, you lose. Rooky here!!!
All laid out like fine silver on the WH dinner table.
PING
The scuttlebutt is that the money was wired by a Houston based FBI toadie. So this is perfectly plausible...and the reason holder said they could not positively accuse he iranian government.
I think Hussein/Soros and crew would have no problem causing another distraction in the Middle East.
After all look at Africa.
Remember this though “Watch the other Hand”
More info at these links on Gunwalker AKA:Fast&Furious
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2011/10/uh-oh-hillary-issa-grassley-have-been.html
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2011/10/ssi-exclusive-is-this-any-way-to-run.html
bflr, but what little I’ve read leads me to believe this article is right on the mark.
Funny but I agree with Juan Williams in this. He was asked by a radio talk jock if it doesn’t seem that whenever a President is in political trouble somehow there seems to materialize
a cause to elevate the terror alert status— or some cause to deploy American combat troops to fight the evil in some new foreign country or something that is supposed to take our attention away from whatever the President doesn’t want us thinking about—and the dog called the national press wags its tail in conditioned response. Juan Williams ,for once was more reasonable than liberal. I think I reflect the gist of what was heard.We ought not be distracted by such staged events. But then Obama should have been Impeached soon as he raised hi hand in solemn Oath or affirmation to preserve ,protect, and defend a Constitution and Laws he as our Revolutionary -AntiAmerican President does not wish to defend.
I said from the beginning that this was BS.
The whole thing blown out of all proportion to cover up Fast and Furious.
America is being led down the Garden Path by the Kenyan and his “Justice” Department.
An Obama/Holder team contrived event. Small fraction Gulf of Tonkin cause without compelling evidence. Bush league.
“I said from the beginning that this was BS.”
Same here, and we still agree for the same reasons.
One thing that would have seemed fishy to any competent Iranian intelligence agent: Why would a MEXICAN cartel want money to be wired to an AMERICAN bank, given the scrutiny that international transfers are subject to under the Patriot Act? Why not wire it to a Mexican, South American, or Caribbean bank, or some other place with discrete banking?
The question is who is the most incompetent boob? Arbabsiar, Eric Holder or Hillary Clinton? Tough choice. Hillary may have the longest history of being a total screwup.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.