Another Neocon Attempt to Frame Iran Falls Apart
By Gareth ****ter, The Nation
January 26, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74331/
Research for this article was sup****ted by the Investigative Fund of The
Nation Institute.
Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush
Administration's pressure campaign
against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world's leading
sponsor of terrorism.
And Team Bush's latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation
that Iran was
responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the
city's Jewish Community
Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994.
Unnamed senior
Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the
bombing in Argentina
"serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and
relation****p with foreign
militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies."
This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by
the General Assembly of
Interpol, which voted to put five former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah
leader on the
international police organization's "red list" for allegedly having
planned the July 1994
bombing. But the Wall Street Journal re****ts that it was pressure from the
Bush Administration,
along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the Interpol
vote. In fact, the Bush
Administration's manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly
in line with its long
practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case
against its geopolitical
enemies.
After spending several months interviewing officials at the US Embassy in
Buenos Aires familiar
with the Argentine investigation, the head of the FBI team that assisted
it and the most
knowledgeable independent Argentine investigator of the case, I found that
no real evidence has
ever been found to implicate Iran in the bombing. Based on these
interviews and the do***entary
record of the investigation, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that
the case against
Iran over the AMIA bombing has been driven from the beginning by US enmity
toward Iran, not by
a desire to find the real perpetrators.
A 'Wall of Assumptions'
US policy toward the bombing was skewed from the beginning by a Clinton
Administration strategy
of isolating Iran, adopted in 1993 as part of an understanding with Israel
on peace
negotiations with the Palestinians. On the very day of the crime, before
anything could have
been known about who was responsible, Secretary of State Warren
Christopher blamed "those who
want to stop the peace process in the Middle East"--an obvious reference
to Iran.
William Brencick, then chief of the political section at the US Embassy in
Buenos Aires and the
primary Embassy contact for the investigation, recalled in an interview
with me last June that
a "wall of assumptions" guided the US approach to the case. The primary
assumptions, Brencick
said, were that the explosion was a suicide bombing and that use of a
suicide bomb was prima
facie evidence of involvement by Hezbollah--and therefore Iran.
But the suicide-bomber thesis quickly encountered serious problems. In the
wake of the
explosion, the Menem government asked the United States to send a team to
assist in the
investigation, and two days after the bombing, experts from the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms arrived in Buenos Aires along with three FBI agents. According to
an interview the
head of the team, ATF explosives expert Charles Hunter, gave to a team of
independent
investigators headed by US journalist Joe Goldman and Argentine
investigative journalist Jorge
Lanata, as soon as the team arrived the federal police put forward a
thesis that a white
Renault Trafic van had carried the bomb that destroyed the AMIA.
Hunter quickly identified major discrepancies between the car-bomb thesis
and the blast pattern
recorded in photos. He wrote a re****t two weeks later noting that in the
wake of the bombing,
merchandise in a store immediately to the right of the AMIA was tightly
packed against its
front windows and merchandise in another shop had been blown out onto the
street--suggesting
that the blast came from inside rather than outside. Hunter also said he
did not understand how
the building across the street could still be standing if the bomb had
exploded in front of the
AMIA, as suggested by the car-bomb thesis.
The lack of eyewitness evidence sup****ting the thesis was just as
striking. Of some 200
witnesses on the scene, only one claimed to have seen a white Renault
Trafic. Several testified
they were looking at the spot where the Trafic should have been when the
explosion occurred and
saw nothing. Nicolasa Romero, the wife of a Buenos Aires policeman, was
that lone witness. She
said she saw a white Renault Trafic approach the corner where she was
standing with her sister
and her 4-year-old son. But Romero's sister testified that the vehicle
that passed them was not
a white Trafic but rather a black-and-yellow taxi. Other witnesses
re****ted seeing a
black-and-yellow taxi seconds before the explosion.
Argentine prosecutors argued that pieces of a white Trafic embedded in the
flesh of many of the
victims of the explosion proved their case for a suicide bomb. But that
evidence was
discredited by Gabriel Levinas, a researcher for AMIA's own legal team.
Levinas is a member of
a leading Jewish family in Buenos Aires who had published a human rights
magazine during the
dictator****p (his uncle's car was used to kidnap war criminal Adolf
Eichmann and spirit him off
to Israel for trial in 1982.)
He discovered that the manufacturer of the white Trafic had been sent
fragments of the vehicle
recovered by the police for analysis and had found that none of the pieces
had ever been put
under high temperature. That meant that these car fragments could not have
come from the
particular white Trafic that police had identified as the suicide bomb
car--since that vehicle
was known to have once caught fire before having been recycled and
repaired.
Yet despite the lack of eyewitness testimony and the weakness of the
forensic evidence, the
State Department publicly embraced the suicide-bomb story in 1994 and
1995.
The Problem of Motive
Independent investigators have also long puzzled over why Iran would have
carried out an action
against Argentine Jews while its Hezbollah allies were embroiled in armed
struggle with the
Israeli military in Lebanon. In their 2006 indictment of several Iranian
nationals in the
bombing, Argentine prosecutors argued that Iran planned the AMIA attack
because Carlos Menem's
administration had abruptly canceled two contracts for the transfer of
nuclear technology to Iran.
But the indictment actually provides excerpts from key do***ents that
undermine that
conclusion. According to a February 10, 1992, cable from Argentina's
ambassador in Iran, the
director of the American Department of Iran's foreign ministry had
"emphasized the need to
reach a solution to the problem [of nuclear technology transfer] that
would avoid damage to
other contracts." Iran thus clearly signaled its hope of finding a
negotiated solution that
could reactivate the suspended contracts and maintain other deals with
Argentina as well.
On March 17, 1992, a bomb blast destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos
Aires--an incident for
which the Argentine prosecutors also held Iran responsible. The
indictment, however, quotes a
top official of INVAP, an Argentine nuclear firm that dominated the
National Commission on
Atomic Energy, as saying that during 1992 there were "contacts" between
INVAP and the Atomic
Energy Organization of Iran "in the expectation that the decision of the
national government
would be revised, allowing the tasks in the contracts to be resumed." The
same official
confirmed that negotiations surrounding the two canceled projects
continued from 1993 to
1995--before and after the AMIA explosion. Those revelations suggest that
the Iranian attitude
toward Argentina at the time of the bombing was exactly the opposite of
the one claimed in the
indictment.
The Hezbollah motive for involvement in the AMIA bombing, according to the
indictment, was
revenge against the Israeli bombing of a Hezbollah training camp in the
Bekaa Valley in early
1994 and the Israeli kidnapping of ****ite leader Mustapha Dirani in May.
That theory fails to
explain, however, why Hezbollah would choose to retaliate against Jews in
Argentina. It was
already at war with the Israeli forces in Lebanon, where the group was
employing suicide bomb
attacks in an effort to pressure Israel to end its occupation. Hezbollah
had a second easy
retaliatory option available, which was to launch Katyusha rockets across
the border into
Israeli territory.
That is exactly what Hezbollah did to retaliate for the Israeli killing of
some 100 Lebanese
civilians in the town of Qana in 1996. That episode inspired greater anger
toward Israel among
Hezbollah militants than any other event in the 1990s, according to Boston
University Hezbollah
specialist Augustus Richard Norton. If Hezbollah responded to this Israeli
provocation with
Katyusha rockets on Israeli territory, it hardly makes sense that it would
have responded to a
lesser Israeli offense by designing an ambitious international attack on
Argentine Jews with no
connection to the Israeli occupation.
The Frame-up
The keystone of the Argentine case was Carlos Alberto Telleldin, a
used-car salesman with a
record of shady dealings with both criminals and the police--and a ****ite
last name. On July
10, 1994, Telleldin sold the white Trafic the police claimed was the
suicide car to a man he
described as having a Central American accent. Nine days after the bombing
Telleldin was
arrested on suspicion of being an accomplice to the crime.
The police claimed they were led to Telleldin by the serial number on the
van's engine block,
which was found in the rubble. But it would have been a remarkable lapse
for the organizers of
what was otherwise a very professional bombing to have left intact such a
visible
identification mark, one that any car thief knows how to erase. That
should have been a clue
that the attack was likely not orchestrated by Hezbollah, whose bomb
experts were well-known by
US intelligence analysts to have been clever enough, in blowing up the
American Embassy in
Beirut in 1983, to avoid leaving behind any forensic evidence that would
lead back to them. It
should also have raised questions about whether that evidence was planted
by the police themselves.
It is now clear that the Menem government's real purpose in arresting
Telleldin was to get him
to finger those they wanted to blame for the bombing. In January 1995,
Telleldin was visited by
retired army Capt. Hector Pedro Vergez, a part-time agent for SIDE, the
Argentine intelligence
agency, who offered him $1 million and his freedom if he would identify
one of five Lebanese
nationals detained in Paraguay in September 2004--men the CIA said might
be Hezbollah
militants--as the person to whom he had sold the van. After Telleldin
refused to go along with
the scheme, an Argentine judge found that there was no evidence on which
to detain the alleged
militants.
The Buenos Aires court, which threw out the case against Telleldin in
2004, determined that a
federal judge, Luisa Riva Aramayo, met with Telleldin in 1995 to discuss
another
possibility--paying him to testify that he had sold the van to several
high-ranking figures in
the Buenos Aires provincial police who were allies of Menem's political
rival, Eduardo Duhalde.
In July 1996, Judge Juan Jose Galeano, who was overseeing the
investigation, offered Telleldin
$400,000 to implicate those police officers as accomplices in the bombing.
(A videotape made
secretly by SIDE agents and aired on television in April 1997 showed
Galeano negotiating the
bribe.) A month after making the offer to Telleldin, Galeano charged three
senior Buenos Aires
police officials with having involvement in the bombing, based on
Telleldin's testimony.
"The Whole Iran Thing Seemed Kind of Flimsy"
In an interview last May James Cheek, Clinton's Ambassador to Argentina at
the time of the
bombing, told me, "To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of
Iranian
responsibility]. They never came up with anything." The hottest lead in
the case, he recalled,
was an Iranian defector named Manoucher Moatamer, who "supposedly had all
this information."
But Moatamer turned out to be only a dissatisfied low-ranking official
without the knowledge of
government decision-making that he had claimed. "We finally decided that
he wasn't credible,"
Cheek recalled. Ron Goddard, then deputy chief of the US Mission in Buenos
Aires, confirmed
Cheek's account. He recalled that investigators found nothing linking Iran
to the bombing. "The
whole Iran thing seemed kind of flimsy," Goddard said.
James Bernazzani, then the head of the FBI's Hezbollah office, was
directed in October 1997 to
assemble a team of specialists to go to Buenos Aires and put the AMIA case
to rest. Bernazzani,
now head of the agency's New Orleans office, recalled in a November 2006
interview how he
arrived to find that the Argentine investigation of the AMIA bombing had
found no real evidence
of Iranian or Hezbollah involvement. The only clues suggesting an Iranian
link to the bombing
at that time, according to Bernazzani, were a surveillance tape of Iranian
cultural attache
Mohsen Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic van and an analysis of
telephone calls made in the
weeks before the bombing.
Shortly after the bombing, the biggest Buenos Aires daily newspaper,
Clarin, published a story,
leaked to it by Judge Galeano, that Argentine intelligence had taped
Rabbani shopping for a
white Trafic "months" before the bombing. A summary of the warrants for
the arrest of Rabbani
and six other Iranians in 2006 continued to refer to "indisputable
do***ents" proving that
Rabbani had visited car dealers to look for a van like the one allegedly
used in the bombing.
In fact, the intelligence re****t on the surveillance of Rabbani submitted
to Galeano ten days
after the bombing shows that the day Rabbani looked at a car dealer's
white Trafic was May 1,
1993--fifteen months before the bombing and long before Argentine
prosecutors have claimed Iran
decided to target AMIA.
In the absence of any concrete evidence, SIDE turned to "link analysis" of
telephone records to
make a cir***stantial case for Iranian guilt. The SIDE analysts argued
that a series of
telephone calls made between July 1 and July 18, 1994, to a mobile phone
in the Brazilian
border city of Foz de Iguazu must have been made by the "operational
group" for the
bombing--and that a call allegedly made on a cellphone belonging to
Rabbani could be connected
to this same group. The FBI's Bernazzani told me he was appalled by SIDE's
use of link analysis
to establish responsibility. "It can be very dangerous," he told me.
"Using that analysis, you
could link my telephone to bin Laden's." Bernazzani said the conclusions
reached by the
Argentine investigators were merely "speculation" and said that neither he
nor officials in
Wa****ngton had taken it seriously as evidence pointing to Iran.
Then, in 2000, one more defector surfaced with a new tale of Iranian
responsibility.
Abdolghassem Mesbahi, who claimed he was once the third-ranking man in
Iran's intelligence
services, told Galeano the decision to bomb the AMIA had been made at a
meeting of senior
Iranian officials, including President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, on August
14, 1993. But
Mesbahi was soon discredited. Bernazzani told me American intelligence
officials believed that
by 2000, Mesbahi had long since lost his access to Iranian intelligence,
that he was "poor,
even broke" and ready to "provide testimony to any country on any case
involving Iran."
A Questionable Informant
Bernazzani admitted to me that until 2003, the case against Iran was
merely "cir***stantial."
But he claimed a breakthrough came that year, with the identification of
the alleged suicide
bomber as Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Lebanese Hezbollah militant, who,
according to a Lebanese
radio broadcast, was killed in a military operation against Israeli forces
in southern Lebanon
in September 1984, two months after the AMIA bombing. "We are satisfied
that we have identified
the bomber based on the totality of the data streams," Bernazzani told me,
citing "a
combination of physical and witness evidence." But the Berro
identification, too, was marked by
evidence of fabrication and manipulation.
The official story is that Berro's name was passed on to SIDE and the CIA
by a Lebanese
informant in June 2001. The informant claimed he had befriended a former
Hezbollah chauffeur
and assistant to top Hezbollah leaders named Abu Mohamad Yassin, who told
him that a Hezbollah
militant named "Brru" was the suicide bomber. That story is suspicious on
several counts, the
most obvious being that intelligence agencies almost never reveal the
name, or even the former
position, of an actual informant.
The September 2003 court testimony of Patricio Pfinnen, the SIDE official
in charge of the AMIA
bombing investigation until he was fired in January 2002, casts serious
doubt on the
informant's credibility. Pfinnen testified that when he and his colleagues
went back to the
informant with more questions, "something went wrong with the information,
or they were lying
to us." Pfinnen said his team ultimately discarded the Berro theory
because the sources in
Lebanon had "failed and were not certain." He concluded, "I have my doubts
about [Berro] being
the person who was immolated."
After Pfinnen was fired in a power struggle within the intelligence
agency, SIDE named Berro as
the suicide bomber in a secret re****t. In March 2003, just after that
re****t was completed,
Ha'aretz re****ted that the Mossad had not only identified the bomber as
Berro but possessed a
transcript of Berro's farewell telephone call to Lebanon before the
bombing, during which he
told his parents that he was going to "join" his brother, who had been
killed in a suicide
bombing in Lebanon. When the 2006 indictment was released, however, it
became clear that no
evidence of such a call existed.
In September 2004, a Buenos Aires court acquitted Telleldin and the police
officials who had
been jailed years earlier, and in August 2005 Judge Galeano was impeached
and removed from
office. But Galeano's successors, prosecutors Alberto Nisman and Marcelo
Martinez Burgos,
pressed on, hoping to convince the world that they could identify Berro as
the bomber. They
visited Detroit, Michigan, where they interviewed two brothers of Berro
and obtained photos of
Berro from them. They then turned to the only witness who claimed she had
seen the white Trafic
at the scene of the crime--Nicolasa Romero.
In November 2005, Nisman and Burgos announced that Romero had identified
Berro from the Detroit
photos as the same person she had seen just before the bombing. Romero, on
the other hand, said
she "could not be completely certain" that Berro was the man at the scene.
In court testimony,
in fact, she had said she had not recognized Berro from the first set of
set of four
photographs she had been shown or even from a second set. She finally saw
some "similarity in
the face" in one of the Berro photographs, but only after she was shown a
police sketch based
on her description after the bombing.
Bernazzani told me that the FBI team in Buenos Aires had discovered DNA
evidence that was
assumed to have come from the suicide bomber in an evidence locker, and
Nisman took a DNA
sample from one of Berro's brothers during his visit in September 2005. "I
would assume, though
I don't know, that once we got the brother's DNA, they compared them," he
said. But Nisman
claimed to a re****ter in 2006 that samples had been contaminated.
Significantly, the Argentine
indictment of the Iranians makes no mention of the DNA evidence.
Despite a case against Iran that lacked credible forensic or eyewitness
evidence and relied
heavily on dubious intelligence and a discredited defector's testimony,
Nisman and Burgos
drafted their indictment against six former Iranian officials in 2006.
However, the government
of Néstor Kirchner displayed doubts about going forward with a legal case.
According to the
Forward newspaper, when American Jewish groups pressed Kirchner's wife,
Christina, about the
indictments at a UN General Assembly in New York in September 2006, she
indicated that there
was no firm date for any further judicial action against Iran. Yet the
indictment was released
the following month.
Both the main lawyer representing the AMIA, Miguel Bronfman, and Judge
Rodolfo Canicoba Corral,
who later issued the arrest warrants for the Iranians, told the BBC last
May that pressure from
Wa****ngton was instrumental in the sudden decision to issue the
indictments the following
month. Corral indicated that he had no doubt that the Argentine
authorities had been urged to
"join in international attempts to isolate the regime in Tehran."
A senior White House official just called the AMIA case a "very clear
definition of what
Iranian state sponsor****p of terrorism means." In fact, the US insistence
on pinning that crime
on Iran in order to isolate the Tehran regime, even though it had no
evidence to sup****t that
accusation, is a perfect definition of cynical creation of an accusation
in the service of
power interests.
Gareth ****ter is an investigative historian and journalist. His most
recent book is Perils of
Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University
of California Press,
2005).
--
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