US
hypes Iran terror threat again By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
PALO ALTO,
California - Like left-over food repeatedly
reheated for public consumption, United States
allegations of an Iranian plot to assassinate the
Saudi ambassador in Washington received a new
lease of life on Monday via the congressional
testimony of the Director of National
Intelligence, James Clapper, as a dress rehearsal
for a fuller bout of Iran-bashing at this week's
"threat assessment" hearings in congress.
In October last year, the United States
Justice Department charged a dual Iranian-American
national and an alleged member of the Islamic
Republic's special operations unit Qods Force of
conspiring to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in
Washington, Adel al-Jubeir.
A 21-page
indictment filed in New York federal court said
the two named defendants, US-based Manssor
Arbabsiar and Iran-based
Gholam Shakuri, sought
to hire someone who they believed was a member of
a Mexican drug cartel but who was actually an
informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency to carry
out the plot in exchange for US$1.5 million.
Arbabsiar, who allegedly arranged a down
payment of $100,000 to the informant, was arrested
on September 29 at JFK Airport in New York on a
return flight from Mexico where he had been denied
entry.
As a result of Clapper's comments,
instead of focusing on the crucial Iran visit by
International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, US
media are concentrating on the new leaks on the
"Iran threat" that once again fuel political
hysteria against Iran in a maneuver to sidetrack
Iran's nuclear transparency.
That plot
"shows that some Iranian officials - probably
including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei - have
changed their calculus and are now more willing to
conduct an attack in the United States in response
to real or perceived US actions that threaten the
regime", Clapper said in his prepared testimony.
This despite the great deal of discontent
and internal grumbling in the US intelligence
community over the allegations, which many see as
untenable and suspect will unravel.
For
now, however, the bosses are banking on a quiet
and compliant Western media that eschews its
earlier skepticism regarding the seemingly
concocted terror plot. With the stakes being so
high, geostrategically speaking, putting
Iranphobia into a higher gear makes only
short-term sense, from the US's vantage point, yet
one with serious side-effect.
This author
has provided a legal deconstruction [1] of the US
terror story that cites numerous reasons to
question the US allegation by pin-pointing various
flaws, contradictions and implausible defects in
the US investigation. These include missing
charges, unnamed defendants, flip-flops on the
"terror money," the over-usage of a paid informer,
unreliable confessions and signs of entrapment,
etc.
For Clapper and his intelligence
officers to claim that Iran's supreme leader was
directly involved in an amateurish plot centered
on a used-car salesman who was granted US
citizenship only a precious few months before the
plot's exposure smacks of an American indulgence
in its Cold War pastime of demonizing the "hostile
other".
The indications are that the US
has tried to frame Iran with a fictitious terror
plot to up the ante against the Islamic Republic,
call it another mischief of the empire striking
back at Tehran at a critical time of growing
tumult in the pro-West status quo in the Middle
East encapsulated under the term Arab Spring,
although a better description may be Arab storm,
denoting an ongoing political hurricane targeting
the US's favorite dictators.
Suffice to
say that the US criminal complaint, presently
pending in a Manhattan court, is permeated with
the unpleasant odor of ill-intent and malicious
prosecution.
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