“Today we are all Nisman” - demonstrators demand justice for the death of prosecutor Natalio Alberto Nisman in the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace in Argentina during a Jan. 19 protest convened over the social networks. His murder shook the entire nation. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 21 2015 (IPS)

The death of a special prosecutor investigating one of the biggest unresolved mysteries in the history of Argentina, the bombing of a Jewish community centre over 20 years ago, has put to the test an immature democracy that is caught up in a web of conspiracy theories and promiscuity between the secret services and those in power.

The victim was Natalio Alberto Nisman, found dead Sunday Jan. 18, the day before he was to present to Congress alleged evidence that President Cristina Fernández had taken part, according to him, in a cover-up of five Iranians suspected of involvement in the Jul. 18, 1994 attack on the AMIA building which left 85 dead and 300 wounded.

The scene of his death – which officials have described as occurring in mysterious circumstances that prompted the need to investigate whether he was pressured to kill himself, under threat – was his apartment in the Puerto Madero neighbourhood in the capital of Argentina.

“This mystery is similar to the story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ that Edgar Allan Poe published in 1841: doors locked from the inside, no balcony, on the 13th floor of an apartment building not accessible by any other means, the body collapsed on the floor of the bathroom blocking the door…one single shot to the temple and without the intervention of another person,” wrote journalist Horacio Verbitsky in the pro-government newspaper Página 12.

Argentines tend to turn to noir novels to describe their own history.

Among the highest-profile unresolved crimes is the disappearance of the hands of the embalmed corpse of former president Juan Domingo Perón in 1987, blamed on a ritual by the Masonic lodge known as Propaganda Due, or P2; an attempt to deal a blow to the country as it had recently returned to democracy in 1983; or an effort to symbolically destroy the cult surrounding the late leader who governed the country from 1946-1955 and 1973-1974.

But in the current global scenario and not so long after the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, which left 30,000 people “disappeared”, the prosecutor’s death has revived the sensation of vulnerability and “déjà vu”, with ingredients from a modern-day police novel.

“We’re all vulnerable. Today they came for him, tomorrow they’ll come for us,” Rita Vega, a teacher, told IPS while taking part in a Jan. 19 protest in the Plaza de Mayo, the square in front of the presidential palace.

The demonstration was convened over the social networks under the theme “I am Nisman”, inspired by the “I am Charlie” campaign that followed the Jan. 7 attack on the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

“Argentine democracy, which is entering its 32nd year, is solid and peaceful enough to weather blows like the one dealt by the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman,” international analyst Martín Granovsky told IPS.

His death has once more divided Argentine society, between those who from the political opposition blame the centre-left Fernández administration for Nisman’s death and government supporters who say the prosecutor committed suicide because he didn’t have proof to back up his accusations, or was “induced” to kill himself.

Ronald Noble, the head of Interpol until late 2014, refuted Nisman’s accusations (based on wiretaps) that the president and officials close to her had asked for the cancellation of international arrest warrants against five Iranians suspected of involvement in the 1994 attack on AMIA, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina Jewish community centre.

On Jan. 14, Nisman accused Fernández of a cover-up aimed at “forging closer relations with the Iranian regime and fully reestablishing trade ties to ease Argentina’s severe energy crisis, through a swap of oil for grains.”

Granovsky, the analyst, said “The AMIA case has a basic problem: when Carlos Menem was president (1989-1999), the state did not carry out an in-depth investigation into the bombing in the first few days, and in addition the complicities generated by the security forces’ side business dealings stood in the way of a serious probe.”

The president brought up that hypothesis, in her first statement on Nisman’s death, through Facebook, stressing that it “suggestively” happened just before the start of the trial for the cover-up of the attack, in which Menem, a former intelligence chief and others are implicated.

The head of the lower house of parliament, lawmaker Julián Domínguez of the governing Frente para la Victoria, said “we want to know what event or what mafioso sector prompted Mr. Nisman to take the decision he took.

“We are certain that there are segments of the intelligence community, the last redoubt that democracy has not yet been able to penetrate, seeking to create signs of instability and to pressure judges,” he said.

In December, the government removed Antonio ‘Jaime’ Stiuso as director of operations in the Intelligence Secretariat.

The ties between Stiuso and Nisman were well-known, and according to government leaks it was Stiuso who made the prosecutor come back early from his vacation in Europe in the middle of the judicial break to make his presentation to the legislature on Monday Jan. 19.

Néstor Pitrola, a legislator with the Workers’ Party, which forms part of the opposition Frente de Izquierda (Left Front), pointed out that Nisman was named special prosecutor in the AMIA case by late president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), Fernández’s predecessor and husband. But “a political shift created an internal war in the justice system and the intelligence services,” he said.

According to Pitrola, the prosecutor’s death revealed the presence of “an intelligence state within the state.

“Three weeks before Nisman made his allegations, the intelligence services were beheaded to the benefit of a new intelligence clique, led by (César) Milani, a repressor during the dictatorship who has been questioned by the justice system,” he said.

Atilio Borón, a former executive secretary of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), said Nisman’s death especially hurts the government, which is the most interested in disproving the prosecutor’s supposed evidence, in a year when both presidential and legislative elections are to be held.

“He was a man who was very mixed up with the services, people you don’t play around with. You don’t fool with the CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency), you don’t play with the Mossad (Israel’s secret service). He took instructions from them; you can see the Wikileaks cables, which have never been refuted,” he said.

Borón also said the international context, “what some call the West’s war against Islam,” should not be ignored.

In that vein, Gustavo Sierra, a journalist with the opposition daily Clarin, referred to “speculations of international intelligence” on the role that Iranian agents or their allies might have played in the prosecutor’s “induced” death, because he might have hurt their interests.

“Could Iranian intelligence have induced Nisman to commit suicide by threatening to kill one of his daughters, who lives in Europe? Did they have compromising information that implicated the prosecutor? Did they manage to make it through the Puerto Madero apartment building’s security barrier using some agent who was able to make it look like a suicide, without being detected?” Sierra wrote.

The plot is too complex, and even the mystery that gave rise to it has never been resolved: who was responsible for the worst attack suffered by Argentina, in a saga that Fernández described as “too long, too heavy, too hard, and above all, very sordid.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman based his 2006 warrant for the arrest of top Iranian officials in the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 on the claims of representatives of the armed Iranian opposition Mujahedin E Khalq (MEK), the full text of the document reveals.

The central piece of evidence cited in Nisman’s original 900-page arrest warrant against seven senior Iranian leaders is an alleged Aug. 14, 1993 meeting of top Iranian leaders, including both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then president Hashemi Rafsanjani, at which Nisman claims the official decision was made to go ahead with the planning of the bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA).

But the document, recently available in English for the first time, shows that his only sources for the claim were representatives of the MEK or People’s Mujahideen of Iran. The MEK has an unsavoury history of terrorist bombings against civilian targets in Iran, as well as of serving as an Iraq-based mercenary army for Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Iran-Iraq War.

The organisation was removed from the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups last year after a campaign by prominent former U.S. officials who had gotten large payments from pro-MEK groups and individuals to call for its “delisting”.

Nisman’s rambling and repetitious report cites statements by four members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which is the political arm of the MEK, as the sources for the charge that Iran decided on the AMIA bombing in August 1993.

The primary source is Reza Zakeri Kouchaksaraee, president of the Security and Intelligence Committee of the NCRI. The report quotes Kouchaksaraee as testifying to an Argentine Oral Court in 2003, “The decision was made by the Supreme National Security Council at a meeting that was held on 14 August, 1993. This meeting lasted only two hours from 4:30 to 6:30 pm.”

Nisman also quotes Hadi Roshanravani, a member of the International Affairs Committee of the NCRI, who claimed to know the same exact starting time of the meeting – 4:30 pm – but gave the date as Aug. 12, 1993 rather than Aug. 14.

Roshanravani also claimed to know the precise agenda of the meeting. The NCRI official said that three subjects were discussed: “The progress and assessment of the Palestinian Council; the strategy of exporting fundamentalism throughout the world; and the future of Iraq.” Roshanravani said “the idea for an attack in Argentina” had been discussed “during the dialogue on the second point”.

The NCRI/MEK was claiming that the Rafsanjani government had decided on a terrorist bombing of a Jewish community centre in Argentina as part of a policy of “exporting fundamentalism throughout the world”.

But that MEK propaganda line about the Iranian regime was contradicted by the U.S. intelligence assessment at the time. In its National Intelligence Estimate 34-91 on Iranian foreign policy, completed on Oct. 17, 1991, U.S. intelligence concluded that Rafsanjani had been “gradually turning away from the revolutionary excesses of the past decade…toward more conventional behavior” since taking over as president in 1989.

Ali Reza Ahmadi and Hamid Reza Eshagi, identified as “defectors” who were affiliated with NCRI, offered further corroboration of the testimony by the leading NCRI officials. Ahmadi was said by Nisman to have worked as an Iranian foreign service officer from 1981 to 1985. Eshagi is not otherwise identified.

Nisman quotes Ahmadi and Eshagi, who made only joint statements, as saying, “It was during a meeting held at 4:30 pm in August 1993 that the Supreme National Security Council decided to carry out activities in Argentina.”

Nisman does not cite any non-MEK source as claiming such a meeting took place. He cites court testimony by Abolghassem Mesbahi, a “defector” who had not worked for the Iranian intelligence agency since 1985, according to his own account, but only to the effect that the Iranian government made the decision on AMIA sometime in 1993. Mesbahi offered no evidence to support the claim.

Nisman repeatedly cites the same four NCRI members to document the alleged participation of each of the seven senior Iranians for whom he requested arrest warrants. A review of the entire document shows that Kouchaksaraee is cited by Nisman 29 times, Roshanravani 16 times and Ahmadi and Eshagi 16 times, always together making the same statement for a total of 61 references to their testimony.

Nisman cited no evidence or reason to believe that any of the MEK members were in a position to have known about such a high-level Iranian meeting. Although MEK propaganda has long claimed access to secrets, their information has been at best from low-level functionaries in the regime.

In using the testimony of the most violent opponents of the Iranian regime to accuse the most senior Iranian officials of having decided on the AMIA terrorist bombing, Nisman sought to deny the obvious political aim of all MEK information output of building support in the United States and Europe for the overthrow of the Iranian regime.

“The fact that the individuals are opponents of the Iranian regime does not detract in the least from the significance of their statements,” Nisman declared.

In an effort to lend the group’s testimony credibility, Nisman described their statements as being made “with honesty and rigor in a manner that respects nuances and details while still maintaining a sense of the larger picture”.

The MEK witnesses, Nisman wrote, could be trusted as “completely truthful”.

The record of MEK officials over the years, however, has been one of putting out one communiqué after another that contained information about alleged covert Iranian work on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, nearly all of which turned out to be false when they were investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The only significant exception to the MEK’s overall record of false information on the Iranian nuclear programme was its discovery of Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility and its Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.

But even in that case, the MEK official who announced the Natanz discovery, U.S. representative Alireza Jafarzadeh, incorrectly identified it as a “fuel fabrication facility” rather than as an enrichment facility. He also said it was near completion, although it was actually several months from having the equipment necessary to begin enrichment.

Contrary to the MEK claims that it got the information on Natanz from sources in the Iranian government, moreover, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh reported, a “senior IAEA official” told him in 2004 that Israeli intelligence had passed their satellite intelligence on Natanz to the MEK.

An adviser to Reza Pahlavi, the heir to the Shah, later told journalist Connie Bruck that the information about Natanz had come from “a friendly government”, which had provided it to both the Pahlavi organisation and the MEK.

Nisman has long been treated in pro-Israel, anti-Iran political circles as the authoritative source on the AMIA bombing case and the broader subject of Iran and terrorism. Last May, Nisman issued a new 500-page report accusing Iran of creating terrorist networks in the Western hemisphere that builds on his indictment of Iran for the 1994 bombing.

But Nisman’s readiness to base the crucial accusation against Iran in the AMIA case solely on MEK sources and his denial of their obvious unreliability highlights the fact that he has been playing a political role on behalf of certain powerful interests rather than uncovering the facts.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Paul Singer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2013. Credit: WEF/cc by 2.0

By Charles Davis
LOS ANGELES, Jul 31 2013 (IPS)

Vulture capitalist Paul Singer has hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in his legal battle with Argentina over the country’s 2001 debt default.

The promise of a huge payday has led the Wall Street hedge fund manager to sink a small fortune into a campaign against the South American nation portraying it as a close – and anti-U.S. – ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran. (See series, Part One)

One way he has done this is by issuing press releases through the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), a trade group he helped found, and buying full-page ads in major newspapers.

Giving money to politicians is another way to affect the debate in the United States.

Senator Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, has been a vocal critic of Argentina, writing a letter to the country’s president denouncing her agreement with Iran to investigate the the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in Buenos Aires. That letter was later quoted in an ATFA ad.

As it turns out, Kirk has received more than 95,000 dollars from employees of Singer’s firm, Elliott Management, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics. Indeed, many letters expressing concern about Argentina’s ties to Iran appear are signed by lawmakers who have received campaign cash from Singer and his close associates.

A Jul. 10 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, for instance, urged the Justice Department not to side with Argentina in its legal battle before the Supreme Court, citing both the AMIA agreement and Argentina’s expanding trade with the Islamic Republic “at a time when the rest of the world (including the United States) is attempting to isolate Iran to pressure it to give up its nuclear programme.”

“Rewarding Argentina’s decision to flout well-established international principles regarding the orderly restructuring of sovereign debt has clearly emboldened its leaders to defy other international norms with impunity,” the 12 lawmakers wrote.

Those who signed the letter received more than 200,000 dollars last year from companies and PACs tied to Singer.

One signer, Congressman Michael Grimm, a New York Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, was reelected to Congress last year after receiving 38,000 dollars from Elliott Management, nearly twice as much as his next largest donor.

Grimm has cosponsored legislation demanding “full compensation” for Argentina’s bondholders – the sponsor of that bill, former Congressman Connie Mack, took in 39,000 dollars from Singer’s company – and has urged the Barack Obama administration to investigate Argentina’s relationship with Iran. ATFA has commended Grimm for his work.

Another lawmaker who signed the letter to Holder is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She accuses the Argentine government of colluding with the Islamic Republic to cover up its alleged role in the AMIA bombing and undermining U.S. interests “by giving Iran a larger footprint in the Western Hemisphere”.

But she isn’t just worried about Iranian-backed terrorism. In a 2012 press release, she said it was “troubling that Argentina refuses to honor its outstanding debts, and evades U.S. court decisions.”

Ros-Lehtinen received 108,000 dollars last year from the American Unity PAC. The PAC was founded in 2012 with a one-million-dollar investment from Singer, accounting for more than a third of the group’s budget.

New Jersey Republican Scott Garrett, chair of the House Financial Services subcommittee on capital markets, also signed the letter to Holder. On Jun. 7, 2012, Garrett held a hearing to address the Obama administration’s support for “deadbeat foreign governments . . . at the expense of our own U.S. investors.”

At the hearing, he decried that “U.S. investors are taking billions of dollars in losses, despite Argentina having the money to pay the bill.”

Garrett received 35,000 dollars from employees at Elliott Management last year, more than all but one of his other campaign contributors.

On Jul. 9, a House subcommittee chaired by South Carolina Republican Jeff Duncan held a hearing entitled “Threat to the Homeland: Iran’s Extending Influence in the Western Hemisphere”, the primary purpose of which was to rebut a recent report from the State Department that said Iran’s influence was on the decline.

Duncan received 10,000 dollars in 2012 from the Every Republican is Crucial PAC, which was heavily supported by the executives of Wall Street hedge funds, including Singer.

At the hearing, Douglas Farah, a former Washington Post reporter turned right-wing foreign policy analyst, testified that Argentina “is rapidly becoming one of Iran’s most important allies.”

He accused the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of taking steps “aimed at absolving senior Iranian leaders of their responsibility in a major terrorist attack,” while also embracing “a series of seemingly irrational economic and political polices that favour transnational organised crime, are overtly hostile to U.S. interests, and could offer Iran a lifeline in both its economic crisis and its nuclear programme.”

That testimony was followed by a Jul. 11 letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, signed by a bipartisan group of politicians, including Singer-supported lawmakers Duncan and Grimm.

The letter, which warned that “Argentina may be seeking to aid Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons programme,” urged the secretary to weigh the Fernández government’s “ties with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism” when considering whether the State Department will side with Argentina in its legal battle with U.S. hedge funds.

Farah, whose testimony was cited in the letter, wrote a Jun. 26 column for the Miami Herald in which he referred to Argentina’s “increasingly cozy relationship with the ayatollahs,” citing the 2012 Nisman report to claim Iran is using the country as a base from which to conduct intelligence and terror operations with the ultimate goal of “exporting the Iranian revolution”.

The column also asserts that the president-elect of Iran “would have been infinitely familiar with the planning” of the 1994 AMIA bombing, a claim echoed by other right-wing pundits but which Nisman himself rejected a day before the column was published.

The column was co-authored by Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative think tank that has been highly critical of Argentina’s relations with Iran. This year, FDD and its analysts have published more than a half-dozen such critiques.

“Why is Argentina letting Iran examine the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, a crime Hezbollah surely committed?” asked Lee Smith, an editor at The Weekly Standard and fellow at FDD, in a column for Tablet magazine. In The Atlantic, FDD’s vice president of research, Jonathan Schanzer, explored the “dark connections between Argentina’s government and Tehran”.

Since 2008, Singer has given FDD at least 3.6 million dollars, according to a 2011 tax filing seen by IPS.

Conservative connections

FDD is but one of many neoconservative organisations with ties to Singer. Since there aren’t that many neoconservatives to begin with, those who don’t recoil at the label all tend to know each other – and serve on each other’s boards.

William Kristol, publisher of The Weekly Standard, serves on the board of the Singer-funded FDD, as well as the Manhattan Institute, a New York think tank that advocates hands-off capitalism and an interventionist military policy; Singer is the chairman of the institute’s board.

In the small world of neoconservative politics, even when there aren’t necessarily financial ties, everyone still knows each other. Still, there are usually financial ties.

In March, Roger Noriega, another former Bush administration official, wrote a piece with José Cárdenas – another Bush official who now works at Noriega’s consulting firm – calling on the U.S. government to hold Argentina accountable “for its failures to abide by its obligations to international financial institutions” and “troubling alliances with rogue governments”. The piece was published by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential neoconservative think tank in Washington.

Noriega has been paid at least 60,000 dollars (in 2007) by Elliott Management to lobby on the issue of “Sovereign Debt Owed to a U.S. Company.” A tax filing that was mistakenly disclosed and reported on by The Nation shows that the publisher of Noriega’s piece, AEI, received 1.1 million dollars from Singer in 2009. Filings for subsequent years have not been made public.

Asked to comment, an AEI spokesperson told IPS that the think tank had “looked into the matter” and found Noriega “has no conflicts of interest in this regard”.

The other people and organisations named in this article did not respond to requests for comment.

Money is power

Singer has used his riches the way a lot of other wealthy people do: to get richer, of course, but also to promote what he believes – and fund the politicians and pundits who will promote it too.

At the very least, those who benefit from his generosity are going to think twice about opposing his interests; one doesn’t bite the hand that feeds. Some may even see the money they receive from Singer as a reason to actively promote his interests.

One thing is clear: no matter how his case against Argentina turns out, Paul Singer is going to be a very rich and powerful man. If he wins, though, he will be richer. And money in the United States means the power to shape the debate not just on financial matters, but war and peace.

Excerpt:

By Charles Davis
LOS ANGELES, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

When Argentina defaulted on its national debt in 2001, U.S. hedge funds swooped in to buy the nation’s bonds at pennies on the dollar, confident they would eventually prevail in the U.S. legal system and force the country to pay out in full.

That battle is set to reach the Supreme Court later this year, but the country’s creditors on Wall Street – labeled “vulture capitalists” by their critics – are also making their case in Congress and the court of public opinion, with a current media campaign aimed at painting Argentina as an increasingly rogue nation in bed with Washington’s enemies.

The public relations effort, which focuses on Argentina’s increasingly friendly relations with Iran, comes as the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is weighing whether to side with Argentina before the Supreme Court in its battle with Wall Street. According to The Washington Post, officials from the Justice Department, Treasury Department and State Department met Jul. 12 with lawyers from both sides to discuss the case.

In previous court filings, the Obama administration has argued that Argentina’s debt is not a matter for the U.S. legal system, reflecting concerns that a victory for its holdout bondholders could cause another default and complicate future debt restructuring plans for other nations.

However, Argentina’s bondholders, including one of the top financiers of right-wing politics in the U.S., have a string of victories under their belt. In October 2012, a federal appeals court ruled that the South American nation and member of the G20 must pay out more than 1.3 billion dollars to its creditors.

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced Jul. 24 that it would not formally side with Argentina in its U.S. legal battle. An IMF statement cited opposition from the Obama administration.

That the White House is backing away from its earlier defences of Argentina indicates that the millions of dollars U.S. hedge funds have spent lobbying members of the administration, Congress and the press are starting to change the debate, with Iran about as popular as Iraq was in 2002.

“We do whatever we can to get our government and media’s attention focused on what a bad actor Argentina is,” Robert Raben, executive director of the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), recently explained to The Huffington Post.

An assistant attorney general under President Bill Clinton (1993-2001), Raben’s group was founded by Argentina’s holdout bondholders and, to date, has spent at least 3.8 million dollars on its efforts to paint Argentina in a bad light. But the money it has spent pales in comparison to what ATFA’s funders stand to gain.

In 2008, hedge fund NML Capital – whose parent company Elliott Management, led by major Republican donor Paul Singer, is spearheading the legal and political battle over Argentina’s debt obligations – paid 48 million dollars for bonds that prior to the country’s default had been valued at over 300 million dollars.

After the default, more than 92 percent of Argentina’s bondholders agreed to accept a fraction of what they were originally owed as part of a negotiated settlement. NML, however, insists Argentina pay out the full 370 million dollars, which would be a return of more than 770 percent on the firm’s initial investment.

Singer has done this before, purchasing bonds worth around 30 million dollars from the world’s poorest country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and suing for repayment of over 100 million dollars. In the case of Argentina, the groups behind ATFA stand to gain more than 1.3 billion dollars.

Including fights going on in other jurisdictions, however, Singer alone ultimately stands to gain more than two billion dollars in his battle with the South American nation. But it’s not just about debt anymore.

A request for comment from ATFA was not responded to by deadline.

Fear of an Iranian planet

Paul Singer is a very rich man – one of the 400 richest in the world. According to Forbes, the hedge fund manager and founder of Elliott Management has a net worth of 1.3 billion dollars. That wealth has enabled him to become one of the top funders of the Republican Party.

In 2012, he gave more than one million dollars to the party’s failed presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, and millions more to those lower down on the ballot. Employees of his firm, meanwhile, gave more than three million dollars to various politicians, making his company one of the top 100 funders of U.S. politics. And those politics are decidedly to the right.

In 2007, Singer described himself as a believer in American exceptionalism, noting that he has given “millions of dollars to Republican organizations that emphasize a strong military and support Israel.” Speaking to the New York Times, Singer explained that he believes the West “finds itself at an early stage of a drawn-out existential struggle with radical strains of pan-national Islamists.”

In the case of Argentina’s relations with Iran, which have grown to more than one billion dollars per year in trade, he finds his financial interests and fear of radical Islam perfectly aligned: by stoking fear of the latter, the U.S. government may be less inclined to interfere with the former.

“What’s the TRUTH About Argentina’s Deal With Iran?” asks a recent full-page ad from ATFA placed in The Washington Post. The deal in question concerns an agreement announced by the governments of Argentina and Iran to open a “Truth Commission” examining the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), which killed 85 people and injured more than 300.

Another ATFA ad featuring photos of Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and outgoing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad poses the question: “A Pact with the Devil?”

A 2006 report from Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman fingered Iran as the culprit, allegedly using the Lebanese group Hezbollah as a proxy. That led to INTERPOL arrest warrants being issued for several high-level Iranian officials.

An updated 2013 report from Nisman, oft-cited in the media campaign against Argentina, claimed the attack was but one piece of evidence for the existence of an extensive Iranian intelligence apparatus throughout South America that has only grown since the AMIA attack, a conclusion that contradicts the US State Department’s recent assessment that any influence Iran had in the region is now “waning”.

No one has ever been convicted in the AMIA case, which has been hampered by a botched prosecution and judicial corruption. Concerns have also been raised about the veracity of Nisman’s report, which claims Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, approved the bombing at a meeting in Tehran just months prior to the attack, a finding that is based on the testimony of a former Iranian intelligence official known as Aboghasem Mesbahi who defected from the Islamic Republic in 1996.

That defector previously told U.S. officials that Iran had funded and facilitated the Sep. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, claiming he was made aware of the authorisation by secret messages in newspapers. His testimony was dismissed by the 9/11 Commission.

In its ad, ATFA quotes a letter from Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, and Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, to President Kirchner expressing concern that the opening of the commission “will lead to a dismissal of charges and the whitewashing of this heinous crime”.

The ad also quotes a defiant Iranian politician stating that under “no circumstances” will the Islamic Republic allow its senior officials to be questioned by any Argentine judges or prosecutors.

Though not mentioned in the ad, Iran’s refusal to submit to the Argentine legal system is the ostensible reason for the “truth commission”, which would create a panel of independent jurists from third-party nations to assess the case and, alongside Argentine jurists, interview suspects in Iran.

The details of Argentina’s relationship with Iran – which consists mostly of agricultural exports – are not terribly important to ATFA, however. Instead, as its executive director put it, that group would simply like to know: “Why is Argentina willing to negotiate with Iran, but not with its law-abiding creditors?”

Argentina has of course successfully negotiated with nine out of 10 of its creditors. But the holdouts, led by Singer, think they can get the whole pot. (See series, Part Two)

Excerpt:

The Obama administration made no assertion of Iranian involvement when it brought the JFK airport plot to trial in 2010. Credit: public domain

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Jul 11 2013 (IPS)

Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor who was prevented by Argentine President Cristina Kirchner from testifying before a U.S. House subcommittee investigating alleged Iranian terrorist networks in the Americas here this week, claimed in a recent report that Tehran was involved in a 2007 plot to blow up fuel tanks at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.

But his report offers no actual evidence that Iran was ever even aware of the airport plot, and the official documents in the case indicate that the U.S. government found no such evidence either.

Nisman’s sensational charge appears to be aimed at undermining the Argentine government’s recent agreement with Iran to jointly determine the truth about the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in which 85 people were killed.

Nisman also wrote a “request for arrests” in 2006 charging that the entire Iranian government leadership was responsible for the AMIA bombing.

Israel and Jewish leaders in Argentina strongly opposed the new accord with Iran, fearing that it could cast doubt on Nisman’s 2006 call for the arrest of top Iranian officials.

In a 31-page summary of a 502-page report issued May 29, Nisman declares, “In this petition, it has been proved that the Iranian authorities not only had been informed of this plan to attack JFK Airport but they appear to be seriously involved in this operation.”

But the summary report contains no real evidence to support such a conclusion. The Barack Obama administration, which was eager to show that Iran was involved in terrorist threats in the United States – as it did in the case of the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador – made no such assertion when it brought the case of the JFK airport plot to trial in 2010.

Nisman bases his claim of Iranian involvement in the JFK plot on his own characterisation of one of the four men convicted in the plot, Abdul Kadir, then a member of Guyana’s parliament, as a “veteran intelligence agent” of Iran.

The Argentine prosecutor asserts that Kadir worked as a spy for Mohsen Rabbani, the former Iranian cultural attache in Argentina who Nisman had accused in 2006 of being the mastermind in the 1994 bombing. In his report, he refers to Kadir’s “deeply-rooted connections” with Iran and describes him as being in “hierarchical subordination” to Rabbani.

But the only evidence Nisman cites in support of those dramatic terms is a series of handwritten letters sent by Kadir to Rabbani and the fact that contact information on Rabbani was found in Kadir’s address book.

The information said to have been found in Kadir’s letters doesn’t appear to be of a kind that covert operatives would normally be expected to provide. As Kadir testified at his trial, it was information that was available in newspapers on the social, economic and political situation in Guyana. That testimony was not contradicted by government witnesses.

The most sensitive item in his letters, according to news reports, was the fact that the army in Guyana suffered from low morale.

Neither Nisman nor the U.S. government has offered any evidence that Rabbani had requested the letters from Kadir, who apparently also sent the same or similar letters to the Iranian ambassador in Venezuela.

Kadir appears to have been eager to ingratiate himself with the Iranian regime, but nothing about the letters suggests that he was acting in an official capacity.

The JFK Airport plot only began to unfold in mid-2006 when former JFK Air Cargo handler Russell Defreitas, a native of Trinidad, met a former member of his mosque and began telling him about wanting to blow up the fuel tanks at the airport. He was unaware that the acquaintance, Steven Francis, had become an FBI informant after having been convicted of cocaine trafficking, and he immediately began recording Defreitas’s statements.

Kadir didn’t even appear in the plot until February 2007, according to an affidavit by the detective working on the case for the U.S. Attorney’s office, Robert Addonizio.
A Jun. 1, 2007 “complaint” against the four alleged conspirators made no reference to Iranian involvement in the case.

The plotters never advanced beyond grandiose ideas and had no funding and no access to explosives. The FBI apparently felt that informant Francis would need to do something to help move the plot along. A report on a meeting of case agents handling Francis in October 2006 obtained by defence lawyers quoted the handlers as saying they would talk with the informant and “task him to increase the pressure on the plotters to move ahead”.

It would have been technically impossible, moreover, for such an operation to do major damage to the airport in any case, despite the statement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in June 2007 that it would have caused “unthinkable” destruction. Blowing up the fuel tanks would have burned millions of dollars in fuel, according to experts, but caused little other damage, because of safety features built into the tanks and pipelines.

Defreitas apparently hoped that Iran might be interested in his plot. The press release of the U.S. Attorney’s office on the case in May 2011 refers to Defreitas’s decision to approach another plotter, Kareem Ibrahim of Trinidad, in the belief that Ibrahim had “connections with militant leaders in Iran”.

But when the plotters met with Ibrahim, according to detective Addonizio, he mentioned only his contacts with leaders of Jamaat al Muslimeen, a Sunni organisation that had mounted an abortive coup d’etat against the government of Trinidad in 1990.

A May 2011 statement by the U.S. Attorney’s office said the plotters had “sent Abdul Kadir to meet with his contacts in the Iranian revolutionary leadership, including Mohsen Rabbani”. But that conclusion was apparently an inference from the fact that Kadir was boarding a plane for Venezuela hoping to go on to Iran, when he was arrested in Trinidad.

No communication by Kadir with Iranian officials about the plot has come to light.

Foreign governments and the news media treated Nisman’s 2006 “request for arrest” of top Iranian officials for the 1994 Buenos Aires bombing as an authoritative source. But Nisman cited as evidence for his conclusion a wide range of data that did not actually support it at all.

Nisman relied entirely on the testimony of Iranian defector Aboghasem Mesbahi in accusing the leadership of the Iranian government of ordering the bombing of the AMIA community centre.

Mesbahi had claimed in affidavits to Argentine investigators that friends in Iranian intelligence had tipped him off that the decision to bomb the Jewish community centre had been made at a meeting attended by top Iranian officials in August 1993.

But in a November 2006 interview, the former head of the FBI’s Hezbollah Office, James Bernazzani, said that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded Mesbahi did not have the access to Iranian intelligence officials that he had claimed in his affidavits to Argentine officials. Bernazzani said intelligence analysts regarded Mesbahi as someone who was desperate for money and ready to “provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran”.

Mesbahi’s reputation was actually worse than that. He had also claimed at various times to have had inside information that Iran was behind the 9/11 attacks as well as the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. U.S. intelligence was sure that he was lying about the 9/11 attacks in particular, because he never communicated any such information to U.S. authorities before the attack itself.

Mesbahi also made the highly inflammatory charge that former Argentine President Carlos Menem had received a 10-million-dollar bribe from Iran placed in a specific Swiss bank account but later withdrew it.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Despite the government’s insistence that the purpose of the agreement struck with Iran is merely to investigate the 1994 bombing of the Jewish institution AMIA, as the Argentine parliament voted its ratification, discussions focused on geopolitics and the country’s position in the changing international scenario.

Following the Senate’s approval last week, Argentina’s House of Representatives voted early Thursday to adopt a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed with Iran to unblock the judicial inquiry into the terrorist attack against the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Aid Association (AMIA), which left 85 people dead and more than 300 injured.

After much debate, the agreement was finally ratified without the support of any legislators from the opposition.

The Iranian parliament still has to ratify the agreement, which will allow Argentine federal judges to travel to Tehran to question five Iranian nationals accused of planning the bombing, for whom at Argentina’s request Interpol had issued red notices (arrest warrants) in 2007.

The opposition’s greatest objection to the agreement is the establishment of a truth commission that will be formed by five independent legal experts, none of them from Argentina or Iran, to examine the legal proceedings conducted in Argentina and issue a non-binding opinion to the parties.

Among victims and relatives of the victims, positions are divided between those who see the agreement as a step back and those who view it as an opportunity, however uncertain, to move forward in a case that is at a standstill due to lack of cooperation from Iran.

Tehran has challenged the evidence allegedly found by Argentine prosecutors against the Iranian nationals and refuses to extradite the suspects.

One of the suspects is Iran’s current Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi, who, despite the Interpol red notices against him, travelled to Bolivia in 2010 to meet with President Evo Morales.

As she announced the MoU, Argentina’s central-left president, Cristina Fernández — who in the past had taken a firm stand before the United Nations General Assembly demanding that Iran comply with the extraditions– vowed she “would never allow the AMIA tragedy to be used as a pawn in a geopolitical game of chess played out by foreign interests.”

With this move, however, Argentina distances itself from the Western powers that are pressuring Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment programme through economic sanctions, but without ruling out military actions, which is what Israel is openly proposing.

“Argentina is not taking a neutral stance with this agreement. On the contrary, to Western eyes the memorandum constitutes an implicit alliance with Iran,” Argentine political scientist Andrés Malamud, a researcher at the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences, told IPS.

According to Malamud, the foreign policy pursued by Fernández and her predecessor, her late husband Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), had been marked until now by a tacit understanding with the United States.

Under that agreement, Washington backed Argentina’s efforts in multilateral financial institutions in exchange for Buenos Aires’ support in the fight against terrorism. “The AMIA case served as a kind of guarantee for that non-written pact,” Malamud said.

“From now on, though, Argentina’s foreign policy will be viewed as anti-West. It’s not a position that can’t be reversed, and the consequences are not yet serious. But it’s no longer up to our country, which is now tied to decisions that will made in Washington, Tehran and Jerusalem,” the expert said.

For Malamud, the Fernández administration’s argument is simple: the investigation is blocked and the agreement is the only possibility it has of making any progress. But, “what is the leading consequence of this high risk move that has low chances of success?” he asked.

“The answer is Argentina’s realignment in the international scenario, distancing itself from the West and moving closer to the South or to emerging powers, in Argentina’s official version, or to pariah states, in the opposing Western version,” Malamud said.

The agreement would also seem to align Argentina more closely with its counterparts in South America, namely Venezuela, Ecuador and Brazil.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez has always been clear in his support to the Iranian regime, as has been Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and to a lesser extent Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011).

In 2010, the government of then President Lula da Silva joined Turkey in an attempt to mediate with Iran in the controversy over Tehran’s nuclear programme, but the initiative was rejected by the United Nations Security Council by a “humiliating 12 votes against two,” Malamud recalled.

“Some see the alliance with Iran as beneficial for Argentina because it opens up markets, can be a source of technology or can give legitimacy to the country in the new international order that is being forged. But the most recent precedent in this sense, (the attempted mediation) by Brazil and Turkey, was not a positive one,” he said.

Brazil and Venezuela voted against Argentina’s request for red notices at Interpol’s General Assembly. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, however, adopted a less enthusiastic stance on this issue and did not meet with her Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when he attended the Rio+20 summit in 2012.

Legislators of Argentina’s governing party, such as Senator Daniel Filmus, insisted on highlighting that ratifying the agreement in no way entails supporting a regime that denies the Holocaust, refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist as a state, or persecutes minorities.

But the agreement is trapped in an international scenario that forces its players to adopt positions. While the powers of the Western Hemisphere pressure Iran to drop its nuclear programme, Argentina offers Tehran a possibility for an understanding between the two countries, without any guarantee that it will bring results in the AMIA investigation.

As Argentina’s Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman cautioned, the agreement could fall apart if the suspects refuse to be questioned. Although he added that they would also have that right if the investigation was conducted in Argentina, and that has not been possible so far.

“The agreement will have to be judged based on its results,” Malamud said.

“If the inquiry commission achieves something substantial, the government will score a point. If the West sinks under an economic Armageddon, it also scores,” because Argentina will have forged ties with energy producing countries, he said.

“But if the United States or Israel bomb Iran and defeat it, Argentina will be forced to go back two spaces,” he said.

He does not rule out any of these possibilities or that the Argentine government will have to “pay a very high political price” if it fails.

An agreement between Argentina and Iran to dig deeper into a 1994 bomb attack on a Jewish community centre in this city will test the solidity of the evidence garnered by a judicial investigation that has ground to a halt because of lack of cooperation from Tehran.

A memorandum of understanding between the two countries, to be debated in the lower chamber of Congress after being approved Thursday by a narrow margin in the senate, would allow Iranian citizens suspected of participating in the attack to be interrogated in their country by Argentine federal justice officials.

If the memorandum is approved, it will not be the first time that Argentine judges travel abroad to investigate suspects who cannot be extradited. But this case, under Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, is in need of guarantees to avoid the desired shortcut to end impunity from turning into a cul-de-sac.Argentina is playing its last card.

The agreement awaiting ratification by the Argentine parliament also provides for the creation of a truth commission made up of international legal experts, who will rule on the legitimacy of the judicial process, although their conclusions will not be binding.

Investigations carried out so far by the Argentine justice system indicate that the attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA, Israeli-Argentine Mutual Aid Association), which destroyed the centre, killing 85 people and injuring over 300, may have been planned by officials and diplomats in Tehran and carried out by a member of the Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah (Party of God) acting with Iranian funding.

In November 2007 the Interpol General Assembly issued a “red notice” international arrest warrant requested by Argentina for Iranian citizens Ali Fallahian, Mohsen Rezai, Ahmad Vahidi, Mohsen Rabbani and Ahmad Reza Asghari. Lebanese citizen Imad Fayez Mughniyah, killed in Syria in 2008, is also wanted.

Vahidi is the current minister of defence in Iran, and Rezai is a presidential candidate in the forthcoming June elections.

Iran has persistently refused to extradite those accused. It also refused a previous Argentine proposal to hold a trial in a third country, after the example of Libyans accused of planning the bomb explosion aboard a passenger airplane belonging to former U.S. airline Pan Am over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, who were tried in a court in the Netherlands.

Given the lack of cooperation from Iran, repeatedly denounced by Argentina in successive United Nations general assemblies, the centre-left government of President Cristina Fernández came to this bilateral agreement.

Fernández, who sent the initiative to Congress on Feb. 8, said the memorandum is “a very important step to unblock a case that was absolutely immobilised, without any possibility of interrogating the accused by Argentine justice.”

The pact is rejected by most opposition parties and by some Jewish community organisations in Argentina, who fear a trap on the part of Iran that would claw back what little advances have been made in justice. But relatives of the victims and Amnesty International applauded the road now taken by Buenos Aires.

Human rights watchdog Amnesty International, based in London, said in a communiqué issued Thursday that the memorandum “creates an opportunity to move forward towards justice and reparations for the victims of the attack on AMIA.”

Both Iran and Argentina must guarantee that the rules of procedure of the Truth Commission are made public and comply with international standards, it said.

The most controversial chapter of the agreement, in the view of the opposition, is the creation of a Truth Commission made up of five legal experts, from countries other than Iran and Argentina, that will scrutinise the evidence in the investigation against the accused, and will issue rulings, although these will not be binding.

“There are precedents for Argentine judges travelling abroad to carry out investigations, but this is not just another case, because here there will be a commission to rule on whether the evidence collected by Argentine justice is relevant or not,” lawyer and academic Guillermo Jorge, a professor at the private University of San Andrés, told IPS.

“Argentina is playing its last card. I see no alternative to this way forward in the case,” said Jorge, the director of the Centre for Transparency and Corruption Control at his university, where proposals for international judicial assistance for clarifying crimes involving more than one country are created and studied.

The legal expert recalled the case of the 1974 attack in which former Chilean army commander Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofia Cuthbert, were killed. Judge María Servini, in charge of that investigation, travelled abroad to collect evidence and question the accused in that crime.

Servini’s work in Chile and the United States contributed to proving that the attack was ordered by secret police agents of the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and carried out by U.S. agent Michael Townley, as he himself confessed as a protected witness in his country.

Recently, judge Ariel Lijo travelled to Germany to collect evidence in a case against executives of the transnational company Siemens, accused of paying bribes to Argentine officials to obtain a billion-dollar contract for manufacturing identity documents in 1998.

On the basis of the information gathered in a wider investigation carried out by the German justice system on bribery undertaken by Siemens in different countries, Lijo requested the arrest of a group of executives of the company. Germany refused their extradition, but judge Lijo is preparing to travel there to question the suspects.

According to Jorge, the controversy in the case of the attack on AMIA arose because although the Argentine justice system considers the evidence accumulated in the investigation to be sufficient to justify interrogating the suspects, in the view of Iran it is weak and insufficient.

The Iranian government maintains that the evidence is based on intelligence reports from other countries and the testimony of allegedly repentant criminals; hence the refusal of the extradition requests. However, it has accepted the memorandum, which introduces a new actor in the controversy, that is, the Truth Commission.

“Although Argentine judges can disregard its conclusions, the commission of experts can rule that the evidence is sufficient and sound, and that will carry political weight. Later on, a court will assess the testimony and decide whether or not to proceed. It will be an advance in terms of the prosecutions,” Jorge said.

The other possible scenario, he said, is that the commission rejects the evidence. “Some legal experts dislike evidence based on intelligence reports answering to political interests,” Jorge said. Argentina has a precedent that does not work in its favour, he said.

In 2003, one of the Iranian suspects, Hadi Soleimanpour, was detained at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom on an Interpol warrant for his arrest pending extradition to Argentina. He was a former ambassador for his country in Buenos Aires at the time of the AMIA attack.

But after analysing the Argentine case against him, Soleimanpour was freed by British justice due to lack of evidence about his participation in the attack, according to the presiding judge. Iran claims this is proof of impropriety in the prosecution’s case.

Interpol stopped pursuing the diplomat after his brief detention and appearance before a London court.

However, Argentina argues that there have been great strides in evidence collection since then. Furthermore, the judge formerly in charge of the case was Juan José Galeano, who was dismissed from his post in 2005 because of serious irregularities committed in the investigation of the attack’s “local connection.”