ARGENTINA - Alberto Nisman

DAILY BEAST ARTICLE Did Iran Murder Argentina’s Crusading Prosecutor Alberto Nisman? An Argentine prosecutor died from a single gunshot wound to the head Sunday, hours before giving evidence about Iran’s involvement in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center. PARIS — Since 2005 Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman has been crusading for his vision of justice in the horrific 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and injured hundreds more. He claimed that Iran was behind it and, more recently, that the Argentine government was trying to block his efforts to prove that. On Sunday night, Nisman was found dead in his apartment, only hours before he was set to testify before an Argentine parliamentary commission about his allegations.   [Accusations involved the President, the Foreign Minister and a phone tap (legal or not legal is open), as I understand.  Also, there has been something going on within the intelligence service of the country ... a new head was appointed.] The circumstances revealed thus far by the police suggest a suicide. The history of Iran’s operations overseas inevitably suggest otherwise. And there are disturbing echoes of the world 20 or 30 years ago when Tehran, often in league with its clients in Hezbollah, waged a global war on the enemies of the Islamic Republic, deploying hit teams second only to the Israelis in their skill at assassination.  [Not up on all of this.  Didn't think Iran was known for 'hit teams' ... thought that was Mossad.] First, let’s look at the official communiqué about Nisman’s death issued by Argentina’s Ministry of National Security on Monday morning, with the facts of the case as the ministry says they are known: Nisman’s lifeless body was discovered Sunday night in his apartment on the 13th floor of Le Parc Tower, which is part of a modern high-rise complex in the Puerto Madero neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Ten members of the Argentine Federal Police force had been assigned to him as bodyguards, but it seems they were not deployed when he was at home. According to the communiqué, members of the team alerted Nisman’s secretary on Sunday afternoon that he was not responding to repeated phone calls. When they learned that he was not answering the doorbell of his house either and that the Sunday newspaper was still on the step, they decided to notify his relatives. [Straight up, I'd be looking at the slap-dash security.  Why so loose?  Why leave openings?  Why so slow to react?] In the world of intelligence, as distinct from the world of criminal justice, there has been little question that Iran was behind the AMIA bombing. The bodyguards then collected Nisman’s mother at her home and took him to Le Parc. When they tried to enter, they found the door locked with the key on the inside. They called the building’s maintenance staff who then called a locksmith.  Nisman’s mother entered the apartment with one of the bodyguards, and they found Nisman in the bathroom, where his body was blocking the door when they tried to open it. They immediately called police crime scene investigators who entered the bathroom, apparently making as much effort as possible not to disturb the evidence. [Agile 'Houdini' assassin?] Nisman was on the floor with a .22 caliber pistol and one empty shell casing nearby. The official communiqué does not say explicitly that he died from a bullet wound to the head, but that has been widely reported in Buenos Aires, as has the detail that the documents for his testimony before parliament were arrayed on his desk. How a murderer might have staged this apparent suicide will doubtless be the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories for years to come, as, indeed, is the case with the investigation into the AMIA bombing itself. That never resulted in a single conviction and was called a “national disgrace” by the late President Néstor Kirchner in 2005. The former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, was among those who signed a petition ten years ago calling for justice, but to no avail. Nisman’s eventual focus on direct Iranian involvement, accusing Tehran of planning and financing the attack and Hezbollah operatives of carrying it out, was not universally supported, even by U.S. investigators who followed the case. “The guilt field was painted with a bit too broad a brush,” former FBI agent James Bernazzani told The New York Times in 2009. Bernazzani had led U.S. investigations of Hezbollah throughout the 1990s and said that while he was “convinced” of the group’s involvement, “we surfaced no information indicating Iranian compliance.” In the world of intelligence, however, as distinct from the world of criminal justice, there has been little question that Iran was behind the AMIA bombing in 1994 and the earlier car-bomb attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 that killed 29 people. [Surely, even in the world of intelligence, conclusion has to be based on available facts.  But law enforcement said there were none pinning it on Iran.  So, the intelligence that Iran was behind it would just be a best guess?] At the time, the Israelis were attacking Hezbollah leaders and Iranian clients in Lebanon, Hezbollah and Iran struck back wherever they thought they could. “It’s an ongoing game, playing by the rules of the Bible,” a senior official in Israeli intelligence told me at height of the carnage, meaning the rule of eye for an eye, “and at a certain point there is a balance of terror where everyone knows what’s expected.” The Iranians also targeted with a vengeance any opposition figures they thought might be dangerous. In 1991, after a failed attempt years before, they managed to talk their way into the home of Shahpour Bakhtiar, the Shah of Iran’s last prime minister. He thought they were friends. They were searched by police at the door. They killed him with a knife from his own kitchen. The younger brother of then-President Hashemi Rafsanjani was named as a suspect in the case.  [Doesn't sound too professional, although it's certainly merciless and barbaric.] Between 1987 and 1993, according a French government memo published in a very detailed study called Le Hezbollah Global, between 1987 and 1993 some 18 opponents of the Tehran regime were murdered in Europe, and the CIA estimated that between 1989 and 1996 the Hezbollah network carried out 200 serious attacks costing hundreds of lives.  [Can the French memo & CIA estimates be trusted?  As it's unlikely anyone else was knocking off opponents of Teheran, the French memo might get a pass but I don't know about the CIA estimate.] By the late 1990s, the Iranian government apparently decided to slow these operations after several of them started to bring down too much heat. The Germans conducted a relentless investigation of the murder of Kurdish leaders in Berlin in 1992, tracing them back to the then-head of Iranian intelligence, Ali Fallahian. The AMIA bombing in 1994 caused international outrage. And the bombing of the Khobar Towers apartments in Saudi Arabia in 1995, which killed 19 Americans, was eventually traced to another group of Iranian acolytes. [Kurdish targets sound more like something the Turkish would be involved in, rather than Iran.  Saudi Arabia and Americans I can't begin to decide.] Finally, Imad Mugniyeh, seen as the key Hezbollah operative in many of the group’s terrorist attacks, dating back to the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, was blown up with a well-placed car bomb in Damascus in 2008. The Israelis generally are credited with that hit.  [Read about this some time ago.  Sounds pretty much what I'd read elsewhere.] But by then, Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon had fought a successful war of attrition that led to Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanese territory in 2000 after decades of occupation. Building on that victory, Hezbollah became, and remains, the most powerful political party in the country. Since then it has focused its actions on a sustained but relatively controlled standoff with Israel, apart from a brutal war in 2006 when it fought the vaunted Israeli army to a standstill. And in the last two years it has deployed in Syria to fight against the Sunni-led rebellion there, including the forces of al Qaeda and ISIS, that threaten the Assad regime. Iran, for its part, has been trying to show itself a reasonable member of the community of nations by negotiating with the Americans and Europeans about the future of its nuclear program. Yet there have been signs within the last few days that the game as old as the Bible continues, and may once again grow very dangerous. Last week, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah boasted that his organization now has weapons that can strike anywhere in Israel. “We have made all necessary preparations for a future war,” he said. Then on Sunday, Israeli forces killed Jihad Mugniyeh, son of the late mastermind, and several other Hezbollah officers who were operating in the Syrian sector of the Golan Heights. The Israeli press reported they had been planning attacks on Israeli targets. Was Alberto Nisman somehow caught up in this long war of assassinations? Or did he decide for reasons we probably cannot know to end his own life? The investigation will continue, unless somebody stops it.  [LOL ... who would be game to continue to investigate?] SOURCE:  The Daily Beast - here. COMMENT Chose this article randomly.  Another piece I'd read on Saudi Arabia challenged what I think is the present pro Saudi status quo, so I figured I'd check out another article by the same publication. Wondering if publication may have a pro-Israeli bias given the headline. The first thought I had on learning of  Nisman's death was, wow, Argentina's totally corrupt ... as I first assumed that someone within Argentina's government or intelligence was responsible.  Later, I wondered who might benefit from destabilising the government & maybe doing a frame that taints the government with suspicion of the killing as well as the cover-up accusation.  Only vaguely thought about Iran at some point, but dismissed it because it didn't seem like they had anything to gain. But ... my knowledge is very limited, so I could be wrong about that.  As I read the article I wasn't that convinced it had anything to do with Iran.  It was only when it got to the nuclear negotiations bit that had me wondering ... along the lines of maybe the motive being to preserve the edge Iran may presently have in negotiations.  But there's a warrant for eight Iranians (and one Lebanese) issued, so it isn't like this is something new and damaging to Iran.  Here's where it gets really interesting: Argentine government accuses prosecutor Nisman of working hand-in-hand with Jaime Stiusso, a former agent at Intelligence Secretariat (SI, formerly known as SIDE) who was reportedly removed when Oscar Parrilli was appointed to head the country’s intelligence services last month. Stiusso was said to be working behind the scenes against the memorandum of understanding —signed by the Kirchnerite administration and Iran in January 2013 to investigate the AMIA bombing. According to a Kirchnerite source, internal rifts within the SI started when the Federal Criminal Appeals Court declared unconstitutional the Memorandum in May last year. [mercopress] I had some other guy's name for the intelligence replacement:   intel head Héctor Icazuriaga replaced by Oscar Parrilli [here]. Sounds like the intelligence agency's been stirred up and it looks like the Foreign Minister has accused those in the intelligence agency of fabricating the complaint: statement by Foreign Minister Hector Timerman against Prosecutor Alberto Nisman describing his complaint as a fabricated product of a manoeuvre by Intelligence Service agents who have been removed from their positions [here] Another article reports that Nisman's Iran & Hezbollah accusations are based almost wholly on information from intelligence services -- and that the US embassy is responsible for pushing Nisman in that direction: Nisman is a prosecutor who devoted the past 10 years to push the accusations against the Iranian regime and Lebanon’s Hezbollah for the AMIA bombing, almost completely based on information provided by intelligence services. The US Embassy was the one that pushed Nisman toward that approach, at the expense of probing any other possible foreign or local responsibilities, as was exposed in the WikiLeaks cables. That thesis is also favoured by the Israeli government and the leadership of the Argentine Jewish community. In particular, the latter tried to lobby before the Embassy in favour of former DAIA President Rubén Beraja, who was convicted and then acquitted of perjury charges to cover up the attack, among other judicial proceedings against him. [here] The last bit of that paragraph doesn't mean much to me.  Who is this Beraja guy?  Quickie look:  businessman, Ruben Beraja, was president of the Delegation of Jewish Argentine Associations (DAIA). GreenLeft reported in 2011: The US pressured an Argentine prosecutor to halt investigations into former Argentine president Carlos Menem and a number of other officials suspected of being involved in a cover-up over the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, Argentine daily Pagina/12 reported on February 27. [here] Article goes on to say that a 1997 report by Argentina’s National Academy of Engineers indicated that a car bomb wasn't the cause of the explosion, as the epicentre of the explosion was within the building.  Not sure which building.  Looks like they're talking about the AMIA building, but I think another article referred to the embassy. Here's where the story becomes totally twisted.  Caught on video: federal judge Juan Jose Galeano offering [car dealer] Telleldin a US$400,000 bribe in return for providing witness testimony implicating the police officers [ibid] But that's not all: The court found that federal judge Luisa Riva Aramayo also offered to pay Telleldin for testimony implicating a number of police officers allied to Menem’s political rival, Eduardo Duhalde. [ibid] How corrupt is Argentina?  That's just put me off Argentina.  Not somewhere you'd go to settle down to a quiet life, is it?  Sounds like a nest of vipers. Here's more on the nukes: In a November 2006 report for the Asia Times Online, Porter said “The indictment [by Nisman and Burgos] shows the US put strong pressure on the Menem government to terminate all nuclear cooperation with Iran.” [ibid] US seems to be highly involved in the goings on in Argentina: The WikLeaks revelations also included cables criticising the Argentine government and showing a close relationship between the US and right-wing opposition figures. [ibid] Now that I've trawled through all this stuff, I'm somewhat confused. Argentinian author Adrian Salbuchi argues that it is more plausible that Israeli intelligence services may be responsible for the attacks in Argentina [here]. Without knowledge of all the related events, it's hard to assess the merits of the timeline or the proposal that it may have been Israeli intelligence services. Initially I found that option hard to believe.  But then I remembered King David Hotel bombing.  Even though this was pre Israeli intelligence services days,  it's hard to dismiss when early Zionist paramilitary organisations that were responsible for the KDH bombing also produced a Prime Minister (Menachem Begin), then head of the organisation associated with the Deir Yassin massacre. If my understanding is correct, David Shaltiel, the guy who gave the Deir Yassin massacre the go-ahead (despite a non-aggression pact signed by the villagers) was a paramilitary commander, who went on to become an intelligence officer and an Israeli diplomat: In the years 1950-1952 Shaltiel served as military attaché of Israel in France, and later fulfilled several diplomatic charges - as Israel's plenipotentiary minister in Brazil and Venezuela (1952–1956), then in Mexico (1956–1959) and ambassador in Netherlands (1963–1966). [wikipedia] I'm now more blown away by this information than I am by the convenient death of Prosecutor Nisman. Reading further, I've discovered an early example of assassination by Zionist paramilitary:  that of Jacob Israel de Haan.  First political murder.  Killed 1924 Jerusalem.  Haan's view of a Zionist future (negotiation with Arabs) didn't fit with the paramilitary organisation's view. What blows me away is that those who participated in extremist violence in Palestine became mainstream (and presumably accepted) figures. Pope Francis (former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio) gets a mention for having signed a petition for AMIA justice 10 years ago. Italian descent, worked as a chemical technician and a bouncer. Religion creeps me out in a big way.  Not for one moment do I believe in do-gooder 'holiness'.  Nor the we-must-revere-religion stance. In terms of the church generally, if you want influence in a place like Latin America you would probably want to play with the church.  Looks like CIA's played with the church. Checking out the church, I've found this: "under Reagan, the CIA linked up with Pope John Paul II, and they attacked together, they attacked liberation theology based communities in Latin America and have really destroyed that whole movement" [Matthew Fox, Theologian] Oh, look.  Here's another article that links CIA with Pope John Paul II: John Paul II appears to have gone even further, allowing the Catholic Church in Nicaragua to be used by the CIA and Ronald Reagan’s administration to finance and organize internal disruptions while the violent Nicaraguan Contras terrorized northern Nicaraguan towns with raids notorious for rape, torture and extrajudicial executions. School of the Americas ('Coup School') got a mention in that one, as well. Must-read article by Robert Parry, investigative reporter, who broke Iran-Contra stories: Pope Francis, CIA and ‘Death Squads’ https://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/16/pope-francis-the-cia-and-death-squads/ Pope Francis & Hollywood   Hollywood meets Vatican Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 Pope Francis and actress, film-maker meet after the screening of 'Unbroken' at the Vatican. Perfection. WWII hero Hollywood flick, Universal Studios, Hollywood & UN heroine, the head of the Catholic Church (wow, somebody powerful is pulling strings and it's not god), the oft repeated "strength of the human spirit", a keepsake rosary ... an almost perfect PR trip, were this not such an absurd concoction. Hollywood Pictures.  Movies. Money.  Money.  Money. Corporate America Wall Street.  Power.  Elite. Myth-makers.  Dreams-makers. Lies.  Propaganda. Humanitarian mantra.  Appropriation for political ends.  Trojan horse. US empire Politics Pontiff, god, & glamour Holy spirit Sport. War. Hero. "strength of the human spirit" Or  indifferent chance? Rosary Blessing Affirming American Empire 2015 For me, the beauty lies in the absurdity of the concoction presented for consumption. ---------------------------------------------------- Various links: *http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/19/did-iran-murder-argentina-s-crusading-prosecutor-alberto-nisman.html *http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/179804/as-illconceived-as-it-sounds *http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/179518/gov%E2%80%99t-accusations-are-%E2%80%98ridiculous-inconceivable%E2%80%99 *http://en.mercopress.com/2015/01/19/d-day-for-argentine-prosecutor-who-charged-cristina-fernandez-with-iran-cover-up *https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/46996 *http://en.mercopress.com/2015/01/19/d-day-for-argentine-prosecutor-who-charged-cristina-fernandez-with-iran-cover-up *https://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/16/pope-francis-the-cia-and-death-squads/