Akbar Manoussi: Let’s look at the facts on the ground and test the validity of Mr. Harper/Obama’s statement.
From the indictment it is clear that a used-car salesman was trying to sell drugs from Afghanistan to the Mexican drug cartel. However, once the FBI got hold of him he was manipulated and no one knows how this supposed assassination story got created. The Iranians have absolutely nothing to gain by the assassination of the Saudi ambassador in the US. This plot is a propaganda prepared by Obama’s administration to make a coalition against Iran both internationally and regionally
Here are the logical reasons why American accusation does not make sense:
1- US government has not released any useful information on the case whatsoever. No transparency exists at all. All they have shown us is a bizarre third rate movie script and the 1992 picture of a 56 year old supposed assassin in 2011. This does not stand a chance in a respectable court of law, but might of course make it through US system of injustice.
The accused in this case is claimed to have been in touch with his “masters” in Iran through his house phone calling the intelligence headquarter in Iran. They discussed the whole plan on the phone and exchanged views about it as well as money matters, it is claimed. This is all happening in a country that has a ministry of love by the name of NSA. Don’t Iranians know this? They must be at least suspicious that being no friend of US, every single call to and from Iran with US is being monitored. How come then they were talking about the claimed assassination plot on the phone?
2-It is claimed the accused has received 100 thousand dollars from Iran in a wire transfer. Has Mr. Obama a recent winner of Nobel Prize forgotten that it was him has imposed severe banking sanctions on Iran and wire transfers from Iran to US are impossible? Or did the accused have a special permit from US treasury allowing him to do just that?
Ok, supposing he did bribe a few big heads in FED to get this illegal permit, how did he convince Iranian intelligence that it was safe to wire the money from the personal account of Iranian intelligence directly to US using the given permit?
Did they not get suspicious assuming the Iranian intelligence know that their banks are under sanctions and even Indian government had trouble wiring money to them for all the oil and gas they got from Iran, and with China, the Iranian government is essentially down to a barter system with no wire transfer because of the same reason?
3-1.5 million dollars is the claimed price for killing the ambassador of the biggest petroleum reserve on planet in the capital of the world’s largest weapons manufacturer along with innocent doll faced Americans in a “fictional restaurant”. But wait a minute what else 1.5 million dollar can buy? Well it can buy you a medium sized apartment in Tehran or a Bugatti supercar the kind that drug dealers buy for their girl friends or perhaps a good nice European painting by an obscure artist.
4-Any self respecting drug dealing gang makes more than a million dollars a week on any busy street in a big city. The gang at the center of this controversy the Zetas is estimated to have annual revenue of over 40 billion dollars. That is something like 800 million dollars a week or roughly 5.2 million dollars each hour. This means 1.5 million dollars would mean just about 15 minutes worth of their usual time. And the 100 thousand dollar down payment means just worth one minute of their usual time. One wonders why would these people even talk to an Iranian moron who cannot wear matching socks, loses his cell phone in public toilets, is high drunk most of the time, smokes cheap pot, and is basically a 56 year old guy who is broke and has not killed anyone in his life and has no useful skill set.
5-Iran is living next to Afghanistan a country that produces 95% of the world’s heroine and opium and the largest hashish producer right under watchful eyes of US military. Iran also is intercepting over half of all the drugs in the world as per United Nations report. This makes Iran know the intricacies of drug smuggling full well. This means they know 1.5 million dollars for a drug gang is pocket change and amounts to nothing. They also know full well that any drug business is peppered with intelligence moles of the resident country. These are basic things that even a team of teenage girls who have watched enough movies know about. So why would Iran send 100 thousand dollars to a broken man to be given to a drug dealer working for a multi-billion dollar drug industry in a country where DEA and ATF is sitting everywhere. This does not make sense.
6-We have been said times and again by US government that Iranian intelligence is very good, possibly better than US intelligence. US claim that only a few Iranian intelligence officers in Iraq were holding off the 150,000 strong US military there for years. They also tell us these same Iranians were commanding Hezbollah in 2006, sinking Israeli ships using smart thermal guided Iranian anti-ship missiles and blowing up sophisticated IDF tanks. How come then this time they failed? When was the last time Iranians had failed in a mission of such importance?
7- The US administration claim that Iran was responsible for Argentina bombings so is responsible here too, this claim does not make sense either. First of all the proofs for Argentina bombings were no better than the proof in this case. At the time of the bombing in Argentina, Iran had a very good relationship with them. American have claimed that despite severe US objections, Argentina rebuilt Tehran nuclear reactor which had been expired and provided them with enriched uranium fuel something which had made Americans very unhappy to say the least.
Then came the bombing allegation of a Jewish cultural center. The funny thing is that there are synagogues, Jewish hospitals and clinics as well Jewish schools and cultural centers in Iran most of them funded by Iranian government so why would Iran go to the other side of the world to bomb a Jewish cultural center in exactly the same country that is providing it with a technology that Iran needs and no one else was ready to share with her? After the bombing, US cried wolf, provided intelligence to Argentina implicating Iran, which resulted in reduction of economic and technologic deals between Iran and Argentina. Who benefited from this? Certainly, not Iran or Argentina.
8-As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, the US has more than 5,000 nukes and is spending $85B to upgrade them and Israel has at least 200 of them. Now, the claim is that Iran is trying to build one or two bombs in the next few years. In the first place, all these claims are pure speculation. The US 2011 NIE and all IAEA reports have stated that there is no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Also, who in his right mind thinks that Iran with one or two nukes is going to attack the US or Israel? Do people think that Iran, which has not attacked another country in 300 years, would risk its existence for a symbolic gesture against a country like Israel which is insignificant to Iran? Nobody even worries about Israel in Iran. Iran is a huge country in comparison (three times the size of France and five times the size of Germany). It is now also almost self-sufficient in almost everything. So, this phony plot concocted by Mossad, the MEK or the incompetent CIA is not going to make any difference in anything. Obama just looks ridiculous taking this nonsense seriously.
9-With track record of US in lying all the time, whether it was in 1953, when US had claimed that pro-freedom people in Tehran had overthrown dictator Mossadeqh (official US statement of the time). However, it is well established that US government organized the coup against an elected and popular Iranian Prime Minister , or when US was claiming that it was Iran that was using chemical weapons against Kurds and Iraq and Saddam did not use them in 1980′s (official US statement of the time) or when they lied about WMD’s in Iraq later on when UN had cleared them up, or when just weeks ago it emerged that those US officials who have brought this new case against Iran were actually selling weapons to Mexican drug gangs and Zetas (proceedings and investigations on Eric Holder the US attorney General who was implicated in gun trafficking with cocaine Mexico cartels, have stopped since this new case came to light)…. one cannot simply trust what US says.
10- Even the timing and so many co-incidents make it suspicious. American hikers/spies were freed at same time this guy is arrested, Israeli POW is being freed in a rare Hamas deal, situation in Syria and Bahrain, propping up of Turkey and Saudi to counter Iran’s influence, the US official involved in negotiation with Iran over US hiker/spy case as well as an Iran adviser to US government is found dead now in his house, former Afghanistan president Burhanuddin Rabbani is killed in Afghanistan few meters away from US embassy in Kabul while he had just returned from Iran, US is about to leave Iraq in December forever, Russia and China use the veto power at UN to save Syria, despite sanctions IMF praises Iranian economy and curses US economy, etc, etc
In a 2009 report entitled “Which Path to Persia?”, the elitist Brookings Institution wrote, “It would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be.”
*Professor of Business and Management
