U.S. DEPT. OF JUSTICE IRANIAN TERRORIST PLOT, MEXICAN CARTEL STORY FALLING APART

By Juan Montoya

As someone has said on this case, it has all the elements of a Gulf of Tonkin, the Battleship Maine, Weapons of Mass destruction, and even the Lusitania all rolled into one.

On then one hand you have one of the linchpins of George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" Iran. And on the other, you have the feared and violent-prone Mexican drug cartels. Add one modicum favored by the U.S. government, a suspiciously-compliant informant, and viola! you have the justification to declare war on either one of these two anti-U.S. enemies.

Conveniently, the story "broke" just as memos were surfacing that U.S. Attorney Eric Holder knew about the The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (abbreviated ATF) plot code-named "Fast and Furious" that ran thousands of heavy-caliber weapons into the hands of the Mexican cartels in a botched attempt to trace them to the organizations' higher-ups.

Holder had denied he knew anything about the blockhead operation for months. The memos "outed" his involvement and knowledge of then harebrained scheme that placed high-powered weapons in the hands of cartel assassins and resulted in the death of not just Mexican victims, but also of several U.S. law-enforcement personnel.

The Iran-Cartel story would surely blow the "Fast and Furious" stories out of the nation's front pages, they thought, and it did.

Acknowledged Iranian expert Professor Juan Cole, put it succinctly: "This plot has it all – Mexican drug cartels, Iran, assassinations, attacks on the Saudi AND Israeli embassies. You name it, it’s in there.

The officials said the plot included the assassination of the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, Adel Al-Jubeir, with a bomb and subsequent bomb attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington, D.C. Bombings of the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, were also discussed, according to the U.S. officials.

Holder said in an announcement that the plan was “conceived, sponsored and was directed from Iran” by a faction of the government and called it a “flagrant” violation of U.S. and international law.

“The U.S. is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions,” Holder said. He said the White House will be meeting with federal agencies before announcing “further action” in regards to Iran.
Holder pushed the Iran issue hard in his announcement. It all seems very convenient, a kind of Legion of Doom of perceived US enemies rolled into one, attacking perceived US allies on US soil. And they throw in Buenos Aires for good measure, the site of a 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy, claimed by Hezbollah in concert with Iran.
Two Iranians who are dual citizens of Iran and the US — Manssor Arbabsiar, and Gholam Shakuri – have been charged in the case. The plot was broken up after Arbabsiar unwittingly hired a DEA informant to carry out the attack for $1.5 million. While Arbabsiar has been captured, Shakuri is still at large.
As many observers have pointed out, the story given us byHolder about the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., makes no sense. Veteran CIA operative Bob Baer, now retired, notes that Iranian intelligence is highly professional and works independently or through trusted proxies, and this sloppy operation simply is not their modus operandi.
"A couple other things here," says Cole. "One, this is yet another example of intelligence and law enforcement work disrupting a terrorist plot, assuming this all turns out to be true. Fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan had nothing to do with disrupting this plot.
The second is that this also appears to be another example of US law enforcement agents sticking themselves into a plot and turning it from something aspirational to something more. We’ve seen this over and over again in the post-9/11 age, and I’m not sure it makes us safer to have DEA or FBI find and pump up low-lifes who had no ability to carry out attacks in the first place.

Holder alleged that Gholam Shakuri, a known member of the Quds Brigade, the special operations force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, was involved and that he was running an Iranian-American agent, Manssor Arbabsiar, a used car dealer with a conviction on check fraud. Arbabsiar wired $100,000 to a bank account he thought belonged to a member of the Zeta Mexican drug cartel, as a down payment on the $1.5 million demanded by the cartel member for carrying out the assassination.
If Arbabsiar really had been an Iranian intelligence asset, he would have been informed if there’s one thing the US typically monitors, it is money transfers of more than $10,000 (as a measure against drug money laundering).

The only safe way to undertake this transaction would have been cash, and no one in the Quds Brigade is so stupid as not to know this simple reality. Moreover, would the Quds Brigade really depend so heavily on someone with a fraud conviction, who was therefore known to US authorities? Expert terrorism deploys “newskins” people who can fly under the radar of police and security forces.

If a rogue Iranian drug cartel with an IRGC cover wanted to hit the Saudi ambassador, then it would be natural for them to reach out to their counterparts, the Zetas in Mexico. Whereas if the Iranian state wanted to assassinate someone, it would be crazy for them to reveal themselves to a Mexican gangster.

Lynn Brezosky, of the San Antonio News-Express has an interesting sidebar on the "terror" suspect that goes something like this: The man accused of scheming to kill a Saudi diplomat is described by those who know him as a scatterbrained, hapless businessman who in college earned the nickname “Jack” for his affinity for whiskey — hardly the type to mastermind a terrorist plot.

A long-time associate and former business partner of Manssor Arbabsiar said the terror suspect had owned a string of used-car and other businesses in the Corpus Christi area, but if anything seemed absentminded and shifty.

“He was pretty disorganized, always losing things like keys, titles, probably a thousand cellphones,” said David Tomscha, an Aransas Pass businessman who ran a used-car lot with Arbabsiar. “He wasn't meticulous with taking care of things.”

Sorry, Mr. Holder. Those of us who grew up with the lies of the U.S. government to invade Vietnam, then Iraq, and later, Afghanistan, and now maybe Iran, and now is insinuating of a plan to put the U.S. military in Mexico against the cartels aren't buying it. 

Besides, if you send U.S. soldier against the cartels, they'll face the very guns you sent there used against them.