False flags and how to start a 'colour revolution' in Argentina

by Mario

How it starts:

1987–88 Iran signed three agreements with Argentina’s National Atomic Energy Commission. The first Iranian-Argentine agreement involved help in converting the U.S. supplied Tehran Nuclear Research Centre (TNRC) reactor from highly enriched fuel to 19.75% low-enriched uranium, and to supply the low-enriched uranium to Iran.

December 1992: The US Embassy in Buenos Aires informs the Argentine government that a continuation of the Iran-Argentine nuclear cooperation agreement is not acceptable to Washington.

In March 1992 the Israel Embassy and in July 1994 the Jewish AMIA building blew up, allegedly caused by car bombs.

Independent Argentine investigations and the initial Charles Hunter (FBI) report shows that both explosions, based on the surrounding damage, is inconsistent with the alleged car bomb theory.

Contrary to all material evidence, the Israeli government and thereafter Washington pressure President Carlos Saul Menem to insist that the alleged car bombs were placed by Iranians in cooperation with Hezbollah.

The judicial process ends nowhere until President Nestor Kirchner appoints judge Nisman in 2005 to start a fresh investigation. Nisman has close contacts with the US Embassy, US attorneys dealing with anti-terrorism investigations and some members of Argentine's SIDE (Intelligence Secretariat).

In 2013 Nisman instructs Interpol to issue warrants against a myriad of notable Iranians and a Lebanese:

- Hashemi Rafsanjani, then President of Iran
- Ali Akbar Velayati, then Foreign Minister
- Ali Fallahijan, then Chief of Intelligence
- Mohsen Rezai, then Commander of the Revolutionary Guard
- Imad Mougnieh, Chief of the External Security Service of Hezbollah
- Ahmed Vahidi, then Commander of the "Al Quds" (Jerusalem) Forces
- Mohsen Rabbani, former diplomatic representative in Argentina
- Ahmad Ashagri, former diplomatic representative in Argentina
- Hadi Soleimanpour, former Ambassador of Iran in Argentina."

President Cristina de Kirchner expressed several times her disbelieve in the Iranian connection (some US officials have publicly questioned whether there was evidence for Iranian involvement [James Cheek]) and used Washington's recent opening of consultations with Iran as an opportunity to negotiate an Iran-Argentine "truth commission" to be made up of five independent judges, none of whom will be from the two countries.

The opposition and the Jewish lobby challenged this agreement.

Finishing touch:

There will be elections in Argentina soon and Cristina de Kirchner cannot be re-elected and there is a wide polarization of candidates contesting the mandate, but the polls show that Kirchner's supported Scioli could win on the second round.

Enter Judge Nisman: He files a complaint that President Cristina de Kirchner had conducted secret negotiations with Iran through non-diplomatic channels, offering to cover up the involvement of Iranian officials (dropping the Interpol warrants) so Argentina could start swapping grain for much-needed oil from Iran. He orders the freezing of all assets of Cristina de Kirchner.

The complaint is based on “alleged evidence” given by (Stiuso who allegedly had good contacts with MOSSAD) the recently fired boss of counter-intelligence of SIDE and other obscure agents.

The opposition media circulates this complaint widely, ignoring the official statement of Interpol that there was never a request from the Argentine government to drop warrants against the Iranians.

The complaint has no legal base if there was an “intend” to cover up. Argentine law penalizes the act and not the intend, this is being ignored again by the opposition media.

The day judge Nisman is invited by the opposition to appear in Congress, he is found dead in his apartment.

While Nisman's complaint would not have lasted few days, his death (suicide or not) will elevate him as a victim of Government conspiracy, the media will insist on this.

Social networks did quickly convert the “Je suis Charlie” to 'Yo soy Nisman' and public demonstrations are being organized daily and numbers are increasing.

Missing still is somebody from the US Embassy distributing cookies. 
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Note from the Saker:
For context, please see:

http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2008/01/hezbollah-didnt-do-argentine-bombing.html

Ex-Argentina Jewish gov’t official to be probed in bombing

the JTA reports:

The Jewish ex-interior minister of Argentina will be investigated for his ties to the AMIA Jewish center bombing.

The Buenos Aires Federal Appeals Court last week ordered the probe of Carlos Vladimir Corach in connection with an illegal payment of $400,000 to Carlos Telleldin, an auto mechanic who was among those charged in the 1994 attack that left 85 dead and hundreds wounded.

Telleldin, who allegedly provided the car bomb that blew up the Jewish center, has not been indicted.

The three Appeals Court justices called on Federal Judge Ariel Lijo to investigate “the existence of concrete allegations involving Carlos Vladimir Corach, which have not been investigated until now” regarding the illegal payment to Telleldin.

Corach was interior minister during the Carlos Menem government in the 1990s. He was responsible for obtaining the building for the Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires and was the main speaker at its inauguration. 
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Note: for context see here.

Latin America mourns the death of Néstor Kirchner

by Carlo Moiana

Former president Néstor Kirchner has unexpectedly died today of heart failure. He was the first elected president of Argentina after the terrible economical and political crisis that the country suffered in 2001.

Kirchner had had some health problems lately: in February he had a surgery for problems in the carotid artery, and in September he had an angioplasty. His doctors recommended him rest, but he kept a very tight agenda: he was a congressman, president of the Justicialist Party (also known as Peronist, Argentina's biggest party) and Secretary General of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur). And, despite not having any formal position in the Executive, headed by his wife Cristina, he is known to be closely involved in it.

He began his political career as governor of Santa Cruz province, in Southern Argentina. Barely inhabited, it has a high income per capita, due to oil and gas extraction and a strong fishing industry. Despite of his leftist tendency, in the 90's Kirchner supported former president Carlos Menen (known for his strict neoliberalism) even in the privatization of Argentina's national oil company YPF, which has a strong presence in Santa Cruz. When the economy was beginning to show problems in the late 90's, he transferred the reserves of his province to banks abroad. Despite his affirmation that these funds have already returned to the country after the crisis was overcome, there are claims that part of these were diverted.

As a president, his government had two parts, one very good and another quite problematic. Initially he had the merit of further stabilizing the country after a terrible crisis. When he came to office, he managed to reach an agreement with the IMF and creditors over the defaulted national debt, began an economical policy of growth, recovering of industrial sector and low exchange rate to benefit exports. The economy began growing around 10% per year, unemployment drastically lowered, together with poverty, and his popularity soared.

But in late 2005 he sacked his Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna, and began a more unorthodox policy of high state expenditures. Inflation began to rise, and the government intervened the statistical institute so not to reveal true inflation data. While most independent economists calculate an inflation of around 30% annually, officially Argentina has an inflation of less than 10% per year. Argentina is the only country in the world with unreliable official economical data: not only inflation, but also GNP growth and poverty level data are also under suspicion.

Another merit of him was breaking at last Argentina's "automatic alignment" with the US. Since Menem became president in 1989, Argentina was the strongest ally of the United States in the region, even sending warships to the first Gulf War in 1991. In 2005, in a conference in the Argentinian city of Mar del Plata, Kirchner together with most of South American presidents rejected Bush's proposal for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, effectively burying this project. But then in 2006 he accepted the controversial US and Israeli version of the attack against the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Association in 1994, blaming Hezbollah and Iran for it. Argentina's foreign policy, though not so closely aligned with the US as in the previous decade, continues to be less independent than Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and even Brazil.

His wife Cristina was elected in 2007, and followed exactly the same policies. Néstor is considered the true strong figure behind the president. Next year there will be presidential elections in Argentina. The political panorama was already complicated: Kirchner had a decrease in popularity, but he kept strong support in many sectors. And he was surely the most influent person in Front for Victory, the faction of the Justicialist Party currently in power and with the biggest representation in the Congress (though not having absolute majority). After his death, it's completely unpredictable for now what will happen in the next elections. Being also the first head of the recently created Union of South American Nations, his death also affects regional policies and the future political and economical integration of the continent.

The Argentine government is receiving condolences from all over the world, specially from countries with similar leftist orientation (both "moderate", as Lula in Brazil and Mujica in Uruguay, and "hard-liners", like Chavez in Venezuela and Correa in Ecuador).

Brazil, Argentina abandon US dollar (for bilateral trade)

Press TV reports:

Brazil and Argentina have launched a new payment system in their bilateral trade, doing away with the US dollar as a medium of exchange.

The two Latin American nations started the Payment System on Local Currency (SML) on Monday following a last month agreement inked by their presidents to use local currencies in a bid to end transaction in dollars.

On Thursday, Argentine Central Bank President Martin Redrado and his Brazilian counterpart Henrique de Campos Meirelles signed the enforcement of the agreement for the SML, under which exports and imports between the two countries will take place with the Brazilian real (BRL) and the Argentine peso (ARS).

The new monetary system mainly favors small and medium industries in both countries because it will save them bank charges when averting their local currencies to dollars.

According to the Central Bank of Argentina, the trade between the two major South American economies stands at about 25 billion US dollars per year.

Although the SML seeks to gradually eliminate the dollar from the bilateral trade, the currency will continue its presence in transactions between Brazil and Argentina, as their central banks will set the exchange rate for the real and the peso with respect to the dollar.

Brazilian authorities said that the SML deepens the integration between Brazil and Argentina and hope it will serve as an example to be adopted by other countries of the Mercosur, like Paraguay and Uruguay.

Hezbollah Didn't Do Argentine Bombing (updated)

Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up

by GARETH PORTER

posted online on January 18, 2008 here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/porter

Research for this article was supported by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration's pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush's latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city's Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina "serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies."

This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by the General Assembly of Interpol, which voted to put five former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader on the international police organization's "red list" for allegedly having planned the July 1994 bombing. But the Wall Street Journal reports that it was pressure from the Bush Administration, along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the Interpol vote. In fact, the Bush Administration's manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly in line with its long practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case against its geopolitical enemies.

After spending several months interviewing officials at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires familiar with the Argentine investigation, the head of the FBI team that assisted it and the most knowledgeable independent Argentine investigator of the case, I found that no real evidence has ever been found to implicate Iran in the bombing. Based on these interviews and the documentary record of the investigation, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the case against Iran over the AMIA bombing has been driven from the beginning by US enmity toward Iran, not by a desire to find the real perpetrators.

A 'Wall of Assumptions'

US policy toward the bombing was skewed from the beginning by a Clinton Administration strategy of isolating Iran, adopted in 1993 as part of an understanding with Israel on peace negotiations with the Palestinians. On the very day of the crime, before anything could have been known about who was responsible, Secretary of State Warren Christopher blamed "those who want to stop the peace process in the Middle East"--an obvious reference to Iran.

William Brencick, then chief of the political section at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires and the primary Embassy contact for the investigation, recalled in an interview with me last June that a "wall of assumptions" guided the US approach to the case. The primary assumptions, Brencick said, were that the explosion was a suicide bombing and that use of a suicide bomb was prima facie evidence of involvement by Hezbollah--and therefore Iran.

But the suicide-bomber thesis quickly encountered serious problems. In the wake of the explosion, the Menem government asked the United States to send a team to assist in the investigation, and two days after the bombing, experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arrived in Buenos Aires along with three FBI agents. According to an interview the head of the team, ATF explosives expert Charles Hunter, gave to a team of independent investigators headed by US journalist Joe Goldman and Argentine investigative journalist Jorge Lanata, as soon as the team arrived the federal police put forward a thesis that a white Renault Trafic van had carried the bomb that destroyed the AMIA.

Hunter quickly identified major discrepancies between the car-bomb thesis and the blast pattern recorded in photos. He wrote a report two weeks later noting that in the wake of the bombing, merchandise in a store immediately to the right of the AMIA was tightly packed against its front windows and merchandise in another shop had been blown out onto the street--suggesting that the blast came from inside rather than outside. Hunter also said he did not understand how the building across the street could still be standing if the bomb had exploded in front of the AMIA, as suggested by the car-bomb thesis.

The lack of eyewitness evidence supporting the thesis was just as striking. Of some 200 witnesses on the scene, only one claimed to have seen a white Renault Trafic. Several testified they were looking at the spot where the Trafic should have been when the explosion occurred and saw nothing. Nicolasa Romero, the wife of a Buenos Aires policeman, was that lone witness. She said she saw a white Renault Trafic approach the corner where she was standing with her sister and her 4-year-old son. But Romero's sister testified that the vehicle that passed them was not a white Trafic but rather a black-and-yellow taxi. Other witnesses reported seeing a black-and-yellow taxi seconds before the explosion.

Argentine prosecutors argued that pieces of a white Trafic imbedded in the flesh of many of the victims of the explosion proved their case for a suicide bomb. But that evidence was discredited by Gabriel Levinas, a researcher for AMIA's own legal team. Levinas is a member of a leading Jewish family in Buenos Aires who had published a human rights magazine during the dictatorship (his uncle's car was used to kidnap war criminal Adolf Eichmann and spirit him off to Israel for trial in 1961.)

He discovered that the manufacturer of the white Trafic had been sent fragments of the vehicle recovered by the police for analysis and had found that none of the pieces had ever been put under high temperature. That meant that these car fragments could not have come from the particular white Trafic that police had identified as the suicide bomb car--since that vehicle was known to have once caught fire before having been recycled and repaired.

Yet despite the lack of eyewitness testimony and the weakness of the forensic evidence, the State Department publicly embraced the suicide-bomb story in 1994 and 1995.

The Problem of Motive

Independent investigators have also long puzzled over why Iran would have carried out an action against Argentine Jews while its Hezbollah allies were embroiled in armed struggle with the Israeli military in Lebanon. In their 2006 indictment of several Iranian nationals in the bombing, Argentine prosecutors argued that Iran planned the AMIA attack because Carlos Menem's administration had abruptly canceled two contracts for the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran.

But the indictment actually provides excerpts from key documents that undermine that conclusion. According to a February 10, 1992, cable from Argentina's ambassador in Iran, the director of the American Department of Iran's foreign ministry had "emphasized the need to reach a solution to the problem [of nuclear technology transfer] that would avoid damage to other contracts." Iran thus clearly signaled its hope of finding a negotiated solution that could reactivate the suspended contracts and maintain other deals with Argentina as well.

On March 17, 1992, a bomb blast destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires--an incident for which the Argentine prosecutors also held Iran responsible. The indictment, however, quotes a top official of INVAP, an Argentine nuclear firm that dominated the National Commission on Atomic Energy, as saying that during 1992 there were "contacts" between INVAP and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran "in the expectation that the decision of the national government would be revised, allowing the tasks in the contracts to be resumed." The same official confirmed that negotiations surrounding the two canceled projects continued from 1993 to 1995--before and after the AMIA explosion. Those revelations suggest that the Iranian attitude toward Argentina at the time of the bombing was exactly the opposite of the one claimed in the indictment.

The Hezbollah motive for involvement in the AMIA bombing, according to the indictment, was revenge against the Israeli bombing of a Hezbollah training camp in the Bekaa Valley in early 1994 and the Israeli kidnapping of Shiite leader Mustapha Dirani in May. That theory fails to explain, however, why Hezbollah would choose to retaliate against Jews in Argentina. It was already at war with the Israeli forces in Lebanon, where the group was employing suicide bomb attacks in an effort to pressure Israel to end its occupation. Hezbollah had a second easy retaliatory option available, which was to launch Katyusha rockets across the border into Israeli territory.

That is exactly what Hezbollah did to retaliate for the Israeli killing of some 100 Lebanese civilians in the town of Qana in 1996. That episode inspired greater anger toward Israel among Hezbollah militants than any other event in the 1990s, according to Boston University Hezbollah specialist Augustus Richard Norton. If Hezbollah responded to this Israeli provocation with Katyusha rockets on Israeli territory, it hardly makes sense that it would have responded to a lesser Israeli offense by designing an ambitious international attack on Argentine Jews with no connection to the Israeli occupation.

The Frame-up

The keystone of the Argentine case was Carlos Alberto Telleldin, a used-car salesman with a record of shady dealings with both criminals and the police--and a Shiite last name. On July 10, 1994, Telleldin sold the white Trafic the police claimed was the suicide car to a man he described as having a Central American accent. Nine days after the bombing Telleldin was arrested on suspicion of being an accomplice to the crime.

The police claimed they were led to Telleldin by the serial number on the van's engine block, which was found in the rubble. But it would have been a remarkable lapse for the organizers of what was otherwise a very professional bombing to have left intact such a visible identification mark, one that any car thief knows how to erase. That should have been a clue that the attack was likely not orchestrated by Hezbollah, whose bomb experts were well-known by US intelligence analysts to have been clever enough, in blowing up the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983, to avoid leaving behind any forensic evidence that would lead back to them. It should also have raised questions about whether that evidence was planted by the police themselves.

It is now clear that the Menem government's real purpose in arresting Telleldin was to get him to finger those they wanted to blame for the bombing. In January 1995, Telleldin was visited by retired army Capt. Hector Pedro Vergez, a part-time agent for SIDE, the Argentine intelligence agency, who offered him $1 million and his freedom if he would identify one of five Lebanese nationals detained in Paraguay in September 2004--men the CIA said might be Hezbollah militants--as the person to whom he had sold the van. After Telleldin refused to go along with the scheme, an Argentine judge found that there was no evidence on which to detain the alleged militants.

The Buenos Aires court, which threw out the case against Telleldin in 2004, determined that a federal judge, Luisa Riva Aramayo, met with Telleldin in 1995 to discuss another possibility--paying him to testify that he had sold the van to several high-ranking figures in the Buenos Aires provincial police who were allies of Menem's political rival, Eduardo Duhalde. In July 1996, Judge Juan Jose Galeano, who was overseeing the investigation, offered Telleldin $400,000 to implicate those police officers as accomplices in the bombing. (A videotape made secretly by SIDE agents and aired on television in April 1997 showed Galeano negotiating the bribe.) A month after making the offer to Telleldin, Galeano charged three senior Buenos Aires police officials with having involvement in the bombing, based on Telleldin's testimony.

"The Whole Iran Thing Seemed Kind of Flimsy"

In an interview last May James Cheek, Clinton's Ambassador to Argentina at the time of the bombing, told me, "To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with anything." The hottest lead in the case, he recalled, was an Iranian defector named Manoucher Moatamer, who "supposedly had all this information." But Moatamer turned out to be only a dissatisfied low-ranking official without the knowledge of government decision-making that he had claimed. "We finally decided that he wasn't credible," Cheek recalled. Ron Goddard, then deputy chief of the US Mission in Buenos Aires, confirmed Cheek's account. He recalled that investigators found nothing linking Iran to the bombing. "The whole Iran thing seemed kind of flimsy," Goddard said.

James Bernazzani, then the head of the FBI's Hezbollah office, was directed in October 1997 to assemble a team of specialists to go to Buenos Aires and put the AMIA case to rest. Bernazzani, now head of the agency's New Orleans office, recalled in a November 2006 interview how he arrived to find that the Argentine investigation of the AMIA bombing had found no real evidence of Iranian or Hezbollah involvement. The only clues suggesting an Iranian link to the bombing at that time, according to Bernazzani, were a surveillance tape of Iranian cultural attache Mohsen Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic van and an analysis of telephone calls made in the weeks before the bombing.

Shortly after the bombing, the biggest Buenos Aires daily newspaper, Clarin, published a story, leaked to it by Judge Galeano, that Argentine intelligence had taped Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic "months" before the bombing. A summary of the warrants for the arrest of Rabbani and six other Iranians in 2006 continued to refer to "indisputable documents" proving that Rabbani had visited car dealers to look for a van like the one allegedly used in the bombing. In fact, the intelligence report on the surveillance of Rabbani submitted to Galeano ten days after the bombing shows that the day Rabbani looked at a car dealer's white Trafic was May 1, 1993--fifteen months before the bombing and long before Argentine prosecutors have claimed Iran decided to target AMIA.

In the absence of any concrete evidence, SIDE turned to "link analysis" of telephone records to make a circumstantial case for Iranian guilt. The SIDE analysts argued that a series of telephone calls made between July 1 and July 18, 1994, to a mobile phone in the Brazilian border city of Foz de Iguazu must have been made by the "operational group" for the bombing--and that a call allegedly made on a cellphone belonging to Rabbani could be connected to this same group. The FBI's Bernazzani told me he was appalled by SIDE's use of link analysis to establish responsibility. "It can be very dangerous," he told me. "Using that analysis, you could link my telephone to bin Laden's." Bernazzani said the conclusions reached by the Argentine investigators were merely "speculation" and said that neither he nor officials in Washington had taken it seriously as evidence pointing to Iran.

Then, in 2000, one more defector surfaced with a new tale of Iranian responsibility. Abdolghassem Mesbahi, who claimed he was once the third-ranking man in Iran's intelligence services, told Galeano the decision to bomb the AMIA had been made at a meeting of senior Iranian officials, including President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, on August 14, 1993. But Mesbahi was soon discredited. Bernazzani told me American intelligence officials believed that by 2000, Mesbahi had long since lost his access to Iranian intelligence, that he was "poor, even broke" and ready to "provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran."

A Questionable Informant

Bernazzani admitted to me that until 2003, the case against Iran was merely "circumstantial." But he claimed a breakthrough came that year, with the identification of the alleged suicide bomber as Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Lebanese Hezbollah militant, who, according to a Lebanese radio broadcast, was killed in a military operation against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon in September 1984, two months after the AMIA bombing. "We are satisfied that we have identified the bomber based on the totality of the data streams," Bernazzani told me, citing "a combination of physical and witness evidence." But the Berro identification, too, was marked by evidence of fabrication and manipulation.

The official story is that Berro's name was passed on to SIDE and the CIA by a Lebanese informant in June 2001. The informant claimed he had befriended a former Hezbollah chauffeur and assistant to top Hezbollah leaders named Abu Mohamad Yassin, who told him that a Hezbollah militant named "Brru" was the suicide bomber. That story is suspicious on several counts, the most obvious being that intelligence agencies almost never reveal the name, or even the former position, of an actual informant.

The September 2003 court testimony of Patricio Pfinnen, the SIDE official in charge of the AMIA bombing investigation until he was fired in January 2002, casts serious doubt on the informant's credibility. Pfinnen testified that when he and his colleagues went back to the informant with more questions, "something went wrong with the information, or they were lying to us." Pfinnen said his team ultimately discarded the Berro theory because the sources in Lebanon had "failed and were not certain." He concluded, "I have my doubts about [Berro] being the person who was immolated."

After Pfinnen was fired in a power struggle within the intelligence agency, SIDE named Berro as the suicide bomber in a secret report. In March 2003, just after that report was completed, Ha'aretz reported that the Mossad had not only identified the bomber as Berro but possessed a transcript of Berro's farewell telephone call to Lebanon before the bombing, during which he told his parents that he was going to "join" his brother, who had been killed in a suicide bombing in Lebanon. When the 2006 indictment was released, however, it became clear that no evidence of such a call existed.

In September 2004, a Buenos Aires court acquitted Telleldin and the police officials who had been jailed years earlier, and in August 2005 Judge Galeano was impeached and removed from office. But Galeano's successors, prosecutors Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martinez Burgos, pressed on, hoping to convince the world that they could identify Berro as the bomber. They visited Detroit, Michigan, where they interviewed two brothers of Berro and obtained photos of Berro from them. They then turned to the only witness who claimed she had seen the white Trafic at the scene of the crime--Nicolasa Romero.

In November 2005, Nisman and Burgos announced that Romero had identified Berro from the Detroit photos as the same person she had seen just before the bombing. Romero, on the other hand, said she "could not be completely certain" that Berro was the man at the scene. In court testimony, in fact, she had said she had not recognized Berro from the first set of set of four photographs she had been shown or even from a second set. She finally saw some "similarity in the face" in one of the Berro photographs, but only after she was shown a police sketch based on her description after the bombing.

Bernazzani told me that the FBI team in Buenos Aires had discovered DNA evidence that was assumed to have come from the suicide bomber in an evidence locker, and Nisman took a DNA sample from one of Berro's brothers during his visit in September 2005. "I would assume, though I don't know, that once we got the brother's DNA, they compared them," he said. But Nisman claimed to a reporter in 2006 that samples had been contaminated. Significantly, the Argentine indictment of the Iranians makes no mention of the DNA evidence.

Despite a case against Iran that lacked credible forensic or eyewitness evidence and relied heavily on dubious intelligence and a discredited defector's testimony, Nisman and Burgos drafted their indictment against six former Iranian officials in 2006. However, the government of Néstor Kirchner displayed doubts about going forward with a legal case. According to the Forward newspaper, when American Jewish groups pressed Kirchner's wife, Christina, about the indictments at a UN General Assembly in New York in September 2006, she indicated that there was no firm date for any further judicial action against Iran. Yet the indictment was released the following month.

Both the main lawyer representing the AMIA, Miguel Bronfman, and Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, who later issued the arrest warrants for the Iranians, told the BBC last May that pressure from Washington was instrumental in the sudden decision to issue the indictments the following month. Corral indicated that he had no doubt that the Argentine authorities had been urged to "join in international attempts to isolate the regime in Tehran."

A senior White House official just called the AMIA case a "very clear definition of what Iranian state sponsorship of terrorism means." In fact, the US insistence on pinning that crime on Iran in order to isolate the Tehran regime, even though it had no evidence to support that accusation, is a perfect definition of cynical creation of an accusation in the service of power interests.
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Listen to the interview of Gareth Porter with Scott Horton for Antiwar Radio here: http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_01_21_porter.mp3

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Commentary: I would like to add a few words here to all that Gareth Porter has written and said. Argentina, a country I know very well, is one of the few countries in the world were real, genuine, Nazis lived. There has always been a large German colony in Argentina and, after World War II many Nazis were welcomed as refugees by Juan Peron who had many personal friends amongst them.

These Nazis had a great deal of influence on the right wing politics of Argentina and one could even purchase reprint copies of the Völkischer Beobachter in the subway of Buenos-Aires.

Argentina also used to be one of the countries with the highest percentage of Jew anywhere in the world, most of them concentrated in the capital Buenos-Aires. Many of them were very active in Argentinian politics including quite a few in the various Marxist guerilla movements such as "Montoneros", the "Tupamaros" or the infamous "ERP" (People's Revolutionary Army). Jews were also active in the unions, the student movements and the left-wing press. As a result, the Nazi-influenced right wing political parties absolutely hated the Jews and their propaganda constantly spoke of defending the 'Raza Criolla' (the 'real' Argentinians) against the 'Judeo-Masonic conspiracy' to destroy the country.

The Argentinian military used to be heavily infiltrated by such right-wing anti-Jewish elements and after the end of the military rule and the coming to power of Raul Alfonsin many blamed "the Jews" for all that had happened.

There was never any doubt in my mind that the Argentinian bombings were the result of a local, home-grown, anti-Jewish terrorist group, possibly liked with the elite "Carapintadas" commandos of the armed forces. As Gareth Porter mentions it in his interview with Scott Horton, these were the people who had motive and opportunity and, most importantly, the means to cover it all up.

The Israelis, who always had a strong network of agents in Argentina, could not have been unaware of all this. What they, and the Americans, did is blame it all on Hezbollah and Iran for political propaganda purposes. Under such circumstances it is not unreasonable to assume that the US and Israel might have had prior knowledge of what was about to happen. That would explain the quasi-instantaneous finger pointing at Iran and Hezbollah without any signs pointing in that direction (even indirectly).

Lastly, the Argentinian judicial system is corrupt beyond belief and heavily penetrated by pro-Israeli elements. To get some politically motivated indictments would have been just about the easiest thing for the Israelis or the CIA.

Thanks to Gareth Porter, one of the biggest propaganda myths against Hezbollah and Iran is finally biting the dust.

Venezuela, Argentina Accuse US of Smear Campaign

December 13th 2007, by Chris Carlson for Venezuelanalysis.com

Government authorities from both Venezuela and Argentina accused the United States of carrying out a smear campaign against them yesterday after US officials arrested four individuals accused of being agents of the Venezuelan government. US officials alleged that the arrested individuals were involved in trying to cover up an "international scandal" between Venezuela and Argentina, but both countries have rejected the claims.

Three Venezuelan citizens and one Uruguayan citizen were arrested in Miami on Tuesday night and appeared before a federal court yesterday on charges of "acting and conspiring to act as agents of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela within the United States," according to an official statement from the US Department of Justice.

The Assistant US Attorney General for National Security Kenneth Wainstein accused the defendants of "coordinating and participating in a series of meetings" with the Venezuelan-American Guido Alejandro Antonini Wilson, who was involved in the illegal trafficking of nearly US$ 800,000 from Venezuela to Argentina last August.

Argentinean customs officials caught Antonini on August 4th of this year attempting to enter the country with a suitcase that contained US$ 790,000. Argentinean officials confiscated the money, but Antonini returned to his home in South Florida.

According to the Assistant Attorney General, the four defendants were working on behalf of the Venezuelan government to get Antonini's help in covering up the source of the money, which, according to US officials, was for "the presidential campaign of Cristina [Fernandez] Kirchner."

"The complaint filed today outlines an alleged plot by agents of the Venezuelan government to manipulate an American citizen in Miami in an effort to keep the lid on a burgeoning international scandal," said Wainstein.

But both the Argentinean and Venezuelan governments have rejected the claims, calling them a "desperate attempt" to tarnish the growing ties between the two countries. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro assured that the case was part of a U.S. plan to damage Venezuela's image.

"This information from Miami makes the role of the US government in this campaign to damage the relations between our governments very clear," said Maduros who assured that they have "no doubt" that the United States is behind the political scandal.

"We are seeing a desperate effort by the government of the United States, using delicate mechanisms of judicial power for a political, psychological, and media war against the continent's progressive governments," he assured.

President of Argentina Cristina Fernandez also rejected the claims, comparing them to an American movie in which "you never know how much is true and how much is a lie." The Argentinean president assured that she "would not be pressured," and insisted that she would maintain her close ties to the Venezuelan government.

"All of our convictions and policies are going to be deepened because Argentina has never needed anyone to tell her who she can be friends with," she said.

President Fernandez, without actually mentioning the United States, accused the country of wanting to subordinate them to their own interests.

"Instead of wanting nations of friends, they want nations of employees and subordinates," she said.

But the president assured that she would continue efforts to strengthen Mercosur, the Bank of the South, and the construction of a "multilateral world."

Argentinean cabinet member Alberto Fernandez, who called the case a "US intelligence operation," also explained that the accusations of the US officials are unlikely to be true. He pointed out that Antonini was detained by the Argentinean officials upon entering the country, and the money was confiscated. Fernandez explained that if the Chavez government wanted to bring in money to finance the campaign of Cristina Fernandez, they could have easily done it a few days later when President Chavez visited the country.

"If the objective was to enter [the country] with a suitcase of money he could have entered the next day in Chavez' airplane and no one would have noticed," he said.

"But this thing has the characteristics of being a dirty trick to tarnish the presence of Chavez in Argentina," said Fernandez. "I have no doubt of that."

Fernandez called on the United States to answer Argentina's request for the extradition of Antonini Wilson, so that they can carry out an investigation with regards to the $800,000.

"If the United States is really interested in the truth, they should extradite Antonini Wilson. But I'm afraid they are protecting him," he said.