Another neo-con attempt to frame Iran falls flat

Another Neocon Attempt to Frame Iran Falls Apart

By Gareth Porter, The Nation

Posted on January 26, 2008, Printed on January 27, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/74331/

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 embedded 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 1982.)

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 N

On Jan 27, 5:53 pm, "Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names"

<PopUlist...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Another Neocon Attempt to Frame Iran Falls Apart

> By Gareth Porter, The Nation

> Posted on January 26, 2008, Printed on January 27, 2008http://www.alternet..org/story/74331/

> 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 embedded 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 1982.)

>

> 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 N