Alleged Iranian Assassination Plot Suspicious, Experts SayWASHINGTON - U.S. Justice Department charges that elements of Iran's government were behind a foiled plot on the life of Saudi Arabia's U.S. ambassador have boggled the minds of many Americans knowledgeable about both Iran and terrorism.
The alleged target and modus operandi – employing a Mexican drug cartel to blow up Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir at a Washington restaurant – are unusual, to say the least, for a government that has focused on political dissidents and theatres of war closer to home.
"Fishy, fishy, fishy,'' Bruce Riedel, a CIA veteran who was formerly in charge of the Near East and South Asia on the White House National Security Council, told IPS. "That Iran engages in assassinations is old news. That it would use a Mexican drug cartel would be new."
Iran has not been behind a political assassination in the United States since a year after the 1979 revolution, when an African-American convert to Islam, Daoud Salahuddin, killed the former press attaché at the Iranian Embassy, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, in a Washington suburb.
Iran was also responsible for assassinations of Iranian dissidents in Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s but used its own agents or members of Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite organization that Iran helped create following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Hezbollah is believed responsible for the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and a spate of other bombings and abductions in Lebanon.
More recently, Iran has allegedly backed local proxies responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
U.S. experts on Iranian spy agencies and tradecraft say the hare-brained scheme described in the Justice Department complaint does not resemble the operations of the Quds Force, the external arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). Al-Quds means Jerusalem in Arabic.
"Nothing about this adds up," said Kenneth Katzman, author of a book on the IRGC and expert on Iran at the Congressional Research Service.
"Iran does not use non-Muslim groups or people who are not trusted members or associates of the Quds force," Katzman said. "Iran does not blow up buildings in Washington that invites retaliation against the Iranian homeland."
Indeed, the timing would be extremely awkward for Iran, which is already facing growing isolation because of its nuclear program and domestic abuses of human rights.
This weekend, Ahmed Shaheed, the new U.N. special rapporteur on human rights to Iran, will release his first report, which is expected to excoriate the Iranian government for its treatment of its own citizens, especially in the aftermath of disputed 2009 presidential elections.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/10/13
