The evidence already available about Argentine Prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s
death from a gunshot to the head creates a strong presumption that he was murdered.
He was about to present publicly his accusation that President Christina
Fernández de Kirchner and her foreign minister, Héctor Timerman conspired to
absolve Iran of the 1994 AMIA bombing and lift the Interpol red notices on the
accused Iranians.
And it was Nisman’s 2006 request for the arrest of six former senior Iranian
officials for the bombing that prompted his push for those red notices. In the
context of Argentine political culture, with its long experience of impunity
for crimes committed by the powerful, the circumstances of his death have led
to a general conviction that the government must have been behind his murder.
But there is good reason to be cautious about that assumption. Nisman’s case
against Kirchner was problematic. The central accusation in his affidavit, made
96 times, according to press accounts, was that Kirchner and Timerman had
sought to revoke the Interpol arrest warrants against the former Iranian officials.
But Ronald K. Noble, the secretary general of Interpol for fifteen years until
last November, denied
Nisman’s accusation. Noble declared, “I can say with 100 percent certainty,
not a scintilla of doubt, that Foreign Minister Timerman and the Argentine government
have been steadfast, persistent and unwavering that the Interpol’s red notices
be issued, remain in effect and not be suspend or removed.”
Noble’s denial raises an obvious question: Why would the Kirchner government,
knowing that Nisman’s main claim could be easily refuted, have any reason to
kill him on the eve of the presentation of his case? Why give those seeking
to discredit the government’s policy on the AMIA bombing the opportunity to
shift the issue from the facts of the case to the presumption of officially
sponsored assassination?
The Kirchner-Timerman negotiation of an agreement
with Iran in January 2013 for an “international truth commission” on the
AMIA bombing that would have sent five respected international judicial figures
to Iran to question the accused Iranians. That was a way of getting around
the Iranian refusal to subject former high-ranking officials to Argentine justice.
But Nisman was trying to prove that was an illicit cover-up for a cynical deal
with Iran. He considered
it “a betrayal of the country and his work”, according to his friend, Gustavo
Perednik.
Nisman’s “criminal complaint” against Kirchner and Timerman claimed the government’s
negotiations with Iran involved a “sophisticated
criminal plan” to make a deal with one of the Iranians the prosecutor accused
of the AMIA bombing, former cultural attaché Mohsen Rabbani. It asserted that
Argentina promised Iran that it would lift the Interpol notices on the six Iranian
in exchange for an “oil for grains” deal.
Nisman’s accusation was based on snippets of transcripts from 5,000
hours of wiretaps of conversations of allies of Kirchner government that
have now been made public by a judge. One of the excerpts quotes
Rabbani himself, in a conversation with an ally of Fernandez, as saying:
Iran was Argentina’s main buyer and now it’s buying almost nothing. That
could change. Here [in Iran] there are some sectors of the government who’ve
told me they are willing to sell oil to Argentina … and also to buy weapons.
The statement proves nothing, however, except that that Rabbani knew some Iranian
officials who were interested in oil sales to Argentina. No evidence of Rabbani
being involved in negotiating on behalf of Iran is suggested in the Nisman document,
and the person at the other end of the line was not an Argentine official. So
the conversation did not involve anyone who even had direct knowledge of the
actual negotiations between the governments of Iran and Argentina.
The same thing applies to the other individuals who have been identified as
speaking on the wiretaps in favour of such a deal. Those individuals are
friendly with officials of the Kirchner government and friendly with Iran, but
the actual negotiations were carried out by senior officials of the foreign
ministries of Iran and Argentina, not by private individuals. The distinction
between knowledge and hearsay is a fundamental principle in judicial processes
for a very good reason.
The presentation of facts or allegations as proof of guilt, even though they
proved nothing of the sort, was also a pattern that permeated Nisman’s 2006
“Request for
Arrests” in the 1994 AMIA bombing. Contrary to the general reverence
in the news media for his indictment of senior Iranian officials for their alleged
responsibility for the bombing, his case was built on a massive accumulation
of highly dubious and misleading claims, from the “irrefutable evidence” of
Rabbani’s participation in planning to the identification of the alleged suicide
car bomber. This writer’s investigation
of the case over several months, which included interviews with US diplomats
who had served in the Embassy in Buenos Aires in the years following the AMIA
bombing as well as with the FBI official detailed to work on the case in 1996-97,
concluded that the Argentine investigators never found any evidence of Iranian
involvement.
Nisman asserted that the highest Iranian officials had decided to carry out
the bombing at a meeting on 12 or 14 August, 1993, primarily on the testimony
of four officials of the Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK), the Iranian exile terrorist
group that was openly dedicated to the overthrow of the Iranian regime. The
four MEK officials claimed to know the precise place, date and time and the
three-point agenda of the meeting.
When US Ambassador, Anthony Wayne, meeting with Nisman in November 2006, asked
him about Argentine press reports that had criticised the document for using
the testimony of “unreliable witnesses,” Nisman responded, according
to the Embassy reporting cable, that “several of the witnesses were “former
senior Iraqi [sic] officials, e.g. Bani Sadr, with direct knowledge of events
surrounding the conception of the attacks.”
Nisman’s suggestion that former Iranian president Abolhassen Banisadr had “direct
knowledge” related to the AMIA bombings was a stunningly brazen falsehood. Banisadr
had been impeached by the Iranian legislature in June 1981 and had fled to Paris
the following month – thirteen years before the bombing.
Nisman also cited the testimony of Abolghassem Mesbahi, who called himself
a “defector” from the Iranian intelligence service, that Iranian officials had
made such a decision sometime in August 1993. But Mesbahi was known by US intelligence
analysts as a “serial
fabricator”, who had also told an obviously false story about Iranian involvement
in the 9/11 attacks. Nisman failed to mention, moreover, that Mesbahi had given
a
secret 100-page deposition to Argentine investigators in 2000 in Mexico
in which he
had claimed the planning for the attack had begun in 1992.
Nisman’s was so convinced of Iran’s guilt that he was ready to see almost any
fact as supporting evidence, even when there was an obvious reason for doubting
its relevance. For example, he cited Rabbani’s shopping for a van “similar
to the one that exploded in front of the AMIA building a few months later.”
In fact, however, as
I reported in 2008, the Argentine investigation files include the original
intelligence report on the surveillance of Rabbani showing that Rabbani’s visit
to the car dealer was not “a few months” before the bombing, but a full fifteen
months earlier.
Despite the Argentine intelligence following Rabbani’s every move and tapping
his telephones for all those months, Nisman cites nothing indicating that Rabbani
did anything indicating his involvement in preparations for a terror bombing.
The FBI official who assisted the investigation told
me in a November 2007 interview that the use of phone metadata to suggest
that Rabbani was in touch with an “operational group” nothing but “speculation”,
and said that neither he nor officials in Washington had taken it seriously
as evidence or Rabbani’s involvement.
The fact that Nisman’s two indictments related to Iran and AMIA were extremely
tendentious obviously does not dispose of the question of who killed him. But
whatever the reason for his being killed, it wasn’t because he had revealed
irrefutable truths about AMIA and Argentine government policy.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in
U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism
for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book is Manufactured
Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He can be contacted
at porter.gareth50@gmail.com.
Reprinted from the Middle East Eye with the author’s permission.
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