The Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, and the crimes that have gone without punishment in Argentina - by Clifford D. May and Toby Dershowitz

...That investigator, just days before he was assassinated, said prophetically: "With Nisman around or not, the evidence is there." Argentines now face a choice: to act on that evidence or to surrender to terrorists and murderers. To put it another way, they must decide what kind of nation Argentina is, and what kind of nation Argentina will become.


Clifford D. May/Toby Dershowitz..
Israel Hayom..
28 January '19..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/crimes-without-punishment-in-argentina/



For more than a decade, Alberto Nisman had been investigating the worst terrorist attack ever committed on Argentine soil: the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds wounded.

Four years ago this week, the federal prosecutor was putting the finishing touches on a report that would accuse then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and a dozen others of helping cover up the Islamic Republic of Iran's responsibility for the attack.

On Jan. 18, the day before he was to present that report to Argentina's Congress, Nisman was found dead in the bathroom of his locked 13th-floor apartment. A .22-caliber bullet had been fired at close-range into his head.

Kirchner initially called his death a suicide – even though his fingerprints were not found on the Bersa pistol left close to his body, and there was no gunpowder residue on his hands.

Just over a year ago, however, an investigation by 28 forensic experts and law enforcement officials conclusively determined that he did not kill himself. In fact, they were able to deduce, two people roughed him up, sedated him, and then shot him.

Who were those people? And from whom were they taking orders? Argentines attempting to answer such questions place themselves in danger.

Late last month, Federal Judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado, who also is Nisman's former wife and the mother of their two daughters, withdrew from formal involvement in the investigation. The reason: ongoing threats – the "need to guarantee the protection and safety of the family," as she phrased it in a written statement.

Nisman used wire-tapped conversations to build his case against Kirchner. Among them was one concerning an ally, former intelligence official Antonio Stiuso. Kirchner says on tape: "We have to kill him." Her defenders claim she did not intend to be taken literally. Stiuso, unconvinced, subsequently fled the country with his family.

In September 2017, former Argentine Ambassador to Syria Roberto Ahuad revealed in testimony that Foreign Minister Hector Timerman had visited Syria in January 2011 to finalize an agreement with Iran, at a meeting hosted by Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. A message sent to Ahuad asked: "When are you committing suicide?" Another warned: "Beware of an induced suicide."

And Eduardo Taiano, the head prosecutor investigating Nisman's murder, has received messages threatening to do to him and his son what was done to Nisman.

Nevertheless, Taiano is continuing to investigate, focusing most immediately on calls made over more than 150 phone lines – many of them reportedly to intelligence agents – on the day Nisman's body was found.

Long before implicating Argentine officials in a conspiracy, Nisman had found solid evidence that officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran planned and financed the AMIA bombing, and that Hezbollah, its terrorist proxy, carried it out.

The Cost of Collaborating with Iran, and There is a Cost - by Ben Cohen

...As more evidence regarding this shameful agreement emerges, the underlying theme that the Iranian regime cannot be trusted will be resonate even more strongly. More immediately, the AMIA scandal gives us an important glimpse into how the Iranians negotiate. What they don’t do is compromise. Instead, they present a mixture of threats, ideological venom and faith in the reluctance of Western leaders to take military action as a negotiating strategy. That’s why any country that declares a conflict with the Iranians satisfactorily resolved – whether that’s the AMIA issue or Tehran’s nuclear ambitions – has reached that conclusion in spite of the facts, not because of them.

Ben Cohen..
J-Wire..
26 December '15..

Next month marks the first anniversary of the death of Alberto Nisman, the Argentine federal prosecutor who spent a decade investigating the 1994 Iranian-backed bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires. In that massacre, 85 people were murdered and hundreds more injured.Nisman’s lifeless body, readers will remember, was discovered in the bathroom of his Buenos Aires apartment on January 18, 2015 – the night before he was due to elaborate on his formal complaint against the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in front of the Argentine Congress. Nisman had concluded, based on the mountain of evidence that was available to him, that the main purpose of Fernández de Kirchner’s 2013 “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) with the Iranian regime was to abandon the demand for six Iranian suspects in the AMIA bombing to be extradited, thereby paving the way to restored relations between Buenos Aires and Tehran.

The Argentine President made one spectacular miscalculation in all of this. At no point did it occur to her that Daniel Scioli, the candidate she chose to succeed her in the presidential election this year, would end up losing the ballot. But that’s exactly what happened. With the victory, in November, of the pragmatic Mauricio Macri, all of Fernández de Kirchner’s bets regarding the future of the AMIA investigation have been made redundant.

There is a lesson here for politicians that goes far beyond Argentina’s borders. Very basically, the lesson determines that while colluding with Iranian terrorism may deliver short-term gains, in the long-term there are no benefits yielded and quite a few costs to boot.

In the case of Fernández de Kirchner and her principal cohorts, among them her foreign minister Hector Timerman, those costs could conceivably include a jail sentence. Securing the MOU with Iran required Argentina’s leaders to lie about the circumstances of the AMIA bombing. At the time, anyone with even superficial knowledge of the atrocity and its tortured aftermath knew that they were lying. Now it can be proven.

Last week, previously unknown recordings of Timerman’s telephone conversations with local Jewish leaders were released into the public domain. No-one quite knows how the recordings surfaced, but it’s reasonable to believe that with Fernández de Kirchner out of the presidential palace, and with President Macri’s new government declaring that it regards the MOU with Iran as null and void, whoever unveiled them has figured that doing so will not result in a knock on the door in the middle of the night – or a bullet in the back of the head.

Prosecutor who accused government officials of covering up terrorist massacre by Iran/Hezbollah is found dead

...Nisman, who was expected to take part in a closed-door hearing in Congress on Monday to reveal the details of explosive allegations that involved President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman, was found minutes before midnight...

The Buenos Aires Jewish community center 
after the explosion [Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
19 January '15..



An almost forgotten terrorist murder-by-bombing of innocent people in a Jewish community center building in the capital of Argentina is in the news again today 21 years later:

The AMIA bombing was an attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA; Argentine Israelite Mutual Association) building. It occurred in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds. It was Argentina's deadliest bombing ever. Argentina is home to a Jewish community of 200,000, the largest in Latin America and sixth in the world outside Israel. Over the years, the case has been marked by incompetence and accusations of cover-ups. [Wikipedia]

Cover-ups?

- September 2004: All the local suspects, many of them officers of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, were charged and then acquitted in September 2004.

- July 2005, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, better known today as Pope Francis, became a signatory on a petition calling for justice in the AMIA bombing case.

- August 2005: The judge in charge of the case, Juan José Galeano, was impeached and removed from his post on charges of "serious" irregularities due to mishandling of the investigation.

- October 2006: The prosecutors appointed to the case, Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martínez Burgos, formally accused the government of Iran of directing the bombing, and Hezbollah of executing it.

This morning, it's reported in the Buenos Aires Herald that Alberto Nisman, one of those two prosecutors, was found dead in a pool of blood in his Buenos Aires apartment last night:

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 
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Terrorist? Absolutely - Introducing Hassan Rowhani, winner of the Iranian sham election for president

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
20 June '13..

The chattering classes have been working overtime this week to sell Americans on the idea that Hassan Rowhani—the winner of the Iranian sham election for president—is not only a moderate but also the harbinger of a chance for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff between the Islamist government and the West. Even if one were to accept the idea that the moderate in a field of candidates hand picked by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is actually a person worthy of the label, the notion that this post brings with it the power to either liberalize Iran or to end its nuclear program is simply false. But, as a report from our former COMMENTARY colleague Alana Goodman in the Washington Free Beacon points out, there’s more proof that Rowhani is up to his neck in the nefarious actions of the regime. It turns out that, as we’ve previously noted, Rowhani was not only an acolyte of Ayatollah Khomenei but deeply involved in the international terrorist wing of Iran’s Islamist movement. As Goodman writes:

Iranian President-elect Hassan Rowhani was on the special Iranian government committee that plotted the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, according to an indictment by the Argentine government prosecutor investigating the case.

The attack on the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) is one of the worst terrorist attacks in recent history with 85 killed and hundreds more wounded. After a lengthy investigation, the evidence uncovered by Argentine authorities pointed directly at the Hezbollah terrorist group and its Iranian masters who made the decision to launch the attack on the Jewish target at a meeting of a committee of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council in August 1993. Khamenei was the head of the group, but one of its members was none other than the person that we are supposed to think is about to change Iran against the supreme leader’s wishes: Hassan Rowhani.

Though Iran’s apologists are unhappy about this revelation, there is no serious effort being made to claim that Rowhani is not guilty or that his role in the crime is being exaggerated. But some of those who have been advocating for the United States to embark upon a new round of dead-end diplomacy because of Rowhani’s rise are bound to argue that the evidence of his past should be ignored or treat it as irrelevant to the question of whether we should consider his election an opportunity for another round of engagement with Iran. That would be a colossal mistake. Understanding Rowhani’s background is crucial to the question of whether he is willing to move Iran back from the nuclear brink and what it tells us should put an end to any hope that he is anything like a moderate.

We will be told that Rowhani’s participation in mass murder should not blind us to the fact that sometimes people change and that former terrorists can become responsible leaders. But such examples (which are rare and often misinterpreted) are generally the product of a genuine change of heart and an ideological shift. And there is no evidence that Rowhani has undergone either.

The Argentinian pact with the devil

Isi Leibler..
Candidly Speaking From Jerusalem..
10 February '13..

Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner has jettisoned whatever was left of her country’s moral standing by consummating a devil’s pact with Iran, whose leaders were responsible for having inflicted the worst-ever act of terrorism on her own citizens.

In March 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires suffered a terrorist bombing which killed 29 and wounded 242 people. Two years later, in July 1994, a second bombing targeted the Jewish community center (AMIA) killing 85 and injuring hundreds.

There were protracted investigations and eventually two Argentinian prosecutors, Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Burgos, formally accused the Iranian government of orchestrating the attacks. In 2007 the Argentinian government even issued arrest warrants for six Iranians accused of involvement, one of whom, Ahmad Vahidi, is currently the defense minister, and another of whom is former president Ali Rafsanjani.

They were placed on Interpol’s “red” list of wanted criminals. None of them were apprehended and, not surprisingly, Iran adamantly refused to cooperate.

Over time, evidence emerged exposing corruption and indicating that a cover-up had taken place. A judge was impeached for bribery and there were allegations that the Iranian intelligence service had deposited $10 million in a Swiss bank account held by former president Carlos Menem in return for his hushing up the affair. In March 2012, Menem was ordered to stand trial for obstruction of justice, but to date there has been no further progress.

In 2005, president Nester Kirchner, the late husband of the current president, described Argentina’s failure to move forward in this matter as a “national disgrace.”

Argentina, Al-Assad And Two Kinds of Dead Jew

Eamonn McDonagh
Z-Word Blog
04 July '10

1.

In Argentina in the 1970s hundreds of young Jewish people were kidnapped, tortured and murdered because they adhered to one of the revolutionary branches of Peronism or Marxism, because they were in contact with someone who did or simply because the rabid antisemites in the police and army saw being Jewish as necessarily being some kind of Bolshevik. 1n 2010 some of their murderers and tortures are having to answer for their acts in courts throughout the country. The present government deserves much credit for this as large sectors of society would prefer the crimes of the 1976 - 1983 dictatorship to be forgotten about.


2.

On the 18th of July, 1994 85 people, almost all of them Jews, were murdered in a bomb attack on the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires. The government of Iran is suspected of being responsible and a number of Iranian citizens, including Iran’s current defense minister, are wanted by the Argentine courts in connection with the attack. The official position of the Argentine government is that it supports the demand for their extradition.

3.

President Bashir al-Assad of Syria has just visited Buenos Aires. He was dined, if not wined, by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The diplomatic love-in with Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world wasn’t spoiled by any mention of dead Jews. In today’s edition of Pagina/12, a national daily and government mouthpiece, there appears a report by Santiago O’Donnell in which describes a press conference given by al-Assad and his own participation in it.

Under the headline “Secular, Modern and Multilateral” the young tyrant is presented as the very model of potable, progressive leadership. His lie about the existence of a flourishing Jewish community in Syrian is accepted at face value and his attempts to play down the Holocaust are described as a “stumble”. O’Donnell can’t bring himself to ask the obvious question about the Iranian fugitives so he asks instead about Syria’s relations with Hezbollah and gets a bromide in response. Right at the end O’Donnell excuses himself for not asking any questions about the totalitarian nature of al-Assad’s rule on the grounds that journalists rarely get access to leaders of such importance. The overall tone of the piece is one of mild fawning.

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Argentina’s Message to Tehran: Relax!

Eamonn McDonagh
Z-Word Blog
20 June '10

Héctor Timerman, Argentina’s new foreign minister, gives a two-page interview to Pagina/12 today in which he says the following with regard to Argentina’s attempts to have a number of Iranians extradited to answer charges of having been responsible for the AMIA massacre,

The case of Iran is simple. An Argentina court has asked for the extradition because it says it has evidence connecting them to the attack on the AMIA and wants to question them. It’s up to Iran to extradite them to Argentina, where they will receive due process. We have always placed our reliance on the path of justice and respect for human rights. But Iran should be aware that Argentina isn’t going to give up on its request to bring these people to justice. We suffered two attacks, first against the Embassy of Israel and then against the AMIA. Since 2003 the government has supported the demands of the courts. We are not taking other measures. We are not going to pursue other measures.

As I have translated the above text from Spanish into diplomatese, let me now translate it into English.

Hey there, everybody in Tehran, I mean both the government and terrorist suspects, you can all pour yourselves another cup of tea and relax. Neither I nor the government are going to do anything to make your lives uncomfortable.

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