Plot described by the US Attorney General sounds like a bad action movie, but why would he lie?
Hamid Dabashi Last Modified: 14 Oct 2011 16:03
"Did an elite branch of Iran's military handpick a divorced, 56-year-old Iranian-American used-car salesman from Texas to hire a hitman from a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the ambassador to Saudi Arabia by blowing up a bomb in a crowded restaurant in Washington?"
This is how Reza Sayyah of CNN quite succinctly summarised the bombshell that the US Attorney General Eric Holder dropped in Washington DC on October 11.
I am of a certain generation and analytical bend of mind that I cannot believe that Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States, can in bright daylight come to national television and just straight lie about a matter so dire and dangerous in its actual and potential consequences.
We have no way of challenging the veracity of what he says. He is privy to intelligence. We are not. He is a figure of authority - we must take what he says seriously. The very assumption and presumption of a democracy is that people in position of such power and authority don't just lie.
And yet: Every which way you look at it: The story is so outlandish, so bizarre, so utterly ridiculous that it has left almost everyone across the political spectrum with a sense of: "... say what?"
Various views
Pepe Escobar has just written a piece for Al Jazeera blasting this report and considering it a plot to invade Iran.
"No one," he said rhetorically, "ever lost money betting on the dull predictability of the US government. Just as Occupy Wall Street is firing imaginations all across the spectrum - piercing the noxious revolving door between government and casino capitalism - Washington brought us all down to earth, sensationally advertising an Iranian cum Mexican cartel terror plot straight out of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. The potential victim: Adel al-Jubeir, the ambassador in the US of that lovely counter-revolutionary Mecca, Saudi Arabia."
Escobar may indeed be right, but he does not deal with the matter of the US Attorney General Eric Holder coming on national television and looking the world straight in the eye and saying what he said. Escobar just sidesteps it, with perfect political poignancy, of course. So does Max Fisher of The Atlantic, who too dismisses the veracity of this report, and thus we are at mercy of someone like Steve Clemens, also of The Atlantic, who comes and says no in fact the Islamic Republic is perfectly capable of trying to do what Eric Holder says they were trying to do.
But it is not just Pepe Escobar doubting the story. We have Julian Borger of the Guardian, who lists no less than eight perfectly legitimate questions as holes in Eric Holder's account. Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole, Tony Karon, Stephen Walt, and John Glaser also raise serious and unanswered questions about the Attorney General's story - with which we are back to square one: Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States.
"His socks would not match ... he was not capable of carrying out this plan."
- New York Times
The story is in fact so bad that even The New York Times, not known exactly for its habitual questioning of the official lines of the US government when it comes to warmongering in the Middle East, published a piece about the used car salesman at the centre of the plot in which we learn that he was a rowdy, incompetent fool. According to his friend: "His socks would not match ... He was always losing his keys and his cellphone. He was not capable of carrying out this plan."
But, again, none of these points can come together to discount the straight face with which Attorney General Eric Holder insisted that this indeed was the case - that this old car salesman with his mismatched socks and misplaced cellphone and keys was the key evidence that Iranians were trying to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, and such.
Holding on fast to our conviction that we must begin with the straight face of the US Attorney General, we must then ask ourselves: Was Eric Holder also party to the legal maneuvering that evidently went on for months in the Obama White House that provided a jurdical narrative that allowed the United States to assassinate one of its own citizens?
According to the New York Times, the Obama administration had a "secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen." The newspaper adds: "The document that laid out the administration's justification - a roughly 50-page memorandum
by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, completed around June 2010" - and more specifically that it was "prepared by two lawyers in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel."
in full: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/10/20111014122536970741.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
