But even though the administration is undoubtedly concerned about that Israeli threat, the Panetta leak had a different objective. The White House was taking advantage of the current crisis atmosphere over that Israeli threat and even seeking to make it more urgent in order to put pressure on Iran to make diplomatic concessions to the United States and its allies on its nuclear programme in the coming months.

The real aim of the leak brings into sharper focus a contradiction in the Barack Obama administration’s Iran policy between its effort to reduce the likelihood of being drawn into a war with Iran and its desire to exploit the Israeli threat of war to gain diplomatic leverage on Iran.

The Panetta leak makes it less likely that either Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Iranian strategists will take seriously Obama’s effort to keep the United States out of a war initiated by an Israeli attack. It seriously undercut the message carried to the Israelis by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month that the United States would not come to Israel’s defence if it launched a unilateral attack on Iran, as IPS reported February 1.

A tell-tale indication of Panetta’s real intention was his very specific mention of the period from April through June as the likely time frame for an Israeli attack. Panetta suggested that the reason was that Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak had identified this as the crucial period in which Iran would have entered a so-called “zone of immunity” the successful movement of some unknown proportion of Iran’s uranium enrichment assets to the highly protected Fordow enrichment plant.

But Barak had actually said in an interview last November that he “couldn’t predict” whether that point would be reached in “two quarters or three quarters or a year”.

Why, then, would Panetta deliberately specify the second quarter as the time frame for an Israeli attack? The one explicit connection between the April-June period and the dynamics of the U.S.-Israel- Iran triangle is the expiration of the six-month period delay in the application of the European Union’s apparently harsh sanctions against the Iranian oil sector.

That six-month delay in the termination of all existing EU oil contracts with Iran was announced by the EU January 23, but it was reported as early as January 14 that the six-month delay had already been adopted informally as a compromise between the three-month delay favoured by Britain, France and Germany and the one-year delay being demanded by other member countries.

The Obama administration had also delayed its own sanctions on Iranian oil for six months, after having been forced to accept such sanctions by the U.S. Congress, at the urging of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

The administration recognised that six-month period before U.S. and EU sanctions take effect as a window for negotiations with Iran aimed at defusing the crisis over its nuclear programme. So it was determined to use that same time frame to put pressure on Iran to accommodate U.S. and European demands.

By the time the news of the postponement of the U.S.-Israeli military exercise broke on January 15, Panetta was already prepared to take advantage of that development to gain diplomatic leverage on Iran.

Laura Rozen of Yahoo News reported that U.S. Defence Department officials and former officials, speaking anonymously, said Barak had requested the postponement and that they were “privately concerned” the request “could be one potential warning signal Israel is trying to leave its options open for conducting a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the spring.”

The Israelis were not on board with that Obama administration tactic. In fact, Netanyahu seemed more interested in portraying the Obama administration as favouring a soft approach on Iran in an election year.

Instead of reinforcing the effort by Panetta to use the six-month window to bring diplomatic pressure, Defence Minister Barak, speaking on Army Radio January 18, said the government had “no date for making decisions” on a possible attack on Iran and, adding “The whole thing is very far off …”

Another indication that the Ignatius column was not intended to increase pressure on Israel but to impress Iran is that it did not reinforce the message taken by Gen. Dempsey to Israel last month that the United States would not join any war with Iran that Israel had initiated on its own without consulting with Washington.

Ignatius wrote that the administration “appears to favor staying out of the conflict unless Iran hits U.S. assets which would trigger a strong U.S. response.” But then he added what was clearly the main point: “Administration officials caution that Tehran shouldn’t misunderstand: the United States has a 60-year commitment to Israeli security, and if Israeli population centers were hit, the United States could feel obligated to come to Israel’s defense.”

Ignatius, who is known for reflecting only the views of the top U.S. defence and intelligence officials, was clearly reporting what he had been told by Panetta in Brussels.

Further underlining the real intention behind the Panetta leak, Ignatius went out of his way to present Netanyahu’s assumptions about a war as credible, if not perfectly reasonable, hinting that this was the view he was getting from Panetta.

The Israelis, he wrote “are said to believe that a military strike could be limited and constrained”. Emphasising the Israeli doubt that Iran would dare to retaliate heavily against Israeli population centres, Ignatius cited “(o)ne Israeli estimate” that a war against Iran would only entail “about 500 civilian casualties”.

Ignatius chose not to point out that the estimate of less than 500 deaths had been given by Barak last November in response to a statement by former Mossad director Meir Dagan that an attack on Iran would precipitate a “regional war that would endanger the (Israeli) state’s existence”

After that Barak claim, Dagan said in an interview with Haaretz newspaper that he assumes that “the level of destruction and paralysis of everyday life, and Israeli death toll would be high.”

But Ignatius ignored the assessment of the former Mossad director.

The Panetta leak appears to confirm the fears of analysts following the administration’s Iran strategy closely that its effort to distance the United States from an Israeli attack would be ineffective because of competing interests.

Reza Marashi, research director at the National Iranian-American Council, who worked in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs from 2006 to 2010, doubts the administration can avoid being drawn into an Israeli war with Iran without a very public and unequivocal statement that it will not tolerate a unilateral and unprovoked Israeli attack.

“Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And sometimes the only way to ensure that a friend doesn’t endanger you or themselves is to take the away the car keys,” Marashi said.

Dempsey’s warning, conveyed to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, represents the strongest move yet by President Barack Obama to deter an Israeli attack and ensure that the United States is not caught up in a regional conflagration with Iran.

But the Israeli government remains defiant about maintaining its freedom of action to make war on Iran, and it is counting on the influence of right-wing extremist views in U.S. politics to bring pressure to bear on Obama to fall into line with a possible Israeli attack during the election campaign this fall.

Obama still appears reluctant to break publicly and explicitly with Israel over its threat of military aggression against Iran, even in the absence of evidence Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon.

Dempsey’s trip was highly unusual, in that there was neither a press conference by the chairman nor any public statement by either side about the substance of his meetings with Israeli leaders. Even more remarkable, no leak about what he said to the Israelis has appeared in either U.S. or Israeli news media, indicating that both sides have regarded what Dempsey said as extremely sensitive.

The substance of Dempsey’s warning to the Israelis has become known, however, to active and retired senior flag officers with connections to the JCS, according to a military source who got it from those officers.

A spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Commander Patrick McNally, offered no comment Wednesday when IPS asked him about the above account of Dempsey’s warning to the Israelis.

The message carried by Dempsey was the first explicit statement to the Netanyahu government that the United States would not defend Israel if it attacked Iran unilaterally. But Defence Secretary Leon Panetta had given a clear hint in an interview on “Face the Nation” January 8 that the Obama administration would not help defend Israel in a war against Iran that Israel had initiated.

Asked how the United States would react if Israel were to launch a unilateral attack on Iran, Panetta first emphasised the need for a coordinated policy toward Iran with Israel. But when host Bob Schieffer repeated the question, Panetta said, “If the Israelis made that decision, we would have to be prepared to protect our forces in that situation. And that’s what we’d be concerned about.”

Defence Minister Barak had sought to dampen media speculation before Dempsey’s arrival that the chairman was coming to put pressure on Israel over its threat to attack Iran, but then proceeded to reiterate the Netanyahu-Barak position that they cannot give up their responsibility for the security of Israel “for anyone, including our American friends”.

There has been no evidence since the Dempsey visit of any change in the Netanyahu government’s insistence on maintaining its freedom of action to attack Iran.

Dempsey’s meetings with Netanyahu and Barak also failed to resolve the issue of the joint U.S.-Israeli military exercise geared to a missile attack, “Austere Challenge ’12″, which had been scheduled for April 2012 but had been postponed abruptly a few days before his arrival in Israel.

More than two weeks after Dempsey’s meeting with Barak, the spokesman for the Pentagon, John Kirby, told IPS, “All I can say is that the exercise will be held later this year.” That indicated that there has been no major change in the status of U.S.-Israeli discussions of the issue since the postponement of the exercise was leaked January 15.

The postponement has been the subject of conflicting and unconvincing explanations from the Israeli side, suggesting disarray in the Netanyahu government over how to handle the issue.

To add to the confusion, Israeli and U.S. statements left it unclear whether the decision had been unilateral or joint as well as the reasons for the decision.

Panetta asserted in a news conference January 18 that Barak himself had asked him to postpone the exercise.

It now clear that both sides had an interest in postponing the exercise and very possibly letting it expire by failing to reach a decision on it.

The Israelis appear to have two distinct reasons for putting the exercise off, which reflect differences between the interests of Netanyahu and his defence minister.
Netanyahu’s primary interest in relation to the exercise was evidently to give the Republican candidate ammunition to fire at Obama during the fall campaign by insinuating that the postponement was decided at the behest of Obama to reduce tensions with Iran.

Thus Mark Regev, Netanyahu’s spokesman, explained it as a “joint” decision with the United States, adding, “The thinking was it was not the right timing now to conduct such an exercise.”

Barak, however, had an entirely different concern, which was related to the Israeli Defence Forces’ readiness to carry out an operation that would involve both attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and minimising the Iranian retaliatory response.

A former U.S. intelligence analyst who followed the Israeli military closely told IPS he strongly suspects that the IDF has pressed Barak to insist that the Israeli force be at the peak of readiness if and when they are asked to attack Iran.

The analyst, who insisted on anonymity because of his continuing contacts with U.S. military and intelligence personnel, said the 2006 Lebanon War debacle continues to haunt the thinking of IDF leaders. In that war, it became clear that the IDF had not been ready to handle Hezbollah rocket attacks adequately, and the prestige of the Israeli military suffered a serious blow.

The insistence of IDF leaders that they never go to war before being fully prepared is a primary consideration for Barak, according to the analyst. “Austere Challenge ’12″ would inevitably involve a major consumption of military resources, he observes, which would reduce Israeli readiness for war in the short run.

The concern about a major military exercise actually reducing the IDF’s readiness for war against Iran would explain why senior Israeli military officials were reported to have suggested that the reasons for the postponement were mostly “technical and logistical”.

The Israeli military concern about expending scarce resources on the exercise would apply, of course, regardless of whether the exercise was planned for April or late 2012. That fact would help explain why the exercise has not been rescheduled, despite statements from the U.S. side that it will be.

The U.S. military, however, has its own reasons for being unenthusiastic about the exercise. IPS has learned from a knowledgeable source that, well before the Obama administration began distancing itself from Israel’s Iran policy, U.S. Central Command chief James N. Mattis had expressed concern about the implications of an exercise so obviously based on a scenario involving Iranian retaliation for an Israeli attack.

U.S. officials have been quoted as suspecting that the Israeli request for a postponement of the exercise indicated that Israel wanted to leave its options open for conducting a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the spring. But a postponement to the fall would not change that problem.

For that reason, the former U.S. intelligence analyst told IPS he doubts that “Austere Challenge ’12″ will ever be carried out.

But the White House has an obvious political interest in using the military exercise to demonstrate that the Obama administration has increased military cooperation with Israel to an unprecedented level.

The Defence Department wants the exercise to be held in October, according to the military source in touch with senior flag officers connected to the Joint Chiefs.

The long-expected rejoinder, made public Monday, charged that 28 of its soldiers at two border bases were killed one by one long after the U.S. military had been told about the attack on a Pakistani base.

The Pakistani critique questions the claims that the U.S. did not know about the Pakistani border posts, that the combined U.S.-Afghan Special Forces unit believed it was under attack from insurgents when it called in air strikes against the two border posts, and that a series of miscommunications prevented higher echelons from stopping the attacks on the border posts.

Revelations in the Clark report – as well as what it omits – support the Pakistani contention that the U.S. investigation covered up what actually occurred before and during the attack. Information in the report suggests that the planners of the Special Forces operation the night of November 25-26 may have known about the two Pakistani border posts that were attacked while feigning ignorance to the commander who had to approve the operation.

It also portrays a military organisation that was not really interested in stopping the attack on the border posts even after it had been told that Pakistani military positions were under fire.

The Pakistani analysis does not repeat the assertion made by Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, the director general for operations, in the aftermath of the attack that the coordinates of the two Pakistani border posts had been given to the U.S. military well before the incident of November 25-26.

The analysis leaves no doubt, however, that the Pakistani military believed the United States was well aware of the two posts. It said each of the posts had five or six bunkers built above ground on the top of a ridge and clearly visible from Maya village about 1.5 kilometres away.

The Pakistani critique asserts that two or three U.S. aircraft had been operating in the area daily, and that U.S. intelligence had questioned Pakistani officials in the past even about changes in weaponry in its border posts.

The Pakistani military document highlights the revelation in the Clark report that Maj. Gen. James Laster, the commander of the “battlespace” in which Operation SAYAQA was to take place, had demanded that the planners of the operation “confirm the location of Pakistan’s border checkpoints”.

The most recent map of Pakistani border positions available at the time, according to the Clark report, was dated February 2011. The obvious intent of the demand by Gen. Laster was that the planners find out if there were any new border checkpoints that needed to be added to update the map.

The Clark report reveals that “pre-mission intelligence analysis” had indicated “possible border posts North and South of the Operation SAYAQA target areas….”

That intelligence was obviously relevant to Gen. Laster’s order, but those border posts did not show up on the map produced November 23. The planners had decided not to check on those “possible border posts” by asking a Pakistani border liaison officer or investigating unilaterally.

The Clark report tiptoes carefully around the implications of that fact, saying the operation’s planners “did not identify any known border posts in the area of Operational SAYAQA”.

The point of requiring confirmation of a new map would presumably have been to go beyond border posts that were on the available map.

Air crews planning for the operation also knew about the “possible border posts”, according to the report, but didn’t include them in their “pre-mission planning packages”, because “they were data points outside the Operation SAYAQA area.”

U.S. investigators showed no apparent curiosity about what appears to have been the deliberate exclusion of the two new border posts from the map given to Gen. Laster.

The Pakistani critique charges that it is “not possible” that the failure to check on the Pakistani posts was “an innocent omission”.

A second point made by the Pakistani military is that the U.S. attack on its “Volcano” base by U.S. helicopter gunships continued for “as long as one hour and 24 minutes” after the U.S. side had been informed of the attack on its post.

Despite the fact that U.S. and ISAF officials had already been informed about the assault on the Pakistani bases “at multiple levels by the Pakistan side”, the Pakistani analysis charges, “every soldier in and around the posts…was individually targeted.”

The Clark report’s account of U.S. responses to being informed by Pakistani officials that their bases were under attack does nothing to allay Pakistani suspicions about the claim that the attack was unintentional.

It confirms the earlier Pakistani claim that its border liaison officer at the ISAF Regional Command East (RC-E) had informed the U.S. officers in charge of “deconfliction” with Pakistani positions on the border minutes after the attack had begun at 23:40 hours that Pakistani Frontier Force soldiers were being “engaged” by U.S.- coalition forces coming from Afghanistan.

The exchange over the news from the Pakistani officer was testy. Gen. Clark recalled in his press briefing on the report December 22 that the Pakistani liaison officer had been asked where the border posts were located, and had not given the coordinates, but had responded, “Well, you know where it is because you’re shooting at them.”

Clark suggested that there was “confusion” about where the attack was taking place, but there was only one place where U.S. forces were firing at positions inside Pakistan that night, and RC-E’s border confliction cell could have easily identified that place quickly enough with one or two calls.

Neither the text of the report nor the detailed time line in an annex show any effort to contact the Special Forces Task Force or Task Force BRONCO, which had approved the operation, about the report that they were attacking Pakistani border posts. The report offers no explanation for the absence of any action on that report, saying only that it “could not be immediately confirmed”.

Twenty minutes before the information had arrived, according to the Clark report, Task Force BRONCO told the Special Operations Task Force in the region it was still waiting to get confirmation from the Border Coordination Center for the area that there were no Pakistani troops near the operation. It added that RC-E was not tracking any PAKMIL border posts on its computerised map of the area.

The Special Operations Task Force then then sent out a message system saying, “PAKMIL has been notified and confirmed no positions in area.”

In yet another suspicious episode, instead of asking the Pakistani liaison to the border coordination commission whether Pakistan had any posts or troops in the area of Operation SAYAQA, RC-E give him a general location that was 14 kilometres away from that area and asked if Pakistan had troops nearby.

The misdirection of the Pakistani liaison officer, which ensured the response that there were no Pakistani troops in the area, is explained in the Clark report as having been caused by a “misconfigured electronic map overlay”.

Asked in his press briefing why the RC-E had refused to provide precise grid coordinates under circumstances in which it was supposed to be determining whether U.S. forces were firing at Pakistani forces, Clark cited “the overarching lack of trust”.

Nearly 40 minutes after the attack on border post “Volcano” began, according to a time line in the report, the U.S. Liaison officer to Pakistan’s 11th Corps reported to the Special Operations Task Force that U.S. helicopters and a drone had been firing on a Pakistani military post.

But the Task Force waited for at least 10 more minutes, according to the timeline, before informing the Special Forces Unit.

Meanwhile Pakistani troops were being hunted down one by one.

Clinton said Iran “only declared the Qom facility to the IAEA after it was discovered by the international community following three years of covert construction.” She also charged that there is no “plausible reason” for Iran to enrich to a 20-percent level at the Fordow plant, implying that the only explanation is an intent to make nuclear weapons.

Clinton’s charges were part of a coordinated U.S.-British attack on Iran’s enrichment at Fordow. British Foreign Minister William Hague also argued that Fordow is too small to support a civilian power programme. Hague also referred to its “location and clandestine nature”, saying they “raise serious questions about its ultimate purpose”.

The Clinton-Hague suggestions that the Fordow site must be related to an effort to obtain nuclear weapons appear to be aimed at counterbalancing Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta’s statement only two days earlier that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons.

The Clinton and Hague statements recalled a briefing for reporters during the Pittsburgh G20 summit meeting September 25, 2009, at which a “senior administration official” asserted that Iran had informed the IAEA about the Fordow site in a September 21 letter only after it had “learned that the secrecy of the facility was compromised”.

That administration claim was quickly accepted by major media outlets without any investigation of the facts. That story line is so deeply entrenched in media consciousness that even before Clinton’s remarks, Reuters and Associated Press had published reports from their Vienna correspondents that repeated the official Obama administration line that Iran had revealed the Fordow site only after Western intelligence had discovered it.

But the administration never offered the slightest evidence to support that assertion, and there is one major reason for doubting it: the United States did not inform the IAEA about any nuclear facility at Fordow until three days after Iran’s September 21, 2009 formal letter notifying the IAEA of the Fordow enrichment facility, because it couldn’t be certain that it was a nuclear site.

Mohammed ElBaradei, then director general of the IAEA, reveals in his 2011 memoir that Robert Einhorn, the State Department’s special
advisor for nonproliferation and arms control, informed him September 24 about U.S. intelligence on the Fordow site – three days after the Iranian letter had been received.

An irritated ElBaradei demanded to know why he had not been told before the Iranian letter.

Einhorn responded that the United States “had not been sure of the nature of the facility”, ElBaradei wrote.

The administration’s claim that Iran announced the site because it believed U.S. intelligence had “identified it” was also belied by a set of questions and answers issued by the Obama administration on the same day as the press briefing. The answer it provided to the question, “Why did the Iranians decide to reveal this facility at this time,” was “We do not know.”

Greg Thielmann, who was a top official in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research until 2003 and was on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the 2009 episode, told IPS the evidence for the claim that Iran believed the site had been discovered was “all circumstantial”.

Analysts were suspicious of the Iranian letter to the IAEA, Thielmann said, because, “it had the appearance of something put together hurriedly.”

But there is an alternative explanation: the decision to reveal the existence of a second prospective enrichment site – this one built into the side of a mountain – appears to have reflected the need to strengthen Iran’s hand in a meeting with the “P5 + 1″ group of states, led by the United States that was only 10 days away.

The Iranian announcement that it would participate in the meeting on September 14, 2009 came on the same day that the head of Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, warned against an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The idea that Iran was planning to enrich uranium secretly at Fordow assumes that the Iranians were not aware that U.S. intelligence had been carrying out aerial surveillance of the site for years. That is hardly credible in light of the fact that the Mujahideen-E-Khalq (MEK), the armed opposition group with links to both U.S. and Israeli intelligence, had drawn attention to the Fordow site in a December 2005 press conference – well before it had been selected for a second enrichment plant.

The MEK had also revealed the first Iranian enrichment site at Natanz in an August 2002 press conference, which had been the kickoff for the George W. Bush administration’s propaganda campaign charging Iran had maintained a covert nuclear programme ever since the 1980s.

But when the MEK identified the Natanz facility, Iran’s only commitment under its safeguards agreement with the IAEA was to inform the agency of any new nuclear facility 180 days before the introduction of nuclear material. That date was then still far in the future.

In November 2003, the Bush administration engineered the passage of resolution at the IAEA Governing Board meeting condemning Iran for “18 years of covert nuclear activity”.

In fact, Iran had announced openly in 1982 that they intended to have the capability to convert yellowcake into reactor fuel. In 1983, Iran asked the IAEA to help it build a pilot plant for uranium enrichment, but the U.S. government intervened to prevent the agency from doing so.

It was that U.S. political interference that forced Iran to purchase black market centrifuge technology from the A.Q. Khan network in 1987.  But Iran openly negotiated with China, Argentina and six other governments for the purchase of nuclear energy and facilities in the 1980s and 1990s.

Despite those well-known facts, the Bush administration charge that Iran had operated a “clandestine nuclear programme” for “18 years” quickly became an accepted fact inserted in many stories by major newspapers such as the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

In asserting that there was “no plausible justification” for Iran’s enrichment to 20 percent, Clinton sought to refute Iran’s explanation that the 20-percent enrichment is supply fuel for its Tehran Research Reactor (TRR).

“The P5+1 has offered alternatives for providing fuel for the TRR,” Clinton said.

The proposal made by the P5+1 in 2009, however, was explicitly aimed at stripping Iran of the bulk of its stock of low-enriched uranium – a prospect that was widely criticised even among critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, including Mir Hossein Mousavi , his rival in the contested June 2009 presidential election.

The main reason for the resistance to the proposal appears to have been that Iran would have been deprived of its bargaining chips in relation to eventual negotiations with the United States.

When Iran agreed to a joint Brazilian-Turkish proposal for a swap in 2010 in June 2010, the Obama administration rejected it, because it left Iran with too much low enriched uranium.

It was after that rejection that Iran vowed to enrich uranium to 20 percent unless it obtained a supply through other means. Iran also demonstrated at the 2011 IAEA Governing Board meeting that it was working on producing its own fuel plates for the TRR, according to former IAEA nuclear inspector Robert Kelley.

Netanyahu is exploiting the extraordinary influence his right-wing Likud Party exercises over the Republican Party and the U.S. Congress on matters related to Israel in order to maximise the likelihood that the United States would participate in an attack on Iran.

Obama, meanwhile, appears to be hoping that he can avoid being caught up in a regional war started by Israel if he distances the United States from any Israeli attack.

New evidence surfaced in 2011 that Netanyahu has been serious about dealing a military blow to the Iranian nuclear programme. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who left his job in September 2010, revealed in his first public appearance after Mossad Jun. 2 that he, Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) chief Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin had been able to “block any dangerous adventure” by Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak.

The Hebrew language daily Maariv reported that those three, along with President Shimon Peres and IDF Senior Commander Gadi Eisenkrot, had vetoed a 2010 proposal by Netanyahu to attack Iran.

Dagan said he was going public because he was “afraid there is no one to stop Bibi and Barak”. Dagan also said an Israeli attack on Iran could trigger a war that would “endanger the (Israeli) state’s existence”, indicating that his revelation was not part of a psywar campaign.

It is generally agreed that an Israeli attack can only temporarily set back the Iranian nuclear programme, at significant risk to Israel. But Netanyahu and Barak hope to draw the United States into the war to create much greater destruction and perhaps the overthrow of the Islamic regime.

In a sign that the Obama administration is worried that Netanyahu is contemplating an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta tried and failed in early October to get a commitment from Netanyahu and Barak that Israel would not launch an attack on Iran without consulting Washington first, according to both Israeli and U.S. sources cited by The Telegraph and by veteran intelligence reporter Richard Sale.

At a meeting with Obama a few weeks later, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Martin Dempsey and the new head of CENTCOM, Gen. James N. Mattis, expressed their disappointment that he had not been firm enough in opposing an Israeli attack, according to Sale.

Obama responded that he “had no say over Israel” because “it is a sovereign country.”

Obama’s remark seemed to indicate a desire to distance his administration from an Israeli attack on Iran. But it also made it clear that he was not going to tell Netanyahu that he would not countenance such an attack.

Trita Parsi, executive director of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), who has analysed the history of the triangular relationship involving the United States, Israel and Iran in his book Treacherous Alliance, says knowledgeable sources tell him Obama believes he can credibly distance himself from an Israeli attack.

In a Dec. 2 talk at the Brookings Institution, while discussing the dangers of the regional conflict that would result from such an attack, Panetta said the United States “would obviously be blamed and we could possibly be the target of retaliation from Iran, sinking our ships, striking our military bases.”

Panetta’s statement could be interpreted as an effort to convince Iran that the Obama administration is opposed to an Israeli strike and should not be targeted by Iran in retaliation if Israel does launch an attack.

Parsi believes Obama’s calculation that he can convince Iran that the United States has no leverage on Israel without being much tougher with Israel is not realistic.

“Iran most likely would decide not to target U.S. forces in the region in retaliation for an Israeli strike only if the damage from the strike were relatively limited,” Parsi told IPS in an e-mail.

The Obama administration considers the newest phase of sanctions against Iran, aimed at reducing global imports of Iranian crude oil, as an alternative to an unprovoked attack by Israel. But what Netanyahu had in mind in proposing such an initiative was much more radical than the Obama administration or the European Union could accept.

When Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is closely aligned with Netanyahu’s Likud Party, pushed the idea of sanctions against any financial institution that did business with Iran’s Central Bank, the aim was to make it impossible for countries that import Iranian crude to continue to be able to make payments for the oil.

Dubowitz wanted virtually every country importing Iranian crude except China and India to cut off their imports. He argued that reducing the number of buyers to mainly China and India would not result in a rise in the price of oil, because Iran would have to offer discounted prices to the remaining buyers.

Global oil analysts warned, however, that such a sanctions regime could not avoid creating a spike in oil prices.

U.S. officials told Reuters Nov. 8 that sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank were “not on the table”. The Obama administration was warning that such sanctions would risk a steep rise in oil prices worldwide and a worsening global recession, while actually increasing Iranian oil revenues.

But Netanyahu used the power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over Congressional action related to Israel to override Obama’s opposition. The Senate unanimously passed an amendment representing Netanyahu’s position on sanctions focused on Iran’s oil sector and the Central Bank, despite a letter from Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner opposing it. A similar amendment was passed by the House Dec. 15.

The Obama administration acquiesced and entered into negotiations with its European allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE on reducing imports of Iranian crude oil while trying to fill the gaps with other sources. But a number of countries, including Japan and Korea, are begging off, and the EU is insisting on protecting Greece and other vulnerable economies.

The result is likely to be a sanctions regime that reduces Iranian exports only marginally – not the “crippling sanctions” demanded by Netanyahu and Barak. Any hike in oil prices generated by sanctions against Iran’s oil sector, moreover, would only hurt Obama’s re- election chances.

In an interview with CNN in November, Barak warned the international community that Israel might have to make a decision on war within as little as six months, because Iran’s efforts to “disperse and fortify” its nuclear facilities would soon render a strike against facilities ineffective.

Barak said he “couldn’t predict” whether that point would be reached in “two quarters or three quarters or a year”. The new Israeli “red line” would place the timing of an Israeli decision on whether to strike Iran right in the middle of the U.S. presidential election campaign.

Netanyahu, who makes no secret of his dislike and distrust of Obama, may hope to put Obama under maximum pressure to support Israel militarily in a war with Iran by striking during a campaign in which the Republican candidate would be accusing him of being soft on the Iranian nuclear threat.

If the Republican candidate is in a strong position to win the election, on the other hand, Netanyahu would want to wait for a new administration aligned with his belligerent posture toward Iran.

Meanwhile, the end of U.S. Air Force control over Iraqi airspace with the final U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq has eliminated what had long been regarded as a significant deterrent to Israeli attack on Iran using the shortest route.

The AP story offers no indication of the nature of the evidence in the case except that former members of the 9/11 Commission and three Iranian defectors provided testimony. What it didn’t say was that at least two of the Iranian defectors have long been dismissed by US intelligence as “fabricators” and that the two “expert witnesses” who were supposed to determine the credibility of those defectors’ claims are both avowed advocates of crackpot conspiracy theories about Muslims and Shariah law who believe the United States is at war with Islam.

The ostensible purpose of the case brought by families of 9/11 terror attack victims was to win damages from those responsible for 9/11. Dozens of such cases involving different terrorist attacks have been brought to US courts over the years, in which “default judgments” have been made against Iran over various attacks in which Iran was allegedly involved, but there is no chance of getting any money for the families.

The only real effect of the case is to promote right-wing political myths about Iran. One of the peculiarities of such cases is that the witnesses are not subject to cross examination in court. The witnesses have every incentive, therefore to indulge in false testimony, knowing that there will be no one to challenge them.

“A Fabricator of Monumental Proportions”

The lawyers and the “expert witnesses” behind the accusation of Iran in regard to 9/11 hoped to sell the press and public on recycled claims first made by Iranian “defectors” several years ago that they had personal knowledge of Iranian participation in the 9/11 plot. The lawyers produced videotaped affidavits by three such defectors who were identified, with a dramatic flourish, as Witnesses “X,” “Y” and “Z.”

In the one public hearing held on the case, the lawyers revealed the identity of purported former Iranian intelligence official Abolghasem Mesbahi – probably a pseudonym – and described his testimony that he had received a series of “coded messages” from a former colleague in the Iranian government in the late summer and early fall of 2001 warning that a terrorist attack against the United States was being planned, and that it was a plan that had been concocted by Tehran in the late 1980s.

Although the judge and the public were being led to believe that this is somehow new information going beyond what was known by the 9/11 Commission report, it is, in fact, very old information and has long been completely discredited. Mesbahi’s story doesn’t hold up, for several reasons, and the most obvious is that, despite his claim that he was warned nearly a month before the 9/11 attacks that civilian airliners would be crashed into buildings in major US cities, including Washington and New York on September 11, he never conveyed that information to the US government before that date.

In October 2001, Mesbahi claimed to right-wing journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman, as reported in Timmerman’s 2005 book that he had tried calling the legal attaché at the US Embassy in Berlin, but was “unsuccessful in several attempts.” But he did not claim any other attempt to reach a US consulate or the US Embassy in Germany by fax, e-mail or letter before September 11, nor did he go to the US Embassy in person to convey this warning. He told Timmerman that he called an Iranian dissident contact in the United States who, he believed, had contacts with US intelligence agencies only some hours after the attacks on New York and Washington.

It wasn’t the first time Mesbahi had claimed inside information about Iranian involvement in a terrorist attack only after the attack had taken place. He had told investigators working on the December 1988 terror bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that Iran had asked Libya and Abu Nidal to carry out the attack on the personal orders of Ayatollah Khomeini. Unfortunately for his credibility, however, he had not come forward with the allegation until after the bombing had happened.

He had also provided affidavits to Argentine investigators in the case of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, claiming his well-informed friends in Iranian intelligence had tipped him off that the decision to bomb the Jewish Community Center had been made at a meeting attended by top Iranian officials in August 1993.

But, in fact, by his own admission Mesbahi had not worked for Argentine intelligence since 1988, and the FBI’s Hezbollah Office’s James Bernazzani, who had helped the Argentine intelligence service with the investigation in 1997, told me in a November 2006 interview that American intelligence officials had concluded Mesbahi did not have the continued high-level access to Iranian intelligence officials throughout the 1990s and beyond that he was claiming. They regarded him as someone who was desperate for money and ready to “provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran,” according to Bernazzani.

Mesbahi wasn’t even consistent in the story he told about the alleged “coded messages.” In an interview with Timmerman, Mesbahi stated that he had gotten two messages from his contact, one on September 1, 2001 and a second three days later. And Timmerman wrote that his alleged contact had “phoned him again” on September 4, indicating that Mesbahi had made no reference to an elaborate scheme to send coded messages through articles in Iranian newspapers.

But in his affidavit to the 9/11 court case, he said he had gotten three messages – on July 23, August 13 and August 27 – and that the coded messages were placed in newspaper articles. Timmerman, who referred the lawyers to Mesbahi, discretely avoided pointing out the huge discrepancy between the two stories, which clearly indicates that Mesbahi fabricated the tale of messages in newspaper articles to make it more dramatic and convincing.

The second defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, claimed he had been an officer of Iran’s Ministry of Information and Security and had provided security for a meeting at an airbase near Tehran on May 4, 2001 attended by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Hashemi Rafsanjani and Osama bin Laden’s son Saad bin Laden. He also claimed to have seen replicas of the twin towers, the White House, the Pentagon and Camp David in the entry hall to the main headquarters of the MOIS with a missile suspended above the targets, and “Death to America” written in Arabic (rather than Farsi) on the side.

Like Mesbahi, Zakeri also first told his tale to Timmerman, who recounts it in his 2005 book. Zakeri, who apparently defected from Iran in late July 2001, claimed he had told the US Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan on July 26, 2001 about the alleged meeting and replicas, warning them that he believed the Iranians and al Qaeda were planning an attack on those targets that would occur September 11. But CIA officials denied categorically to Timmerman that Zakeri had given any such warning to the Embassy and called Zakeri “a fabricator of monumental proportions” and “a serial fabricator.” Zakeri failed an FBI polygraph test in 2003, according to Timmerman.

Crackpot Hate-Islam Extremists as “Expert Witnesses”

Significantly, no reputable retired intelligence analyst on Iran was asked to help judge the testimony of the Iranian defectors. Instead, Clare M. Lopez and Bruce Tefft, both former CIA covert operations case officers, were invited to be “expert witnesses,” in large part to view the videotaped testimony of the three Iranian defectors and assess their credibility.

Based on the record of their public statements, however, they were selected for that role because they could be counted upon to endorse the defectors’ allegations of Iranian involvement in planning the 9/11 attacks and any other assertion, no matter how outlandish, that suggested Iranian guilt.

Lopez has been linked with the neoconservative faction of the Bush administration and the pro-Likud Party extreme right ever since she became Executive Director of the Iran Policy Committee in 2005. Through a series of policy papers issued that year, the Committee sought support from outside the push by a group of pro-Likud officials within the administration for a policy of regime change in Iran.

In particular, the Committee called for using the Mujahedin-E-Khalq or MEK, the armed opposition group listed by the US State Department as a terrorist group because of its assassinations of US officials during the regime of the Shah and bombings of large civilian events in Iran. The MEK had long enjoyed close working relations with Israel, but not with the United States, and the State Department had continued to oppose delisting and alliance with the MEK against Tehran, as proposed by the Defense Department and the Vice-President’s office.

Since 2009, Lopez has been a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy founded and headed by notorious Islam-hating extremist Frank J. Gaffney. One of Lopez’s projects has been to stir up public fear over an alleged threat to America – not from al Qaeda attacks, but from subversion by Muslim-Americans. She is one of a number of authors of a book published by Gaffney’s Center in October 2010 called “Shariah: the Threat to America,” which declares, “The United States is under attack by foes who are openly animated by what is known as Shariah (Islamic Law).”

Revealing the project’s anti-Islam paranoia, the book asserts, “Shariah dictates that non-Muslims be given three choices: convert to Islam and conform to Shariah; submit as second class citizens (dhimmis), or be killed.”

In a videotaped talk she gave on February 23, 2011, Lopez said Muslims, “believe they should be in charge of the world.” The main threat from Islam, she said, is “stealth Jihad” waged by Muslims who “hide behind a moderate image,” but whose “purpose is still the same” as that of al Qaeda.

A second aspect of Lopez’s work for Gaffney has been to intimidate opponents of the hard-line policies toward Iran – and especially the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) – by accusing them of being covert lobbyists for Iran.

Tefft, who retired from the CIA’s Operations Division in 1995, is even more explicit in arguing that there is a worldwide war against Islam. “We are fighting a 14-century war against Islam and its adherents, Muslims,” he declared in an interview with the right-wing website FrontPage in October 2007. “And it is a war that they have declared on all non-Muslims….” Islamic ideology requires Muslims to “make the world Islamic under the Caliphate, and to convert, kill or enslave all non-Muslims….” When the interviewer suggested that there are “moderate Muslims,” Tefft responded, “I don’t think so….” he said. “Were there ‘good’ or ‘moderate’ Nazis?”

Tefft referred to the way “the West” had “prevailed” over Islam with the “defeat of the marauding armies of Islam at the Gates of Vienna in 1529″ and added, “We need to recall that period…and again contain Islam to its existing borders.”

When asked by this writer in a phone interview last week if he had been aware of the advocacy of Islamophobe arguments by Lopez and Tefft, Thomas Mellon, Jr., one of two lead lawyers in the case, did not answer directly, but said, “To the extent that you are accurate, we would say, fine, take them out.” He insisted that the lawyers for the case had not relied on any one of the ten “expert witnesses” listed on the case.

Also playing a central role in weaving the tale of Iranian complicity in the 9/11 attacks for the court case was the right-wing author and anti-Iran activist Kenneth R. Timmerman. According to the lawyers’ brief on the case, it was Timmerman who sought out one of the attorneys, Timothy B. Fleming, and brought to his attention the three Iranian “defectors” who claimed personal knowledge that Iran was involved in the planning of 9/11.

Like Lopez, Timmerman has been linked with hardline pro-Likud organizations and involved in efforts to overthrow the regime in Tehran. Along with Joshua Muravchik, and a group of Iranian exile foes of the Islamic regime, he established the “Foundation for Democracy in Iran” in 1995.

Timmerman has also expressed views sympathetic to the Hate-Islam movement. His 2003 book, “Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War against America,” portrays the United States and Israel as innocent victims of a vicious campaign against the West by whole Islamic societies that refuse to accept the US-Israeli narrative on terrorism. And his new novel, “St. Peter’s Bones,” has been praised by notorious Islam-hater Robert Spencer for revealing the “long-hidden origins of Islam.”

The “Material Support” and “Save Haven” Ploys

The most egregious allegations of Iranian complicity in 9/11 come from three former staff members of the 9/11 Commission – Daniel Byman, Dietrich Snell and Janice Kephart. They had all worked on the section of the 2004 report that had given heavy emphasis to the fact that Iran had not stamped the passports of Saudis who had later become hijackers in the 9/11 attacks when they entered Iran. The section had suggested that this and other evidence could indicate Iranian complicity in the plot, even if it could not yet be proven.

In their affidavits to the court, those three former staffers, two of whom (Snell and Kephart) are lawyers, argue that Iran’s failure to stamp the passports of the al Qaeda operatives constituted provision of “material support” to al Qaeda in executing the 9/11 attacks. US anti-terrorist law specifies that the provision of “material support” to terrorists includes any “service” to terrorists if the provider is “knowing or intending that they are to be used in preparation for, or in carrying out” a terrorist action.

However, a key piece of information in a different chapter of the 9/11 Commission report shows that Iran’s failure to stamp passports was not intended to aid al Qaeda. On page 169, the report says that, in order to avoid the confiscation by Saudi authorities of passports bearing a Pakistani stamp, the Saudi al Qaeda operatives, “either erased the Pakistani visa from their passport or traveled through Iran, which did not stamp visas directly into passports.” In other words, the Iranian practice of not stamping visas directly into passports applied to everyone. And since, as the Commission report acknowledged, there was no evidence of Iranian foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the existence of that policy did not support the thesis of Iranian “material support” for the al Qaeda plot.

The Commission staff went back to the two senior planners of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, in July 2004, to ask them specifically about the Iranian failure to stamp the passports of the hijackers, but, strangely, the Commission report gives no indication of what they said about whether the Iranian practice was intended to assist al Qaeda. Either the staff never asked the question, or the answer was ignored because it contradicted the line that those staff members were pushing in 2004 and are still pushing today.

The former Commission staffers also joined right-wing activists in highlighting the intelligence Commission report statements that “an associate of a senior Hizbullah operative” was on the same mid-November flight from Beirut to Tehran as a group of future hijackers, and that Hezbollah officials in Beirut and Iran had been “expecting the arrival of a group [from Saudi Arabia] during the same time period.” The former staffers insist that these could not have been coincidences and that they had to mean that Iran was involved in the al Qaeda plot.

The argument that the presence of an “associate” of a top Hezbollah official on the same flight as future al Qaeda hijackers could not have been a coincidence is absurd. There were obviously many “associates” of top Hezbollah officials, most whom would have had occasion to travel to Iran frequently. The statistical likelihood that one of them would be on the same flight as the future hijackers would not be so small as to merit suspicion.

And the very same section of the Commission report provides a clear explanation of the anticipation of a group travelling from Saudi Arabia to Iran that reveals the conspiratorial interpretation as dishonest. It says that a senior Hezbollah operative – said to have been Imad Mugniyeh – visited Saudi Arabia in October 2000 to “coordinate activities” there, that he planned to assist a group travelling to Iran in November, and that intelligence reports showed the planned visit to Iran involved a “top Hezbollah commander” and “Saudi Hezbollah contacts.”

But that didn’t stop the lawyers for the case from twisting the Commission report to fit the desired narrative: “The ‘activities’ that Mughniyah went to coordinate,” clearly revolved around the hijackers’ travel, their obtaining new Saudi passports and/or US visas for the 9/11 operation, as several of them did, as well as the hijackers’ security, and the operation’s security.”

Paul Pillar, who was the CIA’s senior intelligence officer on the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and had previously been the senior analyst at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, was categorical about the matter when I interviewed him in 2006. The facts detailed in the Commission Report about passports, travel of the hijackers through Iran, and the presence of a Hezbollah official on one of the flights “don’t show Iranian collusion with al Qaeda,” he told me.

The lawyers’ brief refers to “the existence of a secret network of travel routes and safehouses” worked out from the mid-1990s onward as being “confirmed by al Qaeda military chief Saef al Adel in a May 2005 interview.” That implies that secret arrangements on such “travel routes and safehouses” were made between al Qaeda and the Iranian government. But al-Adel said nothing of the sort. He made it clear in his interview with a Saudi journalist that the Iranians who helped them with housing and logistics were not connected with the Iranian regime.

The “expert witnesses” and the lawyers carefully skirt the fact that in the latter half of the 1990s – at a time when the United States was officially still “neutral” on the civil war in Afghanistan – Iran was providing funding, arms and other support to the Northern Alliance, the non-Pashtun forces seeking to overthrow the Taliban regime which bin Laden and al Qaeda were helping to keep in power.

That Iranian support for the Northern Alliance was still ongoing when the organization’s chief, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was assassinated September 10, 2001 by two Arabs posing as journalists. The leader of the CIA’s post-9/11 covert paramilitary team in Afghanistan, Gary Schroen, reported that there were two IRGC Colonels attached to the Commander of the Northern Alliance, Bismullah Khan, when the CIA team arrived. Nevertheless, Lopez and Tefft as well as Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman, a former intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces who boasts of his “close personal contacts” with senior Israel intelligence and military officials, cite reports supposedly originating with German intelligence that Iran helped al Qaeda operatives carry out the Massoud assassination.

All the “expert witnesses” insist vehemently that Iran continued to provide “safe haven” for al Qaeda operatives who fled from Afghanistan to Iran after 9/11, allowing them to direct terrorist activities against Saudi Arabia in particular. But that accusation merely recycles the claim first made in early 2002 by Bush administration officials seeking to prevent negotiations between the United States and Iran and push for the adoption of a regime change strategy in Iran.

The central pretense of the neoconservative “safe haven” ploy was that, if any al Qaeda operatives were able to function in Iran, Iran must have deliberately permitted it. But the United States has been unable to shut down al Qaeda’s operation in Pakistan after a decade of trying, despite the cooperation of the Pakistani intelligence service and the drone coverage of the tribal areas. If the same criteria applied to Iran were to be applied to the Bush administration and the government of Germany, they could be accused of having provided “safe haven” for al Qaeda operatives prior to 9/11.

In fact, after US complaints about al Qaeda presence in Iran in late 2001, Tehran detained nearly 300 al Qaeda operatives, and gave a dossier with their names, passport pictures and fingerprints to the United Nations. Iran also repatriated at least 200 of those detainees to the newly formed government of Afghanistan.

US Ambassador Ryan Crocker revealed last year that, in late 2001, the Iranians had been willing to discuss possible surrender of the senior al Qaeda officials it was detaining to the United States and share any intelligence they had gained from their investigations as part of a wider understanding with Washington. But the neoconservative faction in the administration rejected that offer, demanding that Iran give them the al Qaeda detainees without getting anything in return.

Iran’s crackdown on al Qaeda continued in 2002-03 and netted a number of top officials. One of the senior al Qaeda detainees apparently detained by Iran during that period, Saif al-Adel, later told a Jordanian journalist that Iran’s operations against al Qaeda had “confused us and aborted 75 percent of our plan.” The arrests included “up to 80 percent” of Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s group, he said, and those who had not been swept up were forced to leave for Iraq.

In further negotiations with the Bush administration in May 2003, Iran again offered to turn over the senior al Qaeda detainees to the United States in return for the MEK captured by US forces in Iraq. The Bush administration again refused the offer.

By 2005, a “senior US intelligence official” was publicly admitting that 20 to 25 top al Qaeda leaders were in detention in Iran and that they were “not able to do much of anything.”

In 2008, one US official told ABC news that administration officials had not been raising the al Qaeda issue publicly, because “they believe Iran has largely kept the al Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate.”

But in the world of the right-wing Islam-hating extremists and others pushing for confrontation with Iran, reality is no obstacle to spinning tales of secret Iranian assistance to al Qaeda.

•  This article first appeared in Truthout.

The real story behind the U.S. withdrawal is how a clever strategy of deception and diplomacy adopted by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in cooperation with Iran outmanoeuvered Bush and the U.S. military leadership and got the United States to sign the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement.

A central element of the Maliki-Iran strategy was the common interest that Maliki, Iran and anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr shared in ending the U.S. occupation, despite their differences over other issues.

Maliki needed Sadr’s support, which was initially based on Maliki’s commitment to obtain a time schedule for U.S. troops’ withdrawal from Iraq.

In early June 2006, a draft national reconciliation plan that circulated among Iraqi political groups included agreement on “a time schedule to pull out the troops from Iraq” along with the build-up of Iraqi military forces. But after a quick trip to Baghdad, Bush rejected the idea of a withdrawal timetable.

Maliki’s national security adviser Mowaffak Al-Rubaei revealed in a Washington Post op-ed that Maliki wanted foreign troops reduced by more than 30,000 to under 100,000 by the end of 2006 and withdrawal of “most of the remaining troops” by end of the 2007.

When the full text of the reconciliation plan was published June 25, 2006, however, the commitment to a withdrawal timetable was missing.

In June 2007, senior Bush administration officials began leaking to reporters plans for maintaining what The New York Times described as “a near-permanent presence” in Iraq, which would involve control of four major bases.

Maliki immediately sent Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari to Washington to dangle the bait of an agreement on troops before then Vice President Dick Cheney.

As recounted in Linda Robinson’s “Tell Me How This Ends”, Zebari urged Cheney to begin negotiating the U.S. military presence in order to reduce the odds of an abrupt withdrawal that would play into the hands of the Iranians.

In a meeting with then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in September 2007, National Security Adviser Rubaie said Maliki wanted a “Status of Forces Agreement” (SOFA) that would allow U.S. forces to remain but would “eliminate the irritants that are apparent violations of Iraqi sovereignty”, according to Bob Woodward’s “The War Within”.

Maliki’s national security adviser was also seeking to protect the Mahdi Army from U.S. military plans to target it for major attacks. Meeting Bush’s coordinator for the Iraq War, Douglas Lute, Rubaie said it was better for Iraqi security forces to take on Sadr’s militias than for U.S. Special Forces to do so.

He explained to the Baker-Hamilton Commission that Sadr’s use of military force was not a problem for Maliki, because Sadr was still part of the government.

Publicly, the Maliki government continued to assure the Bush administration it could count on a long-term military presence. Asked by NBC’s Richard Engel on January 24, 2008 if the agreement would provide long-term U.S. bases in Iraq, Zebari said, “This is an agreement of enduring military support. The soldiers are going to have to stay someplace. They can’t stay in the air.”

Confident that it was going to get a South Korea-style SOFA, the Bush administration gave the Iraqi government a draft on March 7, 2008 that provided for no limit on the number of U.S. troops or the duration of their presence. Nor did it give Iraq any control over U.S. military operations.

But Maliki had a surprise in store for Washington.

A series of dramatic moves by Maliki and Iran over the next few months showed that there had been an explicit understanding between the two governments to prevent the U.S. military from launching major operations against the Mahdi Army and to reach an agreement with Sadr on ending the Mahdi Army’s role in return for assurances that Maliki would demand the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.

In mid-March 2007, Maliki ignored pressure from a personal visit by Cheney to cooperate in taking down the Mahdi Army and instead abruptly vetoed U.S. military plans for a major operation against the Mahdi Army in Basra. Maliki ordered an Iraqi army assault on the dug-in Sadrist forces.

Predictably, the operation ran into trouble, and within days, Iraqi officials had asked General Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, to intervene and negotiate a ceasefire with Sadr, who agreed, although his troops were far from defeated.

A few weeks later, Maliki again prevented the United States from launching its biggest campaign yet against the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. And again, Suleimani was brought in to work out a deal with Sadr allowing government troops to patrol in the former Mahdi Army stronghold.

There was subtext to Suleimani’s interventions. Just as Suleimani was negotiating the Basra ceasefire with Sadr, a website associated with former IRGC Commander Mohsen Rezai said Iran opposed actions by “hard-line clans” that “only weaken the government and people of Iraq and give a pretext to its occupiers”.

In the days that followed that agreement, Iranian state news media portrayed the Iraqi crackdown in Basra as being against illegal and “criminal” forces.

The timing of each political diplomatic move by Maliki appears to have been determined in discussions between Maliki and top Iranian officials.

Just two days after returning from a visit to Tehran in June 2008, Maliki complained publicly about U.S. demands for indefinite access to military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops and private contractors.

In July, he revealed that his government was demanding the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops on a timetable.

The Bush administration was in a state of shock. From July to October, it pretended that it could simply refuse to accept the withdrawal demand, while trying vainly to pressure Maliki to back down.

In the end, however, Bush administration officials realised that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who was then far ahead of Republican John McCain in polls, would accept the same or an even faster timetable for withdrawal. In October, Bush decided to sign the draft agreement pledging withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2011.

The ambitious plans of the U.S. military to use Iraq to dominate the Middle East militarily and politically had been foiled by the very regime the United States had installed, and the officials behind the U.S. scheme had been clueless about what was happening until it was too late.

The White House and the military bloc are gambling that the lengthy investigation into the attack that killed 25 Pakistani troops will defuse popular Pakistani anger and that the final report will allow the Obama administration to return to a more aggressive policy toward Pakistan in 2012.

But the course Obama has chosen is likely to further aggravate the anti-U.S. sentiment [anti-U.S. policy -- Ed.] in Pakistan that has boiled over in response to the violation of Pakistani sovereignty and unprecedented number of deaths of Pakistani troops. U.S. diplomats in Pakistan and State Department officials are seriously concerned that the rejection of any acknowledgement of U.S. responsibility for nearly three weeks will push Pakistan further toward a potentially irreversible break in relations with the United States.

Pakistan has vowed to close “permanently” the U.S.-NATO logistics routes through which more than half of the supplies needed for the war in Afghanistan must pass. Despite the development of an alternative set of routes through Central Asian republics, that closure will seriously constrain the U.S. ability to wage war in Afghanistan within four to six weeks, according to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who usually reflects the latest thinking of Pentagon and CIA officials.

Although Washington hopes that decision will be reversed in the coming weeks, some U.S. officials warn that the closure could harden under popular political pressure.

Serious concern about rapidly rising anti-U.S. sentiment forcing the hand of the Pakistani government led the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, to urge the White House to move quickly to assuage Pakistani anger, according to the New York Times and the CNN security blog “Security Clearance”.

Munter reportedly told a group of White House officials that if the United States has evidence that Pakistani troops had actually fired at U.S. troops first, it should provide it to Pakistan, but that if it has evidence that U.S. forces were at fault, the White House should issue a formal apology in order to prevent far more serious deterioration of relations.

Defence Department officials argued, however, that no statement on the attack should be issued by the White House until the formal investigation is completed, and that the expression of condolences by the White House press secretary and cabinet officials was sufficient until then, according to a report in the New York Times first published November 30.

The investigation launched by CENTCOM commander Gen. James N. Mattis is to be completed and a report submitted by December 23, but the letter from Mattis states that the officer in charge may request additional time to complete it.

At the daily State Department briefing by spokesman Mark Toner Friday, a reporter referred to “concern expressed by U.S. officials in this building…that the window is rapidly closing for the United States to come up with some kind of explanation for the Pakistanis.”

The Defence Department argument that the United States can keep the Pakistani government and population waiting for more than three weeks for the results of the investigation is based in part on the longstanding assumption that the Pakistani military will be forced to accommodate U.S. interests, because of its dependence on U.S. assistance.

Decades of patron-client relations between the Pakistani military and their U.S. military and CIA counterparts have created a widespread belief in the military and CIA that Pakistan is too dependent on the United States for assistance to cut loose completely from U.S. policy.

A December 1 column by the Washington Post’s Ignatius shows that the notion of Pakistan as client state remains intact among Pentagon officials.

Ignatius suggested that the Pakistani military will soon have to wake up from its gestures of opposition to U.S. policy – especially the cutoff of NATO supplies for Afghanistan.

“Continued Pakistani reprisals make sense only (if) Islamabad is heading toward a real and lasting break with Washington,” he wrote, adding, “I don’t get the sense that’s what Pakistan’s leaders really want.”

So the Pakistanis “will need to figure out how to climb down the hill,” he wrote, “now that they have forcefully planted the flag.”

The justification for the military and DOD officials to oppose the admission of responsibility for those deaths and to express regret for it is not based on a conviction that U.S. troops were innocent in the November 26 attack. The November 30 New York Times report said DOD officials “did not deny some American culpability in the episode….”

That private admission suggests that the real reason for rejecting an apology is that it would shift the focus of media attention away from the Pakistani policy of allowing insurgents to have safe havens in Pakistan from which to carry out operations in Afghanistan.

U.S. military and Defence Department officials desperately need to make the case that Pakistani complicity in Taliban insurgent attacks across the border in Afghanistan is the primary obstacle to the success of the 10-year U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan.

That interest can only be served if the investigation ordered by CENTCOM concludes that there is no reason for the United States to apologise, because of the threat to U.S. troops from insurgents who have been protected by the Pakistani army.

The investigation would have to give credibility to the claim by the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) unit and its Afghan counterpart that they pursued the insurgents who attacked them across the border to a location close to, if not inside, an encampment that turned out to be a Pakistani border post.

A series of news media stories in the days after the incident reported just such accounts from members of the SOF commando unit, but the Pakistani army command provided details that refuted it. The U.S. military has denied that the attack on the border posts was deliberate, but it has also acknowledged privately to the New York Times that U.S. troops were culpable in the deaths of the Pakistani troops.

The U.S. military investigation is supposed to be open to Pakistani participation, though not as an equal partner. But Pentagon spokesman George Little confirmed Friday that Pakistan has elected not to participate in it.

Maj. Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, the Pakistani Army’s director general of military operations, has pointed to earlier “joint investigations” of U.S. violations of Pakistani sovereignty as having “come to naught”. He referred to “joint investigations” with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) into the three U.S.-NATO attacks on Pakistani troops on June 10, 2008, December 30, 2010 and July 17, 2011.

The reports generated by those inquiries “give a version not based on facts as we know them”, Nadeem said.

The appointment of Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark to carry out the investigation of the attack on the Pakistani border posts raises yet another issue: whether the investigation will hold the SOF unit involved and the helicopter pilots attached to it fully accountable.

Clark has spent virtually his entire military career in the Air Force Special Operations Command.

The helicopter pilots who made crucial decisions during the assault on the border posts were almost certainly affiliated with the Air Force Special Operations Command.

Even more than other branches of the military, Special Operations Forces officers are known for protecting other SOF personnel against any legal challenge. When he was commander of ISAF in 2010, SOF veteran Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal used two separate investigations to deflect charges that an SOF unit had covered up the killings of two pregnant women in a February 2010 night raid gone bad.

The decision to attack by helicopter gunships, which killed 24 Pakistani troops and stoked a new level of anti-U.S. sentiment feeling in the country, has caught the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in a rare defence posture, because senior officials don’t know what happened and why.

The unwillingness of ISAF, now commanded by Gen. John Allen, to comment on the episode and the swift call for a full investigation clearly reflect doubts on the part of the chain of command as to the veracity of the account given by the unnamed commander of the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) unit who ordered the operation across the border in Pakistan.

That non-committal posture is strikingly similar to the standard ISAF response to charges by Afghan government officials of the killing of civilians by ISAF forces, whether in air strikes or in SOF night raids.

Accounts of the sequence of events leading to the attack leaked to the news media since Saturday by unnamed officials on behalf of the SOF unit in question have portrayed it in stark terms as a provocation by the Pakistani military.

The account of the attack given to Reuters the day after said a combined NATO-Afghan force seeking Taliban commanders in Kunar province near the Pakistani border came under fire “from across the border”, after which NATO aircraft had attacked the Pakistani army post.

The story was attributed to both an unnamed “Western official” and a “senior Afghan security official”, suggesting the two had briefed Reuters together. The Afghan official claimed that the combined force had been fired on from Pakistan while descending from their helicopters, and that the helicopters had then “returned fire”.

That account seemed to suggest that the same helicopters that had delivered the combined force to its target in Afghanistan had then crossed the border in pursuit of the insurgents.

The insistence that the attack had come from across the border parallels the rationale for a previous attack by helicopter gunships inside Pakistan on September 29, 2010. That attack had begun in pursuit of insurgents who were said to have attacked an Afghan army base in Khost province from across the border and killed two Pakistani soldiers after taking ground fire.

Although the normal practice in any cross-border pursuit of insurgents by U.S. forces is to inform the Pakistani military, last year’s incursion avoided such coordination based on an alleged “imminent danger to troops”. It appears that U.S. and Afghan officials were constructing a similar rationale for a surprise attack inside Pakistan in this case.

In subsequent accounts of the Saturday attack from both U.S. and Afghan officials, however, the initial claim that the forces were attacked from across the border was dropped. Associated Press, which said it had been given “details of raid”, reported Monday that the insurgent attack took place inside Afghanistan.

The revised account given to Associated Press portrayed the helicopters as having followed the insurgents in the direction of the Pakistani border outposts and spotting what they believed were insurgent encampments.

Afghan officials were continuing to insist that the insurgents were being sheltered inside the Pakistani posts. A Washington Post story Tuesday quoted a “senior Afghan police official” as saying that, after an initial gun battle, the insurgents retreated Into a Pakistani post and began firing from there.” The insurgents were “firing at the commandos,” the Afghan official was quoted as saying, “and they continued firing so the air support had to come to their defense.”

The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that “several officials” said it was “unclear whether the fire came from insurgents sheltering near the Pakistani posts or from the posts themselves.”

The shifting accounts, the ambiguity about whether the helicopter was unaware that the posts belonged to the Pakistan military, and whether insurgents were actually in the posts or not all clearly bothered the ISAF command and officials in Washington.

Meanwhile, the claim that the helicopter was firing on the posts in the mistaken belief that they were insurgent camps has been refuted in detail by the Pakistani military. Maj. Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, the director general of military operations, who was directly involved in dealing with the attack Saturday morning, said it was “impossible that they did not know these to be our posts”, according to the Pakistani daily The News.

Nadeem and military spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas both pointed out the posts were located on the tops or ridges more than 300 metres from the Afghan border and that they were permanent structures, which would not have been occupied by insurgents. Furthemore, Nadeem said, NATO had been given the map coordinates of those posts, called “Volcano” and “Boulder”.

The head of Pakistani military operations also provided a detailed account of the events indicating that the U.S. military was aware of the fact that Pakistani posts were being attacked from the beginning.

Just minutes before “Volcano” was first attacked, he recalled, a U.S. sergeant from the “Tactical Operations Center” in Afghanistan called a Pakistani major on duty in Peshawar and told him U.S. Special Forces had taken indirect fire in an area called Gora Pahari about nine miles from the army posts.

A few minutes later, the U.S. sergeant called back and told the major, “Your Volcano post has been hit,” Nadeem said.

Nadeem said the Pakistani army informed NATO that their posts were being attacked by ISAF forces, but the attack continued for 51 minutes, then breaking off for 15 minutes, and resuming for about an hour.

U.S. officials in Washington, meanwhile, still had no clear interpretation of Saturday’s events three days later. When asked by a former U.S. official Tuesday whether the U.S. military now understood any better what had happened, an officer following the issue at the Pentagon replied, “We do not.”

Senior officers in ISAF have long lobbied for a more aggressive approach to the problem of insurgent safe havens in Pakistan, arguing that without such a change, success in Afghanistan will be impossible.

But the cross-border attack on Pakistani border posts has had exactly the opposite effect. It has united Pakistanis, both military and civilian, behind a much more nationalistic policy toward the U.S. military role in both Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

It has provoked the Pakistani government to threaten to stop NATO supplies from crossing into Afghanistan permanently, order the United States to vacate its drone base at Shamsi within 15 days, and boycott the upcoming international conference on Afghanistan in protest.

Pakistan’s minister of information, Dr. Firdous Aashik Awan, described the decision to boycott the Berlin conference as marking “a turning point in Pakistan’s foreign policy” that was supported by all parties represented in the cabinet.

A cabinet meeting held in Lahore Tuesday even discussed the expected U.S. cutoff of assistance to Pakistan and called for a detailed assessment of how that cutoff would affect different sectors.

The IAEA claim that a foreign scientist – identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko – had been involved in building the alleged containment chamber has now been denied firmly by Danilenko himself in an interview with Radio Free Europe published Friday.

The latest report by the IAEA cited “information provided by Member States” that Iran had constructed “a large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments” – meaning simulated explosions of nuclear weapons – in its Parchin military complex in 2000.

The report said it had “confirmed” that a “large cylindrical object” housed at the same complex had been “designed to contain the detonation of up to 70 kilograms of high explosives”. That amount of explosives, it said, would be “appropriate” for testing a detonation system to trigger a nuclear weapon.

But former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley has denounced the agency’s claims about such a containment chamber as “highly misleading”.

Kelley, a nuclear engineer who was the IAEA’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq and is now a senior research fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, pointed out in an interview with the Real News Network that a cylindrical chamber designed to contain 70 kg of explosives, as claimed by the IAEA, could not possibly have been used for hydrodynamic testing of a nuclear weapon design, contrary to the IAEA claim.

“There are far more explosives in that bomb than could be contained by this container,” Kelley said, referring to the simulated explosion of a nuclear weapon in a hydrodynamic experiment.

Kelley also observed that hydrodynamic testing would not have been done in a container inside a building in any case. “You have to be crazy to do hydrodynamic explosives in a container,” he said. “There’s no reason to do it. They’re done outdoors on firing tables.”

Kelley rejected the IAEA claim that the alleged cylindrical chamber was new evidence of an Iranian weapons programme. “We’ve been led by the nose to believe that this container is important, when, in fact, it’s not important at all,” Kelley said.

The IAEA report and unnamed “diplomats” implied that a “former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist”, identified in the media as Danilenko, had helped build the alleged containment vessel at Parchin.

But their claims conflict with one another as well as with readily documented facts about Danilenko’s work in Iran.

The IAEA report does not deny that Danilenko – a Ukrainian who worked in a Soviet-era research institute that was identified mainly with nuclear weapons – was actually a specialist on nanodiamonds. The report nevertheless implies a link beween Danilenko and the purported explosives chamber at Parchin by citing a publication by Danilenko as a source for the dimensions of the alleged explosives chamber.

Associated Press reported November 11 that unnamed diplomats suggested Volodymyr Padalko, a partner of Danilenko in a nanodiamond business who was described as Danilenko’s son-in-law, had contradicted Danilenko’s firm denial of involvement in building a containment vessel for weapons testing. The diplomats claimed Padalko had told IAEA investigators that Danilenko had helped build “a large steel chamber to contain the force of the blast set off by such explosives testing”.

But that claim appears to be an effort to confuse Danilenko’s well-established work on an explosives chamber for nanodiamond synthesis with a chamber for weapons testing, such as the IAEA now claims was built at Parchin.

One of the unnamed diplomats described the steel chamber at Parchin as “the size of a double decker bus” and thus “much too large” for nanodiamonds.

But the IAEA report itself made exactly the opposite argument, suggesting that the purported steel chamber at Parchin was based on the design in a published paper by Danilenko.

The report said the alleged explosives chamber was designed to contain “up to 70 kg of high explosives” which it claims would be “suitable” for testing what it calls a “multipoint initiation system” for a nuclear weapon.

But a 2008 slide show on systems for nanodiamond synthesis posted on the internet by the U.S.-based nanotechnology company NanoBlox shows that the last patented containment chamber built by Danilenko and patented in 1992, with a total volume of 100 cubic metres, was designed for the use of just 10 kg of explosives.

An unnamed member state had given the IAEA a purported Iranian document in 2008 describing a 2003 test of what the agency interpreted to be a possible “high explosive implosion system for a nuclear weapon”.

David Albright, director of a Washington, D.C. think tank who frequently passes on information from IAEA officials to the news media, told this writer in 2009 that the member state in question was “probably Israel”.

Although the process of making “detonation nanodiamonds” uses explosives in a containment chamber, the chamber would bear little resemblance to one used for testing a nuclear bomb’s initiation system.

The production of diamonds does not require the same high degree of precision in simultaneous explosions as the initiator for a nuclear device. And unlike the explosives used in a multipoint initiation system, the explosives used for making synthetic nanodiamonds must be under water in a closed pool, as Danilenko noted in a 2010 PowerPoint presentation.

Having endorsed the IAEA’s claims, Albright concedes in a November 13 article that the IAEA report “did not provide [sic] Danilenko’s involvement, if any, in this chamber.”

In an interview with Radio Free Europe Friday, Danilenko denied that he has any expertise in nuclear weapons, saying, “I understand absolutely nothing in nuclear physics.” He also denied that he participated in “modeling warheads” at the research institute in Russia where he worked for three decades.

Danilenko further denied doing any work in Iran that did not relate to “dynamic detonation synthesis of diamonds” and said he has “strong doubts” that Iran had a nuclear weapons programme during those years.

Albright and three co-authors published an account of Danilenko’s work in Iran this week seeking to give credibility to the IAEA suggestion that he worked on the containment chamber for a nuclear weapons programme.

The Albright article, published on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, said that Danilenko approached the Iranian embassy in 1995 offering his expertise on detonation diamonds, and later signed a contract with Syed Abbas Shahmoradi who responded to Danilenko’s query.

Albright identifies Shahmoradi as the “head of Iran’s secret nuclear sector involved in the development of nuclear weapons”, merely because Shahmoradi later headed the Physics Research Center, which the IAEA argues has led Iran’s nuclear weapons research.

But in late 1995, Shahmoradi was at the Sharif University of Technology, which is a leading centre for nanodiamonds in Iran. Albright argues that this is evidence supporting his suspicion that nanodiamonds were a cover for his real work, because the main centre for nanodiamond research is at Malek Ashtar University of Technology rather than at Sharif University.

However, Sharif University had just established an Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in 2005 that was intended to become the hub for nanotechnology research activities and strategy planning for Iran. So Sharif University and Shahmoradi would have been the logical choice to contract one of the world’s leading specialists on nanodiamonds.

But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA
report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is
not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the
world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives.

In fact, Danilenko, a Ukrainian, has worked solely on nanodiamonds
from the beginning of his research career and is considered one of the
pioneers in the development of nanodiamond technology, as published
scientific papers confirm.

It now appears that the IAEA and David Albright, the director of the
International Institute for Science and Security in Washington, who
was the source of the news reports about Danilenko, never bothered to check the accuracy of the original claim by an unnamed “Member State” on which the IAEA based its assertion about his nuclear weapons background.

Albright gave a “private briefing” for “intelligence professionals”
last week, in which he named Danilenko as the foreign expert who had
been contracted by Iran’s Physics Research Centre in the mid-1990s and identified him as a “former Soviet nuclear scientist”, according to a story by Joby Warrick of the Washington Post on November 5.

The Danilenko story then went worldwide.

The IAEA report says the agency has “strong indications” that Iran’s
development of a “high explosions initiation system”, which it has
described as an “implosion system” for a nuclear weapon, was “assisted by the work of a foreign expert who was not only knowledgeable on these technologies, but who, a Member State has informed the Agency, worked for much of his career in the nuclear weapon program of the country of his origin.”

The report offers no other evidence of Danilenko’s involvement in the
development of an initiation system.

The member state obviously learned that Danilenko had worked during
the Soviet period at the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of
Technical Physics in Snezhinsk, Russia, which was well known for its
work on development of nuclear warheads and simply assumed that he had been involved in that work.

However, further research would have revealed that Danilenko worked
from the beginning of his career in a part of the Institute that
specialised in the synthesis of diamonds. Danilenko wrote in an
account of the early work in the field published in 2006 that he was
among the scientists in the “gas dynamics group” at the Institute who
were “the first to start studies on diamond synthesis in 1960″.

Danilenko’s recollections of the early period of his career are in a
chapter of the book, “Ultrananocrystalline Diamond: Synthesis,
Properties and Applications” edited by Olga A. Shenderova and Dieter
M. Gruen, published in 2006.

Another chapter in the book covering the history of Russian patents
related to nanodiamonds documents the fact that Danilenko’s centre at
the Institute developed key processes as early as 1963-66 that were
later used at major “detonaton nanodiamond” production centres.

Danilenko left the Institute in 1989 and joined the Institute of
Materials Science Problems in Ukraine, according to the authors of
that chapter.

Danilenko’s major accomplishment, according to the authors, has been
the development of a large-scale technology for producing
ultradispersed diamonds, a particular application of nanodiamonds. The technology, which was later implemented by the “ALIT” company in Zhitomir, Ukraine, is based on an explosion chamber 100 sq metres in volume, which Danilenko designed.

Beginning in 1993, Danilenko was a principal in a company called
“Nanogroup” which was established initially in the Ukraine but is now
based in Prague. The company’s website boasts that it has “the
strongest team of scientists” which had been involved in the
“introduction of nanodiamonds in 1960 and the first commercial
applications of nanodiamonds in 2000″.

The declared aim of the company is to supply worldwide demand for nanodiamonds.

Iran has an aggressive programme to develop its nanotechnology sector, and it includes as one major focus nanodiamonds, as blogger Moon of Alabama has pointed out. That blog was the first source to call
attention to Danilenko’s nanodiamond background.

Danilenko clearly explained that the purpose of his work in Iran was
to help the development of a nanodiamond industry in the country.

The report states that the “foreign expert” was in Iran from 1996 to
about 2002, “ostensibly to assist in the development of a facility and
techniques for making ultra dispersed diamonds (UDDs) or nanodiamonds…” That wording suggests that nanodiamonds were merely a cover for his real purpose in Iran.

The report says the expert “also lectured on explosive physics and its
applications”, without providing any further detail about what
applications were involved.

The fact that the IAEA and Albright were made aware of Danilenko’s
nanodiamond work in Iran before embracing the “former Soviet nuclear weapons specialist” story makes their failure to make any independent inquiry into his background even more revealing.

The tale of a Russian nuclear weapons scientist helping construct an
“implosion system” for a nuclear weapon is the most recent iteration
of a theme that the IAEA introduced in its May 2008 report, which
mentioned a five-page document describing experimentation with a
“complex multipoint initiation system to detonate a substantial amount
of high explosives in hemispherical geometry” and to monitor the
detonation.

Iran acknowledged using “exploding bridge wire” detonators such as
those mentioned in that document for conventional military and
civilian applications. But it denounced the document, along with the
others in the “alleged studies” collection purporting to be from an
Iranian nuclear weapons research programme, as fakes.

Careful examination of the “alleged studies” documents has revealed
inconsistencies and other anomalies that give evidence of fraud. But
the IAEA, the United States and its allies in the IAEA continue to
treat the documents as though there were no question about their
authenticity.

The unnamed member state that informed the agency about Danilenko’s alleged experience as a Soviet nuclear weapons scientist is almost certainly Israel, which has been the source of virtually all the
purported intelligence on Iranian work on nuclear weapons over the
past decade.

Israel has made no secret of its determination to influence world
opinion on the Iranian nuclear programme by disseminating information to governments and news media, including purported Iran government documents. Israeli foreign ministry and intelligence officials told journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins about the special unit of Mossad dedicated to that task at the very time the fraudulent documents were being produced.

In an interview in September 2008, Albright said Olli Heinonen, then
deputy director for safeguards at the IAEA, had told him that a
document from a member state had convinced him that the “alleged
studies” documents were genuine. Albright said the state was “probably Israel”.

The Jerusalem Post’s Yaakov Katz reported Wednesday that Israeli
intelligence agencies had “provided critical information used in the
report”, the purpose of which was to “push through a new regime of
sanctions against Tehran.

The US tale of the Iranian plot was greeted with unusual skepticism on the part of Iran specialists and independent policy analysts, and even elements of the mainstream media. The critics observed that the alleged assassination scheme was not in Iran’s interest, and that it bore scant resemblance to past operations attributed to the foreign special operations branch of Iranian intelligence. The Qods Force, it was widely believed, would not send a person like Iranian-American used car dealer Manssor Arbabsiar, known to friends in Corpus Christi, Texas as forgetful and disorganized, to hire the hit squad for such a sensitive covert action.

But administration officials claimed they had hard evidence to back up the charge. They cited a 21-page deposition by a supervising FBI agent in the “amended criminal complaint” filed against Arbabsiar and an accomplice who remains at large, Gholam Shakuri.¹  It was all there, the officials insisted: several meetings between Arbabsiar and a man he thought was a member of a leading Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas, with a reputation for cold-blooded killing; incriminating statements, all secretly recorded, by Arbabsiar and Shakuri, his alleged handler in Tehran; and finally, Arbabsiar’s confession after his arrest, which clearly implicates Qods Force agents in a plan to murder a foreign diplomat on US soil.

A close analysis of the FBI deposition reveals, however, that independent evidence for the charge that Arbabsiar was sent by the Qods Force on a mission to arrange for the assassination of Jubeir is lacking. The FBI account is full of holes and contradictions, moreover. The document gives good reason to doubt that Arbabsiar and his confederates in Iran had the intention of assassinating Jubeir, and to believe instead that the FBI hatched the plot as part of a sting operation.

The Case of the Missing Quotes

he FBI account suggests that, from the inaugural meetings between Arbabsiar and his supposed Los Zetas contact, a Drug Enforcement Agency informant, Arbabsiar, was advocating a terrorist strike against the Saudi embassy. The government narrative states that, in the very first meeting on May 24, Arbabsiar asked the informant about his “knowledge, if any, with respect to explosives” and said he was interested in “among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia.” It also notes that in the meetings prior to July 14, the DEA informant “had reported that he and Arbabsiar had discussed the possibility of attacks on a number of other targets,” including “foreign government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with another country,” located “within and outside the United States.”

But the allegations that the Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to “attack” the Saudi embassy and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges dropped “in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,” according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives.

The most suspicious aspect of the administration’s case, in fact, is the complete absence of any direct quote from Arbabsiar suggesting interest in, much less advocacy of, assassinating the Saudi ambassador or carrying out other attacks in a series of meetings with the DEA informant between June 23 and July 14. The deposition does not even indicate how many times the two actually met during those three weeks, suggesting that the number was substantial, and that the lack of primary evidence from those meetings is a sensitive issue. And although the FBI account specifies that the July 14 and 17 meetings were recorded “at the direction of law enforcement agents,” it is carefully ambiguous about whether or not the earlier meetings were recorded.

The lack of quotations is a crucial problem for the official case for a simple reason: If Arbabsiar had said anything even hinting in the May 24 meeting or in a subsequent meeting at the desire to mount a terrorist attack, it would have triggered the immediate involvement of the FBI’s National Security Branch and its counter-terrorism division. The FBI would then have instructed the DEA informant to record all of the meetings with Arbabsiar, as is standard practice in such cases, according to a former FBI official interviewed for this article. And that would mean that those meetings were indeed recorded.

The fact that the FBI account does not include a single quotation from Arbabsiar in the June 23-July 14 meetings means either that Arbabsiar did not say anything that raised such alarms at the FBI or that he was saying something sufficiently different from what is now claimed that the administration chooses not to quote from it. In either case, the lack of such quotes further suggests that it was not Arbabsiar, but the DEA informant, acting as part of an FBI sting operation, who pushed the idea of assassinating Jubeir. The most likely explanation is that Arbabsiar was suggesting surveillance of targets that could be hit if Iran were to be attacked by Israel with Saudi connivance.

“The Saudi Arabia” and the $100,000

The July 14 meeting between Arbabsiar and the DEA informant is the first from which the criminal complaint offers actual quotations from the secretly recorded conversation. The FBI’s retelling supplies selected bits of conversation — mostly from the informant — aimed at portraying the meeting as revolving around the assassination plot. But when carefully studied, the account reveals a different story.

The quotations attributed to the DEA informant suggest that he was under orders to get a response from Arbabsiar that could be interpreted as assent to an assassination plot. For example, the informant tells Arbabsiar, “You just want the, the main guy.” There is no quoted response from the car dealer. Instead, the FBI narrative simply asserts that Arbabsiar “confirmed that he just wanted the ‘ambassador.’” At the end of the meeting, the informant declares, “We’re gonna start doing the guy.” But again, no response from Arbabsiar is quoted.

Two statements by the informant appear on their face to relate to a broader set of Saudi targets than Adel al-Jubeir. The informant tells Arbabsiar that he would need “at least four guys” and would “take the one point five for the Saudi Arabia.” The FBI agent who signed the deposition explains, “I understand this to mean that he would need to use four men to assassinate the Ambassador and that the cost to Arbabsiar of the assassination would be $1.5 million.” But, apart from the agent’s surmise, there is no hint that either cited phrase referred to a proposal to assassinate the ambassador. Given that there had already been discussion of multiple Saudi targets, as well as those of an unnamed third country (probably Israel), it seems more reasonable to interpret the words “the Saudi Arabia” to refer to a set of missions relating to Saudi Arabia in order to distinguish them from the other target list.

Then the informant repeats the same wording, telling Arbabsiar he would “go ahead and work on the Saudi Arabia, get all the information that we can.” This language does not show that Arbabsiar proposed the killing of Jubeir, much less approved it. And the FBI narrative states that the Iranian-American “agreed that the assassination of the Ambassador should be handled first.”  Again, that curious wording does not assert that Arbabsiar said an assassination should be carried out first, but suggests he was agreeing that the subject should be discussed first.

The absence of any quote from Arbabsiar about an assassination plot, combined with the multiple ambiguities surrounding the statements attributed to the DEA informant, suggest that the main subject of the July 14 meeting was something broader than an assassination plot, and that it was the government’s own agent who had brought up the subject of assassinating the ambassador in the meeting, rather than Arbabsiar.

The government reconstruction of the July 14 meeting also introduces the keystone of the Obama administration’s public case: $100,000 that was to be transferred to a bank account that the DEA informant said he would make known to Arbabsiar. The FBI deposition asserts repeatedly that whenever Arbabsiar or the DEA informant mention the $100,000, they are talking about a “down payment” on the assassination. But the document contains no statement from either of them linking that $100,000 to any assassination plan. In fact, it provides details suggesting that the $100,000 could not have been linked to such a plan.

The FBI deposition states that the informant and Arbabsiar “discussed how Arbabsiar would pay [the informant],” but offers no statement from either individual even mentioning a “payment,” or any reason for transferring the money to a bank account. Furthermore, it does not actually claim that Arbabsiar made any commitment to any action against Jubeir at either the July 14 or 17 meetings. And when the informant is quoted in the July 17 meeting as saying, “I don’t know exactly what your cousin wants me to do,” it appears to be an acknowledgement that he had gotten no indication prior to July 17 that Arbabsiar’s Tehran interlocutors wanted the Saudi ambassador dead. The deposition does not even claim that Arbabsiar’s supposed handlers had approved a plan to kill Jubeir until after the Iranian-American returned to his native country on July 20.

Nevertheless, Arbabsiar is quoted telling the informant on July 14 that the full $100,000 had already been collected in cash at the home of “a certain individual.” Preparations for the transfer of the $100,000 had thus commenced well before the assassination plot allegedly got the green light.

The amount of $100,000 does not even appear credible as a “down payment” on a job that the FBI account says was to have cost a total of $1.5 million. It would represent a mere 6 percent of the full price. Bearing in mind that the DEA informant was supposed to be representing the demand of a ruthlessly profit-motivated Los Zetas drug cartel for a high-stakes political assassination well outside its purview, 6 percent of the total would represent far too little for a “down payment.”

The $100,000 wire transfer must have been related to an understanding that had been reached on something other than the assassination plan. Yet it has been cited by the administration and reported by news media as proof of the plot — and key evidence of Iran’s complicity therein.²

The Qods Force Connection

The FBI account of the July 17 meeting shows the DEA informant leading Arbabsiar into a statement of support for an assassination. The informant, obviously following an FBI script, says, “I don’t know what exactly your cousin wants me to do.” But the deposition notes “further conversation” following that invitation for a clear position on a proposal coming from the informant, indicating that what Arbabsiar was saying did not support the administration’s allegation that the assassination plot was coming from Tehran.

After the FBI evidently sought again to get the straight forward answer it was seeking, however, Arbabsiar is quoted as saying: “He wants you to kill this guy.” The informant then presents a fanciful plan to bomb an imaginary restaurant in Washington where Arbabsiar was told the Saudi ambassador liked to dine twice a week and where many “like, American people” would be present. “You want me to do it outside or in the restaurant?” asks the informant, to which question the Iranian-American replies, “Doesn’t matter how you do it.” At another point in the conversation, Arbabsiar goes further, saying, “They want that guy done. If the hundred go with him, fuck ‘em.”

These statements appear at first blush to be conclusive evidence that Arbabsiar and his Iranian overseers were contracting for the assassination of Jubeir, regardless of lives lost. But there are two crucial questions that the FBI account leaves unanswered: Was Arbabsiar speaking on behalf of the Qods Force or some element of it? And if he was, was he talking about a plan that was to go into effect as soon as possible or was it understood that they were talking about a contingency plan that would only be carried out under specific circumstances?

The deposition includes several instances of Arbabsiar’s bragging about a cousin who is a general, out of uniform and involved in covert external operations, including in Iraq — clearly implying that he belongs to the Qods Force. Arbabsiar is said to have claimed that the cousin and another Iranian official gave him funds for his contacts with the drug cartel. “I got the money coming,” he says. Subsequently, in one of the most extensive quotations from the recorded conversations, Arbabsiar says, “This is politics, so these people they pay this government…he’s got the, got the government behind him…he’s not paying from his pocket.” The FBI narrative identifies the person referred to here as Arbabsiar’s cousin, a Qods Force officer later named as Abdul Reza Shahlai, but again, there is not a single direct quotation backing the claim. And the reference to “these people” who “pay this government” suggests that “he” is connected to a group with illicit financial ties to government officials.

This excerpt could be particularly significant in light of press reports quoting a US law enforcement official saying that Arbabsiar had offered “tons of opium” to the drug cartel and that he and the informant had discussed what the New York Times called a “side deal” on the Iranian-held narcotics.³ If these reports are accurate, it seems possible that Arbabsiar approached Los Zetas on behalf of Iranians who control a portion of the opium being smuggled through Iran from Afghanistan, while seeking to impress the drug cartel operative with his claim to have close ties to the Qods Force through Shahlai. But if the DEA informant then pressed him to authenticate his Qods Force connection, he may have begun discussing covert operations against Iran’s enemies in North America.

The only alleged evidence that Arbabsiar was speaking for Shahlai and the Qods Force is Arbabsiar’s own confession, summarized in the criminal complaint. But, at minimum, that testimony was provided after he had been arrested and had a strong interest in telling the FBI what it wanted to hear.

The deposition makes much of a series of three phone conversations on October 4, 5 and 7 between Arbabsiar and someone who Arbabsiar tells his FBI handlers is Gholam Shakuri, presenting them as confirmation of the involvement of Qods Force officers in the assassination scheme. But the FBI apparently had no way of ascertaining whether the person to whom Arababsiar was talking was actually Shakuri. After the October 4 call, for example, the FBI account merely records that Arbabsiar “indicated that the person he was speaking with was Shakuri.”

On their face, moreover, these conversations prove nothing. In the first of the three calls, the person at the other end of the line, whom Arbabsiar identifies to his FBI contact as Shakuri but whose identity is not otherwise established, asks, “What news…what did you do about the building?” The FBI agent again suggests, “based on my training, experience and participation in this investigation,” that these queries were a “reference to the plot to murder the Ambassador and a question about its status.”

But Arbabsiar is said to have claimed in his confession that he was instructed by Shakuri to use the code word “Chevrolet” to refer to the plot to kill the ambassador. In a second recorded conversation, Arbabsiar immediately says, “I wanted to tell you the Chevrolet is ready, it’s ready, uh, to be done. I should continue, right?” After further exchange, the man purported to be “Shakuri” says, “So buy it, buy it.” Despite the obvious invocation of a code word, it remains unclear what Arbabsiar was to “buy.” “Chevrolet” could actually have been a reference to either a drug-related deal or a generic plan having to do with Saudi and other targets.

In a third recorded conversation on October 7, both Arbabsiar and “Shakuri” refer to a demand by a purported cartel figure for another $50,000 on top of the original $100,000 transferred by wire earlier. But there is no other evidence of such a demand. It appears to be a mere device of the FBI to get “Shakuri” on record as talking about the $100,000. And here it should be recalled that the account in the deposition shows that the transfer of the $100,000 had been agreed on before any indication of agreement on a plan to kill the ambassador.

The invocation of a fictional demand for $50,000, along with the dramatic difference between the first conversation and the second and third conversations, suggests yet another possibility: The second and third conversations were set up in advance by Arbabsiar to provide a transcript to bolster the administration’s case.

Terrorist Plot or Deterrence Strategy?

Even if Qods Forces officials indeed directed Arbabsiar to contact the Los Zetas cartel, it cannot be assumed that they intended to carry out one or more terrorist attacks in the United States. The killing of a foreign ambassador in Washington (not to speak of additional attacks on Saudi and Israeli buildings), if linked to Iran, would invite swift and massive US military retaliation. If, on the other hand, the Qods Force men instructed Arbabsiar to conduct surveillance of those targets and prepare contingency plans for hitting them if Iran were attacked, the whole story begins to make more sense.

Iran lacks the conventional means to deter attack by a powerful adversary. In its decades-long standoffs with the United States and Israel, amidst recurrent talk of “preemptive” strikes by those powers, Iran has relied on threats of proxy retaliation against US and allied state targets in the Middle East.⁴ The Iranian military support for Lebanon’s Hizballah, in particular, is widely recognized as prompted primarily by Iran’s need to deter US and Israeli attack.⁵

In one case in 1994-1995, Saudi Arabian Shi‘i militants carried out surveillance of potential US military and diplomatic targets in Saudi Arabia, in a way that was quickly noticed by US and Saudi intelligence.⁶ Although the consensus among US intelligence analysts was that Iran was preparing for a terrorist attack, Ronald Neumann, then the State Department’s intelligence officer for Iran and Iraq, noted that Iran had done the same thing whenever US-Iranian tensions had risen. He suggested that Iran could be using the surveillance for deterrence, to let Washington know that its interests in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere would be in danger if Iran were attacked.⁷

Unfortunately for Iran’s deterrent strategy, however, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was also carrying out surveillance of US bases in Saudi Arabia, and in November 1995 and again in June 1996, that group bombed two facilities housing US servicemen. The bombing of Khobar Towers in June 1996, which killed 19 US soldiers and one Saudi Arabian, was blamed by the Clinton administration’s FBI and CIA leadership on Iranian-sponsored Shi‘a from Saudi Arabia, with prodding from Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, despite the fact that bin Laden claimed responsibility not once but twice, in interviews with the London-based newspaper, al-Quds al-‘Arabi.⁸

Hani al-Sayigh, one of the Saudi Arabian Shi‘a accused by the Saudi and US governments of conspiring to attack the Khobar Towers, admitted to Assistant Attorney General Eric Dubelier, who interviewed him at a Canadian detention facility in May 1997, that he had participated in the surveillance of US military targets in Saudi Arabia on behalf of Iranian intelligence. But, according to the FBI report on the interview, al-Sayigh insisted that Iran had never intended to attack any of those sites unless it was first attacked by the United States. And when Dubelier asked a question later in the interview that was based on the premise that the surveillance effort was preparation for a terrorist attack, al-Sayigh corrected him.⁹

With threats of an Israeli or US bombing attack on Iran, with Saudi complicity, mounting since the mid-2000s, a similar campaign of surveillance of Saudi and Israeli targets in North America would fit the framework of what the Pentagon has called Iran’s “asymmetric warfare doctrine.” If Arbabsiar spoke of such a campaign in his initial meeting with the DEA informant, he certainly would have piqued the interest of FBI counter-terrorism personnel. And this scenario would also explain why the series of meetings in late June and the first half of July did not produce a single statement by Arbabsiar that the administration could quote to advance its case that the Iranian-American was interested in assassinating Adel al-Jubeir or carrying out other acts of terrorism.

A plan to conduct surveillance and be ready to act on contingency plans would also explain why someone as lacking in relevant experience and skills as Arbabsiar might have been acceptable to the Qods Force. Not only would the mission not have required absolute secrecy; it would have been based on the assumption that the surveillance would become known to US intelligence relatively quickly, as did the monitoring of US targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994-1995.

The Qods Force officials were certainly well aware that the Drug Enforcement Agency had penetrated various Mexican drug cartels, in some cases even at the very top level. US court proceedings involving Mexican drug traffickers who were highly placed in the Sinaloa drug cartel between 2009 and early 2011 reveal that the US made deals with leaders of the cartel to report what they knew about rival cartel operations in return for a hands-off approach to their drug trafficking. ¹⁰  Further underlining the degree to which the cartels were honeycombed with people on the US payroll, the DEA informant in this case was not merely posing as a drug trafficker but is reportedly an actual associate of Los Zetas with access to its upper echelons, who has been given immunity from prosecution to cooperate with the DEA.¹¹

When Did Arbabsiar Become Part of the Sting?

The Obama administration’s account of the alleged Iranian plot has Arbabsiar suddenly changing from terrorist conspirator to active collaborator with the FBI upon his September 29 arrest at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He is said to have provided a confession immediately upon being apprehended, after waiving his right to a lawyer, and then to have waived that right repeatedly again while being interviewed by the FBI. Then Arbabsiar cooperated in making the series of secretly recorded phone calls to someone he identified as Shakuri.

For someone facing such serious charges to provide the details with which to make the case against him, while renouncing benefit of counsel, is odd, to say the least. The official story raises questions not only about what agreement was reached between Arbabsiar and the FBI to ensure his cooperation but about when that agreement was reached.

One clue that Arbabsiar was brought into the sting operation well before his arrest is the DEA informant’s demand in a September 20 phone conversation with Arbabsiar in Tehran that he either come up with half the $1.5 million total fee or come to Mexico to be the guarantee that the full amount would be paid.

Yet the FBI account of that conversation shows Arbabsiar telling the informant, without even consulting with his contacts in Tehran, “I’m gonna go over there [in] two [or] three days.” Later in the same evening, he calls back to ask how long he would need to remain in Mexico. Even if Arbabsiar were as feckless as some reports have suggested, he would certainly not have agreed so readily to put his fate in the hands of the murderous Los Zetas cartel — unless he knew that he was not really in danger, because the US government would intercept him and bring him to the United States. Making the episode even stranger, Arbabsiar’s confession claims that when he told Shakuri about the purported Los Zetas demand, Shakuri refused to provide any more money to the cartel, advised him against going to Mexico and warned him that if he did so, he would be on his own.

Further supporting the conclusion that Arbabsiar had become part of the sting operation before his arrest is the fact there was no reason for the FBI to pose the demand — through the DEA informant — for more money or Arbabsiar’s presence in Mexico except to provide an excuse to get him out of Iran, so he could provide a full confession implicating the Qods Force and be the centerpiece of the case against Iran.

The larger aim of the FBI sting operation, which ABC News has reported was dubbed Operation Red Coalition, was clearly to link the alleged assassination plot to Qods Force officers. The logical moment for the FBI to have recruited the Iranian-American would have been right after the FBI recorded him talking about wiring money to the bank account and casually approving the idea of bombing a restaurant and before his planned departure from Mexico for Iran. The only way to ensure that Arbabsiar would come back, of course, would be to offer him a substantial amount of money to serve as an informant for the FBI during his stay in Iran, which he would receive only upon returning. If Arbabsiar had already been enlisted, of course, it would also mean the keystone of the case — the wiring of $100,000 to a secret FBI bank account — was a part of the FBI sting.

FBI Trickery in Terrorism Cases

FBI deceit in constructing a case for an Iranian terror plot should come as no surprise, given its record of domestic terrorism prosecutions based on sting operations involving entrapment and skullduggery. Central to these stings has been the creation of fictional terrorist plots by the FBI itself. In 2006 the “Gonzales Guidelines” for the use of FBI informants removed previous prohibitions on actions to “initiate a plan or strategy to commit a federal, state or local offense.”¹²

Perhaps the most notorious of all these domestic terrorism sting operations is the case in which Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, leaders of their Albany, New York mosque, were sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for allegedly laundering profits from the sale of a shoulder-launched missile for a Pakistani militant group that was planning to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in New York City.

In fact, there was no such terrorist plot, and the alleged crime was the result of an elaborate FBI scam directed against two innocent men.¹³  It began when an FBI informant pretending to be a Pakistani businessman insinuated himself into Hossain’s life and extended him a $50,000 loan for his pizza parlor. Only months after the informant had begun loaning the money did he show Hossain a shoulder-launched missile, and suggest that he was also selling arms to his “Muslim brothers.” It was a devious form of entrapment; the prosecutors later argued that Hossain should have known the loan could have come from money made in the sale of weapons to terrorists and was therefore guilty of money laundering.

The FBI approach to entrapping Hossain’s friend Aref was even more underhanded. Aref was never even made aware of the missile or the phony story of the illegal arms sale. But on one occasion, when he was present to witness the transfer of loan money, what was later said to have been the missile’s trigger system was left on a table in the room. Prosecutors then argued the theory that Aref had seen the trigger, which looks much like a staple gun, and thus had become part of a conspiracy to “assist in money laundering.”

Many other domestic terrorism cases have involved deceptive tactics and economic inducements deployed by the FBI to involve American Muslims in fictional terrorist plots. The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s Law School found more than 20 terrorism cases that involved some combination of “paid informants, selection of investigation based on perceived religious identity, [and] a plot that was created by the government.”¹⁴ This history makes it clear that the Justice Department and FBI are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to fabricate terrorism cases against targeted individuals, and that misrepresenting these individuals’ intentions and actual behavior has long been standard practice. The trickery and deceit in past “counter-terrorism” sting operations provides further reason to question the veracity of the Obama administration’s allegations in the bizarre case of Manssor Arbabsiar.

•  This article was first published in Middle East Research
and Information Project (MERIP)

1. The full text of  of the “amended criminal complaint” is on line.
2. New York Times, October 12, 2011 and Reuters, October 12, 2011
3. New York Times, October 12, 2011 and Bloomberg, October 12, 2011
4. For an official US recognition of Iran’s “assymetric warfare doctrine” as a tool of deterrence of “any would-be invader,” see Department of Defense, Unclassified Report on Military Power of Iran, April 2010, p. 1.
5. Michael Young, “Another Israel-Hezbollah War?” Middle East Security at Harvard, National Security Study Program, February 28, 2008
6. Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1997 and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 276.
7. Gareth Porter, “US Officials Leaked a False Story Blaming Iran,” Inter Press Service, June 24, 2009.
8. Gareth Porter, “FBI Ignored Compelling Evidence of Bin Laden Role,” Inter Press Service, June 25, 2009.
9. Gareth Porter, “US May Have Concealed Deterrent Aim of IranianPlan,” Inter Press Service, October 21, 2011.
10. New York Times, October 24, 2011.
11. So said ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella in his podcast of October 18, 2011, online
12. Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the “Homegrown Threat” in the United States
13. This account of the case is drawn from Petra Bartosiewicz, “To Catch a Terrorist,” Harper’s, August 2011
14. Targeted and Entrapped, pp. 50-52, fn 17

That number would make U.S. night raids by far the largest cause of civilian casualties in the war in Afghanistan. The report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on civilian casualties in 2010 had said the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) by insurgents was the leading cause of civilian deaths with 904.

Except for a relatively few women and children killed by accident, the civilians who died in the raids were all adult males who were counted as insurgents in press releases and official data released by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

The data on night raids, which were given to selected news media, cover three distinct 90-day night raid campaigns from May through July 2010, early August to early November, and mid-November to mid-February. The combined totals for the three periods indicate that a minimum of 2,599 rank and file insurgents were killed and an additional 723 “leaders” killed or captured in raids.

Assuming conservatively that one-third of the alleged leaders were killed, the total number of alleged insurgents killed in the raids was 2,844.

Official Data on Night Raids ISAF has leaked a set of statistics on insurgents killed in night raids published in major news outlets covering three 90-day campaigns of night raids. In August 2010, ISAF released figures to the Washington Post showing that 1,031 rank and file insurgents had been killed from May through July. In November 2010 the New York Times reported a total of 968 rank and file insurgents killed in the three months from August 11 through November 11.

Reuters reported on February 24, 2011 that 600 people were killed during the 90 days from November 18 to February 18. The figure did not distinguish between rank and file and “leaders”.

Those three subtotals add up to 2,599 killed from May 2010 to mid-February 2011.

The Washington Post and New York Times articles also reported 355 and 368 “leaders” killed or captured during the May-July and August-November periods, totaling 723.

An unknown proportion of that total was deliberately assassinated. Nevertheless, it is assumed in estimating the number killed in the raids that the proportion of alleged “leaders” killed to the total killed and captured in the first two campaigns was the same as the proportion of rank and file killed of the total killed and captured: 34 percent of 723, or 245.

The sum of the totals of 2,599 alleged insurgents and 245 alleged “leaders” assumed to have been killed in the raids comes to 2,844. The total number or SOF night raids can be estimated from officially leaked subtotals of 3,000 from May through July; 1,572 from August 11 to November 11, and 1,710 from November 18 to February 18.

Those subtotals add up to 6,282 night raids for the entire 10 months.

SOF night raids during the 10-month period totalled 6,282, according to the same ISAF data.

A third crucial statistic, repeated frequently by U.S and NATO officials in 2010 and 2011, is that shots were fired by SOF units in only 20 percent of night raids.

A U.S. military source, who has been briefed on SOF operation, confirmed to IPS what has been generally known among outside observers – that any time shots are fired by SOF troops in a night raid, someone is killed.

If shots were fired in 20 percent of the 6,282 raids, it means that 2,844 were killed in 1,256 raids.

With very rare exceptions, night raids target only individuals rather than groups. They are carried out at night because they are aimed at catching the individual at home asleep and therefore taken completely by surprise.

Therefore, a minimum of 1,588 people (2,844 total killed minus the 1,256 targets in the lethal raids) were killed in the raids even though they weren’t targeted.

Not every one of the untargeted individuals killed in night raids was a noncombatant civilian. But the socio-cultural and physical setting of the raids guarantees that the percentage of civilians in that total is extremely high.

Within the Afghan compounds that are the physical targets of U.S. night raids live extended family households that normally include not only the male head of family and his wife, but his brothers, sons and cousins and their families.

In Afghanistan, every adult Pashtun male has a weapon in his home, and is obliged by the ancient code of conduct called “Pashtunwali” to defend his home, his family and his friends against armed intruders. In a typical extended family compound, several males have weapons.

As a result, the non-targeted civilians killed in night raids have  invariably been either close relatives or neighbours who have come out to assist against an armed assault.

SOF commanders and the command and staff of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have essentially denied all civilian deaths in night raids, except for women and children, by counting all adult males killed in raids as insurgents.

That ISAF policy has been confirmed to IPS by a U.S. military source briefed on the operational aspects of the raids.

ISAF has counted adult dead in raids as insurgents even when the victims held prominent positions in the Afghan government, as was the case in the Gardez night raid of February 12, 2010.

In that raid, two men who were shot dead in the targeted compound by an SOF unit when they came out of their dwellings with Kalashnikov rifles turned out to have been a district prosecutor and a local police chief. Nevertheless, ISAF reported in its press release on the raid that two insurgents had been killed.

The killing of family members and neighbours who responded to night raids with weapons was already a major issue within the U.S. mission to Afghanistan as early as 2008, according to Matthew Hoh, who was the senior U.S. civilian official in Zabul province in 2009.

“Pashtunwali was causing serious problems for us in the context of night raids,” Hoh told IPS. “It was raised as a key issue in our training even before I went to Afghanistan.”

The problem had become so prevalent by early 2010 that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal referred to it explicitly in his early 2010 directive on night raids, parts of which were released to the public by ISAF March 5, 2010.

McChrystal noted that the Afghan adult male had been “conditioned to respond aggressively in defense of his home and his guests whenever he perceives his home or honor threatened. In a similar situation most of us would do the same.”

McChrystal expressed regret that these “[i]nstinctive responses by an Afghan man to defend his home and family are sometimes interpreted as insurgent acts, with tragic results.”

Although a large proportion of those targeted in the estimated 1,256 lethal raids were undoubtedly Taliban insurgents, a very substantial proportion were civilians.

Some were targeted after malicious tips by tribal and personal enemies. Others fell victim to a targeting system that is overwhelmingly dependent on electronic intelligence. Phone calls to a known insurgent are regarded as a basis for adding a cell phone number to the “kill/capture list”.

One detainee picked up in a night raid earlier this year was told by his interrogator that it was because he had made phone calls to an insurgent, IPS learned from a friend of the detainee’s family.

Hoh, who was briefed on the list, called the Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL) in 2009, told this writer that a large proportion of the targets on the list were not identifiable individuals at all, but mobile phone numbers.

But in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan, contacts with Taliban commanders and other Taliban figures are nearly universal, according to Michael Semple, former deputy EU representative in Afghanistan and a leading specialist on the Afghan insurgency.

In addition, SOF commanders have begun consciously targeting individuals who were not believed to be insurgents but who were believed to have provided moral or material support, or to have intelligence information about them.

That targeting shift, acknowledged by military officials to the authors of a recent study by the Open Society Foundations and The Liaison Office, was reflected in an 82-percent increase in the number of people seized in raids and detained briefly during the August-November  campaign, compared with the May-July campaign.

Those detainees were also counted as insurgents in the data released to the news media, despite the fact that up to 90 percent of them were released as civilians within days or months, as IPS reported last June.

Some of those targeted civilians were killed in raids when they  appeared to challenge the SOF intruders, adding to the 1,588 non-targeted individuals killed in the raids. However, estimating the additional toll of civilians is impossible.

The ISAF Public Affairs Officer for SOF issues and officials responsible for civilian casualties monitoring at the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

Afghan human rights officials and foreign observers have suggested that fewer civilian deaths have occurred in night raids with the increasing use of the so-called “soft knock”, in which Afghan personnel are used to announce the presence of the raiding party with a loudspeaker before entry into the house.

The toll of civilians in more recent 90-day periods may well have been reduced in 2011 compared with a year earlier, as suggested by smaller numbers of alleged insurgents said to have been killed over the course of the three campaigns.

But night raids clearly remain the overwhelmingly primary – though still unacknowledged – cause of civilian deaths in the war.

But when the scanty evidence in the FBI account about what Arbabsiar actually proposed is interpreted in the context of Iran’s past strategy for deterring external attack, it suggests that Arbabsiar’s mission may have been to arrange for surveillance of, and contingency plans for, targets to be hit in the event that Iran is attacked by the United States or Israel.

Iran is relatively weak in conventional military strength, so it has relied heavily on unconventional means of deterrence by letting it be known that proxies in other countries could retaliate against U.S. and Israeli targets if those countries attacked Iran. The clearest example of that strategy was an Iranian-directed campaign of surveillance of U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994-95.

The FBI account contains a series of references to operations said to be proposed by Arbabsiar that hint at just such an unconventional deterrent strategy.

The account says Arbabsiar’s interest in the first meeting with an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant included, “among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia”. That reference makes it clear that the Iranian interest was not in Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir but in a more generic list of targets.

In a footnote, the FBI account says the “missions” discussed would have involved “foreign government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with another country”, located both in the United States and elsewhere.

There is not a single quote from any of that series of meetings between late June and mid-July in which Arbabsiar explains the nature and purpose of those missions, despite the fact that most, if not all, the meetings would have been recorded by the DEA informant under standard FBI procedure.

That signal omission may have been necessary to conceal the fact that Arbabsiar was proposing surveillance of various targets and contingency plans that would be carried out against the targets only in case of an attack on Iran by the United States, Israel or both.

The account has the DEA informant saying that it would “take the one  point five for the Saudi Arabia” and later adds that he would “go ahead and work on Saudi Arabia, get all the information that we can”.

The FBI agent who signed the document then says, “I understand this to mean…that the cost…of conducting the assassination would be 1.5 million dollars.” But there is no actual evidence in the document that the figure had been discussed in connection with a proposal for the assassination of the Saudi ambassador.

Those allusions to “the Saudi Arabia” in the context of a discussion of multiple targets involving more than one country’s facilities suggests that the figure was for surveillance of, and contingency plans for, retaliatory attacks against a number of Saudi targets. By spring 2011, when Arbabsiar was asked to make contact with paramilitary forces in Mexico, according to the FBI account, Iran had reason to believe that the danger of an Israeli attack with U.S.complicity had increased significantly.

In November 2010, The Guardian had published the text of a November 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks revealing that U.S.and Israeli officials had discussed the delivery to Israel of GBU-28 “bunker buster” bombs that would allow an Israeli attack to penetrate underground Iranian nuclear facilities.

U.S. and Israeli officials in the meeting reported in the cable agreed that it would have to be done quietly to avoid any allegations that the U.S. government was helping Israel prepare for an attack on Iran. Then Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright conceded to Newsweek that there was concern among military leaders about how the shipment would be perceived by the Iranians .

The decision to identify Saudi targets for attack in the United States and Mexico presumably reflected strong Iranian suspicions that the Saudi government was prepared to allow Israeli planes to use Saudi airspace to attack Iran, as had been reported by the Times of London and Jerusalem Post in June 2010.

A project to hire a Latin American drug cartel to carry out surveillance of a range of Saudi and Israeli facilities and prepare plans for retaliatory attacks if Iran itself were to be attacked would parallel a similar Iranian campaign involving U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994 and 1995.

By late 1994, the CIA station in Saudi Arabia was reporting that a number of U.S. targets in the country, including military bases and the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, were under surveillance by Iranians and their Saudi Shia allies, as reported in a Senate Intelligence Committee Staff report in September 1996 and other published sources.

It was generally believed within the intelligence community that this surveillance by Iranian allies in Saudi represented a terrorist threat.

But Ron Neumann, then director of the Office Northern Gulf Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, observed at the time that Iranian surveillance of U.S. targets had recurred whenever U.S.-Iran tensions were high, and could be defensive maneuvers on Iran’s part to deter an attack rather than signaling an intent to carry out terrorism.

After the Khobar Towers bombing killed 19 U.S. servicemen in eastern Saudi Arabia in June 1996, the United States accused Iran of having ordered the attack, primarily on the ground that it had organised the surveillance of U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia.

In a striking parallel to the reports in recent days of sensitive intelligence linking Iranian government officials to the alleged assassination plot, the Washington Post reported in April 1997 that there was intelligence tying Hani al–Sayegh, a Saudi suspect in the Khobar Towers bombing, to Brigadier General Ahmad Sherifi of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Post story said that intelligence had “persuaded a growing number of officials in Washington and Ryadh of Iran’s direct involvement in the (Khobar Towers) attack”.

That intelligence consisted of a secretly recorded al-Sayegh phone conversation in Canada about his meeting with Gen. Sherifi two years before the bombing.

When al-Sayegh was interviewed by Assistant Attorney General Eric Dubelier in May 1997 in Ottawa, Canada, he admitted to having participated in the videotaping of another U.S. air base in Saudi Arabia as part of a surveillance programme initiated and directed by Sherifi.

But the FBI record of that interview, to which this writer was given access in 2009, shows that al-Sayegh stated very clearly to Dubelier that the surveillance work for the Iranians was not to prepare for one or more terrorist attacks but to identify potential targets for retaliation in the event of an attack on Iran.

When Dubelier later asked him a question which ignored that distinction, al-Sayegh repeated that it was not to prepare for a terrorist bombing.

Thirteen Saudis, including al Sayegh, were indicted in 2001 for carrying out the Khobar bombing, based entirely on alleged confessions by Shi’a activists detained – and presumably tortured – by the Saudis.

The indictment blamed Iran for directing the bombing, charging that the defendants had “reported their surveillance activities to Iranian officials and were supported and directed in those activities by Iranian officials”.

The 1994-95 Iranian effort in Saudi Arabia, which was apparently not expected to be kept secret from U.S. intelligence, suggests that Iranian officials may have been aiming for a similar effect in seeking a Mexican drug cartel to do surveillance and contingency planning on Saudi and Israeli targets.

The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the broad claim being made by the administration.

But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a former senior intelligence and counterterrorism official in the other.

The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was identified publicly by the Obama administration as a “deputy commander in the Quds Force” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shahlai had long been regarded by U.S. officials as a key figure in the Quds Force’s relationship to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq.

The primary objective of the FBI sting operation involving Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant that was started last June now appears to have been to use Arbabsiar to implicate Shahlai in a terror plot.

U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar claimed that Shahlai was his cousin.

In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an individual “providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq” and thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said Shahlai had provided “material support” to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and that he had “planned the January 20, 2007 attack” by Mahdi Army “Special Groups” on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq.

Arbabsiar’s confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early spring 2011 and asked him to find “someone in the narcotics business” to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with thousands of dollars for his expenses.

But Arbabsiar’s charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar had become the cornerstone of the administration’s case against Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him.

There is no indication in the FBI account of the   investigation that there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar’s claim of Shahlai’s involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador.

The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a terrorist past, and that it was  therefore credible that he could be part of an assassination plot.

Laying the foundation for press stories on the theme, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it was sanctioning Shahlai, along with Arbabsiar and three other Quds Force officials, including the head of the organisation, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, for being “connected to” the assassination plot.

But Michael Issikof of NBC News reported the same day that Shahlai “had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government officials and documents made public Tuesday  afternoon”.

Isikoff, who is called “National Investigative Correspondent” at NBC News, reported that the Treasury Department had designated Shahlai as a “terrorist” in 2008, despite the fact that the Treasury announcement of the designation had not used the term “terrorist”.

On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report closely paralleling the Issikof story but going even further in claiming documentary proof of Shahlai’s responsibility for the January 2007 attack in Karbala. Post reporter Peter Finn wrote that Shahlai “was known as the guiding hand behind an elite militia of the cleric Moqtada al Sadr”, which had carried out an attack on U.S. troops in Karbala in January 2007.

Finn cited the fact that the Treasury Department named Shahlai as the “final approving and coordinating authority” for training Sadr’s
militiamen in Iran. That fact would not in itself be evidence of involvement in a specific attack on U.S. forces. On the contrary, it would suggest that he was not involved in operational aspects of the Mahdi Army in Iraq.

Finn then referred to a “22-page memo that detailed preparations for the operation and tied it to the Quds Force….” But he didn’t refer to any evidence that Shahlai personally had anything to do with the operation.

In fact, U.S. officials acknowledged in the months after the Karbala attack that they had found no evidence of any Iranian involvement in the operation.

Talking with reporters about the memo on April 26, 2007, several weeks after it had been captured, Gen. David Petraeus conceded that it did not show that any Iranian official was linked to the planning of the Karbala operation. When a journalist asked him  whether there was evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala operation, Petraeus responded, “No. No. No… [W]e do not have a direct link to Iran involvement in that particular case.”

In a news briefing in Baghdad July 2, 2007, Gen. Kevin Bergner confirmed that the attack in Karbala had been authorised by the Iraqi chief of the militia in question, Kais Khazali, not by any Iranian official.

Col. Michael X. Garrett, who had been commander of the U.S. Fourth Brigade combat team in Karbala, confirmed to this writer in December 2008 that the Karbala attack “was definitely an inside job”.

Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is on the list of those Iranian officials “linked” to the alleged terror plot, because he “oversees the IRGC-QF officers who were involved in this plot” , as the Treasury Department announcement explained. But a Reuters story on Friday reported a claim of U.S. intelligence that two wire transfers totaling 100,000 dollars at the behest of Arbabsiar to a bank account controlled by the FBI implicates Soleimani in the assassination plot.

“While details are still classified,” wrote Mark Hosenball and Caren Bohan, “one official said the wire transfers apparently had some kind of hallmark indicating they were personally approved” by Soleimani.

But the suggestion that forensic examination of the wire transfers could somehow show who had approved them is misleading. The wire transfers were from two separate non-Iranian banks in a foreign country, according to the FBI’s account. It would be impossible to deduce who approved the transfer by looking at the documents.

“I have no idea what such a ‘hallmark’ could be,” said Paul Pillar, a former head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center who was also National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East until his retirement in 2005.

Pillar told IPS that the “hallmark” notion “pops up frequently in commentary after actual terrorist attacks,”, but the concept is usually invoked “along the lines of ‘the method used in this attack had the hallmark of group such and such’.”

That “hallmark” idea “assumes exclusive ownership of a method of attack which does not really exist,” said Pillar. “I expect the same could be said of methods of transferring money.”

Although the legal document, called an amended criminal complaint, implicates Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar and his cousin Ali Gholam Shakuri, an officer in the Iranian Quds Force, in a plan to assassinate Saudi Arabian Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, it also suggests that the idea originated with and was strongly pushed by a undercover DEA informant, at the direction of the FBI.

On May 24, when Arbabsiar first met with the DEA informant he thought was part of a Mexican drug cartel, it was not to hire a hit squad to kill the ambassador. Rather, there is reason to believe that the main purpose was to arrange a deal to sell large amounts of opium from Afghanistan.

In the complaint, the closest to a semblance of evidence that Arbabsiar sought help during that first meeting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador is the allegation, attributed to the DEA informant, that Arbabsiar said he was  “interested in, among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia”.

Among the “other things” was almost certainly a deal on heroin controlled by officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Three Bloomberg reporters, citing a “federal law enforcement official”, wrote that Arbabsiar told the DEA informant he represented Iranians who “controlled drug smuggling and could provide tons of opium”.

Because of opium entering Iran from Afghanistan, Iranian authorities hold 85 percent of the world’s opium seizures, according to Iran’s Fars News Agency. Iranian security personnel, including those in the IRGC and its Quds Force, then have the opportunity to sell the opium to traffickers in the Middle East, Europe and now Mexico.

Mexican drug cartels have begun connecting with Middle Eastern drug traffickers, in many cases stationing operatives in Middle East locations to facilitate heroin production and sales, according to a report last January in Border Beat, an online news service run by University of Arizona journalism students.

But the FBI account of the contacts between Arbabsiar and the DEA informant does not reference any discussions of drugs.

The criminal complaint refers to an unspecified number of meetings between Arbabsiar and the DEA informant in late June and the first two weeks of July.

What transpired in those meetings remains the central mystery surrounding the case.

The official account of the investigation cites the testimony of the informant (referred to in the document as “CS-1″) in stating, “Over the course of a series of meetings, ARBABSIAR explained to CS-1 that his associates in Iran had discussed a number of violent missions for CS-1 and CIS-1′s purported criminal associates to perform.”

The account claims that the mission discussed included murdering the
ambassador. But no specific statement proposing or agreeing to the act is
attributed to Arbabsiar. “Prior to the July 14 meeting, CS- 1 had reported that he and Arbabsiar had discussed the possibility of attacks on a number of other targets,” the account states.

The targets are described as involving “foreign government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with another country…located either in or outside the United States”, without mentioning any discussion of the Saudi ambassador.

Both that language and the absence of any statement attributed to Arbabsiar imply that the Iranian- American said nothing about assassinating the Saudi ambassador except in response to  suggestions by the informant, who was already part of an FBI undercover operation.

The DEA informant, as the FBI account acknowledges in a footnote, had previously been charged with a narcotics offence by a state in the U.S. and had been cooperating in narcotics investigations – apparently posing as a drug cartel operative – in return for dropping the charges. The document is notably silent on whether the conversation was recorded.

A former FBI official familiar with procedures in such cases, who spoke to IPS anonymously, said the FBI would normally have recorded all such conversations touching on the possibility of terrorism.

The absence of quotes from any of those meetings suggests that they do not support the case being made by the FBI and the Obama administration.

The account is quite explicit, on the other hand, that the July 14 and July 17 meetings were recorded at FBI direction. Statements quoted from those transcripts show the DEA informant trying to induce Arbabsiar to indicate agreement to assassinating the Saudi ambassador.

The informant is quoted as saying he would need “at least four guys” and would “take the one point five for the Saudi Arabia”. He declared that he “go ahead and work on the Saudi Arabia, get all the information we can”.

At one point the informant says, “You just want the, the main guy.” And at the end of the meeting, he declares, “[W]e’re gonna start doing the guy”.

The fact that not a single quote from Arbabsiar shows that he agreed to assassinating the ambassador, much less proposed it, suggests that he was either  non-committal or linking the issue to something else, such as the prospect of a major drug deal with the cartel.

Arbabsiar’s quotes from a Sep. 2 phone conversation referring to the cartel as “having the number for the safe” and “once you open the door that’s it” could refer to a drug transaction that had been discussed, while the FBI account suggest those quotes refer to the assassination and “other projects” with the Iranian group.

At the July 17 meeting, the DEA informant presented a plan to blow up a restaurant to kill the mbassador, with the possible deaths of 100-150 people, eliciting a lack of concern on the part of Arbabsiar about such deaths.

During a visit to Iran in August, Arbabsiar wired two equal payments totalling $100,000 to a bank account in New York. But he was still under the impression that he was about to cash in on a deal with the cartel.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that Arbabsiar had told an Iranian-American friend from Corpus Christie, Texas, “I’m going to make good money.”

There is also circumstantial evidence that Arbabsiar may have even been brought into the sting operation to help further implicate his cousin Gholam Shakuri in the terrorist plot.

Arbabsiar met with his cousin Shakuri in late September and told him that the cartel was demanding that he, Arbabsiar, go to Mexico personally to guarantee payment. That demand from the DEA was an obvious device by the FBI to get Shakuri and his associates in Tehran to demonstrate their commitment to the assassination.

The FBI account indicates that Shakuri told Arbabsiar that he was responsible for himself if he went to Mexico. That statement would have been a warning sign for Arbabsiar, if he still believed he was dealing with one of the most murderous drug cartels in Mexico, that he would be risking his own life for a group that was no longer taking responsibility for him.

Yet Arbabsiar flew to Mexico as if unconcerned about that risk.

After his arrest on September 29 Arbabsiar waived the right to a lawyer and proceeded to provide a complete confession. A few days later, he placed a phone call to Shakuri which was recorded “at the direction of federal enforcement agents”, according to the FBI.

One issue under debate is whether military force alone can settle the problem of the Haqqani network or if a political settlement is necessary.

The other issue is whether the United States should continue to carry out a drone war against the Haqqani network in defiance of Pakistan’s demand for a veto over the strikes, or reach an accommodation with Pakistan that would narrow the focus of the strikes.

That policy debate pits top military leaders, Pentagon officials and the CIA, who want to put priority on pressuring Pakistan to attack the Haqqani forces, against those in the Obama administration who doubt that the military effort can be decisive and support a political approach to that key insurgent force.

The military, the Pentagon and the CIA have been pushing aggressively since late 2010 to get the administration to force the Pakistani military leadership to carry out a major offensive against the Haqqani leadership and forces in North Waziristan, despite an intelligence assessment that Islamabad will not change its policy toward the Haqqani group.

Just days before his tenure of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ended, Mullen took advantage of the consternation of the entire Obama administration over the 20-hour siege of the U.S. Embassy and U.S.- NATO headquarters in Kabul September 13 to raise the issue of Pakistani ties with the Haqqani group at a higher level of intensity.

He sought to exploit what he called “credible evidence” that Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was involved in the planning or execution of the Kabul attacks.

It soon became evident, however, that Mullen was not speaking for a united Obama administration. White House spokesman Jay Carney responded to a question about Mullen’s remarks on September 28 by saying it was “not language that I would use”.

A September 27 article in the Washington Post quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying that Mullen’s charge was “overstated” and that there was “scant evidence” of ISI “direction or control” over the Haqqani group.

Then Washington Times Pentagon correspondent Bill Gertz suggested September 28 that the criticism of Mullen was coming from officials in the intelligence community and the State Department who wanted to relax the pressure on Pakistan over the Haqqani network rather than intensifying it.

The critics were calling for cutting back sharply on drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, according to the Pentagon official who leaked the disagreement to Gertz. Their argument, according to Gertz’s source, was that continuing the strikes at the present level is unlikely to damage Al-Qaeda any more than it already has been.

That argument parallels those made by former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in an August 14 New York Times op-ed piece.

The vast majority of the drone strikes over the past two years, however, have targeted the Haqqani network, not Al-Qaeda or the Pakistani Taliban. The drone war has therefore become the basis for an alliance between the leadership of the CIA and the military in support of pressure on Pakistan’s military over its failure to attack the Haqqani network.

The military and the CIA have argued strongly against negotiating with the Haqqani network. In June 2010, CIA Director Leon Panetta declared publicly, “We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation where they would surrender their arms, where they would denounce Al-Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society.”

That position also reflected the interests of the U.S. military. Panetta’s move to Defence and his replacement by Gen. David Petraeus at CIA ensures that the same alignment of interests will continue.

But the Obama administration’s December 2010 strategy review produced a potential alternative to that military-CIA approach.

An intelligence assessment circulated just as the 50-page classified review of progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan was being completed concluded that Pakistan was not likely to agree to carry out a major military operation against the Haqqani group, regardless of U.S. pressures. It also suggested that, without such a change in Pakistan’s policy, the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan couldn’t succeed.

That strengthened the hand of those who had been sceptical about the military’s approach to the problem. The result, according to sources familiar with the document, was that the strategy review suggested the need for a “political approach” to the insurgency in general and the Haqqani network in particular.

The review, which is described as “diagnostic” rather than “prescriptive”, did not mandate such a political approach, nor did it define what it would entail, according to the sources. The political approach “wasn’t off the ground yet”, one source told IPS.

The implication, however, was that the Haqqani network would have to be integrated into the broader U.S. strategy of “dialogue” with the Taliban insurgent leadership, even as military pressure on the insurgents continued. It could not go further than that, because Obama had not made a decision to enter into peace negotiations with the Taliban.

After the December review, Pakistan stepped up its effort to persuade the United States to deal directly with the Haqqani network, telling the Obama administration that it could bring the Haqqanis to the negotiating table.

Despite opposition from the military-Pentagon-CIA phalanx to a Haqqani role in negotiations, those in the State Department and the White House who were backing a broader strategy of negotiations for Afghanistan and hoping to ease tensions with Pakistan supported separate talks with the Haqqani group.

In a hint of the direction U.S. policy was tilting, Mullen, who was no fan of direct contacts with the Haqqani network, declared in June that some members of the network might be open to “reconciliation”.

ABC News revealed on “The Blotter” October 3 that a U.S. official had met with Ibrahim Haqqani, the son of the patriarch of the organisation, Jalaludin Haqqani, a few months before the September 13 Kabul attacks.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is now in day-to-day command of the network, told BBC the same day that the U.S. had raised the possibility of representation of the network in the Afghan government.

Although no U.S. official has confirmed that claim, it is consistent with past efforts to divide the Haqqanis from Mullah Mohammed Omar, to whom the Haqqanis have pledged their loyalty. In May 2004, Seyed Saleem Shahzad reported in the Asia Times Online that Siraj Haqqani had confirmed a report Shahzad had gotten from another source – presumably ISI – that the United States had offered through ISI to make Jalaludin Haqqani prime minister.

The elder Haqqani’s response, according to his son, was, “After so much killing of Afghans through ‘daisy cutter bombs’ and like, shall I sit in the government under U.S. command?”

While rejecting offers to end their resistance war in return for a position in the government, the Haqqanis are ready to join broader negotiations whenever Mullah Omar agrees to begin talks, as was confirmed by a Haqqani network source to Reuters September 17.

Last week, unnamed U.S. officials were spreading the word to news media that there was reason to believe the Haqqanis were to blame for the assassination of Afghan High Peace Council Burhanuddin Rabbani, despite the apparent absence of any real evidence the group was involved.

That was another indication that the debates over the two Haqqani-related issues are far from being resolved.

But there is much less substance to the administration’s threatening rhetoric than was apparent. In fact, it was primarily an exercise in domestic political damage control, although compounded by an emotional response to recent major attacks by the Haqqani group on U.S.-NATO targets, according to two sources familiar with the policy-making process on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

One source close to that process doubted that there was any planning for military action against Pakistan in the immediate future. “I’m sure we’re going to be talking to the Pakistanis a lot about this,” the source told IPS.

Despite the tough talk about not tolerating any more high-profile attacks on U.S. troops, the sources suggested, there is no expectation that anything the United States can do would change Pakistani policy toward the Haqqani group.

The Haqqani network, a force of 15,000 to 20,000 Pashtun fighters led by former anti-Soviet Mujahideen figure, Jalalludin Haqqani, has long
declared its loyalty to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Looming over the discussions about how to react to the latest attacks is the firm conclusion reached by the Barack Obama administration in last December’s AfPak policy review that it was futile to try to put pressure on Pakistan over the issue of ties with the Haqqani group.

The Obama administration had tried repeatedly in 2009 and 2010 to put pressure on Pakistani army chief Ashfaq Kayani to attack the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, but without any result. Finally, in the December policy review, it was agreed that attacking Pakistan publicly for its ties with the Haqqani network and its refusal to attack those forces in North Waziristan not only would not achieve the desired result but was counterproductive and should stop, according to sources familiar with that review.

But a rising tide of Haqqani group attacks on U.S. and NATO targets in 2011 has made the Obama administration’s AfPak policy much more vulnerable to domestic political criticism than ever before.

The New York Times reported September 24 that the number of attacks by the Haqqani group was five times greater and the number of roadside bombs had increased by 20 percent in 2011 than during the same period of 2010,  according to a senior U.S. military official.

Even more damaging to the administration’s war policy, however, was the impression created by the attack by the Haqqani network on the U.S. embassy and the U.S.-NATO headquarters in the most heavily guarded section of Kabul September 13, and a truck bomb attack on a NATO base three days earlier that wounded 77 U.S. troops.

Top U.S. national security officials had no choice but to cast blame on Pakistan for those attacks and to suggest that the administration was now taking a much tougher line toward Islamabad, despite the knowledge that it was not likely to shake the Pakistani policy, according to the two  knowledgeable sources.

“We’re in a situation where the administration could not do nothing,” said one of the sources.

The administration decided within a few days of the high-profile attack in Kabul on September 13 to highlight the claim that the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, was somehow complicit in the recent Haqqani group attacks.

On September 17, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter charged that the Haqqani network had carried out the attack on the U.S. embassy and U.S.-NATO headquarters a few days earlier and declared, “There is evidence linking the Haqqani network to the Pakistani government.”

Three days later Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters, “We are going to take whatever steps are necessary to protect our forces” in Afghanistan.

Then the administration put out a story through the Washington Post September 21 that was clearly aimed at satisfying the domestic political audience that the administration was sufficiently tough toward Pakistan on its ties with the Haqqani group.

Diplomatic correspondent Karen DeYoung reported that the Obama administration had given “what amounts to an ultimatum” to Pakistan to cut ties with the Haqqani group, warning that the United States would “act unilaterally if Pakistan does not comply”.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Sep. 22, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen made the unusual  admission that the Haqqani network’s attacks in Afghanistan had become “more brazen, more aggressive, more lethal” than ever before, but explained it as a function of ties between the group and Pakistan’s ISI.

He portrayed the Haqqani group as “a veritable arm of the ISI” and suggested that there was “credible evidence” that the ISI was behind the truck bomb attack on the NATO base September 10 as well as the attack on the embassy and the International Security Assistance Force headquarters a few days later. He used oddly contorted language in characterising that evidence, saying that “the information has become more available that those attacks have been supported or even encouraged by the ISI.”

That same line, which only suggested ISI  encouragement” as a possibility, was then peddled to Reuters and CNN, among other news outlets. CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr quoted a “U.S. military official” on September 23 as claiming ISI “knowledge or support” in regard to Haqqani network attacks – another formula revealing the absence of hard  intelligence of ISI complicity.

And Mark Hosenball and Susan Cornwell of Reuters reported September 22 U.S. officials had conceded that information suggesting that ISI had encouraged Haqqani attacks on U.S. forces was uncorroborated”.

Absent from these reports was any indication that the U.S. intelligence community had been consulted by Mullen before making claims about “credible intelligence” of ISI complicity.

What was missing from the administration’s public pronouncements and leaks was the fact that both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations had been well aware that the Pakistani military had close strategic relations with the Haqqani network.

“It’s not as if the United States didn’t know that the Pakistani military considers the Haqqani network a strategic asset,” said one knowledgeable source.

The long AfPak policy review by the Obama administration in 2009 was based on the knowledge that the Pakistani government was unlikely to give up its support for the Haqqani network and the Taliban Quetta Shura.

On November 29, 2009, the day Obama made his final decision to support an increase of more than 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, his Afghanistan war adviser, Gen. Douglas Lute, warned him that Pakistan’s policy of support for the Haqqani network and other insurgents was one of four key factors that created a serious risk of policy failure in Afghanistan, according to Bob Woodward’s book “Obama’s Wars”.

Even those who had held out hope in the past that pressure on Pakistan could lead to change in its relationship with the Haqqani group have now given up on that possibility. The New York Times reported Saturday that officials who once believed Washington could manipulate the Pakistani military to end its support for the Haqqani group “through cajoling and large cash  payments” were now convinced that Pakistan would not change its policy as long as it feels threatened by Indian power.

You would have to believe that, based on media coverage of the event. The New York Times reported that the assassination had “struck a body blow to the peace process”, and that theme dominated almost every story. Most stories included quotes from Rabbani supporters such as one in the Times article declaring: “The peace process is finished.”

Dexter Filkins was more emphatic, opining in the New Yorker that the Rabbani assassination was a “blow to the very idea that reconciliation with the Taliban is possible – or even desirable.” It could even be “the opening shot in the civil war that more and more Afghans believe could follow on the heels of the American and NATO withdrawal”, Filkins wrote.

But this storyline is based on the premise that Rabbani and the High Peace Council had been offering the Taliban a good faith effort to negotiate a peace settlement. In fact, what Rabbani was offering was the same thing Gen David Petraeus had offered to the bogus Quetta Shura official a year earlier: A discussion that could not possibly resolve the overriding issue for the Taliban, which is the indefinite presence of US and NATO troops in the country.

Rabbani vs the Taliban

Rabbani was one of the most outspoken enemies of the Taliban [EPA] As the president of the Northern Alliance during its civil war with the Taliban from 1996 to 2001, Rabbani was among the most vociferous foes of the Taliban. He viewed even Karzai’s rhetorical gestures toward “reconciliation” with the Taliban as a way of completing the process of Pashtun domination over Tajiks and other non-Pashtun minorities.

In February 2010, seven months before he was named to head the High Peace Council, Rabbani had declared to Canadian author and journalist Terry Glavin: “Bringing back the Taliban by some kind of reconciliation is not to bring about security. This is to play a card against others … It is to bring an ethnic card into play in Afghanistan.”

The only program for the Taliban Rabbani had embraced as Chairman of the HPC, in fact, was “offering amnesties and jobs to Taliban foot soldiers and asylum in third countries to leaders”, as Reuters reported September 20.

The Taliban leaders had never believed that the HPC was intended to negotiate a political settlement. On January 12, 2011, the Taliban declared on the website of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” that they regarded the High Peace Council as serving solely “cosmetic” purposes as “part and parcel of the American war strategy”.

The article cited, in particular, the fact the HPC “do not consider the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan … as an important item of the agenda”.

More concretely, the Taliban complained that the HPC did not “follow a roadmap that would lead to a decisive stage where peace and reconciliation will become … indispensable”.

That was an apparent reference to a proposal dubbed a “road map” to a settlement by four former Taliban officials, including Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, an early leader of the Taliban movement who spent two and a half years in the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.

The “road map” proposal assumed that the United States would have to play the key role in any negotiations. It called for the United States to end its night raids and for the Taliban to stop attacks on government personnel and infrastructure as “confidence-building measures”, after which the two sides would negotiate on the central issues of the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s renunciation of ties with al-Qaeda.

Only after they reached agreement on foreign troops and al-Qaeda would the negotiators tackle the question of an internal political settlement, which would revolve around changes to the Afghan constitution. The same Taliban commentary seemed to leave the door open to dealing with the HPC, but only if it dealt with the central problem of the foreign troop presence.

What pullout?

“[The HPC should confront the Americans on] whether they are ready to respect and accept a solution based on a pullout of their forces from Afghanistan.”  (Taliban statement on the HPC)

“If the peace council wants, in earnest, to usher in peace in Afghanistan,” it said, it should confront the Americans on “whether they are ready to respect and accept a solution based on a pullout of their forces from Afghanistan”.

That is not what happened, however, in the months that followed that Taliban statement on the HPC. The Council initiated contact with the Taliban in May, and over the next four months interacted frequently with, and developed trust in, its Taliban interlocutors. But the account provided of those contacts by Council Member Rahmatullah Wahidyar in his September 22 press conference is revealing – primarily for what it fails to mention. Rabbani and his advisors appear to have been unconcerned by the fact that the HPC could offer nothing to the Taliban on the central problem of US and NATO troops.

And when the Taliban contact informed the Council a week before the assassination that the Taliban leadership was now prepared to enter into talks with the Afghan government, the Council officials were not worried by the fact that such talks would have contradicted the consistent public and private Taliban position that that they could be no negotiations on an internal settlement until the issue of foreign troop presence was resolved.

These all-too-amiable contacts were taking place, moreover, against a backdrop of the Obama administration and Karzai manoeuvring to keep US troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. In mid-March, US Deputy Undersecretary of Defence Michele Flournoy revealed – in Congressional testimony – the US intention to continue to carry out “counter-terrorism operations” from “joint bases” in Afghanistan well beyond 2014.

That announcement came just as the Obama administration was beginning a series of secret meetings with a Taliban representative in Germany and Qatar. They were explicitly understood to be “preliminary” rather than substantive talks, but the Taliban certainly posed the question whether the United States was prepared to offer a timetable for withdrawal in substantive negotiations.

The Taliban broke off the talks in May, and US officials later claimed that it was because the existence of the talks had been leaked to the media. But if the United States had said anything to persuade the Taliban that it was prepared to offer such a withdrawal schedule, the talks would certainly not have been so abruptly terminated.

As I reported in July, former Afghan Prime Minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai told me that a group of Taliban officials he had met earlier that month had said, once the Americans tell them ‘we are ready to withdraw’, they would agree to have peace talks.

‘Strategic partnership’

By late August, however, the last ambiguity surrounding the US policy on troops in Afghanistan had been removed. The Telegraph’s Ben Farmer reported August 19 that the Obama administration and Karzai were close to an agreement that would keep up to 25,000 US troops, including Special Operations Forces as well as US fighter planes and helicopter gunships, until at least 2024.

At that point, the Taliban and Rabbani both knew that the HPC had no power to negotiate a real peace settlement with the Taliban. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the Taliban took advantage of the opportunity to kill the credulous Rabbani. The only surprise is that Rabbani and his advisors could have actually believed that the Taliban were giving up their primary war aim so easily.

After all, the Taliban were continuing to show, month after month, that they could strike at targets in most heavily protected zones in Kabul and elsewhere – and that their targets included prominent political, administrative and security officials such as Rabbani.

When Karzai’s national security advisor, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, revealed the outlines of the “strategic partnership” pact in early August, the Deputy Chairman of the HPC, Abdul Hakim Majid, made a highly revealing comment to The Telegraph’s Farmer. He said he suspected the Taliban had “intensified” their insurgency in response to the news that Karzai was about to agree to allow the United States a semi-permanent military presence in Afghanistan.

That observation puts in sharp relief the profound lack of realism of the popular assumption that a “peace process” could have been underway in the context of the US-Karzai manoeuvring to take US military presence off the negotiating table.

But we can now expect a cascade of stories for many months blaming the absence of Afghan peace negotiations on the Rabbani assassination – rather than on a fundamental policy decision by President Barack Obama to hold on to a semi-permanent military presence.

•  This article first appeared in AlJazeera

The study provides new evidence of the degree to which the criteria used for targeting of individuals in night raids and for seizing them during raids have been loosened to include people who have not been identified as insurgents.

Based on interviews with current and former U.S. military officials with knowledge of the strategic thinking behind the raids, as well as Afghans who have been caught up in the raids, the authors of the study write that large numbers of civilians are being detained for brief periods of time merely to find out what they know about local insurgents – a practice the authors suggest may violate the Geneva Conventions on warfare.

A military officer who had approved night raids told one of the authors that targeting individuals believed to know one of the insurgents is a key factor in planning the raids. “If you can’t get the guy you want,” said the officer, “you get the guy who knows him.”

Even when people who are known to be civilians have not been targeted in a given raid, they have been detained when found on the compound of the target, on the ground that a person’s involvement in the insurgency “is not always clear until questioned”, according to a military officer who has been involved in operational questions surrounding the raids interviewed for the report.

Raids prompted by the desire for intelligence can result in the deaths of civilians. The Afghan Analysts Network, a group of independent researchers based in Kabul, investigated a series of night raids in Nangarhar province in October-November 2010, and found that the raids were all targeting people who had met with a local religious cleric who was believed to be the Taliban shadow province governor.

Two civilians were killed in those raids when family members came to the defence of their relatives.

The report notes that many Afghans interviewed said night-time operations had targeted a number of compounds simultaneously, in some cases covering entire villages.

In a village in Qui Tapa district of Konduz province, SOF units, accompanied by Afghan army troops, conducted a raid that detained 80 to 100 people, according to the report. The interviewees said a masked informant pointed out those people to be taken a U.S. base to be interrogated.

The idea of using military operations to round up civilians to exploit their presumed knowledge of the insurgency has a long history in the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon official in charge of detainee affairs until the end of 2005 told IPS that concerns about “over-broad detention” in Afghanistan – meaning the practice of sweeping up large numbers of civilians – were countered by pressures for “more aggressive detention operations”.

As then head of NATO intelligence in Afghanistan, Canadian Brig. Gen. Jim Ferron, explained in a newspaper interview in May 2007, “The detainees are detained for a reason. They have information we need.”

It is not clear that civilians actually provide important intelligence on insurgents, however. The civilian victims of night raids are family and friends of Taliban fighters and commanders, who have no incentive to provide information that would make it easier for SOF units to track them down.

But another factor inclines the Special Operations Forces commanders in Afghanistan to focus more on people for whom the evidence of involvement in the insurgency is weak or nonexistent, according to the new report. After taking heavy losses, in 2010, Taliban commanders at district level and above are increasingly residing in Pakistan rather than in towns in Afghanistan where they can be more easily  targeted.

Without those targets on their lists, SOF units in Afghanistan may have had to choose between going after more civilians or reducing the number of operations. And the growth in the number of operations and the statistics on alleged insurgents killed or captured are a key measure of the relevance of SOF units.

An average of 19 raids per night were conducted during the period from December 2010 through February 2011, according to data published by
Reuters last February. But a senior U.S. military adviser interviewed for the report in April 2011 said that as many as 40 raids were taking place in a single night.

A military officer involved in the night raids told an author of the study that there were no longer enough mid- to high-level commanders still active in Pakistan to justify the present high rate of raids, and many raids were now likely to be targeting people who are known not to be insurgents but who  might  know something about specific insurgents.

Other officers interviewed for the report denied that contention, however, claiming there were still plenty of commanders left to target.

The report suggests that it is dangerous to detain family members in particular in order to exploit their knowledge of relatives in the insurgency, because it further inflames an already angry population across the country.

“If that is the criteria, they might as well arrest all southerners,” said one Afghan journalist living in Kandahar. “The person who is an active Taliban is either my uncle, cousin (or) nephew…”

Based on interviews with residents in villages where raids have taken place in the past several months, the report concludes that communities “see raids as deliberately targeting and harassing civilians, in order to discourage communities from providing food and shelter to insurgents, or to pressure them to supply intelligence on the insurgency.”

Most of those civilians targeted or swept up in night raids are released within a few days, according to the report. That assessment is consistent with the revelation, reported by IPS in September 2010, that roughly 90 percent of the individuals who were said by ISAF in August 2010 to have been “captured insurgents” were, in fact, released either within two weeks of initial detention or within a few months after being sent to Parwan detention facility.

The authors of the report conclude that deliberately targeting and rounding up civilians who are not suspected of being insurgents merely to exploit possible intelligence value “may constitute an arbitrary deprivation of liberty” and thus “inhumane treatment” in violation of Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

The report suggests there is “anecdotal” evidence that the targeting for the raids has become more accurate.

But that anecdotal evidence appears to be contradicted by other anecdotal evidence that the targeting has become more indiscriminate in deliberately targeting civilians.