Keystone Cops in FBI endanger the world

Iran Assassination Plot Has Earmarks of FBI Care and Feeding

By Ian Williams, October 19, 2011

Last weekend the Martin Luther King memorial was unveiled in Washington, evoking  his speech “I have a dream.” I was having a dream too, but mine wandered between nightmare and “déjà vu all over again.” Unlike many on the left in the USA, when I see President Obama I see a fundamentally decent person reading a script written by others -- which in this dream is like Colin Powell reciting his fundamentally flawed brief at the UN about Iraqi weapons.
The taurine faecal evidence of an Iranian plot to kill a Saudi envoy in the US has all the conviction of Hitler describing Polish infiltration into German territory in 1939 -- and all the humiliation of seeing a decent person’s integrity being abused.
The “plot” recalls how much of American governmental behavior evokes the unreformed eighteenth century British polity on which it is based. Apart from the overtly corrupt electoral system gerrymandered into an American version of rotten boroughs and the Gradgrindish attitudes to public welfare, that is no more apparent than in the legal system.
Maybe they no longer hang people for pickpocketing any item worth more than a shilling, but they do execute quite a few on dubiously assembled evidence that relies on paid informants and, especially in the case of the FBI, on paid instigators.
So one does not have to join the  Iranian Ayatollah Fan Club to be skeptical of the latest allegations. It is a sad fact that almost every terrorist plot the FBI has unearthed for many years -- even before 9-11 -- has also been planted and nurtured by the FBI. Even in the long-forgotten first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 it was an Egyptian officer who was also a paid FBI informant who seems to have instigated the completely inept plot, for which arch-enemy of the Mubarak regime Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman is still serving a life sentence -- or not, since the actual charges of conspiracy and sedition are reminiscent of days of repression in Britain around the time of the Peterloo massacre that moved Shelley to stirring verses, rarely taught in English Lit classes.
It does not take a close shave with Occam’s razor to question whether Teheran really sent a wire transfer of a $100,000 to the USA to secure the assassination of the Saudi Ambassador. Firstly, every transfer of more than $10,000 has to be registered, and rings alarms bells for money laundering, and secondly, sadly, among Mexican cartels, that sum buys a wholesale massacre, not a retail murder.
Then there is the old question, Cui Bono? Who would benefit? One can never totally discount the stupidity of the Iranian regime, but this goes beyond expectations. Iran would gain little from offing a Saudi diplomat -- but lose lots. The FBI gets itself yet another (contrived) terrorist plot to justify its huge spending and the intrusions into civil liberties it has been allowed under the so-called “war on terror.” Its previous record of getting informants and instigators who are paid and pardoned of other crimes to set up the weak and gullible to be arrested with a fanfare certainly fits the script here: an arrested drug smuggler paid to suborn an Iranian immigrant second hand car salesman struggling under a huge debt load.
But Israel wants an excuse to attack Iran -- and hitherto even a complaisant Washington has warned against that. Obama might not support, but if persuaded by these amateur theatricals, like Colin Powell, he might not oppose an assault very vigorously. And there are many in his administration for whom the question “Is it good for Israel?” outweighs whether it is good for Obama, let alone America.
Even if this were just Keystone Cops stuff from a xenophobically insular FBI, without thought for the international consequences, it could have profound international consequences. Quite apart from the  sanguinary consequences to Israel itself, not to mention to Iran and the region, of any solid manifestation of Netanyahu’s bellicosity, a closure of the Gulf and removal of a huge portion of the world’s oil supplies would be all that is needed to bring the whole house of cards, dollar and Euros, tumbling down.
And to return to Martin Luther King, let us remember, despite official American media amnesia. King was a democratic socialist, who was assassinated while being tailed by the FBI, as he supported a strike by a municipal workers’ union. He knew the FBI well -- he would be properly skeptical of any claim they made. And he would be occupying Wall St, not calling for war on Iran.

Cheney/CIA: Blame to Spare and Blame to Share

It is a yardstick of the degree of paranoia in former Vice President Dick Cheney’s messiah complex that he ordered the CIA counter terrorism programme to be kept secret from Congress, let alone that he also authorised secret wire tapping in defiance of the law.

All the evidence suggests that if he had had the good sense to put them both in the USA PATRIOT Act, and who knows, the outing of Valerie Plame as well, they would have been passed into law on the nod from both sides of Congress whipped into authoritarian frenzy by the title Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.

After all, few if any of the legislators who voted for this massive erosion of civil liberties, Democrats included, read any longer than the lengthy title. Russ Feingold was the sole Solon to vote against. While Democratic leaders are shouting loudly now, they were hoodwinked and stampeded like lemmings into the Aye lobby, goaded along by patriotism. Cheney of course was one of the herdsman for the lemmings, culpable on every level. Certainly the Congressional Intelligence committees would have been unlikely to blench at the idea of a program to assassinate Al-Qaeda leaders in a personal sort of way, when neither they nor their colleagues have shouted over-much about the use of drones and missiles with a proven record of “collateral” damage.

Quite apart from the moral aspects, the political fallout from the drone attacks suggests, as the French statesman said about one of Napoleon’s over-enthusiastic executions, they are worse than a crime, they are blunders.



John Nance Gardner, who served two terms as Vice President to FDR said the office was "not worth a bucket of warm piss." (The same spirit of non-boat rockery that led the lemmings to vote for the PATRIOT Act, transformed the “piss” to “spit”). But he was VP to Franklyn Delano Roosevelt. Cheney was VP to George W. Bush who proudly did not do “nuance” and who let him have a free rein, indeed a free reign, far beyond the very limited powers and prerogatives of the Vice Presidential Office. In retrospect, one can only be very relieved that nothing happened to Air Force One on 9-11.

Cheney’s behavior should certainly be the subject of a public investigation, and on the evidence available, there are prima facie arguments for prosecution. But the complicity of the Democratic leaders in this pattern of repressive actions probably inhibits them from following through. They certainly were prepared to blink, if not wink, when faced with evidence of water-boarding and other forms of torture.

They should follow the example of Senator Robert Byrd who lamented his vote for the PATRIOT act, which he described as “a case study in the perils of speed, herd instinct and lack of vigilance when it comes to legislating in times of crisis. The Congress was stampeded, and the values of freedom, justice and equality received a trampling in the headlong rush." Democratic leaders should ’fess up to their complicity: and go after Cheney with vigor.

And promise never again to let themselves be railroaded by spurious patriots, presidents, or vice presidents into surrendering their prerogatives as legislators and their ethics as politicians.