Today Obama violated American and International law by assassinating militants in Pakistan with a drone missile strike.
US missile kills Haqqani 'coordinator' in Pakistan
Posted 10/13/2011 7:18 AM ET
By Rasool Dawar, Associated Press
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — An American missile strike killed a ranking member of the militant Haqqani network on Thursday in northwestern Pakistan, striking a group that Washington claims is the No. 1 threat in Afghanistan and is supported by Pakistani security forces, local intelligence officials said.
The strike came as U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Marc Grossman arrived in Pakistan to improve ties between Washington and Islamabad that have been severely strained by stepped-up American claims of Pakistan assistance to the Haqqanis.
Two other militants were killed in the attack close in the Haqqani stronghold of North Waziristan, the group's main sanctuary along the Afghan border, said the Pakistani officials in the region. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
They identified the Haqqani member as Jalil and said he was a "coordinator" for the group. The men were walking down a street when the drone-fired missile hit, the officials said. One said Jalil was related to Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the network.
The missiles hit close to Dande Darpa Khel village, which is home to a large seminary with links to the Haqqanis.
Later Thursday, a second volley of drone-fired missiles hit a militant position on the hills close to the frontier in South Waziristan, killing three people, intelligence officials said.
The officials said the militants were firing rockets and mortars across the border at an American base in Machadad Kot in Afghanistan.
U.S. officials do not talk about the CIA-led drone program. NATO and U.S. officers in Afghanistan were not immediately available for comment.
The al-Qaida-allied Haqqani network is one of most organized insurgent factions fighting the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and it has been blamed for high-profile assaults against Western and Afghan targets in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Washington has long urged Islamabad to attack the fighters, who live undisturbed in North Waziristan despite the region being home to several thousand Pakistani troops. At the same time, the U.S. is pursuing the possibility of peace talks with the Haqqanis and other Taliban factions, reflecting the fact that the insurgency can't be defeated militarily.
In brief remarks to reporters, Grossman, whose mission is to promote the peace process, talked about his confidence that the U.S. and Pakistan can "can make a commitment to future work" together, suggesting work still needs to be done to restore the relationship.
Last month, senior American officials accused Pakistan's spy agency of assisting the Haqqani network in attacks on Western targets in Afghanistan, including a strike last month on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Pakistani officials have denied the charges.
They were the most serious allegations yet of Pakistani duplicity in the 10-year war in Afghanistan and sent already strained ties between Islamabad and Washington plunging further. Obama administration officials have since backtracked somewhat on the claims.
Most independent analysts say Pakistan is either tolerating or supporting the Haqqani network to some degree because it foresees chaos in Afghanistan once America withdraws, and wants to cultivate the group as an ally there against the influence of India, its regional enemy.
Since 2008, the United States has regularly unleashed unmanned drone-fired missiles against militants in the border region, which is home to Pakistani militants, Afghan factions like the Haqqanis and al-Qaida operatives from around the world, especially the Middle East.
This year, there have been around 50 drone strikes, most of them in North Waziristan. Pakistani officials protest the strikes, which are unpopular among many Pakistanis, but the country is believed to support them privately and makes no diplomatic or military efforts to stop them.
U.S. leverage against Pakistan to get it to fight the Haqqani group is limited because it relies on the country to truck much of its war supplies into Afghanistan. The supplies of non-lethal material arrive in Pakistan's port of Karachi by sea before traveling into Afghanistan by land.
The convoys are occasionally attacked by insurgents, especiallty close to the border, where the militants are strongest.
On Thursday, gunmen opened fire and set ablaze five tankers carrying oil for NATO and U.S. troops in Sindh province, some 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) from the border, said police officer Khair Mohammad Samejho. The tankers were parked outside a restaurant in Shikarpur district when they were attacked, he said.
U.S. ties Iran to plot to assassinate Saudi diplomat
by Jerry Markon and Karen DeYoung -
Oct. 12, 2011 12:00 AM
Washington Post
WASHINGTON - U.S. officials on Tuesday accused elements of the Iranian government of plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, allegations that threatened to aggravate the already tense relationship between the United States and Iran's leaders.
The Justice Department unsealed charges against two Iranians, one of them a U.S. citizen, accusing them of orchestrating an elaborate murder-for-hire plot that targeted Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi envoy to Washington and a key adviser to King Abdullah. The Iranians planned to employ Mexican drug traffickers to kill Jubeir with a bomb as he ate at a Washington restaurant, U.S. officials said.
Attorney General Eric Holder said that "the United States is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions," but other officials indicated that it was not yet clear who in the Iranian government was behind the alleged plot.
"There's a question of how high up did it go," said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House thinking. "The Iranian government has a responsibility to explain that."
Federal authorities said they foiled the plan because the Iranian American, Manssor Arbabsiar, happened to hire a paid informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration to carry it out. Arbabsiar, 56, was arrested Sept. 29 in New York and later implicated officials of Iran's paramilitary Quds Force in directing the plot, U.S. officials said.
In addition to Jubeir, officials said, the plot envisioned later striking other targets in the United States and abroad, though those plans appeared preliminary at best. Arbabsiar has acknowledged that he was recruited and funded by men he understood to be senior officers in the Quds Force, an elite division of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for foreign operations, court documents say.
An Iran-based member of that force, Gholam Shakuri, is also charged in federal court in New York with conspiracy to murder a foreign official and to commit an act of international terrorism.
The Iranian government denied the accusations, calling them a new round of "American propaganda" and saying they were fabricated to divert attention from U.S. economic troubles and the Occupy Wall Street protests.
"The U.S. government and the CIA have very good experience in making up film scripts," Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a spokesman for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said in Tehran. "It appears that this new scenario is for diverting the U.S. public opinion from internal crises."
The Obama administration also announced financial sanctions on five Iranians, including the two suspects, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the government would work with allies to devise more actions to isolate the Islamic Republic.
Arbabsiar appeared Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and was ordered held without bail. His court-appointed attorney, Sabrina Shroff, said he will plead not guilty. Shakuri remains at large in Iran.
Shiite-dominated Iran and Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia are longtime rivals for regional dominance, a contest that moved into high gear with the U.S. elimination of Iraq's Saddam Hussein as a powerful buffer between them. The competition between the two nations began to play out in proxy battles in Lebanon, Bahrain and elsewhere.
But some specialists on Iran expressed skepticism about why the Islamic Republic would resort to the murder of a prominent Saudi official, a virtual act of war against that country, in the U.S. capital.
"Why would Iran want to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington?" said Alireza Nader, an Iran expert at the Rand Corp. "I'm not discounting the evidence necessarily, and Iran has a long history of supporting terrorism. But plots against the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., would be outside that norm."
Other experts said the seemingly unusual method of carrying out the assassination, recruiting what the plotters thought was a Mexican drug trafficker, made sense. "Let's face it: The level of scrutiny in Mexico is less," said Fred Burton, a former State Department security specialist who monitors threats in Mexico for the Stratfor group.
Mexican drug cartels are now multifaceted, transnational criminal organizations that have detonated increasingly sophisticated car bombs. U.S. federal agents have said the Mexican mafia's learning curve, from crude pipe bombs to radio-triggered plastic explosives, has been rapid.
U.S. officials declined to comment on Iran's motive for the alleged plot, saying that the information is classified and that they are continuing to investigate. They also would not specify the other possible targets, declining to confirm other media reports that the targets included the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington.
Officials described the details of the plan as chilling, with Holder calling it "a deadly plot" and FBI Director Robert Mueller saying that "though it reads like the pages of a Hollywood script, the impact would have been very real, and many lives would have been lost."
The plot dates to early spring, when a cousin of Arbabsiar's, who he thought was a senior member of the Quds Force, approached him while he was in Iran about a plan to kidnap Jubeir, according to court documents.
Arbabsiar allegedly told the cousin, identified only as Iranian Official No. 1, that he did business on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border and knew a number of drug traffickers. The Iranian official told Arbabsiar that he should hire a trafficker to carry out the plot "because people in that business are willing to undertake criminal activity in exchange for money," according to the criminal complaint.
It remains unclear what led Arbabsiar to the person identified only as CS-1. The confidential DEA source, referred to by Arbabsiar as "the Mexican" in meetings tape-recorded by federal agents, was described only as a paid informant who was once charged in the United States with a drug offense.
The charges were dropped because the informant has provided valuable information in a number of cases, and in this instance, he quickly notified federal agents that Arbabsiar had contacted him, according to court documents and federal officials.
The two began a series of meetings in Mexico in May that quickly turned to discussing the killing of Jubeir, the documents say. Jubeir, the son of a Saudi diplomat, is one of the most powerful foreign policymakers outside the royal family.
The informant told Arbabsiar that he would need four men to carry out the assassination. His alleged price: $1.5 million.
Shakuri gave Arbabsiar thousands of dollars to fund the plot, which was approved by other Iranian officials, court documents say. As a down payment, Arbabsiar allegedly arranged for $100,000 to be wired to an account that was secretly overseen by the FBI.
For the site of the bombing, the informant suggested a Washington restaurant where Jubeir "goes out and eat(s) like two times a week," according to the secret recordings. When the informant noted that others could be killed in the attack, including U.S. senators, Arbabsiar dismissed these concerns as "no big deal," court documents say.
"They want that guy (the ambassador) done (killed)," Arbabsiar reportedly said. Federal authorities said the informant was never referring to an actual restaurant.
According to the Justice Department, Arbabsiar was arrested by federal agents while on a layover at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport after being denied entry in Mexico. He had been under surveillance by agents on the plane.
Arbabsiar waived his Miranda rights against self-incrimination and has provided "extremely valuable intelligence," according to a letter prosecutors sent last week to a federal judge in New York updating her on the status of his detention.
Those Keystone Iranians
By David Ignatius, Published: October 12
When White House officials first heard an informant’s report last spring of an Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington, they found it implausible. They asked the same question we all have been puzzling over since the indictment Tuesday of the alleged plotters:
If the Iranians planned such a sensitive operation, why would they delegate the job to Mansour Arbabsiar, an Iranian American former used-car dealer, and a hit team drawn from a Mexican drug cartel? To say it sounded like a spy novel is unfair to the genre. The wacky plot was closer to that of an Elmore Leonard “caper” novel, along the lines of “Get Shorty.”
But over months, officials at the White House and the Justice Department became convinced the plan was real. One big reason is that the CIA and other intelligence agencies gathered information corraborating the informant’s juicy allegations — and showing that the plot had support from the top leadership of the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the covert-action arm of the Iranian government.
It was this intelligence collected in Iran — not tips from someone inside the Mexican drug mafia — that led the Treasury Department to impose sanctions Tuesday on four senior members of the Quds Force who allegedly were “connected” to a plot to murder the Saudi ambassador. The alleged conspirators included Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, and three deputies who allegedly “coordinated” the scheme.
Let’s make two assumptions: The first is that the allegations made by the prosecutors about Arbabsiar are true. This seems likely, given that he’s a cooperating witness. The second is that Quds Force operatives were willing to talk with Arbabsiar about a covert operation in the United States. That, again, seems pretty clear from the transcript of the Oct. 4 telephone call Arbabsiar made to his main Quds Force contact, Gholam Shakuri, under prosecutors’ direction.
The puzzle is why the Iranians would undertake such a risky operation, and with such embarrassingly poor tradecraft. Soleimani and his group are some of the savviest clandestine operators in the world. In past columns, I’ve likened him to “Karla,” the diabolically clever Russian spymaster in John le Carre’s novels. Why would the Iranian Karla turn to such a bunch of screwballs?
Here’s the answer offered by senior U.S. officials: The Iranians are stressed, at home and abroad, in ways that are leading them to engage in riskier behavior.
Officials say Quds Force operations have been more aggressive in several theaters: in Syria, where the Iranian operatives are working covertly to help protect the embattled regime of President Bashar al-Assad; in Iraq, where the Quds Force this year stepped up attacks against departing U.S. forces; in Afghanistan, where they have been arming the Taliban; in Azerbaijan, where they have been more aggressive in projecting Iranian influence; and in Bahrain, where their operatives worked to support and manipulate last spring’s uprising against the Khalifa government. (Shakuri, who was indicted Tuesday, is said to have helped plan Quds Force operations in Bahrain.)
But why the use of Mexican drug cartels? U.S. officials say that isn’t as implausible as it sounds. The Iranians don’t have the infrastructure to operate smoothly in the United States. They would want to use proxies, and ones that would give them “deniability.”
“They’re very willing to use all kinds of proxies to achieve specific clandestine foreign-policy goals,” says a senior U.S. official who has been briefed on intelligence reports.
It would mark a significant escalation for Iran to conduct terror operations inside the United States. But such attacks would come against the background of a secret war in the shadows that began in 1983, when the predecessor to the Quds Force recruited Lebanese Shiite bombers to destroy the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, killing more than 300. The organization was then known internally (by the few who knew of it) simply as “Birun Marzi,” or “outside borders.” Then it took the cover name “Department 9000,” and later, in deference to the Arabic name for Jerusalem, Quds Force.
A final factor in this unlikely plot is the political turmoil in Tehran. The Quds Force is seen by analysts as the executive-action arm of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who is in a bitter battle with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. During this feud, the Iranian ministries of foreign affairs and intelligence have increasingly been hobbled, leaving the field to the Quds Force. It’s a chaotic situation tailor-made for risk-takers, score-settlers and freelancers.
davidignatius@washpost.com
US assassination squad - Iran assassination squad
While the American Empire is mad and angry about this attempt by the Iranian government to assassinate a Saudi diplmot that certainly isn't going to stop American Emperor Obama from murdering anybody he damn well feels like murdering.
In these articles Emperor Obama orders a drone missle strike which killed an American cleric in Yemen.