Just over 20 years ago, a Jewish Community Center in Argentina suffered a devastating terror attack when a bombing resulted in the murder of 85 people, with more than 100 injured. After all these years, no one has paid a price except for possibly the prosecutor – Alberto Nisman – who was hours a way from presenting smoking gun evidence in front of Congress that implicated the Argentine government in a conspiracy with Iran and that country’s senior leaders to coverup the truth.
Nisman was found dead on Sunday, January 18, 2015 with a single bullet wound to the forehead; he had been shot at point blank range. His body was found inside his locked apartment with no gun powder residue on either one of his hands. The very next day, he was scheduled to present evidence that would do extremely significant damage to his country’s government, dating back to the administration in power at the time of the bombing, as well as the administration in power today.
After an investigation that has spanned over two decades, Argentine government officials – to include President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner – were quick to rule Nisman’s death a suicide within hours:
“Suicide provokes, in all cases, first: disbelief, and then: questions. What was it that led a person to make the terrible decision to take his own life?” Fernandez wrote in a lengthy letter she posted on her Facebook page.
Two days later, it was reported that Kirchner – perhaps in a politically calculated decision – reversed course in a letter on her website. About Nisman’s death, she wrote the following:
“They used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead,” Mrs. Kirchner wrote in the letter, which she subtitled, in part, “The suicide (that I am convinced) was not suicide.”
While Kirchner now claims Nisman was murdered, she is also insisting that his charges against her were unfounded… but that his murder had something to do with those charges:
The Fernandez administration hit back sharply after Nisman’s complaint was filed last week, denying that there was a cover-up about Iranian links to the bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association building.
We’re left to conclude Fernandez’s rationale is that someone shot Nisman in an effort to defend her honor against libel and slander. Governments are powerful entities. If Nisman’s charges were unfounded, why would anyone gain from murdering him?
Here is one report published shortly after Nisman’s murder:
Intercepted conversations between representatives of the Iranian and Argentine governments point to a long pattern of secret negotiations to reach a deal in which Argentina would receive oil in exchange for shielding Iranian officials from charges that they orchestrated the bombing of a Jewish community center in 1994.
The transcripts were made public by an Argentine judge on Tuesday night, as part of a 289-page criminal complaint written by Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor investigating the attack. Mr. Nisman was found dead in his luxury apartment on Sunday, the night before he was to present his findings to Congress.
But the intercepted telephone conversations he described before his death outline an elaborate effort to reward Argentina for shipping food to Iran — and for seeking to derail the investigation into a terrorist attack in the Argentine capital that killed 85 people.
The New York Times reported on the potential motive for Argentina to coverup for Iran:
The phone conversations are believed to have been intercepted by Argentine intelligence officials. If proved accurate, the transcripts would show a concerted effort by representatives of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government to shift suspicions away from Iran in order to gain access to Iranian markets and to ease Argentina’s energy troubles.
The suspicious circumstances surrounding Nisman’s death make an already compellingly damning case all the more credible.
Nisman’s death is certainly not the only red flag in the decades-long case. The judge assigned to the case shortly after the attack was later impeached. At the time of the impeachment, more than 10 years after the bombing, Argentina’s President Nestor Kirchner, whose widow Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is that country’s president today, could do little more than pass the buck to a previous administration. In Clinton-esque fashion, it smacked of stonewalling in an attempt to one day declare the event old news:
Justice (Jose) Galeano was impeached for allegedly paying a witness $400,000 to change his testimony and for burning incriminating evidence from the AMIA bombing case. Later, in July 2005, President Nestor Kirchner formally admitted past Argentine government culpability in the investigation of the 1994 AMIA bombing when he stated that the government withheld crucial information that could have solved the case. An Iranian terrorist organization was still suspected of actually carrying out the bombing, but Kirchner claimed that much of the responsibility should fall on the past Argentine government for its poor handling of the attack.
Perhaps the most explosive charges involved where the order to carry out the bombing came from:
In October 2006, Nisman and fellow prosecutor Marcelo Martínez Burgos formally accused top officials within the government of Iran with orchestrating the bombing and Hezbollah for carrying it out. Their indictment stated that the decision to approve the bombing was ultimately made by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but other senior government members were also part of the discussion, including then-President (at the time of the bombing) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahijan and National Security Council Secretary Hassan Rouhani.
In 2006, it was the suit and tie wearing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was president of Iran. It was also widely acknowledged that he was a front for the real power in Iran – the Supreme Leader and the mullahs. In fact, Ahmadinejad’s successor – Hassan Rouhani – became president seven years after being accused by Nisman of having approved the bombing. In 2007, Kirchner succeeded her husband Nestor as President of Argentina. Nestor was expected to run for the presidency again and replace his wife in 2011. In 2010, however, Cristina became a widow when Nestor died of heart failure; she is still president today.
In 2013, Argentina’s Congress voted to include Iran in the investigation process by setting up a “truth commission” and making Iran part of it.
Two years later, on the eve of his explosive revelations in the form of a nearly 300-page report being made public and part of Argentina’s Congressional record, Alberto Nisman, who had been investigating the case for years, was found dead.
It is worth noting that throughout the first decade of the 21st century, as courageous people in Argentina – to include Nisman – were building a case against Iran and the Argentine government, the Bush administration may have been doing the same thing relative to Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
Argentina NOT ALONE in Covering Up Iran’s Involvement in Terror Attacks
After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration quickly targeted Taliban training camps in Afghanistan. Americans were told the new war was on terror and that al-Qaeda was to blame for carrying out the attacks. Little attention was paid to the source of al-Qaeda’s funding or its big gun collaborators, which were found to include Iran.
The truth is that Saudi Arabia was behind al-Qaeda’s financing but paid no real price, in a way similar to how Iran has never paid a price for the largest terror attack in Argentina. As was the case with Argentina and Iran, the U.S. had business dealings with the Saudis that had to be protected. As Shoebat.com clearly demonstrated, when it came to holding Saudi Arabia accountable for 9/11, the deal amounted to trading 3000 Americans for Three Saudi Princes.
Less than two years after 9/11, the Bush administration went into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. This was not only wrong-headed but it aided another nation state that was found guilty of participating in the 9/11 attacks by a U.S. District judge by collaborating with al-Qaeda to carry them out. That nation state was Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraq.
As Shoebat.com has reported on at great length, a case known as Havlish vs. Iran, Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, et. al. was presented before U.S. District Court Judge Georg B. Daniels. In 2011, Daniels ruled in favor of the Plaintiffs, finding each defendant complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Several of those defendants were also identified by Nisman as co-conspirators with the Argentinian government to coverup Iran’s involvement in the deadliest terror attack on Argentinian soil. This would have meant that at a minimum, the George W. Bush administration either missed or ignored Iran’s role in 9/11. At a maximum, the U.S. Government did what Nisman charged his own government had done – conspired with Iran to coverup Iran’s role in the mass murder of nearly 3000 American citizens.
Likewise, 9/11 was the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil and the U.S. Government – like the Argentinian government – appears to have covered up Iran’s involvement while spilling blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq, which actually served to reward Iran for its involvement in 9/11.