Argentina judge orders arrest of ex-President Kirchner over Iran terror cover-up

[ill]

Argentina judge orders arrest of ex-president Kirchner over Iran terror cover-up

An Argentine judge on Thursday ordered the arrest of the country’s former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner for allegedly covering up Iranian involvement in a 1994 bombing at a Buenos Aires Jewish center that left 85 people dead.

Judge Claudio Bonadio accused Kirchner of the crime of treason as he asked lawmakers to remove the immunity from prosecution she has as a senator.

Prosecutor Eduardo Taiano said the judge also ordered the arrest of former Kirchner aide Carlos Zanni and activist Luis D’Elia on the same charges. Former foreign minister Hector Timerman was ordered held under house arrest due to health issues.

The former president is accused of signing a deal with Tehran to allow Iranian officials suspected of ordering the attack on the Jewish center to be interviewed by Argentine magistrates in Tehran rather than in Buenos Aires.

She has previously called the case an “absurdity.”

“As happens regularly in Argentina, the news was first leaked to the press and Cristina has not yet been notified,” an aide to the former president told AFP.

In November an investigation by the country’s border police agency concluded that Alberto Nisman, who led the probe into the Buenos Aires terror attack, was murdered just four days after he formally accused then-president Kirchner of covering up the role of former Iranian officials in the attack.

Prosecutors subsequently ordered a murder investigation into Nisman’s death that previously been ruled a likely suicide. Nisman, 51, was found dead on January 18, 2015, with a bullet in his right temple. A .22 caliber pistol was found next to him.

Alberto Nisman, the late prosecutor who investigated the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center, talks to journalists in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Wednesday, May 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
The Jewish center bombing case is the most serious before Kirchner, who is facing trial in several other cases involving corruption and money laundering stemming from her years as president.

Last week, the court rejected an appeal by Kirchner to dismiss the laundering charges. The 64-year-old faces charges including money laundering, bribery and criminal conspiracy in the so-called Hotesur case, named after a Kirchner family hotel business in Patagonia, the suspected source of the allegedly laundered funds.

The rejected appeal also applies to her children Maximo, 40, and Florencia, 27, according to the Center for Judicial Information.

Kirchner, 64, who had two four-year terms in office, is due to take her seat in the Senate next week after her election victory in October crowned a political comeback and granted her immunity from imprisonment in several corruption cases.

The Senate will now have to vote on lifting her immunity at the judge’s request, for which a two-thirds majority is needed.

Kirchner’s leftist alliance in the Senate has a total of 32 seats, but only around a dozen senators are in the Kirchner camp. The center-right Cambiemos alliance of President Mauricio Macri has 25 seats in the upper house.

Several prominent members of her former government have been detained on corruption charges in recent weeks, including ex-public works minister Julio De Vido and Amado Boudou, Kirchner’s vice president from 2011 to 2015.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Dudes laughed at me when I said Hezbollah had a South American presence

 

[88m3]

About time

 

[ill]

Dudes laughed at me when I said Hezbollah had a South American presence

I've been on board with that one from the start. It will be crazy if they expose how she had the prosecutor killed in open court.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

I've been on board with that one from the start. It will be crazy if they expose how she had the prosecutor killed in open court.

see I'm confused as to who killed him...the Iranians or her, and why they even made the deal.

I don't understand it cause theres such a big jewish population in Argentina and there had to be some sweetheart deal for her to do what she did

 

[ill]

see I'm confused as to who killed him...the Iranians or her, and why they even made the deal.

I don't understand it cause theres such a big jewish population in Argentina and there had to be some sweetheart deal for her to do what she did

Theres also a lot of Nazi's and Nazi-sympathizers in Argentina. Don't forget that was one of the main places Nazi's ran away to.

My best guess is the prosecutor was a domestic job to clean up her side of things. She's dirty af and I wouldn't put it past her to silence the opposition.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Theres also a lot of Nazi's and Nazi-sympathizers in Argentina. Don't forget that was one of the main places Nazi's ran away to.

My best guess is the prosecutor was a domestic job to clean up her side of things. She's dirty af and I wouldn't put it past her to silence the opposition.

 

[ORDER_66]

I've been on board with that one from the start. It will be crazy if they expose how she had the prosecutor killed in open court.

Holy shyt!!!!

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Holy shyt!!!!

story is crazier than you can imagine.

Argentinian lawyer Alberto Nisman was murdered, police report finds

Police: Argentina’s Alberto Nisman’s Murder Was Made to Look Like a Suicide

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Holy shyt!!!!

Spoiler: article

Iranian Terror. Argentinian Cover Up. Justice at Last?
By MARK DUBOWITZ and TOBY DERSHOWITZDEC. 11, 2017

Argentines marking the one-year anniversary of the death of Alberto Nisman. Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press
One morning last week, Argentines woke up to a political earthquake: A judge had charged a former president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, with “treason against the homeland,” punishable by up to 25 years in prison. Her crime? Nothing less than covering up Iran’s role in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in the Americas before Sept. 11.

On July 18, 1994, Ibrahim Hussein Berro, an operative of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, drove a van filled with 606 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil into the Buenos Aires Jewish community center, known as AMIA. More than 300 Argentines were wounded; 85 were murdered. It remains the bloodiest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history.

From 2004 until 2015, our friend, the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, tirelessly pursued the truth behind this crime. He knew from his investigation that the attack was an Iranian-planned operation. And he determined that Ms. Kirchner was behind a cover-up designed to whitewash Iran’s role.

What drove Ms. Kirchner? Argentina faced deep economic problems at the time, and the financial benefits of closer relations with Iran might have tempted her. Her government also had populist ties to Iran and the Bolivarian bloc of nations led by Venezuela. Whatever the reason, never has Ms. Kirchner been formally charged in the crime. Until now.

When the federal judge Claudio Bonadio handed down the 491-page indictment against Ms. Kirchner; her foreign minister, Hector Timerman; her handpicked intelligence chief; her top legal adviser; two pro-Iran activists; and 10 others, he didn’t mince words. He called the attack on the Jewish community center an “act of war” by Iran and accused Ms. Kirchner of covering up the role of senior Iranian leaders and their Hezbollah proxies in exchange for a trade deal.

If only Alberto Nisman were alive to see justice finally being pursued.

Three years ago, Mr. Nisman was set to testify to the country’s Congress on Ms. Kirchner’s role in the cover up. The day before his testimony, on Jan. 18, 2015, he was found dead in his apartment in Buenos Aires, with a bullet in his head. This, despite the fact that he had a 10-man security detail paid to protect him.

Within hours, Ms. Kirchner announced that Mr. Nisman had committed suicide. In the days that followed, she strangely claimed his death was part of a lovers’ spat. Finally, she changed her story once more: His death may have been the result of rogue intelligence operatives.

When we heard the news of Mr. Nisman’s death and of Ms. Kirchner’s suspected cover-up, we were horrified, but not entirely shocked. Anyone who had followed Mr. Nisman’s pursuit of this case knew that he was assuming grave risks by taking on both a terrorist state and his own government. Through a decade of investigation, Mr. Nisman received death threats against not only him but his children as well. One email he told us about had a picture of bloodied and brutalized bodies lying on the ground, with a note saying this would be the fate of his young daughters if he did not cease his investigation.

None of it stopped him. Fearless and resolute, Mr. Nisman and his team had determined that former Iranian and Hezbollah officials planned the AMIA attack. He was able to show definitively that the plan included no less than Iran’s former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani; its minister of intelligence; its foreign minister; the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; the head of the corps’ elite Quds force; the Iranian cultural attaché in Argentina; and the third secretary at Iran’s Embassy in Buenos Aires, as well as the former head of Hezbollah’s external security. His investigation led Interpol to issue red notices — akin to international arrest warrants — against six of the perpetrators. Argentina itself issued arrest warrants for Mr. Rafsanjani and Ali Akbar Velayati, then foreign minister, which Iran predictably disregarded.

But Mr. Nisman did not stop there.

In May 2013, he released a 500-page indictment outlining how Iran had penetrated not just Argentina, but also Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Guyana, Paraguay, Trinidad, Tobago and Suriname, and how it used mosques, social service organizations and its own embassies to radicalize and recruit terrorists. Mr. Nisman also shared information that helped American authorities determine that Mohsen Rabbani, the Iranian embassy cultural attaché and one of the AMIA bombing masterminds, helped four men, including his disciple, a Guyanese official named Abdul Kadir, plot to blow up the fuel lines at Kennedy International Airport in New York. Mr. Kadir is serving a life sentence in the United States for the foiled plot, which could have led to the loss of countless lives.

In a normal democracy, investigating the murder of a man like Alberto Nisman would be a top priority. But Ms. Kirchner and her allies assured that justice for Mr. Nisman’s murder was stymied for years.

That changed three months ago, when, under Argentina’s new president, Mauricio Macri, a fresh investigation by the Argentine national police found that Mr. Nisman had been drugged with Ketamine, a drug used to sedate animals, then brutally beaten before he was shot in the head.

The case against Ms. Kirchner is based on more than 40,000 legal wiretaps and other evidence, much of it collected by Mr. Nisman, which reveals a secret backchannel between her government and Iran. On Ms. Kirchner’s personal orders, she and her associates used the backchannel to negotiate a public memorandum of understanding that would purportedly have the two countries establish a “truth commission” to jointly identify the culprits of the bombing. Mr. Nisman believed it was designed to expunge the Interpol red notices against the plot’s perpetrators.

One thing is entirely clear: Ms. Kirchner and her allies went to great lengths to establish this backchannel. For example, in 2011, Mr. Timerman, Ms. Kirchner’s foreign minister, made a secret trip to Syria to iron out the plan with Ali Akbar Salehi, then Iran’s foreign minister. This trip was revealed earlier this year by a former Argentine ambassador to Syria in court testimony. Further implicating Ms. Kirchner and Mr. Timerman is a voice recording of him acknowledging Iran’s responsibility in the bombing.

Ramón Allan Bogado, who claims to be a one-time Argentine intelligence agent and is one of those recently indicted, testified last month that the backchannel included an arrangement for Argentina to provide Iran with nuclear technology, with front companies in Argentina and Uruguay to conduct the transactions. He alleged that officials at the highest levels of Argentina’s government were aware of the scheme. If true, this would be even worse than Mr. Nisman had uncovered and may provide a further explanation about why someone wanted him dead.

The judge in the case has asked the Argentine Congress, where Ms. Kirchner serves as a recently elected senator, to strip her of immunity so that she can be arrested and tried. But regardless of what happens to her, Argentina is on track to make amends for more than two decades of gross injustice. President Macri has abandoned Ms. Kirchner’s revisionist history of the 1994 bombing, and he supports an independent investigation that would finally identify who ordered Alberto Nisman’s death.

But President Macri has more challenges ahead. As Mr. Nisman documented, Iran and Hezbollah have penetrated Latin America, and still pose a grave threat to the security of Argentina, the region and the United States.






@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @wire28 @smitty22 @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @.r. @GinaThatAintNoDamnPuppy! @GnauzBookOfRhymes @Dracudiddy @Dameon Farrow @TheNig

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

This is insane...this is over nuclear tech????





Argentina's ex-president is going down for treason for covering up a threat to the entire western hemisphere
Linette Lopez

Former Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner attends a swearing-in ceremony for senators at the Argentine Senate in Buenos Aires, November 29, 2017. Picture taken November 29, 2017. Reuters

• A judge has ordered former Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Krichner be arrested on charges of treason.
• Those charges relate to a 1994 bombing in Buenos Aires that killed 84 people, and her attempt to cover up Iran's involvement it.
• It is a case that not only illustrates Iran's threat to the western hemisphere, but also what can happen when weak leaders are approached by bad actors bearing promises.

An Argentine judge has ordered the arrest of the country's former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner on charges of treason. When she is finally in custody it will not only be a victory for Argentina, but a victory for the security of the entire western hemisphere.

To understand why you have to understand what she's going down for.

Fernandez — one half of the most romantic and powerful political couple in Argentine politics since the Juan and Evita Peron — is being accused of covering up the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires. That bombing has wide ranging implications beyond the tragic deaths of 84 Argentines.

Alberto Nisman. REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci

That is because the bomb was set off by Iran-backed terrorists, who for decades have been building a presence in South America.

Alberto Nisman, an Argentine prosecutor, had been tracking their whereabouts for years — and was even ordered to investigate the AMIA bombing by Fernandez's late husband, former president Nestor Kirchner.

When he took power in 2003 Kirchner, like the rest of the country, wanted the perpetrators of the AMIA bombing brought to justice.

But later in his regime things changed. After a collapse in 2001, Argentina's economy would not get out of in crisis mode. It was locked out of international markets and the situation looked increasingly desperate. The accusation of treason against Christina Fernandez de Kirchner is that when money got tighter, she got more desperate too.

She needed friends with cash. And there was Iran, waiting with a bag — strings attached of course.

It was under her tenure as President that Nisman was murdered in early 2015, the very day he was going to testify that she was covering up Iran's involvement in the AMIA bombing.

This is not about Argentina, it's about Iran
Iran decided to murder Argentine citizens because the country had stopped sharing nuclear knowledge with Iran. People often forget that Argentina developed one of the most advanced nuclear programs in the world after WWII. There's your motive.

But of course, the more important question for this story is: Why would the president of Argentina cover for the people who murdered 84 of her own citizens? Mostly it was money.

When Argentina's economy collapsed in 2000-2001, it began a slow, painful recovery — recovery made more arduous by the fact that Argentina flat-out refused to pay some of its creditors. This ostracized Argentina from international markets, made it a cash-strapped nation, and ultimately hurt the Kirchners politically.

Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner (R) and his wife, president-elect Cristina Fernandez (L) greet Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez before the farewell dinner for Kirchner on the eve of Fernandez's inauguration as president, at the San Martin Palace in Buenos Aires December 9, 2007. Reuters

That meant the couple would have to fight to hold on to power, and that fight would take money. According to Brazilian journalist Leonardo Coutinho, who testified on this matter before members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2015, that's when late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stepped in.

Coutinho told Congress that he interviewed three defected officials of Chavez's regime who said they witnessed a conversation between the Venezuelan president and his then-Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in January 2007.

Ahmadinejad and Chavez reportedly planned to coerce Argentina into sharing nuclear technology with Iran and stopping the hunt for the perpetrators of the AMIA bombing in exchange for cash, some of it to finance Fernandez's political aims. It's unclear whether Fernandez knew exactly where this money was coming from. Either way, she took it and the deal was done.

Alberto Nisman knew all of this, and Iran knew he knew it. According to diplomatic cables published in the 2010 Wikileaks dump, he even confronted Iranian officials about it in 2007 and they went ballistic calling for his arrest.

He was about to tell Argentina's legislature about Fernandez's attempt to hide this arrangement when he was found dead in his apartment. That death, and the government's attempt to have it labeled a suicide, has rocked Argentina to this day.

A woman poses for a photo during a peaceful demonstration, honoring late Argentine state prosecutor Alberto Nisman, outside the Argentina Embassy in Mexico City, February 18, 2015. Reuters

Fernandez is gone, Iran is not
Fernandez is currently a senator, and therefore enjoys immunity. But the Argentine legislature recently stripped a former member of her administration of their immunity, so her arrest seems like foregone conclusion at this point.

Of course, that doesn't mean this saga is over. The US, Argentina and other nations in the western hemisphere must still contend with the threat of Iran in the region.

According to Politico, the Trump administration has ramped up efforts:

The administration’s counter-Hezbollah campaign is an interagency effort that includes leveraging diplomatic, intelligence, financial and law enforcement tools to expose and disrupt the logistics, fundraising and operational activities of Iran, the Qods Force and the long list of Iranian proxies from Lebanese Hezbollah to other Shia militias in Iraq and elsewhere. But in the words of Ambassador Nathan Sale, the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, “Countering Hezbollah is a top priority for the Trump administration.”

Since it took office, the Trump administration has taken a series of actions against Hezbollah in particular—including indictments , extraditions , public statements and issues rewards for information on wanted Hezbollah terrorist leaders—and officials are signaling that more actions are expected, especially in Latin America. Congress has passed a series of bills aimed at Hezbollah as well.

The goal, according to an administration official quoted by POLITICO, is to “expose them for their behavior.” The thinking goes: Hezbollah cannot claim to be a legitimate actor even as it engages in a laundry list of illicit activities that undermine stability at home in Lebanon, across the Middle East region and around the world.

So that's something.

Ultimately, though, what happened with Hezbollah in Argentina could happen anywhere, and with any of the world's numerous bad actors. All it takes is people in power desperate enough, or amoral enough, to allow those actors to use carrots rather than sticks to achieve their ends.

The Fernandez administration was more wrapped up in greed and holding on to power through an increasingly radical, ideologically fueled cult of personality than it was in the security of the Republic. In that state it was willing to work with anyone.

That should sound familiar.