MoA - Neocons Push Dubious Paper To Allege Iran - Al-Qaeda Connection
Neocons Push Dubious Paper To Allege Iran - Al-Qaeda Connection
The anti-Iran powers in the U.S. again try to smear Iran as allied with al-Qaeda. The accusations will be used to justify further hostilities against the country.
Suddenly an anonymous, and likely fake, document appears and is prominently launched into the public circulation. To provide plausibility for the publishing the new CIA director Mike Pompeo ordered his staff to release additional data allegedly found in Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan.
These "new" papers were first released to the neoconservative anti-Iran lobby
Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Among the "hundred thousands" of pages a mysterious 19 page document is claimed to prove Iranian collaboration with al-Qaeda. The way the release was handled and the prominence put on this one specific paper indicates that the now released stash was "spiked" with this document to initiate hostilities against Iran.
We have been here before. Fake documents produced by the CIA and neo-conservative think-tanks
were used to allege that Saddam Hussein was buying Uranium in Niger (copy below). False claims were made that Saddam had contacts with the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack in New York.
Former CIA Career Analyst
Ned Price explains the politics behind the new release:
Ned Price @nedprice - 6:30 PM - 1 Nov 2017
- @CIA released what it claims are the final public files from Bin Laden’s lair. I’m all for transparency, but this isn’t about that.
- In Jan, DNI, which led the declassification effort, released what it said was the final tranche of Bin Laden files. Link
- The DNI-led review was overseen by career intel officials, who concluded that, w the Jan files, all those of public interest were released.
- But a funny thing happened when CIA Director Pompeo came into office. I’m told he re-launched a review of the files.
- In doing so, he took officers away from important missions to pore—and re-pore—over the millions of documents.
- How can we be sure this was a CIA effort? Unlike previous releases, today’s files are hosted on CIA.gov, not the DNI site.
- He said as much at the gathering of a conservative group, @FDD, opposed to the Iran deal in September. Link
- As luck would have it, CIA provided an advance copy of today’s files to @LongWarJournal, this group’s publication. Link
- The ploy is transparent despite the fact that the newly-released documents don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.
- What’s not as transparent are the motives of Pompeo, the administration’s leading and most influential Iran hawk.
- Remember Cheney on @MeetThePress, pointing to Atta’s supposed Prague meeting w Iraqi officials? It was a key element of the march to war.
- History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. Need to remain vigilant to ensure Pompeo isn’t able to write it.
The CIA's outlet for these papers, the FDD,
writes about the cache:
Documents show tense al Qaeda-Iran relationship:
Al Qaeda’s relationship with Iran’s government has been fractious at best and openly antagonistic at worst, according to documents confiscated from Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan and made public on Thursday.
The one new document that now changes the old assessment by 180 degree is of course the one the right-wing
Telegraph and
other outlets immediately point out:
Trove of Bin Laden documents reveal Iran's secret dealings with al-Qaeda.
But how come that an assessment from a "senior jihadist" received by Bin Laden is anonymous? How does FDD know that the author is "senior"? Why doesn't he have a name?
The alleged "senior jihadist" paper wants us to believe that Iran offered al-Qaeda “training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon"? That is ludicrous. Al-Qaeda always had an anti-Shia ideology and agenda. It is not plausible that the Shia majority Iran would ask the Shia organization Hizbullah to train the anti-Shia killer gangs of al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda is an enemy of Iran. After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 some al-Qaeda members and their families fled towards Iran. They had no other place to go. All of them were immediately detained or put under house arrest. A deal was likely made in which al-Qaeda promised to refrain from attacking Iran while Iran would keep these hostages unharmed. The al-Qaeda members were not "guests" in Iran. In its yearly
Country Reports on Terrorism the U.S. State Department
notes:
Iran remained unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qa’ida (AQ) members
it continued to detain, and refused to publicly identify those senior members
in its custody.
In 2015 Iran
released some al-Qaeda members in exchange for an Iranian diplomat al-Qaeda had taken hostage in Yemen. That is not the record of a friendly relation.
The 19-pages document is not plausible. It was obviously produced and prominently launched for a specific political purpose. It contradicts earlier released papers as well as the historic record.
Professor Max Abrams
notes:
Max Abrahms @MaxAbrahms - 4:05 AM - 2 Nov 2017
- The regime change playbook plays on American fears of Salafist terrorists by claiming the target-leadership supports them.
- For Saddam it was that he supported Al Qaeda. For Assad it was that he supported ISIS. For Iran it will increasingly stress Al Qaeda ties.
Add to that the
equally implausible claims that Russia is supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. (With what? Rusty AK-47s?)
It seems likely that the "never-before-seen 19-page document" with "a senior jihadist’s assessment" was written up in Langley or Tel Aviv. It was then put into the stash of the now released Bin Laden files to give it a somewhat plausible origin. FDD was specifically pointed to that very document to bring it into public circulation.
This is clearly reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney regime's campaign against Iraq in which faked documents claimed that Saddam was buying Uranium from Niger and that he had contacts with the perpetrators of 9/11. The release of this document is primitive warmongering propaganda.
So primitive indeed that many will fall for it.
---
Update:
Others are equally suspicious of this release.
Ankit Panda at
The Diplomat asks:
Was the bulk release of Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottabad data trove an act of transparency or something else?
Professor As'ad AbuKhalil, the Angry Arab,
notes a lot of auspicious issue in a released document the CIA called the Bin Laden journal. Of the document discussed above he writes:
Then there is that 19-page document (unsigned) and it is ostensibly is a document showing ties between Iran and Al-Qa`idah. This one is the hardest to believe.
The document does not make sense: at several points it talks about Iranian regime being very pragmatic and another point it talks that the enmity between US and Iran is very real and not fake. But this last contention is totally against all the beliefs of Islamists (of the various kind) who are convinced that the US and Iran are allies under the table.
The paper also alleges that Iran offered to send Al-Qa`idah members to train at Hizbullah camps in Lebanon. This is clearly a fabrication and shows a clumsy effort to implicate Iran in a relations with Al-Qa`idah. But why would Iran need to send Al-Qa`dish fighters who are allegedly in Iran already to Lebanon to train? Why not train them there in Iran? Also, the document itself then says: that Iranian governments arrested all of them and they had to go into hiding.
This document in particular clearly is fabricated--I venture--and I don't know who wrote it. It also struck me as less religious in tone than what we normally read form those quarters.
Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif
jumps in:
Javad Zarif @JZarif - 7:29 PM - 2 Nov 2017
A record low for the reach of petrodollars: CIA & FDD fake news w/ selective AlQaeda docs re: Iran can't whitewash role of US allies in 9/11
) shyt from mike pompeo as everyone else, you didn't read those documents before the release.
