© AFP / Getty
While I happened to be researching another subject, a central question in the investigation came to be how Iran - which supplied
none of the 9/11 terrorists and no financing to them and no organizing of them, and which hasn't been connected with nearly as many terrorist incidents globally as Saudi Arabia has - came to be
officially called by the U.S. "the top state sponsor of terrorism." The following is the portion of my resulting article that happens to concern this very question, and it's modified slightly here, so as to focus only on this exact question:
The lie about this matter began, actually, with the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex in the Saudi city of Khobar, which killed 19 U.S. military, who worked at the
Dharan air base three miles away.
Prior to that incident, I am not able to find any such reference as "Iran is the top state sponsor of terrorism" or "Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism" or anything like it.
This incident - the Khobar Towers bombing - became the
lynchpin of the accusation by the Saudi royal family, the U.S. State Department, and the CIA, that Iran is
the foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Both Robert Mueller and
his longtime ally James Comey (the latter of whose firing as the FBI chief, by U.S. President Trump, had sparked the appointment of Mueller to become the Special Counsel investigating the U.S. President) had performed crucial roles in establishing that the Khobar Towers bombing was a Hezbollah operation run by the Iranian Government - and, starting upon this basis, in helping to develop the case that Iran
"is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism." However, as has been made clear by several great independent investigative journalists, on the basis of far more-solid documentation than the official account, the Khobar Towers bombing was instead entirely a
fundamentalist-Sunni operation, specifically perpetrated by Al Qaeda, which hates Shia and which also hates America's military presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden's
claim of the bombing's having been done by Al Qaeda, was, in fact, entirely honest and accurate.
Comment: Bet the Trump administration didn't see this one coming!