Research for this article was supported by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.
Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration's pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush's latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for
the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city's Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the
Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina "serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies."
This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by the General Assembly of Interpol, which voted to put five former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader on the international police organization's "red list" for allegedly having planned the July 1994 bombing. But the
Wall Street Journal reports that it was pressure from the Bush Administration, along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the Interpol vote. In fact,
the Bush Administration's manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly in line with its long practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case against its geopolitical enemies.
Comment: So, to recap: barely a year after the end of the USSR in 1991, and thus the end of the Cold War 'titanc geopolitical struggle between Western Capitalism and Eastern Communism', a terror attack blamed on 'Islamic Jihad Organization', a previously-unknown-organization-but-trust-us-it's-linked-to-Hezbollah-and-thus-Iran, blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina, effectively heralding the new global paradigm of what a decade later became known as the 'Global War on Terror': rabid, atatvistic, jihadist Muslims the world over just 'randomly' blowing up civilians because such a terror strategy would result, eventually, in a global, pan-Muslim movement that is politically undefinable yet somehow religiously coherent (to Muslims only, of course).
The media back then misinformed the public about the nature of both the 1992 and the 1994 bombings in Buenos Aires, which were in fact most likely caused by explosives
planted within each building, thus not 'truck-bombs', much less 'suicidal truck-bombs'. The motive ascribed to these bombings at the time was that Iran was upset at the stalling of negotiations between Argentina and Iran to assist with
the development of a civilian nuclear program for Israel's Mid-East rival. Iran and 'the bomb', and its having uranium processing plants at all, of course later featured heavily in geopolitical intrigues, but it's interesting to see just old (and how much of a 'red line') this issue is for the US and Israel.
The above report superbly summarizes the farcical 'investigations' into these bombings up until the time of its publication, although its author apparently missed the bombshell 2006 report in Argentine media about an Israeli diplomat who was arrested while departing Argentina for Chile
with a bag full of explosives. What happened next is that the Kirchners (husband and wife, Nestor and Cristina), as successive presidents of Argentina from 2007-2015, attempted to handle this hot potato by ultimately calling for a 'truth commission', an all-encompassing re-investigaton of the bombings,
to be set up in conjuction with the Iranian government.
Cristina Kirchner's impetus for doing so became clear when she publicly named Guillermo Borger, the successor of AMIA, the Jewish community's organization in Buenos Aires, as being in contact with a "foreign espionage agency that knows of a new terror attack planned against Argentina." Between the lines, all understood this to be a reference to the Mossad, not Hezbollah or Iran. This obviously spooked the Israelis, and Borger responded to the accusation by saying that such a new, open investigation "
will allow a third bombing in Argentina" - effectively threatening to 'bomb more Jews' in Argentina in order to pin the blame on Iran, again, and thus on Kirchner for 'making us do this'.
But before this truth commission could get off the ground, Kirchner found herself deposed, and briefly jailed, on 'corruption charges', all of which stemmed from alleged immunity she had granted Iranian officials as part of this deal. Thusly was the last serious attempt to really investigate the Buenos Aires bombings buried under the rubble. Now it's 2023, and Argentina has just elected someone who is so pro-Israel, he wants to convert to Judaism to demonstrate his fealty...
Comment: "We've caught the terrorists! And he is... one of us."