USA terror against Iran

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Posted Monday, March 01, 2010 3:50 PM
Did the U.S. Have Contact With Terror Group That Attacked Iran?

Mark Hosenball

After Abdolmalek Rigi.the suspected leader of the anti-Iranian jihadist group Jundullah.was arrested by Iranian authorities last week, he made a startling public claim: the Obama administration offered to give his group money and munitions to help in their efforts to undermine the government of Iran. Obama administration officials say Rigi is making up stories. They insist the United States has never had a relationship with Jundullah, a little-known group of Sunni jihadists based along Pakistan.s border with Iran. The group has carried out deadly bombing attacks that have killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians.

Yet there appears to be at least some brief history between the U.S. and Junduallah. Declassified has learned that several years ago, the group did in fact try to cut a deal with U.S. officials.but were rebuffed.

A former U.S. intelligence official said that soon after the 9/11 attacks, a top Jundullah operative, claiming to be acting on Rigi's authority, approached CIA representatives in Pakistan and told them the group would help the U.S. against both Iran and Al Qaeda. According to the former U.S. official.who like others cited in this article asked for anonymity when talking about sensitive information.the Jundullah operative proposed that the group would kidnap leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Al Qaeda and turn them over to the Americans. U.S. officials flatly rejected any relationship with the group, said the former official. But the official did say that the door was left slightly ajar in case Jundullah really did capture important Al Qaeda operatives. That never happened.

Jundullah has become the focus of news stories following Rigi.s reported capture. Iranian state-run television broadcast what it claimed was Rigi.s confession. On camera, Rigi said, that the Obama administration promised him unlimited military aid and funding for an insurgency against Iran's embattled clerical regime. "After Obama was elected, the Americans contacted us and they met me in Pakistan,. Rigi told his Iranian interviewers. .They said they would cooperate with us and will give me military equipment, arms and machine guns. They also promised to give us a base along the border with Afghanistan next to Iran." (These quotes are taken from a transcript prepared by Press TV, an English-language network run by the Iranian government.)

The big question, of course, is whether Rigi was actually .confessing. or merely reciting what his Iranian captors wanted him to say. (The New York Times reported that the interview may have been intended to stir up anti-American sentiments within Iran.) Either way, Obama administration officials, like their Bush administration predecessors, have emphatically denied that U.S. agencies have ever been involved in any operations with Jundullah. They say that years ago the group was deemed too violent and untrustworthy by American intelligence. Current and former officials also say they suspect the group has been thoroughly infiltrated by Iranian intelligence.

.The Iranians are to Jundullah as termites are to wood,. a U.S. counterterrorism official told Declassified. .The group is hopelessly penetrated, and its methods don.t accord with those of the United States..

In 2007, ABC News reported that Jundullah, which at the time was allegedly conducting bombing and other guerrilla operations inside Iran, had been secretly encouraged and advised by U.S. officials over a two-year period. U.S. officials denied the ABC report before congressional committees.

In his purported confession, Rigi suggested that when his plane was intercepted, he was on his way to a meeting at a U.S. airbase in Kyrgyzstan with a senior U.S. official, identified in some Iranian news reports as Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special diplomatic representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

State Department chief spokesman P. J. Crowley told Declassified that such reports were "complete nonsense."
Tag(s): CIA, Barack Obama, Al Qaeda, Iran, Bush Administration

====== CAREFUL THE AUThOR IS AN AGENT =======

Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra.

Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2).

But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA - Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5).

Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan / Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter.

Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1

7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1.

7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2.