[NYTr] FSeizure of Iranians Failed to Validate Bush Line

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

IPS - Nov 17, 2007
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40104

Seizure of Iranians Failed to Validate Bush Line

Analysis by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (IPS) - The George W. Bush administration's campaign
to seize and detain Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)
officials in Iraq, presented by Bush himself last January as a move to
break up an alleged Iranian arms smuggling operation in Iraq, appears
to have run its course without having been able to link a single
Iranian to any such operation.

Despite administration rhetoric suggesting that the U.S. military had
solid intelligence on which to base a campaign to break up
Iranian-sponsored networks supplying armour-piercing weapons, what is
now known about the kidnapping operations indicates that the actual
purpose was to obtain some evidence from interrogations that would
support the administration's line that the IRGC's elite Quds Force is
involved in assisting Shiite forces militarily.

None of the six Iranians now held by the U.S. military, however, has
provided any evidence for the administration's case despite many months
of very tough interrogation usually employed on "high value" detainees.

Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department Bureau of
Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and
South Asia, told IPS he believes the administration badly wanted to get
information from the Iranian detainees that they could use to make
their case, but has been unable to do so.

"I'm convinced that they haven't gotten anything out of them," he said
in an interview. "They haven't come up with anything they can shop
around."

The programme has also been a political embarrassment in relations with
U.S. allies in Iraq. U.S. military seizures of Iranians who the U.S.
military claimed were IRGC Quds Force officers have been condemned not
only by the Shiite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki but by
Kurdish leaders as well. The U.S. military apologised in August for "a
regrettable incident" in which eight Iranians were arrested in Baghdad,
and then freed after Iraqi protests.

The U.S. quietly released nine Iranian detainees last week, two of whom
were seized in the Kurdish city of Erbil in January, saying they were
"of no continuing intelligence value". The others do not appear to have
been part of the deliberate targeting of Iranian officials.

What was later learned about the U.S. raids on Iranian officials in
Kurdistan last January and again in September and in Baghdad last
December shows that the U.S. military was targeting Iranians merely on
the basis of their affiliation with the IRGC, while claiming publicly
to have intelligence of their involvement in weapons trafficking.

The Jan. 10 raid was on an Iranian liaison office that had been
operating in the Kurdistan capital of Erbil for 10 years with official
Iraqi government approval. The U.S. military issued only a
vaguely-worded rationale for kidnapping the five Iranians, saying they
were "suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and
coalition forces..."

That was a thinly-veiled allusion to their suspected membership in the
Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iraq's Kurdish foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, who demanded the
release of the five Iranians, explained that they were not part of a
"clandestine network" but were working on visas and other paperwork for
travel by Iraqis to Iran. Zebari pointed out that the men were working
for the Revolutionary Guard Corps because that institution has the
responsibility for controlling Iran's borders.

It is also common for IRGC officers to be given positions in a wide
range of non-military Iranian government agencies. That was the case
with Mahmoud Farhadi, the Iranian official kidnapped by U.S. military
from a hotel in Soleimanieh, Kurdistan Sep. 20.

U.S. military spokesman Rear Adm. Mark Fox told reporters that Farhadi
was a member of the "Ramadan Corps" of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard
command responsible for all Iranian operations inside Iraq and the
"linchpin" behind the smuggling of "sophisticated weapons" into Iraq by
the Quds Force.

But officials of the Kurdistan regional government and the Kurdish
president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, publicly confirmed the Iranian
government's assertion that Farhadi was a civilian official of the
Kermanshah province governor-general's office on a "commercial mission
with the knowledge of the federal government in Baghdad and the
government of Kurdistan."

Again, Kurdish authorities did not contest the fact that Farhadi had
been in the IRGC. The governor of Suleymaniye, Dana Majeed,
acknowledged his IRGC membership to National Public Radio a week after
the U.S. kidnapping, but insisted that his job was to expedite trade
and transit across the border.

The U.S. military was apparently operating on the basis of information
from the Iranian armed opposition group Mujahideen E Khalq (MEK) that
was badly out of date. The political arm of the MEK, the National
Council or Resistance of Iran, which had been providing information to
U.S. intelligence on the Iranian nuclear programme and on Iranian
officials operating in Iraq, published a detailed article on Farhadi
Sep. 25 which claimed that he was the commander of the Quds Force Zafar
Base and said nothing about his having working for the province on
cross-border trade.

But an article in a local Kurdish language daily in Soleminiye on Sep.
24 reported that an "informed source" belonging to unnamed "Iranian
opposition group -- obviously the MEK -- had used the past tense in
regard to Farhadi's role as Quds Force commander and acknowledged that
Farhadi was now working in a commercial delegation.

In December 2006, two accredited Iranian diplomats were kidnapped from
the Embassy car on the way from praying at a mosque and later had to be
released. But four other Iranian officials were kidnapped in the
compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite political party
called SCIRI, who had visited Bush three weeks earlier. They were in
the home of the chairman of the Parliamentary security committee and
head of the Badr organisation.

The official explanation was that they were being detained on
"suspicion of carrying out or planning attacks against Iraqi security
forces". But the Iraqi interlocutors are part of the Iraqi government
which supports the occupation and opposes the Madhi army. If the
Iranian officials detained were actually plotting with their hosts to
attack Iraqi security forces, it would have meant that the SCIRI and
the Badr Group were planning to attack their own government.

U.S. military officials claimed to the Washington Post that they had
captured maps of Baghdad delineating Sunni Shiite and mixed
neighbourhoods that would be useful for militias, lists of weapons
systems and "information about importing modern, specially shaped
explosive charges into Iran".

But Laura Rozen of the National Journal quoted a U.S. official as
saying that the evidence was far less conclusive than was claimed.
"They are trying to walk this back," said the official. "There are no
smoking guns about Iran in Iraq."

None of the allegedly damning evidence was mentioned in the Feb. 11
military briefing to the U.S. media on the alleged Quds Force EFP
smuggling, indicating that these claims were vastly exaggerated.

[Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist
specialising in U.S. national security policy. His latest book, "Perils
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was
published in June 2005.]

(END/2007)