Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Cuba: Hassan {hearts} Fidel

Iran Leader Meets With Fidel Castro During Stop in Havana

Officials did not say where they talked, but photos appeared to show them inside Castro’s home. A government statement said the two leaders discussed the importance of food production and threats to world peace.

Yeahm “the importance of food production and threats to world peace”; that, and the billions of freshly-laundered cash that Obama so kindly shipped to the mullahs. Rouhani praised Cuba’s “economic resilience.”

Carlos Eire has the perfect headline:
Nosferatu and little brother King Raul meet with Iranian despot Rouhani

They’re Two of a Kind,

This time I found a keeper, I made up my mind
Lord the perfect combination is her heart and mine
The sky’s the limit, no hill is too steep
We’re playin’ for fun, but we’re playin’ for keeps

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Cuba: Rouhani will visit

Yes, the same Rouhani that the late Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman accused of involvement in planning the July 1994 terror attack on the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, will pay the Castros an official visit after stopping by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Venezuela this week.

The Obama administration laundered billions of dollars for Iran, and now it’s junket time!

Warms your heart, doesn’t it?

Carlos Eire posts the details of Rouhani’s latest,

After attending the Dictator’s Summit in Venenozuela, Rouhani will head straight to the Castro Kingdom, where he will be hold “negotiations” about “multiple cooperation agreements” with King Raul.

While in Castrogonia, the Iranian despot will also visit Ex-Maximum Leader Fidel.

Afterwards, Rouhani will travel north, to meet with other enemies of the U.S. at the United Nations.

In other smart diplomacy era news, US official: Navy aircraft threatened with shoot down by Iran.

Prior posts on Rouhani here.



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Argentina: Cristina wants to dissolve Secretariat of Intelligence

Let’s keep in mind that the Secretary of Intelligence was first on the murder scene,
Argentina leader wants shakeup after scandal

Kirchner has sent a draft bill to the country’s parliament which, if passed, would mean the Secretariat of Intelligence (SI) is replaced by the Federal Intelligence Agency.

Cristina would have us believe that Nisman, probably one of the most knowledgeable people on Iran’s presence in Latin America, was

a naive investigator who was used by others who fed him false information

I wonder whether anyone believes Kirchner at this point.

However, Alberto Nisman’s death ‘responsibility of pro-Kirchner intelligence operatives’, claims ex-official
Former senior Argentine security official blames presidential loyalist cell for killing of prosecutor as Cristina Kirchner calls for intelligence agency to be dissolved

But in the latest twist to the dramatic saga, the former senior official said that it was in fact Kirchner loyalists in the intelligence services (SI) who were responsible for Mr Nisman’s death.
He said that political operatives from the president’s Peronist faction took control of the SI after she fired its director John Stiusso and his deputy in December for allegedly being too close to the US and Israeli intelligence services.

Why kill Nisman after so many years?

Because, it is alleged, that among the Iranians who participated in the decision to bomb the AMIA buliding was none other than the current president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani.

Juan Zarate underlines why Alberto Nisman’s death is significant,



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Argentina: Yesterday, and today

Yesterday:
June 2013, Douglas Farah & Mark Dubowitz, writing on Terror and Foreign Policy (read the whole article),

The election of Rouhani is a gift to the Argentine government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was already moving in the opposite direction to her prosecutor – rapidly forgetting her nation’s history by normalizing relations with the Islamic Republic’s soon-to-be former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and pushing the bombing investigation into cold storage.

Journalist: Prosecutor Tied Rouhani to Argentina Terror Attack 

The late Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman accused Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani of involvement in planning the July 1994 terror attack on the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, journalist Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald reportedWednesday.

Andrés Oppenheimer:

Nisman told me that Rouhani was not among the eight Iranian officials whose international arrest he had requested to Interpol in 2006, but that he was a member of the committee that had planned the attack. Nisman added that a key witness, a former Iranian VIVEK official named Abolghasem Mesbahi, had testified that Rouhani was a member of the Vijeh committee at the time of the bombing.

Today:
January, 2015, Who Killed Alberto Nisman?
First his death was declared a suicide; now Argentina’s president says it was the work of her enemies. What about Tehran?

If Nisman was murdered, it involved a level of sophistication not normally associated with Argentina but not uncommon for Iran. Tehran has more than 40 years of experience knocking off meddlesome individuals abroad and is now trying to allay global distrust as it bamboozles Barack Obama about its nuclear-weapons program. Nisman’s search for truth may have put a target on his back.

More evidence points to a murder:

Argentinian federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman was shot from a distance of at least 15 centimeters [6 inches]
. . .
The finding completely contradicts the government’s initial claims that Nisman had committed suicide, an assertion president Cristina Fernandez Kirchner has since backtracked from.

The forensics exam also confirmed that there was no exit wound, a result expected when a gun is pressed to the temple, the Federal Police source said.

Elsewhere, journalist Damián Patcher, who first broke the news of Nisman’s death,

had to flee Argentina in fear for his life:

After I left Argentina I found out that the government was still publishing wrong information about me on social media. The Twitter feed of Casa Rosada, the Argentine presidential palace, posted the details of the airline ticket I had bought, and claimed that I intended to return to Argentina by February 2 — in other words, I hadn’t really fled the country. In fact, my return date is in December.

The government proudly tweeted the details, thereby showing they’re keeping an eye on people,

UPDATE
Linked to by Neo-neocon. Thank you!

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Iran’s tango with Latin America

Readers of this blog will find nothing surprising about this, but this article is today’s must-read:
Iran’s Tango with Latin America

Latin America and the Caribbean tend to be looked at through the prism of drugs, criminal violence or illegal immigration. Anything that challenges this myopic view, such as Iran expanding its operational reach into the region, is either ignored or the threat minimized to justify the way things have always been done. On numerous instances, U.S. agencies responsible for an avalanche of data about the transnational, cross-regional nexus between narcotrafficking, arms networks and terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah, have been marginalized and the Western Hemisphere links to these particular security risks erroneously set aside or treated solely as “law-enforcement matters.”

The crime-terror convergence; the bilateral relations between Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia; the decades-long systematic effort to establish clandestine intelligence stations and operatives. Read it here.

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