Behind the Nisman 'Scandal': British
Gunning for the Argentine President
by Cynthia R. Rush
Feb. 8—The British Empire and its assets on Wall Street and in the City of London, including Barack Obama, are determined to overthrow—if not kill—the President of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Having failed to force her into submission through the blackmail and bludgeoning by their predatory vulture funds—Fernández turned the tables on them by breaking with the bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system and allying with the BRICS nations instead—these imperial factions have now launched a desperate drive to bring her down, plotting a "color revolution," through the thoroughly orchestrated scandal surrounding the suspicious death of federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman on Jan. 18.
Lyndon LaRouche has labeled the attack on Fernández "a complete fraud," carried out by British imperial gangsters for the sole purpose of overthrowing the Argentine President, or setting her up for assassination.
An Orchestrated Scandal
Nisman allegedly committed suicide one day before he was scheduled to testify in Congress on the criminal complaint he had filed Jan. 14, charging Fernández, Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman, and some local political allies of "aggravated coverup" of Iran's alleged role in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 84 people and injured hundreds more. After ten years heading up the investigation into the bombing, with nothing to show for it despite ample financial resources and a large staff, Nisman suddenly raced back from a vacation in Spain to make the sensational accusation against Fernández, having not even informed the presiding judge in the case, Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, that he intended to file the case against the President.
The 300-page dossier Nisman filed as his evidence against Fernández is so lacking in legal foundation, and so sloppily written, that many legal experts who've examined it question whether Nisman, an experienced lawyer and prosecutor, could have possibly written it. Wiretapped conversations cited as evidence are largely based on speculation and hearsay, such that, these legal experts concluded, the document couldn't have held up in a court of law. President Fernández labeled the charges as "patently absurd."
But, armed with Nisman's corpse, Wall Street and London-controlled factions of Argentina's media, the judiciary, and the political opposition, backed by the Empire's international media outlets, went into a frenetic flight forward, implying that Fernández must be guilty of a crime that, in reality, stinks of a foreign intelligence operation—probably MI5, the Mossad, or CIA.
Fernández has not been cowed, vowing in a Jan. 26 address to the nation, "I will not be extorted, I will not be intimidated; I'm not afraid—let them say what they want, make all the denunciations they want." Soon afterward, the Empire's toadies ratcheted up their targeting of the President. The coup-mongering Clarín media monopoly, whose owner was a collaborator of the fascist 1976-83 military junta, trumpeted in its Feb. 1 edition, based on some evidence found at his apartment, that Nisman had actually intended to issue an arrest warrant for Fernández.
At the same time, known assets of the global Project Democracy apparatus, which organizes London- and Wall Street-backed "color revolutions" against their political opponents, have gone into high gear, trying to whip up popular hatred of the President with "I am Nisman" pots and pans demonstrations, parroting the "I am Charlie" rallies in France following the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices. Social media jumped in with slogans like "Cristina-assassin" and "Ayatollah Cristina," claiming that the President is a killer who backs "terrorist" Iran.
Fernández is well aware of the nature of the operation. As she noted Jan. 21 in remarks posted to her Facebook page, Nisman's complaint against her "was never in itself the real operation against the government. It fell apart almost as soon as he announced it." Suggesting that Nisman was set up, she wrote that "the real operation against the government was Nisman's death after he accused the President, and her Foreign Minister ... of covering for the Iranians accused in the AMIA bombing. [Argentina's enemies] used him alive, and then they needed him dead."
Multiple Targets
Argentina is not the only Ibero-American nation being targeted for its orientation toward the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Wall Street and London are determined to smash any nation that dares defy them by aligning with the BRICS nations' global development paradigm. The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), run by the British monarchy's Nazi-loving Prince Philip, together with other anti-development "Green" NGOs, has already deployed against the Chinese-financed Nicaraguan interoceanic canal, a key component of the World Land-Bridge, claiming it will harm the environment and uproot impoverished peasants.
Through its stooge Obama, the Empire has also aimed its fire against Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto for taking even tentative steps toward cooperating with the BRICS, and inviting China to invest in some key development projects. Bowing to pressure from Obama, last November Peña Nieto abruptly canceled the Mexico City-Querétaro high-speed rail line, the contract for which China's Railroad Construction Company had already won. Subsequently, after Obama's trip to Mexico and Peña Nieto's state visit to Washington, in late January, citing "environmental violations," the Mexican government shut down the Dragon Mart Business Center in Cancún, which China had viewed, according to Sputnik News Jan. 28, as part of its effort to "build a New Silk Road in Latin America."
The same Elliott Associates and Aurelius Capital Management vulture funds that have preyed on Argentina for years to overturn its sovereign debt restructuring and force it to its knees, are also targeting BRICS member Brazil for destabilization, using a corruption scandal at the giant state oil firm Petrobras to either force President Dilma Rousseff into line, or oust her from office. Rousseff was the head of Petrobras's board of directors from 2003 to 2010, during the time an alleged bribery and corruption scandal at the company took place. The London Economist has suggested she could be impeached.
Argentina a Thorn in Their Side
But the Empire's special wrath is reserved for Cristina Fernández, who, in the context of the crumbling trans-Atlantic financial system, is a huge thorn in its side because she has not capitulated to the vulture funds which have spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to destabilize the country economically and politically.
Unlike weaker or poorer nations in Africa or Asia that didn't have the means to resist vulture fund attacks, Argentina had the resources and political will to not only fight back, but to go on the political offensive internationally, gaining allies in the BRICS nations, among the G-77 and other developing nations, on behalf of the right of all countries to carry out a sovereign debt restructuring free from vulture interference. Last September, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted up Argentina's proposal to debate the creation of a global framework for regulating sovereign debt restructuring, which debate officially began at the UN on Feb. 2.
To the horror of the murderous Troika—the European Central Bank, the IMF, and European Commission—which has imposed genocidal conditions on Greece to exact payment on its unpayable debt, the newly elected government is reportedly studying Argentina's sovereign debt restructuring, with its hefty 75% "haircut" that was accepted by a majority of creditors—excluding the "holdout" vultures that were then deployed against Argentina. Those same speculators are now poised to assault Greece as well.
In the midst of the current operation against her, Fernández again flanked the imperialists by embarking on a stunningly successful Feb. 3-5 state visit to China, whose political and financial support over the several months since President Xi Jinping's July 2014 state visit to the country, has provided Fernández with important leverage against the British Empire's destabilization efforts.
The 22 agreements she signed with Xi Jinping, to strengthen their Comprehensive Strategic Alliance, span multiple areas of the political and economic spectrum, with special emphasis on science and technology—nuclear energy and aerospace are key features—energy, transportation, agriculture, defense, and infrastructure. The breathtaking scope of this bilateral alliance, which extends more broadly to the BRICS nations as well, has already elicited hysterical denunciations from imperial financier interests, inside and outside Argentina, most prominently from the vulture fund lobby group, American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), run by Elliott Associates owner, the multibillionaire Paul Singer.
Notably, ATFA loudly backed the claims in Nisman's dossier, proclaiming they proved "the true nature" of Fernández's relationship with "terrorist" Iran. ATFA has been harping on this theme for over a year, generously financing U.S. Congressmen who repeat it.
A Gigantic Fraud
As one observer noted, "What they failed to do with the vulture funds, they're trying to do now with the Nisman case."
The central thesis of Nisman's "criminal conspiracy" charge against Fernández and Timerman is that they had allied themselves "geopolitically" with the Iranian government to cover up that nation's alleged role in the AMIA bombing, in exchange for lucrative oil and grain deals that a "desperate" Argentine government needed to alleviate a supposedly dire economic crisis.
Nisman's targeting of Cristina Fernández is explicit, accusing her of being the "intellectual author" of the "criminal conspiracy" designed to "fabricate Iran's innocence." The vehicle for carrying this out, he alleged, was the January 2013 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that the Argentine government signed with Iran, by which a commission of international jurists from nations other than Iran or Argentina, would travel to Tehran to interrogate the nine Iranians Nisman had charged with the bombing in a 2006 indictment, which law enforcement experts at the time said was based on flimsy evidence. Since Iran was not about to extradite its citizens, the MOU would have for the first time allowed for the questioning of the accused.
Almost as soon as Nisman announced his criminal complaint, which also included the demand for embargoing 20 million pesos in the President's assets and similar penalties levied against Timerman and the others named in the suit, his case began to crumble.
In a Jan. 16 interview with El Destape online, the judge presiding in the AMIA case, Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, denounced Nisman, charging that intelligence agencies, not Nisman, were calling the shots in the investigation, and that the prosecutor's conduct in the case "bordered on the criminal." He had "ruined evidence" and may have illegally tapped phones, the judge said, thus raising questions as to the authenticity of tapped conversations presented as evidence. Nisman's case is so filled with "irregularities," Canicoba told Radio Nacional that his accusations are "very dubious from a legal standpoint."
According to Nisman, in order to facilitate economic and trade deals with Iran, Fernández and Timerman also pressured Interpol to lift the "red notice" arrest warrants it had issued for the accused Iranians. But Ronald K. Noble, who served as Interpol's Secretary General from 2000 to 2014, debunked Nisman's claim. In a Jan. 16 press conference, Timerman read an e-mail he had received from Noble that morning stating that at no time did the Argentine government request lifting of the arrest warrants. Noble told Timerman that he "could not believe" the attacks against Fernández, knowing that for years she, as well as her late husband, President Néstor Kirchner, had used every international forum, at the UN and elsewhere, to seek justice for the AMIA victims, and demand that Iran provide an accounting of its actions.
Official documentation proves that the alleged oil and grain deals never took place. It is only multinational grain cartels such as Cargill, Bunge, and Dreyfuss, among others, that sell grains to Iran, and Argentina cannot even refine the type of crude oil that Iran produces and would have no reason to import it.
Foreign Intelligence Stench
Four days after Nisman made his spectacular charge against the President, he was found dead in the bathroom of his luxury apartment in the Puerto Madero district of Buenos Aires. Entrance into the building was carefully monitored, and the prosecutor also had a ten-man security detail.
Foreign intelligence paw prints are all over this case. Nisman's primary source of "intelligence" for the AMIA case, and preparation of the dossier, was the state intelligence service's (SIDE) Director of Operations, Antonio "Jaime" Stiuso, a 42-year veteran of the agency known for his close working relationship with both the Mossad and the CIA. He is described as a feared operative, an expert in electronic monitoring and surveillance, whose blackmail and extortion of politicians and judges have earned him enormous power and political leverage. Last December, Fernández fired Stiuso from SIDE, as the first step toward dissolving the agency that had for years served as a rats' nest of foreign subversion and intrigue.
According to several observers, Stiuso fed Nisman huge amounts of unfiltered intelligence on the AMIA bombing, and expected the prosecutor to extract what he deemed "usable." He was in constant communication with Nisman, and in the final hours before his death, the prosecutor placed several calls to Stiuso, who has now been subpoenaed to testify in the case by investigating prosecutor Viviana Fein.
According to a 2011 Wikileaks dump of State Department cables, Nisman also coordinated every step of his investigation into the AMIA bombing with the U.S. Embassy legal attaché (LEGATT), usually an FBI operative, keeping him informed of his progress, consulting on planned actions, and even slavishly apologizing if he did anything without first consulting LEGATT. Before advising Judge Canicoba Corral or any other Argentine official, Nisman reportedly first consulted with the U.S. Embassy on rulings or statements he intended to make on the case.
Stiuso and the Embassy were adamant that Nisman not deviate from the George W. Bush Administration's accusation that Iran and Hezbollah were the culprits in the AMIA bombing, despite the lack of credible evidence. He was discouraged from pursuing other leads, of which there were many.
In a Jan. 18, 2008 article published in The Nation, investigative reporter Gareth Porter, who has followed the AMIA case for many years, reported on his interview with former U.S. ambassador to Argentina Anthony Wayne, as well as with U.S. law enforcement personnel who had assisted in the investigation of the AMIA bombing. Wayne told Porter that "to my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with anything." That assessment was confirmed by Ron Goddard, then deputy chief of the U.S. Mission in Buenos Aires, and by James Bernazzani, former head of the FBI's Hezbollah unit, who assembled a team of specialists to go to Buenos Aires in 1997 to assist with the AMIA investigation.
Bernazzani told Porter in November of 2006 that when he arrived in Buenos Aires, he discovered that the Argentine investigators "had found no real evidence of Iranian or Hezbollah involvement."
It is instructive that Nisman's death occurred a few months shy of the trial of individuals who deliberately botched the first investigation of the AMIA bombing, destroying evidence, bribing witnesses, and failing to pursue leads pointing to non-Iranian suspects. The June trial for obstruction of justice, whose defendants include former President Carlos Menem, former SIDE Director Hugo Anzorreguy, and Ruben Beraja, former head of the official Jewish community organization DAIA, among many others, is expected to reveal intelligence that was deliberately covered up by the original judge in the case, Juan José Galeano, also one of the defendants.
