what Iran and Argentina have in common in the first place. But the joker in the deck is Israel....as always, and evidently everywhere it pops up. Israel has the hates for Iran, and has for a long time.

Argentina is just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And Israel is the tail that wags the American dog.

The Israeli Embassy bombing in 1992, and the AMIA bombing in 1994.

Media talking heads have always resisted discussing anything that did not place blame for the AMIA or Embassy bombings squarely on Iran. Victims' rights groups in Argentina itself - where the incident took place - aren't so sure, and have been calling for the impeachment and prosecution of the late special prosecutor Alberto Nisman for years for callous disregard toward the investigation, just as his predecessors in the job were in 2004.

The fact remains that no evidence has been found of such involvement in 20 years (https://consortiumnews.com/2015/02/07/a-rush-to-judgment-in-argentine-bomb-case/), not by the Argentines, the U.S., Israel, INTERPOL, or anyone else. Even Nisman admitted that (while slow-walking the investigation for 10 years); Interpol, in fact, ruled out Iranian complicity a decade ago already.

What little "evidence" had been put up as "proof" had to be withdrawn for having been fabricated - including the bribery of witnesses. Articles of faith for the car-bomb believers, such as the white van and the bomb crater, have been debunked since at least 1996 - the first by forensics (who took purported pieces of said van to a lab 20 years ago, only to be told they were from 2 or 3 different cars), and the second by sheer photographic evidence.

People lie, but photos do not; hundreds of photos were taken at the time by scores of different news media and individuals. They clearly show no crater, and that the blast each time was centered in the building. Moreover, both the AMIA and Embassy were located in narrow, heavily built-up streets. None of the surrounding buildings were destroyed, as would have to happen in a car bomb in a narrow street that takes out a 7-story building. In fact only two suffered more than cosmetic damage: the small, century-old parochial school in front of the Embassy, whose roof collapsed but whose walls stood (they would have been obliterated by a car bomb); and the reinforced concrete building to the right of the AMIA, which exhibited a gaping hole inside the retaining wall shared with its ill-fated neighbor - a sure sign of an interior blast.

Witnesses lie, but scars do not. A repairman was working under the motor of his old work truck when the blast took place. The elusive "van" would have necessarily been parked within a few feet of this poor man, and yet he survived with only the scarring on the side of his body facing the blast. This would have had to have been a miracle straight out of the Old Testament, had the blast taken place on the street. His testimony was taken, but never entered into the record.

And the bomb forensics? Engineers who were commissioned to perform the very first forensic tests in both cases affirmed the obvious: that the blasts took place inside the buildings (their findings were - you guessed it - excluded from any reports).

So if these bombs were, as the evidence indicates, inside jobs, then it follows that the real target was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Peace Process itself - both of which were violently opposed by the Israeli far-right, lest we forget. They were the only ones that gained anything from this, and it was they, as you know, who ultimately assassinated Prime Minister Rabin. Netanyahoo, who was first elected to office just six months later, owes his impressive career to that tragedy - and what's more has allowed Israeli government to be hijacked by the every same elements. He would, then, have the most to lose if the AMIA files were ever declassified.

and more and more, I loathe Israel. I don't know any good things about it.

But yes, Israel is almost unique among the modern democracies in that, over time, the abuses have only gotten more and more brutal; the recent atrocities in Gaza are probably the best example of that.

The problem is the leadership; but impunity makes all that possible. Moderate Israelis have no chance against monsters like Bibi when the media - and their benefactor, the U.S. - gives them cover no matter how brazen they get. Obviously they don't even respect the U.S. anymore, high-handedly waving aside even the meekest Obama administration requests for restraint - not to mention inviting himself to address Congress (to show the U.S. "who's the boss&quot .

A simple thing like declassifying the AMIA files - and possibly others, such as the London Embassy bomb just days after AMIA - would change all that. It would not only bring the perpetrators to justice, above all it would make Israel itself a much better country.

from your pen to the ears of TPTB!

And yes, the problem in Israel is primarily that its leadership has skewed to the hard right, in good part based on infinite funding from RW US sources. The moderates, much less the left, literally do not have a voice - and there are a lot of good people of conscience who live in a literally intolerable situation as a result. For non-Jewish Israelis, the situation is much, much worse.

Last edited Fri Apr 3, 2015, 05:23 PM - Edit history (1)

It is what it is. We can only hope that good faith prevails.