I could end up dead because of this.
So spoke Argentine special prosecutor Alberto Nisman last week. The “this” he referred to was his accusation that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman had covered up Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires.
On Monday, Nisman turned up dead.
He was found shot to death inside his home, pistol by his side, only hours before he was to explain to a closed-door congressional hearing the evidence — tapped phone calls — substantiating his allegations. The official explanation is suicide.
Certainly this is convenient for the Kirchner government, given how Nisman had traced the ’94 bombing back to Hezbollah, which was acting on orders from Iran. In that bombing, 85 people were killed and 300 injured.
In 2013, Kirchner and Timerman tried to establish a joint Iranian-Argentinian commission to “investigate.” Nisman last week said the commission, which never came about, was a fraud, really designed to whitewash Iran in exchange for diplomatic relations and a trade of grain for the oil energy starved Argentina desperately needs.
All this comes at the moment President Obama is pursuing a nuclear deal with Tehran that even his fellow Democrats in Congress are skeptical about. Indeed, for all the talk about a new Iran, the two Iranians believed to have planned the 1994 attack — Mohsen Rezai and Ali Akbar Velayati — remain prominent in Iran’s politics today.
Alberto Nisman’s lonely crusade for justice ended the way many feared it would. Let’s not add insult by rushing into a deal with Iran even more dangerous than the one Nisman exposed in Argentina.
So spoke Argentine special prosecutor Alberto Nisman last week. The “this” he referred to was his accusation that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman had covered up Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires.
On Monday, Nisman turned up dead.
He was found shot to death inside his home, pistol by his side, only hours before he was to explain to a closed-door congressional hearing the evidence — tapped phone calls — substantiating his allegations. The official explanation is suicide.
Certainly this is convenient for the Kirchner government, given how Nisman had traced the ’94 bombing back to Hezbollah, which was acting on orders from Iran. In that bombing, 85 people were killed and 300 injured.
In 2013, Kirchner and Timerman tried to establish a joint Iranian-Argentinian commission to “investigate.” Nisman last week said the commission, which never came about, was a fraud, really designed to whitewash Iran in exchange for diplomatic relations and a trade of grain for the oil energy starved Argentina desperately needs.
All this comes at the moment President Obama is pursuing a nuclear deal with Tehran that even his fellow Democrats in Congress are skeptical about. Indeed, for all the talk about a new Iran, the two Iranians believed to have planned the 1994 attack — Mohsen Rezai and Ali Akbar Velayati — remain prominent in Iran’s politics today.
Alberto Nisman’s lonely crusade for justice ended the way many feared it would. Let’s not add insult by rushing into a deal with Iran even more dangerous than the one Nisman exposed in Argentina.
