Imad Mughniyah: Allegation as Fact

Senior Hezbollah military leader, Imad Mughniyah, was killed in Damascus on 12/2/08 when his vehicle exploded. A persistent Israeli/US charge for many years has been that Iran/Hezbollah were behind the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, and that Mughniyah had "orchestrated" the attack.

Contrast the different approaches to the allegation by Fairfax and Murdoch:

Fairfax: "Israel blames him for bomb attacks against its embassy and a community centre in Argentina in 1992 and 1994." Israel braces for retaliation after Hezbollah chief killed, Ed O'Loughlin, SMH, 15/2/08

Murdoch: "Mughnieh had been a high profile Israeli target since he led two attacks on Israeli interests in Argentina in 1992 and 1993." Divided Beirut turns out to mark death of slain leaders, Martin Chulov, The Australian, 15/2/08; "In 1993, Mughnieh orchestrated the attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and a later bombing of a Jewish centre in the Argentinian city." Slain terrorist stayed in shadows, Martin Chulov, The Australian, 16/2/08

O'Loughlin merely reports the allegation. Chulov reports the allegation as fact.

[Notice too the discrepancy between O'Loughlin and Chulov when it comes to dates. Predictably, Chulov's dates are wrong. The bombing took place, not in 1993, but 1994. In addition, he gets the year of the earlier bombing of Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires right (1992) in his first report, but wrong (1993) in his second. Where pro-Israel propaganda trumps factual reporting, however, as it generally does in the Murdoch press, screwing up dates is a mere bagatelle.]

The allegation will, of course, continue to be presented as fact in the Murdoch press and myriad other pro-Israel propaganda outlets, especially on the internet. For what it's worth, however, anyone interested in the truth should consult Gareth Porter's 18/1/08 investigation for the The Nation, Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up. Porter's is a model of investigative journalism. The entire article can be accessed at:- http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/porter

Here is Porter's introduction to whet your appetite:-

"Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration's pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush's latest tactic is to play up a 13-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city's Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing 86 and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina 'serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular, Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies'.

"This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by the General Assembly of Interpol, which voted to put 5 former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader [Imad Mughniyeh] on the international police organization's 'red list' for allegedly having planned the July 1994 bombing. But the WSJ reports that it was pressure from the Bush Administration, along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats that secured the Interpol vote. In fact, the Bush Administration's manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly in line with its long practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case against its geopolitical enemies.

"After spending several months interviewing officials at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires familiar with the Argentine investigation, the head of the FBI team that assisted it and the most knowledgeable independent Argentine investigator of the case, I found that no real evidence has ever been found to implicate Iran in the bombing. Based on these interviews and the documentary record of the investigation, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the case against Iran over the AMIA bombing has been driven from the beginning by US enmity toward Iran, not by a desire to find the real perpetrators."

Now, Mughniyeh might not have had anything to do with the AMIA bombing, but did you know about his "alleged role as the terrorist 'mastermind' behind the planning for Hezbollah's July 2006 war with Israel..?" (Chulov again, 16/2/08) No? Neither did I!

Let us deal with this (unsourced, of course) sweeping allegation that Mughniyeh had planned a war against Israel in 2006: Hezbollah had planned to abduct Israeli soldiers - but for a prisoner exchange, not a war. In fact, Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is on record as saying that "We had not forseen, not even to one-hundredth, that the hostage taking would lead to a war of that scope...it was not possible that a reaction to a hostage taking reaches such proportions." [Quoted in The 33-Day War by Achcar & Warschawski, p 33] Tragically, it seems Nasrallah wasn't aware of Moshe Dayan's dictum: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." No, the planning for a war with Hezbollah was actually the other way around. In the words of Ron Pundak, Director-General of the Peres Center for Peace: "Hezbollah gave them a wonderful option to do something the army was already prepared to do, with a well-constructed operational plan on the shelf." (Achcar & Warschawski, p 35)