Why Does Argentina Keep Shielding Iran?
There remains an unsolved murder mystery.
When heads of state gather, as they did for the United Nations General Assembly last week, you have a choice: Tune out, or prepare to be bathed in blather, boilerplate, and blatant lies. That said, the remarks of Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner deserve at least a few minutes of our undivided attention.
Her biggest whooper: “[I]n Argentina, my government, our government will tirelessly continue seeking the truth and justice in the AMIA case.”
The AMIA case, you may recall, was the most lethal act of terrorism in the Americas prior to Sept. 11, 2001. On July 18, 1994, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires (the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina) was suicide-bombed, killing 85 people and wounding more than 300.
The evidence, of which there is no shortage, leads to one conclusion: Iran’s rulers ordered the mass murder; Iran’s proxy terrorist organization, Hezbollah, carried out the mass murder; and in recent years, Argentine officials at the highest levels have been involved in a cover-up of the mass murder.
Coincidently, influential Washington types last week filled the Newseum’s Annenberg Theater for the premier of “Los Abandonados” (“The Abandoned”), a compelling film directed by Matthew Taylor that tells the story of the bombing, and of Alberto Nisman, the intrepid federal prosecutor who spent a decade investigating the case. Nisman was shot and killed on Jan. 18—the day before he was scheduled to present a 300-page report and testify before Argentina’s congress. He had become convinced that Kirchner was herself implicated in the cover-up.
Initially, Kirchner alleged that Nisman had committed suicide. Later, she and her allies said he had indeed been murdered, but perhaps by a jealous lover or a rogue Argentine intelligence operative whose motive was to discredit her. In her address at the U.N. last week, Kirchner said only that “prosecutor Nisman” had “passed away.”