Israel Matzav

Time claims Mossad behind Iranian assassination

Time Magazine is claiming that the Mossad was behind Wednesday's assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan.

Like three previous Iranian scientists ambushed on their morning commute, the latest nuclear expert to die on his way to work was a victim of Israel's Mossad, Western intelligence sources tell TIME. Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, an expert on a phase of uranium enrichment, perished on a Tehran street on Wednesday after an assassin in a passing motorcycle attached a magnetized explosive to the side of his Peugeot 405. "Yeah, one more," a senior Israeli official said with a smile. "I don't feel sad for him."

Wednesday's attack followed the pattern of previous operations planned by Mossad and carried out over the past two years by Iranians trained and paid by Israel's spy agency, according to intelligence sources. The targets were chosen from the ranks of scientists seen as crucial to Iran's nuclear effort — the country's top physicist, Majid Shahriari, was killed by a magnetized bomb in October 2010 — then shadowed for weeks to determine their routines and points of vulnerability.

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Israel is officially silent on the incident. However, its top spokesman for the country's military posted this on Facebook: "Don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but for sure I am not shedding a tear." The Obama Administration insisted it had nothing to do with the attack. "The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this," National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor declared. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made her denial of U.S. involvement "categorical."

The contrast in responses reflects the good-cop, bad-cop roles the allies have assumed in the international effort to dissuade Iran from pushing ahead with its nuclear program. While Washington leads the global effort to press economic sanctions on Tehran, Israeli leaders frequently make thinly veiled suggestions that it may not be able to restrain itself from launching military action on Iran; they also never bother to deny a leading role in covert efforts to slow the nuclear program. In addition to the assassination campaign, Western intelligence sources say Israel was responsible for the massive explosion at a missile base outside Tehran in November.

Let's suppose for a minute that all this is true. I would think that Americans would be happy about it. I would think that Americans want Iran stopped, and that they would rather it happen this way than via a full scale (nuclear) war. Am I missing something? Time seems awfully sympathetic to the Iranians.

And if the sanctions don't work?

"Because stopping a nuclear Iran is so important, we've said this before and I'm saying it again, all options are open. All the possibilities." said Shapiro. "And I'll say more than that, we are examining these possibilities actively, and we are drawing up the necessary plans to ensure that all these options exist, and I'm not ruling out any option. President Obama has clearly said that he will do everything and take every necessary step to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons, and I don't think that it has anything to do with the timing of the elections or any other political issue, it's important to a lot of these issues."

Caspit said he asked the ambassador what he meant by "planning the options," and whether they are also training for the implementation of these options, as foreign reports say the Israeli air force has been doing for some time. "Shapiro was quiet, and then said that America doesn't need all that much training: 'We have a massive military presence in the Persian Gulf, right?'"

Some of you may recall that earlier this week, I was critical of Secretary of State Clinton for denying US involvement in Roshan's assassination rather than just saying "no comment." If Obama really means what he says about Israel being a US ally (and I honestly don't believe that he means it, but I believe that most of the American people do mean it), the two countries should be acting like a married couple with a unified approach to everything that's going on. That means letting the Iranians think that everyone is out to get them unless they stop pursuing nuclear weapons. Somehow, Time Magazine doesn't seem to see it that way.

Labels: Iranian nuclear threat, Mossad, sabotage

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:50 AM