Two seemingly unrelated events unfolded last week. On Tuesday in Washington, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the stunning disruption of an alleged plot by a former used-car salesman from Texas and members of Iran's Quds Force to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. using the hired muscle of Mexican drug traffickers. Then on Wednesday, a House subcommittee held a hearing on "Narcoterrorism and the Long Reach of U.S. Law Enforcement." By all accounts these were separate phenomena. Yet both center on the same question: Is narcoterrorism the latest, greatest threat to U.S. national security? Or are we moving toward a redefinition of huge tracts of criminality as terrorism?
The U.S. Justice Department representatives insist the alignment of the hearing and the announcement of the arrest were completely fortuitous. But, on Wednesday, the hearing before the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade, originally slated to discuss Afghanistan, Mexico and Colombia (countries at the front lines of the drug war), was dominated by Iran. Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Brookings Institution fellow who testified, said, "The Republican side of the committee, in particular, [was] very focused on Iran's activities in Latin America and very concerned about it, and doesn't think the U.S. is taking a tough enough position on that."(See whether Iran really plotted to kill an ambassador.)
Indeed, apart from being bizarre, the alleged Iranian-Mexican conspiracy to detonate explosives in Washington managed to expand the definition of narcoterrorism, conflating it with another strain of radical politics. The term dates back to the Pablo Escobar era of Colombia, but it has recently found new currency in American politics on the campaign trail among Republican candidates. Originally, it described the bombings and targeted killings employed by the Medell?n cartel against the Colombian government in the late 1980s. As invoked by Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry in debates and stump speeches, the term refers to the violence from cartels along the U.S. border as the of-the-moment national-security threat. That is in addition to the post-9/11 definition, which posited that terrorist groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda were bankrolling their operations with profits generated from partnerships with drug-trafficking organizations. Now the allegations against the Iranian-American used-car salesman Manssor Arbabsiar and five supposed co-conspirators have trammeled another American b?te noire into the mix.
Felbab-Brown worries that the debate on narcoterrorism may suffer in a rush to draw evidence from the Arbabsiar allegations. "I think it will be fodder for the very simplistic argument that terrorists and criminals should no longer be considered separate, that they all should be considered part of this monolithic, homogenous mess," she told TIME.(Read about how the plot is uncharacteristic of Iran's hit men.)
Before the hearing began, subcommittee chairman Ed Royce of California and Congressman Ted Poe, a Texas Republican and a subcommittee member, cited the case as evidence of the need to secure the U.S. border from the cartel threat. By the time the hearings got going, the subject had expanded from border security to U.S.-Saudi relations and sanctions on Iran. Poe applauded the Arbabsiar arrest and called for the U.S. government to "verbally support the Iranian freedom fighters in their efforts to change the regime in Iran."
The U.S. attorney prosecuting the case made it clear that politics played no role in announcing the indictment. "The timing of [Tuesday's] charging decision was based, as in every case, exclusively on operational and law-enforcement considerations," said Ellen Davis, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York. Arbabsiar, who is accused of conspiring to murder a foreign official and several counts related to the murder-for-hire scheme, was held for 14 days before being brought before a judge and the charges were announced. During that time, according to a letter prosecutors wrote to the judges supervising the case, the Iranian American provided "extremely valuable intelligence." "Federal law-enforcement agencies are vigorously and expeditiously pursuing leads relating to the defendant's statements, the results of various criminal search warrants, and other information obtained in this investigation," federal prosecutors wrote in a letter dated Oct. 6.
Read about the political fallout between the U.S. and Iran.
Manhattan's U.S. attorney has been making the case that narcoterrorism poses a unique danger to the U.S. since 2007. Working with the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) multiagency Special Operations Division ? and empowered by a new, vastly broadened view of American jurisdiction ? federal prosecutors have built an impressive roster of sting cases that have netted suspects all over the world, from Liberia and Romania to Togo and Honduras; among these is Viktor Bout, the alleged arms merchant nicknamed the Lord of War, whose trial in New York City began on Thursday.
The Bout case has endured controversy from the outset. After his 2008 arrest in Bangkok, American and Russian officials fought through Thai courts for custody of the accused arms dealer. Following his extradition to New York, the federal judge overseeing his case initially found that the DEA Special Operations Division agents who arrested and interrogated Bout "were not credible" in certain instances and had made "false" representations to Bout. (For reasons that are not yet clear, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, later rewrote her filing, removing the language that directly accused the DEA agents.) (See "Hiring Narcos to Murder the Saudi Ambassador? If It's True, Tehran Is Pretty Dumb.")
Like the Arbabsiar allegations, many of the other cases pursued by the DEA in the Southern District of New York reverberate through diplomatic and national-security circles. In one case, accused Afghan drug lord Haji Juma Khan was charged with aiding the Taliban and was taken to lower Manhattan to face charges. In pretrial motions, the federal government successfully invoked state secrets and national-security privilege concerning the evidence. (Nearly three years have passed, and Khan has yet to face trial.) A case announced this summer involves an Iranian, Siavosh Henareh, accused in a drugs-for-weapons deal implicating Hizballah in Lebanon.
Sabrina Shroff, the federal public defender representing Arbabsiar, sees his indictment within this legal continuum. "There seems to be a thread running through these cases ? from Haji Juma Khan to Viktor Bout to Siavosh Henareh to this case. Whether the thread is the [Special Operations Division] or the now routine international stings or another thread, that is only visible to law enforcement," says Shroff. "It is a dangerous one that ensnares and uses individuals without regard for their rights under our Constitution." (Read about whether Iran is a terrorism threat in the U.S.)
The Arbabsiar case stands out from the others in its category. Unlike in nearly every other narcoterrorism sting pursued, the DEA almost immediately handed over its informant to the FBI, limiting its role in the investigation. The crimes attributed to Arbabsiar in the indictment appear to have been initiated by the accused in the U.S. ? in this case, Texas, a state at the center of a political battleground on the issue of border security. Still, like most of the other cases, the ultimate question is likely to hinge on the credibility of the party that turned Arbabsiar in. A former DEA agent, Mike Levine, who now serves as a covert-investigations instructor and expert witness on law-enforcement procedures in criminal and civil trials, says the evidence as presented in the Arbabsiar indictment "doesn't seem logical" and warned that an outlier to the case is the Mexican narcotrafficker informant. "Agents want the informant to be successful because they want the case to be successful," Levine says. "A common flaw of investigators is agents looking the other direction of any information that will make their informant look bad." He notes a strange aspect of the case: "DEA, of all agencies, are best at handling informants, yet DEA gave the informant over to the custody of the FBI." But this case was strange from the moment it was made public.
Read about Obama's pledge to punish Iran.
See photos of Obama in Saudi Arabia.
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