Adam L. Silverman, PhD*
Yesterday COL Lang put up a brief post pertaining to the announcement that the FBI and DOJ had broken up an Iranian Quds Force backed plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador, as well as conduct embassy bombings in DC. While the comments have been very interesting, I tripped across a few other blogs that had some interesting thoughts and analysis on the matter.
The first is from Emptywheel. She's the blogger that actually broke the news story on how many times KSM had been waterboarded and she did extensive coverage of the Scooter Libby trial and the FBI's investigations into the anthrax case. Basically, she spends a lot of time poring over and through material and comparing the sources looking for overlooked material, gaps, etc. This makes sense as she's a non-practicing PhD in Comparative Literature. In this case she went through the criminal complaint and compared the material that the DOJ has released and what has been said in the media availabilities. While she's not making any definite conclusions, she seems to be arguing that this is more of the same from the FBI - find someone that can be manipulated by a confidential informant and then run with it.
Emptywheel drew my attention to a piece by Max Fisher at the Atlantic that I hadn't yet seen that makes the case that doing something like this actually runs counter to what Iran is trying to strategically do in the region and vis a vis the US.
Finally, I went and looked at Professor Juan Cole's take on the whole thing and he seems to thing the golden nuggets of wisdom are to be found within the claim that Arbabsiar could get a lot of Iranian opium to the cartles. Simply, this might have had much more to do with drugs than terrorism.
At this point anyone's guess is as good as mine; none of this makes much sense.
* Adam L. Silverman is the Culture and Foreign Language Advisor at the US Army War College. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Army War College and/or the US Army.
