I wouldn’t want to be Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the 28-year-old former US
Marine just recently sentenced to death by a court in Iran after being
convicted of being an American spy.
Former Marine Sgt. Amir Mirzaei Hekmati (left) with US soldiers in an undated photo
Hekmati, who was born in Arizona to Iranian exile parents, and who
grew up in Michigan, is being defended by President Obama, whose White
House spokesman Tommy Vietor, declared, “Allegations that Mr. Hekmati
either worked for, or was sent to Iran by the CIA are false.”
The White
House, not content with that denial, went on to trash the Iranian
government and legal system, with Vietor adding, “The Iranian regime has
a history of falsely accusing people of being spies, of eliciting
forced confessions, and of holding innocent Americans for political
reasons.”
This spirited high-level defense of Hekmati, who was arrested in
late August shortly after he entered Iran, would carry a bit more weight
though, if President Obama himself hadn’t lyingly made the same
statement in person at a press conference last spring, in reference to
Raymond Davis, the man Pakistani police arrested after he had
slaughtered two young men (later identified as Pakistani intelligence
personnel) on a crowded Lahore street in broad daylight.
Despite weeks
of insistence by the White House and the State Department that Davis
was, variously, a consular or embassy employee in Pakistan, and threats
to cut off US aid to the country if he were prosecuted, the US was
eventually forced to admit that Obama had lied, and that he was in truth
a contract worker for the CIA. (
ThisCantBeHappening!, in an
investigative report funded by and run simultaneously by
Counterpunch magazine shortly after the shooting incident, first outed Davis as a US intelligence operative.)
Davis, who was suspected by Pakistani prosecutors of actually being
involved in a campaign of terror bombings in Pakistan, also faced a
possible death penalty for murder and espionage, but was ultimately
released and deported from Pakistan after pleading guilty to the
shootings and paying (with funds provided behind the scenes by the US)
blood money to the families of his victims, in a back-room deal worked
out with the Pakistani government.
Vietor’s second assertion in the Hekmati case, that the Iranian
regime routinely makes false accusations of spying against people, is
laughable, coming as it does from a US government that tortures
captives, that has been bringing false terrorism cases against people at
a prodigious rate, and that is currently holding, in Guantanamo, at
Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and in US prisons, literally hundreds of
people who have been falsely accused of being spies and terrorists.
A videotaped confession released by the Iranian government shows
Hekmati, who also holds an Iranian passport and speaks fluent Farsi,
confessing to working as a spy for the CIA. In that confession, which
was broadcast in Iran, he says he was trained in intelligence work in
the Marines and later at Bagram and by the giant military contractor BAE
Systems, and was to have been maneuvered into a position inside the
Iranian Intelligence Ministry.
That confession tape is being condemned
as a sham by the US. But State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland’s
statement saying, “Allegations that Mr. Hekmati either worked for, or
was sent to Iran by the CIA, are simply untrue. The Iranian regime has a
history of falsely accusing people of being spies, of eliciting forced
confessions, and of holding innocent Americans for political reasons,"
sounds almost comical coming from a government that for many months
tortured Army Specialist Bradley Manning, first in a military jail in
Kuwait where he was prevented from contacting anyone, including a
lawyer, and then at a military prison in Quantico, VA.
Manning’s
prolonged torture, which included being kept stripped naked 24 hours a
day, having to stand naked at attention for inspection outside his cell
each day, being sleep-deprived for days on end, and being held in
solitary, all of which treatment was condemned by a former Marine
commander of Quantico, were all in an apparently unsuccessful effort to
get him to “sing.” The government is desperate to get Manning to
implicate Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange as the instigator who got
Manning to allegedly provide Wikileaks with hundreds of thousands of
embarrassing secret Pentagon and State Department cables, documents and
videotapes, exposing US war crimes and diplomatic bullying.
It doesn’t help Hekmati’s case either that President Obama, a former
Constitutional Law professor who as president is also the commander in
chief of the US military, months ago publicly declared Pvt. Manning
guilty of treason, though Manning had yet to face a military court, and
is still, as of this date, supposed to be presumed innocent.
While Hekmati’s family, the US government, and the Iranian exile
community in the US are all declaring Hekmati’s innocence on the charge
of spying, claiming he had innocently entered Iran to visit his two
grandmothers, both of whom live there, his case does seem a bit
peculiar. This is not just another college professor or journalist
caught up in some political game, or a wayward hiker who mistakenly
crossed the border into Iran.
According to the Associated Press, records show Hekmati served in
the Marines from 2001 to 2005, trained in Arabic at the Army’s language
school in Monterey, California, was deployed to Iraq from April to
November 2004, where he reportedly worked in intelligence, and later, in
2010, worked for BAE Systems Inc, US subsidiary of BAE Systems PLC, a
UK-based military contractor that on its website describes itself as a
“global defense and security company.” The BAE site
says the company delivers a “full range of products and services for
air, land and naval forces, as well as advanced electronics, security,
information technology solutions and support services.”
BAE is heavily involved in the military intelligence field.
AP also reported that Hekmati left BAE after his surprisingly short
tenure there to go to work in some “unspecified capacity” for the U.S.
government--a vague terminology that is usually used for intelligence
agency work. His father, a community college professor in Flint,
Michigan, reportedly told AP that before going to Iran, reportedly to
visit a grandmother who lives there, his son had been working in Qatar
for a company “that serves the Marines.” No further information about
that company or the nature of its work was provided.
The US maintains a huge military base and airfield in Qatar, which,
of course, is ground zero for US military planning for any future attack
on, or conflict with Iran. The US Central Command (CENTCOM), which
would be the command center in any war with Iran, is also located in
Qatar. More to the point, perhaps, Qatar is also where the US Special
Operations Command Central (SOCCENT) is located, which oversees the
secret operations of US Army Rangers, Green Berets, Delta Force, Marine
Corps, US Navy SEALS and pilots of the US Air Force. Various journals
have quoted US government sources as confirming that the US is engaged
in secret operations against Iran, including sabotage and spying, and
the US has also been sending spy drones over the country, one of which
was recently captured by Iranian forces.
Certainly there is good reason to believe that the Iranian legal
system, like the US legal system, is corrupt and unfair, particularly
when it comes to cases involving national security. And I’m not saying
Hekmati is a spy, based on either his conviction by an Iranian court or
on his videotaped “confession.”
I am saying that the denials by the US are every bit as unreliable,
even to the point of being laughable, as are any claims being made by
Iran.
The sad reality is that the US government has become such a cesspool
of lying and disinformation, of torture and forced confessions, and of
corrupted courts and prosecutors, that it no longer has the capacity or
the image of integrity to convince other nations or the people of the
world of the innocence of those American citizens who get caught up in
international spying charges.
If Hekmati is innocent of the crime of spying, he will have to
count on some kind of a Cold War-type spy-swap deal, or on some kind of
diplomatic deal in which the US agrees to stop threatening to bomb
Iran, and agrees to keep Israel’s war-mongers at bay, to deliver him
from lengthy imprisonment or execution. He sure can’t count on moral
suasion from Washington winning his release!
Meanwhile he has to hope that a cynical group of neo-cons and
neo-libs in Washington aren’t merrily plotting to use his execution as
an excuse to do what they’ve been angling at for years: attack Iran.
Addendum:
State Department spokeswoman Nuland's later denial on Wednesday
of any US role in the moving car-bombing of an Iranian chemical
engineer, Ahmadi Roshan, a university professor who was blown up by a
magnetic bomb that was attached to his car in traffic by two men on a
motorcycle, is equally unreliable. With the US claiming the right to
blow up anyone anywhere that the White House decides is a terror
accomplice, why would anyone take the State Department's word on this,
or believe its condemnation of the attack as an unacceptable "act of
violence"? The US is committing much worse "acts of violence" and
mayhem every day in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and other countries with
its drone attacks. Furthermore, as far back as 2008, journalist Seymour
Hersh was reporting in the New Yorker magazine that the US was running a
$400-million covert operation in Iran that included the killing of
targeted individuals, as well as supporting anti-government terror
organizations that operate inside Iran. And in May 2010 the New York
Times reported that Gen. David Petraeus had signed an authorization for
covert operations against Iran and 11 other countries, mostly in the
Middle East. If the killers of Prof. Roshan were not directly on the US
payroll, it's a fair bet that they were linked to US covert actions, or
were working for Israel's Mossad, which is the CIA's partner in the
Middle East. Roshan is the fourth scientist with alleged links to Iran's
nuclear fuel program to have been killed by a sophisticated bomb attack
in what is clearly an organized campaign of targeted assassination.
