(Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir speaks to the media at the Mideast Peace Conference in Annapolis, November 27, 2007. REUTERS/Jason Reed)
This alleged Iranian terror plot the FBI reported today is really quite something. It reads like any one of the 419 scams in my spam folder meets an episode of 24 or Breaking Bad meets yellowcake and the run-up to the Iraq war. Is this real life, or some Bay of Pigs pre-election-year hallucination?
The FBI’s own synopsis is here. Snip:
The criminal complaint alleges that, from the spring of 2011 to October 2011, Arbabsiar and his Iran-based co-conspirators, including Shakuri of the Qods Force, have been plotting the murder of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. In furtherance of this conspiracy, Arbabsiar allegedly met on a number of occasions in Mexico with a DEA confidential source (CS-1) who has posed as an associate of a violent international drug trafficking cartel. According to the complaint, Arbabsiar arranged to hire CS-1 and CS-1’s purported accomplices to murder the Ambassador, and Shakuri and other Iran-based co-conspirators were aware of and approved the plan. With Shakuri’s approval, Arbabsiar has allegedly caused approximately $100,000 to be wired into a bank account in the United States as a down payment to CS-1 for the anticipated killing of the Ambassador, which was to take place in the United States.
The hell?
There’s an interesting Emptywheel post about it here, with some food for thought. A Washington Post item here, and a New York Times piece here, which contains absolutely no lulz at all.
A number of things concern me about this.
One of them is, wait: if all of this business is real, then there are Zetas or whatever just floating around inside the United States, waiting to be hired by miscreant mullahs to just, you know, assassinate dudes inside our borders? The drug cartels have operatives in the US who can be hired to bump people off at the behest of hostile foreign nation-states?
I ask of you, Boing Boing readers, what the shit is this shit?