Alberto Nisman’s Death and
AMIA: Who Cares About the Truth?
By Ezequiel Adamovsky
February 04, 2015 "ICH"
- On 18 January the Argentine
prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead in
his apartment in Buenos Aires. A few days
before he had returned from his vacations in
Europe and presented a shocking and
unexpected accusation. He claimed that he
had proved that President Cristina Kirchner
and the Foreign Minister Hector Timerman
were in the process of orchestrating a
cover-up in the investigation of Iran over
the 1994 bombing of AMIA (the main Jewish
community center of Argentina) that left 85
dead. He presented his proofs – a lengthy
289-page report – to a federal judge, who
was not able to immediately reveal its
content, as it mentioned Argentine
intelligence agents by name. The opposition
summoned Nisman to the Congress to present
his findings. The meeting, scheduled for the
19 January, was never held, as Nisman died
few hours before.In
the polarized political life of Argentina,
the case was immediately used for political
purposes. The main newspapers and TV
channels, sworn enemies of the government,
sparked doubts over the circumstances of
Nisman’s death, suggesting that he was
either murdered or pushed to commit suicide
in a last-minute attempt to prevent his
presentation at the Congress. Politicians in
the opposition immediately fueled similar
theories. Hundreds of people set to the
streets carrying placards “I am Nisman” (or
“Je suis Nisman” written in French, as an
echo of the Charlie Hebdo demonstrations),
blaming the government for the death of an
honest man who had uncovered its dirty
secrets. “I am Nisman” became trending topic
in social networks, while anti-Kirchner
intellectuals and journalists proclaimed
that the murder/induced suicide of Nisman
was the symbol of the death of the Republic
under Kirchner’s administration. Similar
stories were soon reproduced by the
international media, which used the case as
yet another example of the phantasmal threat
of
Latin American “populism” and for other
purposes (including the
bashing of Obama over his Iran policy).
The government officials
responded clumsily, firstly rushing to
proclaim that it was an obvious case of
suicide (before any forensic analysis of the
evidence), and shortly afterwards claiming,
without any proofs, that it was a murder
ordered by an obscure alliance between rogue
intelligence agents and the owners of
Clarín, the main news corporation of
Argentina. In this explanation, the purpose
of the crime was to destabilize Cristina
Kirchner’s government: the murderers firstly
pushed Nisman to present an absurd
accusation against the president and then
killed him, so as to make it look as a
political assassination. Some of the
pro-government intellectuals and journalists
proclaimed that Nisman’s death was part of a
coup d’état attempt
orchestrated by the USA.
The manipulation of the
information, already epidemic in Argentina,
reached bizarre proportions, as several
people tried to profit from this death for
political or personal purposes. Newspapers
published unreliable or deliberately false
information (such as
Clarín’s allegation that a
source from the forensic investigation said
that the gun that killed Nisman was
triggered at 15cm of the head and therefore
was no suicide). The Buenos Aires Herald
journalist Damian Patcher left the
country in a hurry and found shelter in Tel
Aviv – a city he nevertheless called “home”
– after claiming that his life was in danger
as he had ruined the plans of the government
to conceal Nisman’s death (he was the first
journalist who tweeted that there were
strange movements in the prosecutor’s
apartment, but he did that at a time when
Nisman’s mother and other people were
already there). Patcher’s rather imaginative
story about Argentine spies following him
while he was trying to escape from the
country gained him international notoriety,
but was not even backed by his own
newspaper,
which took it with a grain of salt.
Politicians were not
slower at profiting from Nisman’s fate. To
give but few examples, Sergio Massa (who has
good chances to become Argentina’s next
president), formally requested to be
regarded a plaintiff in the investigation of
AMIA’s bombing and/or of Nisman’s
denunciation – he was unsure of which one he
was talking about –, something that is
legally impossible but gave him some nice
newspaper headlines. The mayor of Buenos
Aires, Mauricio Macri – another favorite for
the next presidential elections – appeared
in a press conference, saying he was deeply
concerned for the future of the Republic and
of the AMIA case. He conveniently forgot
that he appointed Jorge “el fino” Palacios
as chief of the new local police that he
created in 2009. Palacios is currently under
indictment in the AMIA court case,
considered a participant in the crime of
concealment, a role that
was perfectly clear when Macri appointed him.
Macri himself is indicted
in another case for having used his new
police for illegal telephone hearings of,
among others, Jorge Burstein, spokesperson
of one of the associations of relatives of
the AMIA victims, who was leading the
campaign against Palacio’s appointment.
Eight days after the prosecutor’s death, the
versatile Patricia Bullrich – part of
Menem’s troupe at the time of AMIA’s
bombing, now Macri’s ally – had a sudden
recollection. She told a newspaper that she
had had a meeting with Nisman the day before
his death, in which the prosecutor said that
some spy linked to Iran had betrayed him
– she cannot provide any names or additional
information, though – which gained her
invaluable press coverage. Strangely enough,
she had not mentioned that fact in the
several
descriptions of that meeting that she
had offered to the media in previous days.
So what do we really
know about this whole matter?
Who was Alberto
Nisman?
Although he is portrayed
as a man who died looking for the truth,
Nisman was far from being a justice hero. He
was the prosecutor in charge of the
investigation of AMIA’s bombing for many
years and his role there was indeed obscure.
Long time ago, some of the
people who knew the details of that
investigation pointed out that in 1994, from
day one after the bombing, before any single
piece of evidence was produced, Argentinean
president Carlos Menem had agreed with the
U.S. and Israel to blame Iran. For the U.S.
and Israel, it was of an obvious
geopolitical interest. For Menem, whose
international policy was defined as one of
“carnal relations” (sic) with the U.S., it
was not only a matter of pleasing his
friends, but also of covering up himself.
Indeed,
as we later knew, some of the hints of
the initial investigation pointed to the
Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad, who had
financed Menem’s presidential campaign
(Carlos Menem is from a Syrian-Lebanese
family) and was by then deeply disappointed
with his foreign policy and with other
domestic promises that he had not kept.
We still do not have the
slightest clue as to who ordered AMIA’s
bombing. It could well have been Iran. But
the truth is that the Syrian lead was never
examined and that that was a deliberate
decision. The continuity of Israel’s
interest in getting Syria off the hook after
the initial moments and in the past recent
years is not well documented,
but the U.S.’ is. More importantly,
there was a conspiracy to mislead the
investigation of the local complicities, in
which Menem and Juan José Galeano, the first
judge in charge of the case (later removed
and now under trial), among others, were
involved
Alberto Nisman was
instrumental in both forms of judicial
manipulation. As the Wikileaks affair
exposed, he was practically working for the
U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, which was
pushing to leave the Syrian lead in oblivion
and to close the local chapter of the
investigation as soon as possible. Nisman
would take as undeniable facts all of the
“intelligence information” that the embassy
gave him without further examination. He
reported every single of his decisions to
the embassy before informing the new judge
appointed to the case. He even took at least
one of his rulings to the embassy to get it
corrected before presenting it. He simply
ignored the judge, who urged him repeatedly
to pursue other leads apart from the Iranian
and to check with other sources the
information that the US was giving him.
But more importantly,
Nisman was instrumental in the false
accusation forged against a bunch of
Argentinean policemen who had supposedly
helped the Iranians in the bombing, by means
of which Menem and his associates were
hoping to close the local chapter of the
investigation. Argentina’s intelligence
agency SI was in charge of that operation,
which continued under the next presidents
–including Fernando de la Rúa, from the
Unión Cívica Radical, and Eduardo Duhalde,
whose Secretary of Intelligence, Miguel
Ángel Toma, is now Sergio Massa’s close
ally. As Claudio Lifschitz, the man who
exposed the covering-up of the local
connection,
said recently, Nisman endorsed the
accusation against those policemen in full
knowledge that they were innocent. Luckily,
the court in charge of that case dismissed
the whole investigation and demanded a new
one
All this information about
Nisman was perfectly known (for instance, I
referred to his responsibility in the
failure of the investigation in a
2009 newspaper piece). Shortly before he
died two of the associations of relatives of
the victims of the 1994 bombing were openly
saying that Nisman was "part of the old
covering-up maneuvers” (APEMIA)
and that he represented “the interests not
of the victims, but of those who covered up”
the bombing (Memoria
Activa). The sad story is that none of
the main political parties in Argentina was
keen on questioning Nisman’s behavior before
he came up with his denunciation of Cristina
Kirchner.
Santiago O'Donnell, the
journalist who investigated the Wikileaks
concerning Argentina, included large
sections and a whole chapter exposing Nisman
in his books Argenleaks (2011) and
Politileaks (2014). As he recently
explained
in his blog, no newspaper – including
the pro-Kirchner Página 12, where
he still works – was willing to report on
this part of the Wikileaks revelations. Both
the Kirchners and the opposition backed
Nisman wholeheartedly, either because they
did not want to confront American and
Israeli interests, or because it was
comforting to believe in Nisman’s claims
that he had resolved AMIA’s case. Now that
his death is useful for political purposes,
the opposition continues to overlook his
obscure behavior. Even journalists and
intellectuals who are perfectly aware of
Nisman’s past – including top Clarín’s
columnist Jorge Lanata, who
once wrote that the prosecutor’s AMIA
investigation was totally fictitious –
prefer not to mention it these days.
How dangerous is
Nisman’s accusation against the government?
In few words, Nisman’s
argument is that Cristina Kirchner
masterminded a secret plan to absolve
Iranian officials accused of the 1994
bombing in return for deliveries of
much-needed oil from Iran. Having that goal
in mind, in 2013 she obtained approval from
the Congress for an international treaty of
cooperation with that country, known as the
Memorandum of Understanding, that
established a sort of international “truth
commission” with the alleged purpose of
interrogating the suspects in Teheran. The
real purpose – the argument goes – was to
get Interpol arrest warrants against the
Iranian officials dropped, which Foreign
Minister Timerman tried (but failed) to do.
The evidence that Nisman presented in his
report rely almost entirely on telephone
hearings of the alleged agents of both
sides: among others one representative of
the Muslim community in Argentina (speaking
on behalf of the Iranians), the former
piquetero leader Luis D’Elía
(Cristina’s man), and an agent of
Argentina’s Intelligence Agency (SI). No
person in office or with formal ties with
the government was included in the
recordings.
By now, those who made the
effort of reading Nisman’s 289-page report
have concluded that it is of no legal
substance. Even the newspaper
La Nación, a fierce enemy of
the government, had to report that the
denunciation made little sense in legal
terms. And it’s not just a matter of proofs
being unconvincing. Some of Argentina’s
best-reputed jurists said that they could
not even discern which law was supposedly
breached. Even if such plan existed in the
president’s mind, none of the steps towards
implementing it were actually made (which
makes the offense abstract). The only step
allegedly taken was signing the Memorandum.
But an international treaty approved by law
of a Congress, as they explained, can never
constitute a crime. A law can certainly be a
bad law, it can be stupid or harmful, it can
be unconstitutional; but by definition,
passing such law can never be held as a
criminal act.
In terms of the proofs,
Nisman’s report was also weak. As the
Buenos Aires Herald put it, it
“fails to fan flames of conspiracy”.
Immediately after the brief was released,
Ronald Noble – Secretary-General of Interpol
between 2000 and 2014 and mentioned by
Nisman as prospective witness – issued a
strong statement saying that the
prosecutor’s allegations were false, and
that Timerman not only had never sought to
annul the warrants issued for the Iranian
suspects, but that he “passionately”
requested their continuity after the
Memorandum was signed. On the other hand,
after the name was known, the government
informed that the alleged secret agent
recorded in the telephone hearings was not
such thing, and that the SI had filed a
lawsuit against him in the past for
pretending to be one.
As for Luis D’Elía, he is
a notorious member of the kirchnerist
movement. In 2003 Néstor Kirchner had
appointed him in a minor position in his
government, but D’Elía was asked to resign
in 2006 after he voiced his support for
Iran’s controversial president Mahmud
Ahmadinejad. Since 2006 he has had no formal
place in government, although it is true
that he consorts with important state
officials. A well-known pro-Iran speaker, in
the telephone hearings he appears promoting
the end of the sanctions against the
Iranians, promising forthcoming results, and
showing off his good connections with the
government. A notorious man often accused of
being an anti-Semite (even
by renowned members of the government)
and scorned by the press every second day,
he is an unlikely choice for the role of an
International Man of Mystery. Even the
CIA believes, according to Clarín,
that Nisman’s denunciation is inconsistent
and that D’Elía should not be taken
seriously.
Finally, the whole purpose
of the conspiracy that Nisman denounced
sounds weird. After many years actively
endorsing Argentina’s case against Iran in
all the international forums, in 2013
Cristina Kirchner suddenly changed her mind
and started to mastermind a secret plan to
leave Iran off the hook. What for? For oil,
Nisman argued. But Argentina does not need
or import oil in relevant quantities and it
has never imported it from Iran (as, for
technical reasons, Iran’s oil cannot be
processed in Argentinean refineries). When
the country had to import oil in the past it
did it from other sources, such as Bolivia,
Nigeria or Angola. Argentina does import
large quantities of fuel oil and gas from
other countries but not from Iran, which is
not even capable of exporting such items.
So how did Nisman
die?
The judicial investigation
has not concluded yet, so basically nobody
knows anything on solid grounds. The
evidence analyzed so far has concluded that
Nisman died of a gunshot triggered at less
than 1cm of his head, and that it came from
the gun that was found under his body, in
the bathroom where he died. The rest of the
evidence analyzed so far strongly suggests
that Nisman killed himself: the door of the
bathroom was closed and blocked by the
prosecutor´s own body and there is no
evidence that the corpse could have been
moved there from some other place. No-one
else’s DNA was found in the bathroom and no
relevant hint of a murder was yet presented.
If it was suicide, then the investigators
will have to check if it was somehow induced
or if, as some commentators have argued, it
was the reaction of a desperate man who
understood that the denunciation he had just
presented was not going to convince anyone
and that his career was sinking (Ronald
Noble’s statement discrediting his
allegations and the criticism of APEMIA and
Memoria Activa were aired just before his
death).
If it was an induced
suicide, a key person to resolve the mystery
seems to be Diego Lagomarsino, the man who
took the killing gun to the prosecutor’s
apartment few hours before the death.
Lagomarsino was one of Nisman’s closest
associates, and he claims that he lent the
weapon at the request of the prosecutor, who
told him that he needed it in case “some
lunatic attacked him on the street”.
Nobody knows who Lagomarsino really is, but
two informants have already said that he
worked
in the intelligence business.
Of course, murder cannot
be dismissed as a hypothesis. After all,
Nisman was working in a case in which the
Argentinean intelligence agency (SI) and the
CIA were involved and had strong interests
of their own. Suspected framed suicides are
not unknown to Argentina or to other
countries, including the US or the UK (take
for instance the recent cases of
Theodore S. Westhusing and
David Kelly, both related to Middle
Eastern affairs). Although assassination is
a rather common practice among
CIA agents, no hints indicate that the
US may have been involved this time (at
least not directly).
As for the SI, it has been
out of control for a long time. A month
before Nisman’s death, the government had
decided to purge it, by removing several
agents, including its chief-in-the-shadows
Antonio “Jaime” Stiusso. Stiusso had been
working at the SI since 1972 and
was highly appreciated by the CIA and the
Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency).
Besides, he was Nisman’s main source of
information in the AMIA case for the past
ten years, as the prosecutor publicly
acknowledged several times, and also in his
recent denunciation against the Cristina
Kirchner. The government is now pointing to
Stiusso as the hidden hand behind Nisman’s
death, and has now decided to dissolve the
SI altogether and create a wholly new
intelligence agency under the supervision of
the Congress. Other non-kirchnerist voices
have
also pointed to Stiusso and even the
CIA allegedly believes that Nisman’s
death is somehow related to internal
disputes within the SI.
Again in this case,
politicians of all persuasions seem to have
discovered now that the SI is out of control
(with the exception of Miguel Angel Toma,
who
set out to support Stiusso, which seems
to confirm earlier speculations that the
agent is now
working for Sergio Massa). But many of
them profited from its services in all these
years and
turned a blind eye when Gustavo Béliz,
one of Néstor Kirchner’s Ministers,
denounced Stiusso in 2004 for using
illegal telephone hearings to blackmail
magistrates and politicians (after that
Béliz
was asked to quit and felt he needed to
live abroad for a decade).
In the past several years
the Congress special commission in charge of
monitoring the activities and budget of the
SI was almost inactive. That commission is
composed by deputies and senators of all
political parties; after 2010 it was
presided by an anti-kirchnerist.
These are some of the
awkward facts behind a story in which the
distinction of good and evil is a lot more
complicated than it first appears.
Unfortunately, the majority of the local and
international voices that we have heard so
far seem to be primarily interested in
Argentina’s coming elections and/or in the
future of the Middle East. Finding the truth
about the two most important issues at stake
here –AMIA’s bombing and the circumstances
of Nisman’s death– is not the main point in
their agenda.