In the fall of 2010, Clizbe was summoned from his Northern Virginia home to a restaurant at Baltimore-Washington International Airport for lunch with a Department of Defense contractor named Kerry Patton. The two had grown friendly on an email list affiliated with the International Association for Intelligence Education. The lunch was Patton’s idea; he wanted Clizbe to meet a mentor of his, Wayne Simmons. Simmons had served in the C.I.A. for 27 years and appeared regularly as an analyst on Fox News. He was ‘‘all Kerry could talk about,’’ Clizbe recalls.

Though Simmons had become well known to people in that right-wing media circle, Clizbe didn’t know his name. He never encountered Simmons during his days with the C.I.A. — it’s a massive, compartmentalized organization, after all — and he didn’t have cable TV. Still, Simmons and Clizbe should have had plenty to discuss. Their political leanings were similar enough. Simmons claimed to be ‘‘far right of Attila the Hun.’’ But something about Simmons didn’t sit right with Clizbe.

Over lunch, it seemed to Clizbe that Simmons was oblivious to the routine ‘‘butt-sniffing’’ that C.I.A. veterans routinely engage in: questions about time spent at the ‘‘Farm’’ and about stints in war zones. Simmons said he had operated separately from Langley; he hinted at brazen operations against drug cartels, opining on the painful isolation of an operative’s existence. ‘‘ ‘You and me, we know what it’s like,’ ’’ Clizbe recalls him saying. ‘‘ ‘It’s how we have to live our lives.’ ’’

Clizbe added: ‘‘He was so full of bluster that anybody who hadn’t been in the C.I.A. would have had their socks knocked off. But the things he said were so not C.I.A.’’ ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/magazine/the-plot-to-take-down-a-fox-news-analyst.html

article | posted January 18, 2008 (web only)

Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up

...Bernazzani admitted to me that until 2003, the case against Iran was merely "circumstantial." But he claimed a breakthrough came that year, with the identification of the alleged suicide bomber as Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Lebanese Hezbollah militant, who, according to a Lebanese radio broadcast, was killed in a military operation against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon in September 1984, two months after the AMIA bombing. "We are satisfied that we have identified the bomber based on the totality of the data streams," Bernazzani told me, citing "a combination of physical and witness evidence." But the Berro identification, too, was marked by evidence of fabrication and manipulation...

In September 2004, a Buenos Aires court acquitted Telleldin and the police officials who had been jailed years earlier, and in August 2005 Judge Galeano was impeached and removed from office. But Galeano's successors, prosecutors [font color=blue]Alberto Nisman[/font] and Marcelo Martinez Burgos, pressed on, hoping to convince the world that they could identify Berro as the bomber. They [font color=darkred]visited Detroit, Michigan[/font], where they interviewed two brothers of Berro and obtained photos of Berro from them. They then turned to the only witness who claimed she had seen the white Trafic at the scene of the crime--Nicolasa Romero.

In November 2005, Nisman and Burgos announced that Romero had identified Berro from the Detroit photos as the same person she had seen just before the bombing. Romero, on the other hand, said she "could not be completely certain" that Berro was the man at the scene. In court testimony, in fact, she had said she had not recognized Berro from the first set of set of four photographs she had been shown or even from a second set. She finally saw some "similarity in the face" in one of the Berro photographs, but only after she was shown a police sketch based on her description after the bombing...

Despite a case against Iran that lacked credible forensic or eyewitness evidence and relied heavily on dubious intelligence and a discredited defector's testimony, Nisman and Burgos drafted their indictment against six former Iranian officials in 2006. However, the government of Néstor Kirchner displayed doubts about going forward with a legal case. According to the Forward newspaper, when American Jewish groups pressed Kirchner's wife, Christina, about the indictments at a UN General Assembly in New York in September 2006, she indicated that there was no firm date for any further judicial action against Iran. Yet the indictment was released the following month.

Both the main lawyer representing the AMIA, Miguel Bronfman, and Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, who later issued the arrest warrants for the Iranians, told the BBC last May that pressure from Washington was instrumental in the sudden decision to issue the indictments the following month. Corral indicated that he had no doubt that the Argentine authorities had been urged to "join in international attempts to isolate the regime in Tehran."

A senior White House official just called the AMIA case a "very clear definition of what Iranian state sponsorship of terrorism means." In fact, the US insistence on pinning that crime on Iran in order to isolate the Tehran regime, even though it had no evidence to support that accusation, is a perfect definition of cynical creation of an accusation in the service of power interests.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/porter

Democracy Now! ‏@democracynow 2 hours ago

El Salvador: 4 Former Soldiers Arrested for 1989 Murders of 6 Jesuit Priests http://owl.li/Y5bD8