In the wake of the much-heraldedFBI sting that supposedly foiled a dastardly plot by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard elite Qods Force – involving a bumbling, failed used-car salesman’s botched attempt to hire a reportedly Mossad-trained Mexican drug cartel – to blow up the Saudi ambassador in a crowded but fictitious Washington D.C. restaurant, a duly alarmed U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security convened an urgent hearing on “Iranian Terror Operations on American Soil.” As evidence of Tehran’s supposed threat to the Homeland, the Committee heard testimony from “expert witnesses” who could best be described as propagandists for Israel. Commenting on the partisan line-up, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations remarked, “If it wasn’t so serious, it would be satire.”

...Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, in his accustomed role as unofficial surrogate CIA spokesman, has thrown light on how the CIA under its new director, David Petraeus, helped craft the screenplay for this week’s White House spy feature...

...Ignatius adds that, “It was this intelligence collected in Iran” that swung the balance, but he offers no example of what that intelligence was....

...The public record shows that former Gen. Petraeus has long been eager to please the neoconservatives in Washington and their friends in Israel by creating “intelligence” to portray Iran and other target countries in the worst light...

...CIA & Mossad abductions & assassinations:

Islamic cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, who was abducted off the streets of Milan, Italy, on Feb. 17, 2003, and then flown from a U.S. air base to Egypt where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year...

In 2009, Italian prosecutors convicted 23 Americans, mostly CIA operatives, in absentia for the kidnapping after reconstructing the disappearance through their unencrypted cell phone records and their credit card bills at luxury hotels in Milan...

Then, there was the suspected Mossad assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh at a hotel in Dubai on Jan. 19, 2010, with the hit men seen on hotel video cameras strolling around in tennis outfits and creating an international furor over their use of forged Irish, British, German and French passports...

...assassinations of senior Iranian nuclear scientists and generals over the last couple of years within Iran itself

...dispatching armed drones to distant corners of the globe to kill...

...five years later, a two-line item in The Washington Post told the truth: a small-time Iranian exile working in Washington for Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, confessed in 1986 that he had dreamed up the hit squads.

Below are two articles by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, founded by former Foreign Service Officers, which has covered the region for 30 years.

That anyone in the DOJ or the US foreign policy establishment would take all this seriously is not plausible. I conclude that this is Obama’s turn to wag the dog as he faces defeat at Romney’s well-manicured hands next year this time.

IPS, Gareth Porter – WASHINGTON, Oct 13, 2011 (IPS) - While the administration of Barack Obama vows to hold the Iranian government "accountable" for the alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, the legal document describing evidence in the case provides multiple indications that it was mainly the result of an FBI "sting" operation.

Although the legal document, called an amended criminal complaint, implicates Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar and his cousin Ali Gholam Shakuri, an officer in the Iranian Quds Force, in a plan to assassinate Saudi Arabian Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, it also suggests that the idea originated with and was strongly pushed by a undercover DEA informant, at the direction of the FBI. 

...Robert Baer, a 21-year veteran CIA operative and analyst, questioned whether the plot was genuine... Hillary Mann Leverett, an adviser on Iran in former President George W. Bush's administration, said this act made no sense, and contradicted Iran's national security strategy... 

...12 of the 18 living ex-chiefs of Israel's two security agencies (Mossad and Shin Bet), have been opposing an open war with Iran and are "either actively opposing Netanyahu's stances or have spoken out against them." So the trick for the right-wing Israeli government has been how to drag the U.S. into this war and make it an American-Iranian confrontation rather than an Israeli-Iranian conflict.

...those who have the most to gain from such a clash are Israel and the Iranian opposition, particularly the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO). [Israel has long been pushing for an attack on Iran; now Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren is pushing the alleged plot.]

...the more important question is then why the U.S. government took the bait and escalated the incident to a dangerous course with uncalculated consequences? 

The alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US does not fit with what is known about the supposed perpetrators.... Could the alleged plot be provocation by an outside agency seeking to start a conflict between Iran and its enemies?