The volume of commentary may be unprecedented as officials appear to feel that the more frequently and more loudly they accuse the Americans of inventing the plot, the less impact the US charges will have.
Some of the public comments in Tehran seem to have lost touch with reality. For example, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast complained Tuesday that the United States would not allow Iranian diplomats to visit the accused plotter, Manssor Arbabsiar, a dual Iranian-American national. He leveled that complaint 24 hours after State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Washington would allow such consular visits.
For the most part, Iranian officials have been saying that Washington invented the assassination plot in an effort to divert attention from what Iran says are massive anti-government protests raging across America that will topple both capitalism and the US government.
But there have been other inventive explanations. The most interesting came Sunday from the Mehr news agency, which asserted that Ali-Gholam Shakuri, the Qods Force officer charged along with Arbabsiar, was actually a “key member” of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, implying that the plot was actually an invention of that group and that the ignorant Americans had fallen for the ploy.
Mehr said the information on Shakuri came from Interpol. The Iran Times contacted Interpol, which declined to comment. But contrary to the common public belief, Interpol is not a police force and doesn’t conduct investigations. It is simply a liaison agency linking police forces around the globe and sharing information on wanted people.
Mehr said that Shakuri had been sighted in Washington, DC, and at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. But the Iraqi military surrounds Camp Ashraf and doesn’t allow people to enter and leave it.
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi asked the United States to provide the information it had on Arbabsiar and Shakuri so Iran could investigate the case. President Ahmadi-nejad saw the ridiculousness of investigating something Iran was denouncing as phony and said Iran would not investigate the American allegations.
But Salehi also compared the American charges to Nazi propaganda. “They are like the propaganda methods used in the Hitler era—make the lie big enough and loud enough and repeat it over and over again and eventually even you yourself will come to believe it,” he said.
Salehi warned Saudi Arabia against taking the issue to the Security Council. But the Saudis did ask the Security Council to take up the matter, as did Washington and London.
One of the odder responses out of Iran was its denial of having met American officials. The State Department told reporters last week that Washington met with Iranian diplomats at the UN to officially inform them of the case and discuss it. The Iranian mission at the UN denied there had been any contact—since meetings with Americans are a no-no for the Islamic Regime.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner repeated again that diplomats had indeed met face-to-face to discuss the case, but added that the US “didn’t receive a very constructive response.”
Ahmadi-nejad was his usual very quotable self in denying the American accusations. “Only those who don’t have culture and logic resort to assassination. The Iranian people are civilized and cultivated. Why should we go to the United States to assassinate an ambassador from a friendly country. Those who hear of this laugh,” he said.
That comment ignored the 1989 death fatva issued by Ayatollah Khomeini calling on Muslims to kill author Salman Rushdie, the 1980 murder near Washington of dissident Ali-Akbar Tabatabai whose American killer was immediately given sanctuary in Iran, the assassination of former Prime Minister Shahpur Bakhtiar, whose killer was welcomed back to Iran as a national hero after his release from a French prison, and other similar instances of official support for murder.
Supreme Leader Ali Kha-menehi weighed in Sunday. He seemed more concerned with possible American retaliation against the Islamic Republic. “By attributing an absurd and meaningless accusation to a few Iranians, they tried to show that Iran supports terrorism.… This conspiracy didn’t work and won’t work,” he said. “If US officials suffer some delusions, let them know that any unsuitable act, whether political or security, will meet with a resolute response from the Iranian people.” Curiously, he did not threaten a response from the Iranian government, just the Iranian people.
Majlis Deputy Mohammad Dehqani said the US charges were leveled at this time to overshadow the annual anti-American “Disavowal of Pagans” rally that Iran sponsors each year in Saudi Arabia during the hajj. This year’s rally will be held in the first week in November. It will be held inside the Iranian camp with non-Iranians barred, as every year, from attendance by the Saudis.
In Pakistan, the daily Nation quoted an unnamed Pakistani intelligence official as saying Iran would never pick an Iranian to carry out the plot because Iranians in America cannot move about unmonitored by spy agencies.
One of the more curious and memorable denials of the plot came from Hojatoleslam Mehdi Taeb, a hardline cleric, who said, “We have no need to assassinate a Saudi ambassador. If we need to assassinate someone, we have the capacity to assassinate even [Saudi] King Abdullah himself.”