Iran

In October 1980 Iran created the Organization of Islamic Liberation Movements (OILM) which started to operate as the real machinery for exporting the revolution. Its leader, Mehdi Hashemi, was appointed Commander of a special unit within the Revolutionary Guard Corps (Pasdaran) and from that position he started organizing a structure which contained warfare guerrilla units, initially including Saddam Hussein ́s Iraqi dissidents who, at that time, were refuges in Iran.

It was demonstrated that in 1982 an important seminar was held in the Islamic Republic of Iran, attended by approximately 380 religious men from 70 different countries. This meeting was a turning point on the regime’s method to export the revolution, understood as the cultural, political and religious infiltration promoted to expand a radical and violent vision of Islam. In the seminar, it was concluded that the regime would use violence and terrorism to reach its expansionist objectives. And that is why Javad Mansouri called to turn each Iranian embassy into an intelligence center and a base to export the revolution.

First Commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Javad Mansouri: “Our revolution can only be exported with grenades and explosives”.

Few months after the seminar, the Islamic Republic of Iran sent Mohsen Rabbani to settle in Argentina. This a report sent to Iran by Rabbani from Argentina: “According to our Islamic point of view, Latin America is for us and the international world, a virgin area, that unfortunately, till now, its huge potential has not been taken into account by the Islamic people of Iran. (...) we have a solid support against the imperialism and Zionism intrigues, being an important aid in favor of our presence in the area”.

The indoctrination itself does not only consist in the study of Islam in the students’ home countries but also its continuance in the city of Qom, for which the candidates have to be sponsored and also approved a rigorous selection in which it is examined their religious knowledge and mainly, their commitment to the principles of the Islamic Revolution.

So, what starts as a cultural and religious instruction, in certain cases, ends up in the training of extremist fighters, who may be involved in terrorist operations. Assad Hussein Berro, suicide bomber who crushed a truck full of explosives against a convoy of Israelis soldiers in southern Lebanon in August 8th 1989, was religious and ideologically formed in Qom. The Tunisian Fouad Ali Saleh, convicted for the terrorist attacks in Paris in 1985 and 1986, was a student of religion in Qom; and Mohsen Rabbani, who was in charge of the local logistics in the AMIA bombing, is a professor at Qom.

Hezbollah Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, had been a student at Qom.

Abolghasem Mesbahi: “The religious activity of the Mullahs consists in doing infiltration work in the local communities, surveillance of dissidents and recruitment of people that will be used in the future and who may even kill in the name of religion”.

Mohammad Mehdi Pourmohammadi, accredited as Iranian Ambassador in Uruguay in August 11th, 1987, had criminal records on arms trafficking and was implicated in terrorist activities.

The First Secretary, Ahmad Abousaedi, accredited in Uruguay from April 1st, 1991 to January 23rd, 1995, was identified by witness Mesbahi as a member of the Revolutionary Guards Corps in charge of the local planning in every future attack. Therefore, it is more than suggestive to know for a fact that Abousaedi entered Argentina on June 18th 1994, exactly one month before the AMIA bombing.

Bin Laden
May 03, 2010

A new and vastly different picture of the Al Qaeda leader's life has been emerging over the past few years. In this scenario, he wakes each morning in a comfortable bed inside a guarded compound north of Tehran. He is surrounded by his wife and a few children. He keeps a low profile, is allowed limited travel and, in exchange for silence, is given a comfortable life under the protection of Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

The idea that Bin Laden is in Iran got a strong boost recently with the premiere of a documentary called “Feathered Cocaine.” In it, Alan Parrot, the film’s subject and one of the world’s foremost falconers, makes a case that Bin Laden, an avid falcon hunter, has been living comfortably in Iran since at least 2003 and continues to pursue the sport relatively freely. He is relaxed, healthy and, according to the film, very comfortable.

To make his case, Parrot, president of the Union for the Conservation of Raptors, took two Icelandic filmmakers, Om Marino Arnarson and Thorkell S. Hardarson, into the secretive world of falconers. It's a world in which some birds can sell for over $1 million, and in which the elite of the Middle East conduct business in luxurious desert camps where money, politics and terror intermingle.

Parrot, who was once the chief falconer for the Shah of Iran and who has worked for the royal families of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, still has extensive contacts in Iran and the falcon world. One of those contacts, described as a warlord from the north of Iran and disguised in a balaclava, reveals in the film that he has met Bin Laden six times on hunting trips inside Iran since March 2003. He says the Al Qaeda leader is relaxed and healthy and so comfortable that “he travels with only four bodyguards.”

Their last confirmed meeting was in 2008, Parrot says. “There may have been more since then, but I haven’t talked to my source since we left Iran,” he said.

Parrot told FOX news.com that the extraordinary disclosure by the warlord, who supplies the falcon camps Bin Laden visits on hunting forays, was not done out of altruism. “One of my men saved his life and this was the repayment," he said. "He was asked to talk. He wasn’t happy about it.”

To prove his case, Parrot said he managed to get the telemetry setting for the falcons Bin Laden was flying, and he provided them to the U.S. Government. “They could locate him to a one-square-mile area using those unique signals”’ he said. He says the government never contacted him to follow up.

Parrot's story is supported in the documentary by former CIA agent Robert Baer, an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East and of how the CIA is managed. Baer, the onetime Middle East operative on whom the movie Syriana is based, explains that while he was in the CIA, he used satellites to watch the camps and they proved to be one of the key ways Al Qaeda was funded. He underscored how important falconry is to the vastly wealthy, and how Parrot’s position gave him a unique lens on that world.

Among the other clues are:

Iran accepted 35 Al Qaeda leaders after the fall of the Taliban, despite the schism between Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots and the Shiite regime in Iran.

In February 2009 the U.S. Treasury placed sanctions on several high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives working out of Iran and helping run the terror network.

In 2004 author Richard Miniter, in his book “Shadow War,” wrote that two former Iranian Intelligence agents told him they had seen Bin Laden in Iran in 2003.

In June 2003 the respected Italian newspaper Corre de la Sierra, quoting intelligence reports, reported that Bin Laden was in Iran and preparing new terror attacks.

Some analysts believe the reason Bin Laden switched from video to audiocassettes for his announcements was that he couldn’t find a place in Iran that matched the terrain of northern Pakistan.

In December 2009 it was widely reported that one of Bin Laden's wives, six of his children and 11 grandchildren were living in a compound in Tehran. The living situation was made public after one of the daughters escaped the compound and sought asylum in the Saudi Embassy. It is in this compound, Parrot says, that Bin Laden has found sanctuary.

Parrot said Bin Laden was renowned as an avid falconer who captured most of the falcons around Kandahar to raise funds to support his terror efforts. Each spring wealthy Arabs from the Gulf would fill military cargo planes full of specially equipped Toyota Land Cruisers and other equipment and fly to the falcon camps in Afghanistan. "Usama would arrive and presented the falcons as gifts," Parrot said. "In return, the wealthy princes would leave the cars and equipment with him when they left, giving Al Qaeda a considerable material advantage over others, including the Taliban.”

Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism expert at the White House through two administrations, has admitted in interviews and before the 9/11 Commission that on one of the three occasions the United States was able to place Bin Laden, he was in a falcon camp set up by falcon hunters from Dubai. The CIA requested a cruise missile strike against Bin Laden. Clarke said he stopped the government from firing at the camp because “it didn’t look like an Al Qaeda camp.”

Christian involvement in Hezbollah
December 2011: Prosecutors filed a civil suit aimed at financially punishing American and Lebanese businesses that the government charges were behind a Hezbollah-controlled global network that laundered huge sums in South American cocaine proceeds.

The court action, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks nearly half a billion dollars in penalties from three Lebanese financial organizations — the now-defunct Lebanese Canadian Bank and two Beirut-based money exchange houses — and 30 auto dealers in the United States.

Thursday’s complaint offers fresh details about the workings of what it says was a scheme to launder South American cocaine cash and Hezbollah’s own money, naming the American-based auto dealers and people it says were Hezbollah operatives.

For example, the action charges that Oussama Salhab was a Hezbollah operative in Togo who ran a network that transported cash from cars sold in Benin on flights to Beirut. Prosecutors say he worked with Maroun Saade — suspected of being a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Lebanese Christian political party allied with Hezbollah — who has been charged in a separate case with aiding the Taliban.

Bin Laden in Lebanon
Brummana High School: Around the 1960s and 1970s, after Faisal of Saudi Arabia began to oversee the educations of the children of the Bin Laden family, several of the boys of the family attended BHS.

The students included Khalil bin Laden and Saleh bin Laden. One American researcher, Steve Coll, states that, according to five former administrators and students connected with the school, Osama bin Laden was a student briefly in the mid-1960s. Author Adam Robinson, in his biography of Osama Bin Laden, Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of the Terrorist, also claims that Osama was at the school.

"God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the Towers, but after the situation became unbearable—and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon—I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were those of 1982 and the events that followed—when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way: to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we were tasting and to stop killing our children and women." - Osama bin Laden, 2004

Usbat al-Ansar
According to informed US and Lebanese sources, Mughniyah's collaboration with bin Laden has occurred mainly in conjunction with Usbat al-Ansar (The League of Supporters), a militant Palestinian Sunni Islamist group operating primarily in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in the southern Lebanese port of Sidon and, according to some reports, the Nahr al-Bared camp in northern Lebanon.

The founder of the group, Hisham Shreidi, was once a senior leader of Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya (The Islamic Association) during the war-torn1980s. Al-Jama'a, an urban-based Sunni fundamentalist movement operating mainly in Tripoli, Sidon and Akkar, advocated the establishment of an Islamic political order and called for holy war (al-jihad al-muqaddas) against modern day "crusaders" such as Israel and Lebanon's Christian communities. While Shreidi was renowned for his efforts in fighting Israeli forces in south Lebanon, his active participation in fighting against the Amal movement of Nabih Berri in 1986 led Al-Jama'a to expel him from the organization. After this, Shreidi established Usbat al-Ansar.