Category Archives: UN United Nations Fraud Corruption

9500 Visas Revoke Due to Terror,Where are they? Don’t Know

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FNC: The Obama administration cannot be sure of the whereabouts of thousands of foreigners in the U.S. who had their visas revoked over terror concerns and other reasons, a State Department official acknowledged Thursday.

The admission, made at a House oversight hearing examining immigrant vetting in the wake of major terror attacks, drew a sharp rebuke from the committee chairman.

“You don’t have a clue do you?” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Michele Thoren Bond, assistant secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs.

Bond initially said the U.S. has revoked more than 122,000 visas since 2001, including 9,500 because of the threat of terrorism.

But Chaffetz quickly pried at that stat, pressing the witness about the present location of those individuals.

“I don’t know,” she said.

The startling admission came as members of the committee pressed administration officials on what safeguards are in place to reduce the risk from would-be extremists.

At issue is how closely the U.S. government examines the background of people seeking entry to the country, including reviews of their social media postings.

Leon Rodriguez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told committee members that such checks aren’t being done in an abundant manner, and he was not specific about when or how it would occur.

Lawmakers are trying to ascertain which safeguards are in place to ensure that extremists are not exploiting a variety of legal paths to travel to the United States.

One of the San Bernardino, Calif., shooters came to the U.S. on a K-1 fiancee visa last year despite the fact that the FBI believed she was already radicalized.

Tashfeen Malik came to the U.S. on a K-1 fiance visa in July 2014 and passed multiple background checks and at least two in-person interviews, one in Pakistan and another after she married Syed Farook. FBI Director James Comey has said Malik and Farook communicated privately online about jihad and martyrdom before they married.

Lawmakers at times angrily pressed officials on why even public social media wouldn’t routinely be looked at for vetting those trying to enter the country.

“If half the employers are doing it in the United States of America, if colleges are doing it for students, why wouldn’t Homeland Security do it?” said Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. “We don’t even look at their public stuff, that’s what kills me.”

DHS did launch three pilot programs specifically aimed at reviewing social media postings as part of the immigration vetting process.

“There is less there that is actually of screening value than you would expect, at least in small early samples, some things seem more ambiguous than clear,” Rodriguez told lawmakers Thursday. He said foreign alphabets frequently used in social media posts were a challenge to translate.

“We all continue to believe there’s a potential for there to be information of screening value … particularly in high risk environments,” he added.

Both DHS and the State Department are reviewing the process for vetting visa applications, including the K-1 program, and have been directed by the White House to create specific recommendations for improvements.

DHS is specifically reviewing policies on when authorities at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services can look at social media posts as part of the process for evaluating applications for certain visas.

“There are some legal limits to what we can do,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Wednesday. He added that he thinks reviews of social media should be done more often, but did not provide specifics.

During his opening remarks Chaffetz, said: “It is unclear how someone who so openly discussed her hatred of our country and way of life could easily pass three background checks. We need to understand how the breakdown happened with Malik and what we are doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Lawmakers have also pressed for changes to the Visa Waiver Program, which allows many citizens from 38 countries to travel to the United States without being subjected to the in-person interview required to receive a visa. Many fear that foreign fighters who carry western passports will be able to exploit that system to travel freely to the United States.

Earlier this month the House voted overwhelmingly to tighten controls on that program and require visas for anyone who has been to Iraq or Syria in the last five years. Security changes to the program were also included in the Senate version of a massive spending bill expected to be approved later this week.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Hearing on Immigration and Visas December 17, 2015

PURPOSE:

• To review the screening process for foreign nationals entering the United States, including the ability to review social media as part of the vetting process.
• To assess the likelihood of foreign nationals exploiting the U.S. immigration system and examine vulnerabilities within that system.
• This hearing is a follow-up to an Oversight Subcommittee hearing last week, where a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official was unable to answer basic questions on the Agency’s ability to vet, track, and screen individuals who arrive in the United States.

BACKGROUND:

• Foreign nationals seeking to enter the U.S. must ordinarily obtain either an immigrant visa or a nonimmigrant visa. A third category of foreign nationals seeking entry into the U.S. are refugees, who enter under refugee status.
• An exception to the rule is the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), where an individual who seeks entry to the U.S. must apply for, and receive, a visa before entering the country. Currently, nationals of 38 countries can enter the U.S. without first obtaining a visa under the VWP.
• Under current law, two departments—the Department of State and DHS—play roles in administering the law and policies on immigration visas.
• In light of the attacks in San Bernardino, CA, Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Subcommittee Chairman Ron DeSantis (R-FL) sent a letter to DHS seeking information relating Tashfeen Malik’s entry into the U.S. on a fiancée visa.

 

Witnesses and testimonies

Name Title Organization Panel Document
The Honorable Anne C. Richards Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration U.S. Department of State Document
The Honorable Michele Thoren Bond Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Consular Affairs U.S. Department of State Document
The Honorable Alan Bersin Assistant Secretary for International Affairs, Chief Officer for the Office of Policy U.S. Department of Homeland Security
The Honorable Leon Rodriguez Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Related Documents

Name Document
Credible Fear Claims Document

POTUS a Shiite? Anti-Israel Evidence….

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Congress Rejects Obama Move to Restore Funding for Anti-Israel U.N. Group

FreeBeacon: Congress has rejected a request by the Obama administration to restore U.S. funding for a United Nations organization long criticized for its anti-Israel bias, according to sources on Capitol Hill.

The Washington Free Beacon disclosed earlier this week that the Obama administration was pressuring lawmakers on Capitol Hill to restore around $80 million in annually funding to the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, otherwise known as UNESCO.

Taxpayer funding to the organization was slashed in 2011 after UNESCO accepted Palestine as a member state, a move that violated U.S. law barring the funding of any U.N. group that skirts the peace process by prematurely admitting Palestine as a full member nation.

However, the State Department petitioned Democratic lawmakers on the Senate’s appropriations committee to restore UNESCO’s funding and grant the administration authority to provide an additional $160 million to help erase accrued debts.

The administration argued that the lack of funding was harming the United States’ credibility at UNESCO and contributing to a rise in anti-Israel actions, such as a recent move to label Jerusalem’s Western Wall as a Muslim holy site.

The State Department requested that a waiver be added to the Senate’s version of a sprawling yearly spending bill set to be approved by Congress before year’s end. However, that request was killed off by lawmakers and did not make its way into the final text of the bill.

The administration’s effort to restore UNESCO funding, despite a law banning it, raised concerns among Republican leaders and prompted several to take a stand against it.

Sen. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), who spearheaded efforts to block the funding waiver, told the Free Beacon that Republican leadership in the Senate took a bold stand by rejecting the administration’s request.

“I thank congressional Republican leadership for working with Senator [Marco] Rubio and me to uphold a 25-year-old law and stop the Administration from air-dropping back-door funding to UNESCO, the U.N. organization whose anti-Israel member states have granted membership to the non-state actor of ‘Palestine’ and provocatively tried to designated the Western Wall in Jerusalem as a Muslim holy site,” Kirk told the Free Beacon in a statement.

German Jihadist Gives Testimony, Islamic State

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Back from the ‘Caliphate’: Returnee Says IS Recruiting for Terror Attacks in Germany

Photo Gallery: An IS Returnee Opens Up

Islamist extremist Harry S. wasn’t in Syria for long. But during his stay there, he claims, Islamic State leaders repeatedly tried to recruit him to commit terror attacks in Germany. Security officials believe he could be telling the truth.

Spiegel: It was an early summer morning in the Syrian desert, with not a cloud in the sky, when Mohamed Mahmoud asked those gathered around him: “Here are some prisoners. Which of you wants to waste them?”

Not long before, Islamic State (IS) had taken the city of Palmyra, and now jihadists from Germany and Austria were to participate in the executions of some of the prisoners taken in the operation. They drove to the site of the executions in Toyota pick-ups, bringing along an IS camera team in order to document the atrocity in the city of antique ruins. Even then, Mohamed Mahmoud was known to German security officials for his repeated propaganda-video calls to join the jihad. On that early summer day in Palmyra, though, he didn’t just incite others. He grabbed a Kalashnikov himself and began firing. That day, Mahmoud and his group of executioners are thought to have killed six or seven prisoners.

The story comes from someone who was in Palmyra on that day: Harry S., a 27-year-old from Bremen. “I saw it all,” he says.

Harry S. returned to Germany from Syria and is now in investigative custody. He has told security officials everything about the brief time he spent with Islamic State and has also demonstrated his readiness to deliver extensive testimony to German public prosecutors. He stands accused of membership in a terrorist group. His lawyer Udo Würtz declined to offer a detailed response when contacted, but said of his client: “He wants to come clean.”

German investigators are extremely interested in the testimony of the apparently repentant returnee, even as they are likely unsettled by what he has to say.

A Vital Witness

Harry S., after all, is more than just a witness to firing squads and decapitations. He also says that on several occasions, IS members tried to recruit volunteers for terrorist attacks in Germany. In the spring, just after he first arrived in Syria, he says that he and another Islamist from Bremen were asked if they could imagine perpetrating attacks in Germany. Later, when he was staying not far from Raqqa, the self-proclaimed Islamic State capital city, masked men drove up in a jeep. They too asked him if he was interested in bringing the jihad to his homeland. Harry S. says he told them that he wasn’t prepared to do so.

Harry S. was only in IS controlled territory for three months. Yet he might nevertheless become a vital witness for German security officials. Since the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, fear of terrorism has risen across Europe, including in Germany, and security has been stepped up in train stations and airports. And the testimony from the Bremen returnee would seem to indicate that the fear is justified. Harry S. says that, during his time in the Syrian warzone, he frequently heard people talking about attacks in the West and says that pretty much every European jihadist was approached with the same questions he had been asked. “They want something that happens everywhere at the same time,” Harry S. says.

Harry S.’s path from the Bremen quarter of Osterholz-Tenever to the jihadists of Islamic State was not particularly remarkable. His radicalization was similar to many other young, directionless men from European suburbs, from the Molenbeek district of Brussels to Lohberg in Dinslaken. In Tenever, some of the residential towers are up to 20 stories tall.

Harry S. is of interest to German security officials also because he claims to...

Harry S. is of interest to German security officials also because he claims to have met Denis Cuspert (the former Berlin rapper known as Deso Dogg), and Mohamed Mahmoud, an Austrian Islamist thought to have a leadership role within Islamic State.

The son of parents from Ghana, Harry S. grew up in “difficult conditions,” according to a court file. His father left the family just as he was entering puberty. Even though Harry S. initially only managed to graduate from a lower tier high school in Germany, he dreamed of returning to his parents’ homeland and working as a construction engineer.

There was even a brief moment when it looked as though he was going to get control over his life. But then, in early 2010, he and some friends robbed a supermarket, getting away with €23,500, and flew to the island of Gran Canaria for a vacation. It wasn’t long before the authorities were on to them and Harry S. was sentenced to two years behind bars for aggravated theft.

A Dangerous Radical

In prison, he met a Salafist named René Marc S., the “Emir of Gröpelingen” — a man who Bremen officials consider to be a dangerous radical. It didn’t take long before prison officials noticed a “change in character” in Harry S. According to prison records, he converted to Islam and expressed “radical sentiments” about world events. After his release, the new convert visited the Furqan Mosque (which has since been shut down) in the Gröpelingen neighborhood of Bremen. At the mosque, he became part of a Salafist clique which sent at least 16 adults and 11 children to Syria in 2014.

Harry S. tried to make the journey as well. From Istanbul, he flew in April 2014 to Gaziantep, a large Turkish city near the border with Syria, but his trip came to a premature end. Turkish authorities arrested him and sent him back to Bremen, where he told police that he had wanted to help out in Syrian refugee camps. The authorities didn’t believe him and confiscated his passport in an effort to prevent him from making another attempt. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, he was required to report to the local police station.

But the authorities were still unable to prevent the Salafist from traveling to Syria to join the war. Harry S. simply grabbed an acquaintance’s passport and, with another Islamist from Bremen, traveled overland via Vienna and Budapest. This time, there were no police waiting for him at the border to Syria. Instead, he was met by smugglers who brought him across the border to an IS safe house set up for new arrivals from around the world.

Harry S., a large man with broad shoulders, was trained as a fighter in Syria. He claims to have been drilled in training camps together with 50 other men: sit-ups, hours of standing in the sun and forced marches lasting the entire day. Those who gave up were locked up or beaten. His Kalashnikov, it was driven home to him, should become like his “third arm” and he was told to keep the weapon in bed with him while sleeping.

Once he finished training, he says he was to become a part of a special unit, a kind of suicide squad for house-to-house combat. Harry S. claims that, during his brief time in Syria, he was never sent into battle — but he claims to know many young men, including Germans, who died in battle. “Luckily, I managed to get away,” he says.

Notorious German-Speaking Jihadists

The insights of the Bremen convert into Islamic State are of interest for security officials. Harry S. is the first returnee who can offer insight into the roles played by two notorious German-speaking jihadists who have joined Islamic State: Mohamed Mahmoud, an Islamist from Austria, and the former Berlin rapper Denis Cuspert (aka Deso Dogg). Rumors that they were recently killed in Syria have thus far not been confirmed by German officials.

Mahmoud initially attracted attention in Vienna for his radical Internet postings and spent four years in prison there. He then moved to Germany, where he founded a Salafist group called “Millatu Ibrahim” together with Cuspert. The association was banned by the German Interior Ministry three years ago, whereupon several members went underground, only to reappear as members of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Harry S. met both Cuspert and Mahmoud in Raqqa. He sat together in a mosque with Cuspert and says the former rapper had just come back from the front. S. said his impression was that Cuspert was more important to Islamic State as the “hero” of propaganda videos used to attract Western recruits than as a fighter. Mahmoud, he said, had more influence and would hold ideology training sessions on Fridays in Raqqa. Mahmoud, Harry S. says, is “really dangerous,” adding that he had never before met such a disturbed person. After the executions in Palmyra, S. says, Mahmoud was proud of what he’d done.

SPIEGEL was unable to confirm everything that Harry S. said. But many of the details he mentioned are consistent both with the findings of security officials and with the testimony of other terror suspects.

‘Walked and Walked’

Plus, there is proof of the executions in Palmyra that Harry S. claims he saw. In the summer, Islamic State released a five-and-a-half minute video that was edited in some parts like a horror film. It was the first German-language execution video released by IS and it depicts two men kneeling between antique columns with Mahmoud and another Islamist from Germany standing behind them, weapons in hand. “Merkel, you dirty dog,” Mahmoud calls into the camera. “We will take revenge.” Then they shoot the prisoners in the head; a jihad hymn plays in the background.

Harry S. likewise makes a brief appearance in the video. Clad in camouflage, he carries an Islamic State flag across the picture. His defense attorney Udo Würtz says that his client didn’t directly participate in the executions. “He is a lackey who allowed himself to be misled by the propaganda of IS and who misled himself.”

Shortly after the executions in Palmyra, Harry S. began his journey out of Syria and back to Germany. He says he could no longer stand all of the violence. Despite his great fear that Islamic State could pursue and kill him as a traitor, he left secretly one evening and made his way to Turkey. “I walked and walked,” he says.

When Harry S. landed in Bremen on July 20, the police were waiting for him — with a warrant for his arrest.

102,000 Syrian Refugees on Elm Street, USA

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ISIS seeks many small attacks, crowdsources terrorism – FBI director

Addressing the NYPD Shield conference in New York City on Wednesday, Comey compared the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) to a hydra, a mythic monster that grew two new heads for every one that was cut off.

.@FBI Director Comey at the NYPD Shield Conference now thanking the NYPD for being good partners.pic.twitter.com/Jkpo2MpTkD

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews)

Unlike Al-Qaeda, which was more centralized and focused on major acts of terrorism, IS has “has become the leader in global jihad by this crowdsourcing of terrorism” through social media platforms, the FBI chief said.

Comey also used the speech as an opportunity to push his anti-encryption agenda, telling the audience that encrypted messaging makes terrorist “go dark” to law enforcement.

Encryption is “at the center of terrorist tradecraft,” he said, urging for more surveillance capability in the name of fighting terrorism.

Echoing his remarks in the wake of the San Bernardino attack, Comey said that Americans should not live in a “disabling state of fear” but should channel their anxiety into a “healthy awareness” of their surroundings.

Asked about the San Bernardino attackers, Comey said the FBI was still trying to understand where they were in the four hours between the holiday party shooting and the shootout with police, if there was anything else they were planning to do, and if anyone else was helping them.

“We still have not seen evidence… that they were part of an organized cell of some sort, or that there were other parts to this plan,” the FBI chief said.

As lawmakers clash over refugees, Syrian immigration quietly tops 100,000 since 2012

FNC: A proposal to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees to the United States has ignited a bitter debate in Washington, but more than 10 times that number of people from the embattled country have quietly come to America since 2012, according to figures obtained by FoxNews.com.

Some 102,313 Syrians were granted admission to the U.S. as legal permanent residents or through programs including work, study and tourist visas from 2012 through August of this year, a period which roughly coincides with the devastating civil war that still engulfs the Middle Eastern country. Experts say any fears that terrorists might infiltrate the proposed wave of refugees from United Nations-run camps should be dwarfed by the potential danger already here.

“The sheer number of people arriving on all kinds of visas and with green cards, and possibly U.S. citizenship, makes it impossible for our counterterrorism authorities to keep track of them all, much less prevent them from carrying out attacks or belatedly try to deport them,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies.

“I think it’s reasonable to assume that the U.S. Government ran the minimum intelligence traces required at the time of entry.”

– Fred Burton, Stratfor

Numbers obtained from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection show 60,010 Syrian visa holders have entered the U.S. since 2012, including 16,245 this year through August. Additional numbers provided by a Congressional source showed another 42,303 Syrians were granted citizenship or green cards during the same period.

“It is highly unlikely that the 102,313 Syrians who were admitted over the past three years were effectively vetted,” said spokesman Ira Mehlman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “Even in countries where we have a strong diplomatic presence, the sheer volume of background checks being carried out precludes the kind of thorough vetting that is necessary.”

The Syrians being admitted are coming directly from their homeland, usually through the U.S. visa program, as opposed to the refugees President Obama is seeking to take in through U.N.-run refugee camps. Most have secured legal entry before they arrive.

“Refugees are part of the admitted category,” said Jaime Ruiz, spokesman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “Their cases are approved prior to arriving into the U.S.”

Those who escaped Syria’s grinding civil war, which has killed an estimated 300,000, and made it to the U.S. are more likely to be those with the money and means to access the U.S. immigration bureaucracy, say experts. But even that system is susceptible to fraud.

President Obama’s proposal raised immediate concerns that ISIS, which vowed to infiltrate refugee camps, could use forged documents to enter the U.S. White House assurances that refugees would be carefully screened met with renewed skepticism after it was revealed that terrorist Tashfeen Malik obtained a fiancée visa despite notable red flags. Malik, who together with her husband killed 14 and wounded 21 in a terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., Dec. 2, listed a phony Pakistani address and reportedly had a history of posting jihadist messages on social media platforms.

Malik’s entry into the U.S., combined with so many Syrians already here, is even more concerning than the proposed refugees, according to Fred Burton, of the global intelligence firm Stratfor.

“I’m more fearful of those currently inside the U.S. predisposed to strike locally as with the San Bernardino model,” Burton said. “I think it’s reasonable to assume that the U.S. government ran the minimum intelligence traces required at the time of entry.”

Mehlman said the same concerns raised in regard to the refugees – mainly that no reliable documents can be issued in a country in complete meltdown – apply to the Syrians already here.

“All civil order has collapsed, and meaningful background checks are impossible,” Mehlman said. “Instead, we rely on cross-checking databases. However, many people with ties to terrorist groups are not in any databases, which means there is no way we can identify them before they arrive here.”

A government official who expressed astonishment at such large immigration numbers from a relatively small country, said approximately half are legal permanent residents and the remainder came here on visas, the latter of which remains a point of contentious concern.

Screening of all immigrants and refugees must be tightened, said Rep. Mike McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

“This administration has forbid our front line security professionals from more broadly incorporating social media information into the visa application process, something that might have kept this attacker out of our country,” said McCaul, R-Texas. “We need more robust vetting and screening of all visa applicants.”

Additional data obtained from CBP found that while five Syrians have been apprehended in 2014 and another five in 2015 attempting to cross over the southern border from Mexico, the northern border escapes public and political scrutiny. In 2014 eight Syrians were apprehended by Border Patrol attempting to cross into the U.S. from Canada. Given the visa waiver agreement with Canada, there is no reason to sneak across the border. Since 2011, 1,229 Syrians have been granted entry from Canada.

Ollie North with the Peshmerga vs. Islamic State

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By the way, the Peshmerga are Muslims.

Obama’s non-war and the consequence on humanity versus Islamic State:

TheHill: A U.S. aircraft carrier passed through the Suez Canal on Tuesday, creating a presence that will allow the U.S. to ramp up airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The USS Harry S. Truman is due to arrive in the Persian Gulf right around Christmas, where it will begin striking the terrorist group, a Navy official told The Hill.

The Truman and its accompanying carrier strike group will join the French aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle in the Gulf, which reportedly arrived earlier this month.

The U.S. has steadily increased airstrikes against ISIS, with November hitting a high of 3,271 bombs, according to U.S. Central Command statistics.

Twisted logic designed by the Obama White House and the new ISIS Czar:

    President Obama’s new ISIS czar said yesterday that resolving the Israel Palestine conflict is necessary to defeating Islamist extremists. Rob Malley, senior advisor to Obama “for the Counter-ISIL Campaign in Iraq and Syria” and White House Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, said at a New York conference that the conflict enables ISIS in two ways. Extremists “refer constantly” to the situation of Palestinians. So they would lose a recruiting tool if the matter were resolved. And the failure to resolve the conflict makes it “very difficult” to get “the kind of open cooperation that we really need to get changes on the ground”– because Saudi Arabia and other states can’t work openly with Israel as matters stand. Malley said that resolving the conflict was not a “magic wand” to ending problems in the Middle East, but asked if ISIS’s next stop was going to be Gaza or the West Bank, he went on: I don’t know where the next stop will be but I think there’s a more basic point, which is that the absence of a resolution is fueling extremism. If you want to go to Gaza that’s self-evident. Whether ISIS is going to have a foothold there.. that’s a separate question. But I think it stands to reason that resolving this conflict would at least help, it wouldn’t resolve– but it would be a major contribution to stemming the rise of extremism, and to allow the kind of cooperation that is needed [to take on] what should be a common challenge, which is the challenge of ISIS, and of other extremist organizations.

As Oliver North described in the video above, the Baghdad government is directed by Iran, a rogue nation sponsor of terror of which Obama and John Kerry have normalized relations forcing the world to accept the whole Tehran regime.

But what about our own hemisphere?

Iran Taking Over Latin America

by Joseph Humire

  • “This is a matter of life or death. I need you to be an intermediary with Argentina to get help for my country’s nuclear program. We need Argentina to share its nuclear technology with us. It will be impossible to advance with our program without Argentina’s cooperation.” – Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
  • According to Venezuelan informants, whitewashing Iran’s accused from the AMIA attack was only a secondary objective in its outreach to Argentina. The primary objective was to gain access to Argentina’s nuclear technology and materials — a goal Iran has for more than three decades.
  • During the last 32 years, Iran has achieved a resounding success in promoting an anti-US and anti-Israel message in Latin America. Its state-owned television network, HispanTV, broadcasts in Spanish 24 hours a day, seven days a week in at least 16 countries throughout the region.
  • The lifting of sanctions and influx of billions of dollars as a result of Iran’s nuclear deal will undoubtedly help Iran in Latin America, where many countries face economic turmoil and can use an Iranian “stimulus.”
  • While Latin America is often regarded as a foreign policy backwater for the United States, it is the geopolitical prize for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

During the last couple months, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been playing a political tug of war over Latin America. On November 10, 2015, Iran’s deputy foreign minister held a private meeting with ambassadors from nine Latin American countries to reaffirm the Islamic Republic’s desire to “enhance and deepen ties” with the region. This was followed by similar statements from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) in Tehran later that month.

The same day, the Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel al-Jubeir, presided over a South American-Arab world summit in Riyadh. FM al-Jubeir, while Ambassador to the United States in 2011, had himself been the target of an Iranian-Latin American assassination plot. Read the full summary complete with citations here.