«There is no way it can be described as something other than anti-Semitic.»
A federal judge in Argentina has indicted former leftist President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner for treason, ordering her arrest for trying to cover up Iran’s possible role in a 1994 bombing killing 85 people, according to Reuters.
“In January 2015, the prosecutor who initially made the accusation, Alberto Nisman, was found shot dead in the bathroom of his Buenos Aires apartment,” Reuters reported. “Nisman said Fernandez worked behind the scenes to clear Iran and normalize relations to clinch a grains-for-oil deal with Tehran.”
The death was classified as a suicide, according to Reuters. “[A]n official investigating the case has said the shooting appeared to be a homicide. Nisman’s body was discovered hours before he was to brief Congress on the bombing of the center.”
The timing of the shooting casts doubt on the circumstances regarding his “suicide.”
Kirchner is currently a senator, so Argentina’s Congress would vote to strip her of parliamentary immunity before her arrest can occur. Judge Claudio Bonadio also ordered the house of arrest of Hector Timerman, who has been foreign minister under Kirchner.
Removing immunity for legislators is rare in Argentina. Congress voted on October 25 to remove immunity for Kirchner’s former planning minister, Julio de Vido, who was arrested that same day, according to Reuters.
The attack occurred on July 18,1994, at the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association’s headquarters. A suicide bomber drove a van full of explosives into the building in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding hundreds more, according to Haaretz.
The association, founded in 1894, is a non-political, Jewish communal organization with employees and possessed a library of rare Jewish books.
At the time of the 1994 attack, the association served a community of 250,000 Jews, the second largest Jewish population in the Americas, second only to the U. S. The headquarters contained 100 years of historical archives. Everything was destroyed in the bombing.
“There is no way it can be described as something other than anti-Semitic,” Haaretz said.
The bombing occurred just two years after 29 people were killed in a car bombing at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.
Bonadio, in his ruling, wrote that evidence “in the case showed Iran, with the help of Argentine citizens, had appeared to achieve its goal of avoiding being declared a ‘terrorist’ state by Argentina,” according to Reuters.
The maximum sentence for treason in Argentina is punishable up to 10 to 25 years in prison.
Kirchner denies all claims of wrongdoing.

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Trump hasn’t reversed Obama’s counter-ISIS strategy, but he has accelerated ISIS setbacks.
WASHINGTON — President Trump said this week that the military has “knocked the hell” out of the Islamic State, adding that the battlefield success is based on his decision to give commanders more latitude in fighting the terror group.
“I want to thank Gen. Mattis for doing such a great job with respect to ISIS,” Trump said, turning to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at Wednesday’s cabinet meeting. “He’s knocked the hell out of them. Of course, I’ve made it possible with what I’ve let you do.”
It’s true that the Islamic State has lost its grip on nearly all the terrain it controlled when it first came on the scene three years ago in Iraq and Syria, but pinpointing credit for that success is more complicated.
What Trump left unsaid was that his administration is pursuing a strategy against the Islamic State, which is also called ISIS, largely formulated under Obama.
“Nothing President Trump did or authorized was a fundamental game changer in the counter-ISIS strategy,” said Jennifer Cafarella, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.
The Obama strategy was designed to support local ground forces in Iraq and Syria with coalition air power, advisers and training. American ground forces are not engaged in direct combat with the terror group.
The United States has deployed about 5,200 troops to Iraq and 2,000 in Syria. Most are serving in advisory or training roles.
The overall strategy hasn’t changed, but Trump’s decision to give field commanders more decision-making authority has accelerated the pace of the campaign, analysts said.
In the past year, ISIS has been driven from Raqqa, its de facto capital in Syria, and Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.
The Islamic State has lost most major towns and cities it once controlled and the remnants are clinging to a string of towns and villages on the Euphrates River stretching between Iraq and Syria.
There are about 3,000 militants left in Iraq and Syria, down from a peak of more than 25,000 in 2014 and 2015.
Trump “delegated authority to the right level to aggressively and in a timely manner move against enemy vulnerabilities,” Mattis said earlier this year, in explaining the president’s changes.
Analysts say the new authorities have allowed commanders to move more quickly to seize the initiative on battles. The Pentagon said it still vets requests for airstrikes carefully, but commanders closer to the battle can now approve those strikes.
Critics had said Obama was too restrictive, requiring White House clearance for even small troop increases or changes in where advisers were on the battlefield.
“Target approval was at too high a level and too slow,” said Michael Barbero, a retired Army lieutenant general who served three tours in Iraq. “That has changed.”
Still, it is nearly impossible to predict how the war with ISIS would have developed without Trump’s changes.
Even before Trump took office, U. S. officers had started making some changes.
Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, who recently completed a tour as the top coalition commander based in Baghdad, issued a directive in December that moved advisers closer to the combat units they were supporting to capitalize on progress Iraqi forces were having in Mosul.
“By putting the advisers further forward with the Iraqis it allowed a lot more agility and a lot more clarity to the decision making,” Col. Pat Work, a U. S. adviser in Iraq, said in an interview after returning to the United States earlier this year.
Airstrikes in Iraq and Syria increased dramatically, but it’s not clear whether that is a result of new authorities or progress ground forces would have ahd regardless. The number of bombs and other weapons dropped in both countries increased 65% to 36,351 in the first nine months of this year over the same period in 2016, according to U. S. military statistics.
Since then, bombing has tapered off as the number of targets in Iraq and Syria have declined. The Pentagon is also considering reducing the number of trainers and advisers in the region.
The chaos of war often makes it hard to identify any single factor for success or failure.
“There was a lot more to this than bombs and there was a lot more to this then any single decision,” Work said.

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