Iraq Releases Alleged Quods Force Agent After Three Days

By Cernig

Media outlets and neocon bloggers made much of a US military announcement on November 18th about the arrest of an alleged senior Iranian Quods Force agent in Iraq, saying he had been detained by Iraqi authorities. However, Nader Qorbani is now back in Iran and his release raises questions about just how truthful the US military's announcement had been.

Was he an Iranian arms smuggler or did he restore religious sites? Was that white powder he had on him cocaine or salt? Who arrested him, and why was he freed?

Those questions surround the detention of an Iranian man, Nader Qorbani, accused by U.S. officials of being a senior officer of Iran's Quds Force paramilitary unit but who was quietly released Friday after three days in custody.

...U.S. military officials, who heralded Qorbani's Nov. 18 capture with a press release headlined, "Forces detain Iranian involved in lethal aid shipments," said his job was a cover for smuggling weapons into Iraq in boxes of building materials. It said Qorbani was carrying cocaine and was attempting to leave Iraq when he was arrested at the airport.

..."We respected their [Iraqi] sovereignty by complying with their request. Their request was to transfer the individual into their custody," said a military spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Abram McGull.

... Iran's semiofficial Fars News Agency quoted an Iranian diplomat, who was not named, as saying the white stuff found on Qorbani was salt, not cocaine. McGull said the "white powdery substance," about 50 grams' worth, initially tested positive for cocaine but was retested and found to be non-narcotic. He said he did not know what it was.

The Qorbani case might not have seemed so odd but for the U.S. military's initial announcement of his arrest, and then its silence.

In the two days after the announcement, nothing was said about the case until Thursday, when Army Brig. Gen. David Perkins, the U.S. military spokesman, was asked about the man's status.

Perkins said Qorbani had been held for a short period of time and given to the Iraqi government. Perkins described him as a Quds Force officer. He also said, twice, that Iraqi security forces, not U.S., had made the arrest.

McGull later said that a private security company contracted by the United States to work at the airport had detained Qorbani. He said Qorbani was turned over to U.S. forces and held until Thursday, when he was handed to Iraqi officials. He was freed the next day and returned to Iran.

The U.S. has arrested several Iranians in Iraq alleging they were Quods agents. Most have been turned over to Iraqi authorities and promptly released, with the Iraqis saying they were diplomats or Iranians conducting legitimate business in Iraq. Even more Iraqis have been detained on similiar allegations and most are still held by the U.S. Not one has yet faced formal charges or any kind of trial. Meanwhile, the oft-promised "proof" that Iran is massively arming so-called special groups in Iran has never materialized, and a recently revealed US military study found that less than 1% of all weapons found in militant caches in Iraq had an Iranian origin - in particular, none of 350 IED devices found could be sourced to Iran.

The "massive threat posed by Iranian Quods agents in Iraq" narrative is as empty of real, showable, proof as the "massive threat of Iranian arms in Iraq" narrative and the "massive threat of Iranian nukes" one. Yet all three have been widely accepted as fact by the media and Western politicians despite the British military who searched for four years in Southern Iraq saying the first two are unproven and the US intelligence community as well as the IAEA stating clearly that the last is. The legacy of the Iraqi WMD snark-hunt and spurious tales of Saddam/al Qaeda co-operation seems to be that you can fool all of the people all of the time as long as your tale is scary enough.