Iranian Operatives Planned to Kidnap a Brooklyn Author, Prosecutors Say | Hacker News Reader

Iranian Operatives Planned to Kidnap a Brooklyn Author, Prosecutors Say

nytimes.com

89 pointsent10173 comments

> The Iranian intelligence official [based in Iran] used private investigators to surveil, photograph and video record the author, the government said

It is a shame that the NYT doesn’t include more information about these third party PIs — presumably licensed US investigators?

If you help someone who is planning to commit a crime, that feels like you too have done something wrong. I wonder if the indictment also includes the PIs?

The financial world has had KYC / Know Your Customer laws for a while now. Surely the same goes for PIs, with penalties for helping the bad guys?

Edit: one conspirator was a Californian and has been charged with “providing financial services in support of the plot”, though it’s not clear if they were negligent in due-diligence or an outright Iranian government villain:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/13/iran-intelli...

A PI can be just a guy with a car and a camera though. You can't expect them to be able to handle the degree of regulations banks have. Your link says they were hired under false pretenses.

There's more detail on the allegations here: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/iranian-intelligence-official...

> As alleged, Bahadorifar provided financial and other services from the United States to Iranian residents and entities, including to Khazein, since approximately 2015. Bahadorifar facilitated access to the U.S. financial system and institutions through the use of card accounts and offered to manage business interests in the United States on Khazein’s behalf. Among other things, Bahadorifar caused a payment to be made to a private investigator for surveillance of Victim-1 on Khazein’s behalf. While Bahadorifar is not charged with participating in the kidnapping conspiracy, she is alleged to have provided financial services that supported the plot and is charged with conspiring to violate sanctions against Iran, commit bank and wire fraud, and commit money laundering. Bahadorifar is also charged with structuring cash deposits totaling more than approximately $445,000.

> Farahani, Khazein, Sadeghi and Noori are each charged with: (1) conspiring to kidnap, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison; (2) conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and sanctions against the government of Iran, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; (3) conspiring to commit bank and wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison; and (4) conspiring to launder money, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Bahadorifar is charged with counts two, three and four, and is further charged with structuring, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

Only five states allow private investigators to operate without a license. In many (most?) states, including all of the big ones, they require a degree in criminal justice or equivalent experience in law enforcement to even qualify.

Why do we call it kidnapping instead of extraordinary rendition?

Possibly because the world in general has settled on certain things being lawful, such as the freedom to criticize governments without repercussion, and if Iran wants to go against that trend they can't expect to get the western media red carpet treatment.

> Possibly because the world in general has settled on certain things being lawful

Extraordinary rendition is one of those things the world has settled on as being unlawful.

The actual answer is: when geopolitical allies do distasteful things we use euphamisms, when geopolitical enemies do it, we drop the propaganda pretense.

As I recall, extraordinary rendition occurred precisely because the interrogation techniques they wanted to use were illegal in the US but legal in the other country, which was by the way a willing participant. It may have involved kidnapping or it may not depending on the case, but certainly denotes an important distinction as compared to simply violating some foreign country's laws to bring someone to (your idea of) justice. The zinger simply doesn't fit well here.

> extraordinary rendition occurred precisely because...were illegal in the US

> an important distinction as compared to simply violating some foreign country's laws to bring someone to (your idea of) justice

Is the important distinction you want to make that its only wrong if your violated a different country's laws and not your own (personally i'd view that as worse)? Otherwise i struggle to see what the distinction you're trying to point out here is.

I think OP is saying that it’s “kidnap” when they do it but “extraordinary rendition” when we do it, regardless of what the accusation is. A helpful reminder that we correctly perceive this specific case as intolerable, and therefore we should not also allow our governments to do the same regardless of the euphemism they use

No, the OP suggesting there is a moral equivalence between both when there isn’t.

Why not?

Kidnapping people to face punishment without fair trial seems wrong no matter who does it.

While all (most? many?) extraordinary renditions are kidnappings, not all kidnappings are renditions. The difference is that when doing extraordinary renditions, we are delegating the incarcaration/torture/interrogation of the victim to _some other actor_ specifically so that we can technically not be performing horrible acts. That's what makes it a special kind of kidnapping.

Kidnapping is only one of the ways we ingest people to treat in this manner, if I recall right. Presumably one could be arrested and then renditioned elsewhere -- the rendition is the part where we send someone elsewhere to be harmed in ways that our laws don't permit us to do ourselves.

"Extraordinary" is the part of the phrase that means kidnapping.

Except when the government in question is the US, as with Assange.

Same with terrorism - it’s evil, unless it’s Blackwater.

Right the West would never hire a company like UC Global to spy on a journalist famous for criticizing governments. And they certainly wouldn't encourage them to kidnap or assassinate that person. They deserve for their kidnappings to be called "extraordinary rendition."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8041597/US-plotted-...

This is a crime because it happened in the US, targeting an American. Does the article claim any morality high ground? Are you saying this isn't an indictable crime because every country does the same?

I was replying to a specific post that was discussing the morality of the West.

Though, I think it should also be a crime for the US to plot the kidnapping or assassination of foreign dissidents too.

Wikileaks was created by Assange while he was in the US?

They're talking about Alinejad, Assange isn't an American.

> such as the freedom to criticize governments without repercussion

Edward Snowden

Was extraordinary rendition not performed with the consent of the host country?

Just in Europe, a number of countries have protested the US government coming in without consent and kidnapping people, so the answer is no.

Because everybody knows what 'kidnapping' means, and everybody knows that it's a crime. Not everybody knows what extraordinary rendition means, or that it's a crime. The general public not knowing or caring what "extraordinary rendition" means was even used as a joke in the tv show Archer.

Why not call murder an extraordinary death? Provides different, possibly misleading, information.

From her twitter: https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1415115191084322816

After reading that the Brooklyn author is indeed of Iranian origin, this story made a lot more sense.

It seems that middle east regimes think they can control any of their citizens no matter where they live.

I wonder if the US will impose sanctions on Iran, or if the US administration is not that eager to send that message.

Good that this stuff gets prosecuted. And now we can continue to do that with Turkey, Saudi and every other country not respecting nations sovereignty in doing the same thing with their dissidents abroad.

This comment is hilarious. It highlights Americans selective view of history and ignorance of what their country regularly does.

First time anyone saw me as an American, not sure what to make of it. Now that you mentioned it, the world should never have let the US get away with the war on terror and everything that came with it. But hey, that's the world we live in now, one of our own making.

> This comment is hilarious. It highlights Americans selective view of history and ignorance of what their country regularly does.

Or the GP commenter thought it went without saying that prosecuting other countries intelligence services for this stuff will happen as a prerequisite to prosecuting our own intelligence services for this stuff.

Saudi's murder of Khashoggi in Turkey.

Russia's poisoning of the Skripal's in England.

Now, Iran's attempted kidnapping (probable murder) in the US.

These repressive regimes sure are getting desperate...

Or perhaps they have realized that there are few negative consequences to these actions?

Lately I think a lot about stuff like that (luckily I start a new job tomorrow so I will less time for that). And to me it seems that the West / Nato opened the gates with the war on terror, Guantanamo Bay, secret prisons and everything else. Nobody opposed that, even when own citizens were affected, like happened in Germany. Now a whole lot of people that are a lot more ruthless are using these measures, and the democratic west has no ground to stand on to do anything about it.

> Nobody opposed that, even when own citizens were affected

I know that many of us bridle a bit at that. I recall being furious about it, and writing to representatives, and voting for people who I thought might do less of it. It's deeply frustrating that the results of that seem to have been completely ineffective, but it still hurts to hear that characterized as "not opposing" something.

It's wrong when we did it, and it's wrong when others do.

I was furious as well. With "we" I meant our democracy defending countries and governments. Personally, it took the rise of an alt-right party that got above the 5% limit to win seats in parliament for me to vote again.

Open the gate? If you read about Cold War history you'd find endless stories about kidnapping for political reasons.

One of a more famous example:

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/eichmann-capture...

And a more recent one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Hongwei

Or perhaps you guys just need a history lesson, this is all very mild stuff as far as repressive regimes go.

It’s not like as if they’re deliberately blowing up passenger aircraft https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103

That was in 1988, quite a lot has happened since then. In the aftermath of it, Gaddafi was cowed and sanctioned. Libya became less far provocative and accepted blame for the incident. By the mid-00s, it seemed like the demise or reform of oppressive regimes like Libya was inevitable. America took Libya, still under Gaddafi, off it's list of state sponsors of terror. Gaddafi's reputation never really recovered though, and that reputation probably played a role in his eventual death (nobody cared to save him.) It seemed as though other leaders of repressive regimes were laying low, hoping the same wouldn't happen to them.

What we are seeing now seems like a return to form. Obviously all of this falls well short of the political violence seen in the 20th century. That's not an interesting observation. By that standard, literally everything after WWII has been a huge nothing-burger. That shouldn't stop us from observing worrying trends in the present.

So what changed and when? Russia never stopped assassinating their enemies in foreign countries, Litvinenko was killed in 2006.

Saudis maybe funded 9/11.

I don’t believe there’s been any kind of a return to form, there was never any quiet period. It’s just pure coincidence that a couple of these stories got reported recently.

It remains to be seen if there has been an uptick in such activities. I'd argue that they have never stopped, but most of them are lower profile cases that the mainstream barely notice.

There’s only an uptick in reporting.

The US hadn't recently decorated anyone for blowing up passenger aircraft either, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655.

Desperate? That's a positive spin to put on this. I'd say they're getting bold. They've always done stuff like this, but now they seem to care less about hiding it.

I don't think this is "caring less about hiding it". They lied to the private investigators they were using. I think this is just "getting caught".

Or they have become emboldened because there has been a vacuum in global moral leadership the past 4 years

USA does this all the time. They do it to criminals, but if Iran considers this author a criminal then the kidnap part is not really an issue -

This was securities and mail fraud -

"alleging that he had been illegally abducted by agents of the United States government. Reed claimed that he had been living in Bimini in the Bahamas, engaging in real estate transactions, when CIA agents enticed him by deceitful means upon a private airplane destined not for Nassau, as he had been told, but for Fort Lauderdale, Florida. According to Reed, the agents made him lie on the floor of the small plane for thirty minutes, holding a cocked gun to his head and threatening to blow his brains out."

https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-reed-31

> USA does this all the time. They do it to criminals, but if Iran considers this author a criminal then the kidnap part is not really an issue -

It's criminal because it targeted an American citizen, on American soil. Why isn't that so hard to get? It wouldn't be criminal if it happened in Teheran, since that would be under a different sovereignty.

> It's criminal because it targeted an American citizen, on American soil

This is not true. It's in the article.

She's an Iranian (dual) citizen and no kidnapping would have happened on American soil.

USA does do what you say and kidnaps non American citizens not on American soil. Not sure if Iran ever has.

But both off topic to my point.

Kidnapping is cool or not. America does it all the time. You can be against both countries doing it. Just don't pretend what Iran was going to do was unusual.

It's not hard to get, it's just that it's rather silly - should North Korea have the right to kidnap someone allegedly targeting NK citizens?

The only reason it works is because the US is the bully. Same reason american war criminals and terrorists usually don't get prosecuted.

Amid all the untold negatives of a world returning to great power competition as geopolitics resumes, grass will finally begin to grow over the spot where people used to gather and incredulously recount such basic precepts of power to each other as “might is right” and “do as I say, not as I do, or I will shoot you”.

I think it's important to realise that it's not only the US-hostile regimes that do this.

Not only US-hostile regimes, but the US regime itself!

It seems the headline is misleading in that it implies a kidnapping in the middle of Brooklyn was attempted, but the body of the article says they tried to "lure her to a third country".

I don’t think it’s misleading at all. That’s just not reading carefully

So how did they get the search history and screenshot taken shown as evidence?

This would have been quite the test for the Biden administration. I'm honestly curious what action they would have taken had it succeeded.

This is a line in the sand that the U.S. government should not allow to be crossed going forward. All U.S. citizens anywhere, and anyone on U.S. soil, should be protected. This is one of the very good reasons to have such powerful intelligence agencies and military forces, to literally safeguard freedom.

The U.S. is not a free country if its people have to live in fear of foreign dictators and theocrats. Had she been kidnapped or hurt, Biden would be right to respond with military force against everyone responsible.

Germany on the other hand has an official policy that if you have two passports they will not interfere with the other countries policies whatever they choose to do with their citizen. Canada has had a different stance on that, although arguably still weak, they at least consider their dual citizens abroad to be under their own jurisdiction.

On one hand, the behavior would be different if _literally abducted from German soil_.

On the other hand, the German government has almost no power to project force abroad so it might not matter much (aside from some sanctions or whatever).

Just the casus belli for a war with Iran we were looking for!

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"

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