If the Saudi Ambassador Had Been Killed with Fast and Furious Weapons, Would Holder Be an Accomplice?

On October 11, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder held a press conference to announce that FBI and DEA agents had stopped an Iranian plan to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. The men behind the plot were “Manssor Arbab Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri.” And of these two, only Arbabsiar has been arrested.

The plot became known when Arbabsiar traveled to “Reynosa, Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas, and negotiated a $1.5 million payment for the assassination of the Saudi ambassador.”

Unbeknownst to Arbabsiar, the contact he made in Mexico was a DEA informant. And soon thereafter, with the help of the FBI, the DEA office in Houston launched an investigation that appears now to have ended successfully.

It’s important to note there were also bombing plots allegedly associated with these plans. Thus the criminal complaint filed against Arbabsair and Shakuri accused “the men of conspiracy to murder a foreign official; conspiracy to engage in foreign travel and use interstate and foreign commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire; conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction: specifically explosives; and conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism.”

Ironically, during his press conference on these things, after Holder said the plot was “conceived, sponsored and was directed from Iran,” he actually had the gall to describe crossing international borders to plan and execute crimes as a “flagrant” violation of U.S. and international law.

When he used the word “flagrant,” a few questions arose in my mind:

Was he describing a flagrant violation similar to selling 2,500 weapons to straw purchasers who were going to knowingly pass them to criminals?

Or was he talking about a flagrant violation like we’ve witnessed via the smuggling of those weapons across an international border via gun walking?

Or did he mean flagrant as in the flagrant cover-up of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder with Fast and Furious weapons?

I am just so confused.

Of course, I don’t expect Holder to answer any of these questions, because I watched him walk out of the room following the press conference as soon as the reporters began asking about Fast and Furious.

Yet I still have one more question that I must ask – If the two Iranians had talked to real Mexican cartel members (instead of DEA agents) and if those cartel members had killed the Saudi Ambassador with guns they acquired via Fast and Furious, would Holder be an accomplice to that murder?

After all, Holder owns Fast and Furious.