Spies R Us

Trey Smith

I wouldn’t want to be Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the 28-year-old former US Marine just recently sentenced to death by a court in Iran after being convicted of being an American spy.

Hekmati, who was born in Arizona to Iranian exile parents, and who grew up in Michigan, is being defended by President Obama, whose White House spokesman Tommy Vietor, declared, “Allegations that Mr. Hekmati either worked for, or was sent to Iran by the CIA are false.” The White House, not content with that denial, went on to trash the Iranian government and legal system, with Vietor adding, “The Iranian regime has a history of falsely accusing people of being spies, of eliciting forced confessions, and of holding innocent Americans for political reasons.”

This spirited high-level defense of Hekmati, who was arrested in late August shortly after he entered Iran, would carry a bit more weight though, if President Obama himself hadn’t lyingly made the same statement in person at a press conference last spring, in reference to Raymond Davis, the man Pakistani police arrested after he had slaughtered two young men (later identified as Pakistani intelligence personnel) on a crowded Lahore street in broad daylight. Despite weeks of insistence by the White House and the State Department that Davis was, variously, a consular or embassy employee in Pakistan, and threats to cut off US aid to the country if he were prosecuted, the US was eventually forced to admit that Obama had lied, and that he was in truth a contract worker for the CIA.
~ from White House and State Department in No Position to Issue Credible Spying Denials by Dave Lindorff ~

This story genuinely goes to the heart of much of what we've read and discussed in the Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi, Huainanzi and other Taoist texts: When we don't act out of supreme virtue, we find ourselves in trouble again and again!

This situation is not unlike the circumstance of a child who vehemently denies culpability for breaking mom's favorite lamp, only to admit later that it is indeed true. It places the parent in a difficult situation the next time around when the child again professes innocence at some offense. Why should the child be believed this time?

Of course, Hekmati is in an even worse predicament. Not only has President Obama lied before about the identity of an American spy, but it has been well documented that through the CIA we have spies all over the place. The centerpiece of the current administration's imperialistic thrusts has been covert operations; heck, Obama has bragged about this.

So, even if Hekmati is as innocent as the driven snow, what would lead the Iranians to believe it?