The AMIA Saga Is Not Some Long-Ago and Safely Buried Horror

I greatly appreciate the responses by Matthew Levitt and Ben Cohen to my essay on the catastrophic July 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center (AMIA) in Buenos Aires. Each of these responses, in its distinct way, reinforces and expands upon my analysis in “The Shameful Cover-Up of the Worst Attack on Diaspora Jews Since the Holocaust.”

Noga Tarnopolsky’s response, by contrast, is skeptical both of my arguments and of me. And so, in what follows, I’ll largely focus on her comments, discussing areas of agreement and, especially, disagreement between us while on occasion enlisting support from Levitt and Cohen.

Where Tarnopolsky and I agree can be quickly stated: we agree in our assessment of Cristina Kirchner. As president of Argentina from 2007 to 2015, Kirchner was a disaster for any hoped-for but long-delayed investigation either of the 1994 bombing or of its predecessor in Buenos Aires, the 1992 bombing of the Israel embassy. Most egregiously, Kirchner undertook actively to bury any such investigation, once and for all, by means of a 2013 “memorandum of understanding” with the mullahs of Iran. Only two years later, the special prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who in a series of reports since 2006 had charged Iran with responsibility for the attack, and who was on the point of revealing damning evidence of Kirchner’s own role in the cover-up, was murdered, raising serious and still unresolved questions about the role played in his murder by that disputatious and palpably dishonest Argentinean president.