James Mattis, just-retired CENTCOM Commander strongly criticized US for not doing much about an Iranian regime terror plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in a bomb attack on a Washington restaurant in 2011.
At the Aspen Security Forum on July 20, James said, “When we finally caught them in the act of trying to kill Adel, we had a beleaguered attorney general, a fine man but beleaguered politically, stand up and give a legal argument that frankly I couldn’t understand,” he said. “They have been basically not held to account….I don’t know why the attempt on Adel wasn’t dealt with more strongly”. “We caught them in the act and yet we let them walk free.” He added.
At an October 2011 press conference Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced about that plot. According to them It was an Iranian regime’s attempt using a Mexican drug cartel to arrange the killing of the Saudi official, Adel Al-Jubeir, while dining at Cafe Milano in Georgetown.
An Iranian-American living in Texas, Manssor Arbabsiar, and the Iranian regime’s Quds Force official Gholam Shakuri were charged with conspiring to carry out the bombing—which the U.S. officials said was headed off with the help of an undercover Drug Enforcement Agency informant.
Mattis said, “We’ve got to be very careful of avoiding confrontation with Iran because right now with their cyber effort, they’re like children balancing lightbulbs full of nitroglycerin. You get the picture? One of these days they’re going to drop one and it’s going to knock out the London stock exchange or Wall Street because we never drew a line and said, ‘You won’t do it.’…It’s also very important once and a while that we say, ‘This is what we absolutely will not tolerate’.”
Mattis said after his public interview that he did not intend to focus his criticism on Holder, but the overall U.S. response. He said other senior officials should have spoken out to signal to the Iranian regime that the U.S. was taking the matter seriously.
