Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said this morning that Iran may have more plots underway in addition to the abortive plot to assassinate a Saudi Arabian ambassador in the United States.
“Do you think there are other ongoing plots,” Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday asked Feinstein, “in other countries?” Feinstein replied that “there well could be,” adding that she “[doesnt] think this is just an isolated thing that suddenly came up.” Feinstein also noted that the head of the Iranian force responsible for the assassination plot “is reported to be very close to the supreme leader [Ayotollah Khameini of Iran],” while acknowledging that the United States has no evidence linking Khameini to the plot.
Feinstein said she’d like to see the United States sanction the Iranian central bank, which might have an adverse affect on their oil exports. Feinstein agreed with Wallace that the sanction “would mean we blacklist any foreign country or company that does [business] with the central bank.”
Feinstein explained her support for such sanctions with a brief summary of Iranian misdeeds and terrorist links:
Apart from such an Iranian change, “we are on a collision course,” Feinstein said. She added that “our country should not be looking to go to war” given our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I think we should be looking to stop bad behavior, short of war.”
