06/03/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist from IPS News.
That's Interpress Service, IPSnews.org, and also we keep his archives at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back as always.
It's good to have you here.
Listen, right before I went on the air, I got this in the e-mail box.
And you know what happens.
You're going to send me an e-mail.
You've got to expect a phone call and an interview request.
This is brand new for IPS.
It will very soon, if it's not already, be on Antiwar.com.
The article is called Report Ties Dubious Iran Nuclear Documents to Israel.
It's at IPSnews.net right now.
This is in relation to the old accusations about the smoking Iranian laptop that you and so many others have already debunked, Gareth?
Exactly, yes.
This is harkening back to an old story, which will be familiar to many of your listeners, I'm sure.
Basically, what prompted this story is that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a report last month, early in May, in which they essentially reported on interviews with unnamed foreign intelligence analysts and didn't name the country or countries which the unnamed analysts were affiliated with.
But interestingly, Associated Press, a couple of days after the issuance of the report, came out with a story which mentioned one country and one country only, and that was Israel, in which some of the interviews took place.
And since there was only one foreign analyst who was actually quoted in the piece, it's a pretty clear indication that it was the Israeli intelligence official, a high-ranking Israeli intelligence official, who was being quoted.
Yeah, but what's the problem?
I mean, surely the Senate report, being official and everything, read just like a Gordon Prather article, right?
Well, yeah, exactly.
That's what one would expect if you don't have any understanding of the way the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee operates.
So what was wrong with it?
What was wrong with the Senate report that they apparently got from the Israelis, Gareth?
Well, I think the problem is that there's no political will or ability to provide the kind of critical context in which to interpret what is being said by the interlocutor, in this case a high-ranking, described as a high-ranking allied intelligence official, who basically said that the Iranian documents, which have been called the alleged studies documents by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the laptop documents, for those of us who are following it from outside, the intelligence collection which deals with the alleged nuclear weapons work that Iran was supposed to be doing before 2003, that these documents included blueprints for what were referred to as nuclear warheads.
So this is a rather spectacular, astounding argument or assertion, I should say, which was indeed given a good deal of play.
The Washington Post had an article about it.
It was in Fox News.
So millions of people obviously have now read this story and have reinforced the idea that the Iranians had already gotten blueprints for nuclear weapons before they stopped their alleged nuclear weapons work.
Well, it's just like Groundhog Day.
It's not just that you're back on the show, but you're back on the show and we're having the exact same conversation we had at least more than a year ago about the New York Times, Broad and Sanger.
I won't elaborate about them because time is short.
Broad and Sanger got this wrong, and David Albright, the guy who might as well be Broad and Sanger as far as I can tell, corrected them quite sharply, and it was all over the Internet.
It was a long, very pointed article disputing that phrase and saying, listen, a reentry vehicle is not a nuclear warhead.
And, by the way, the smallest nuke that the Iranians could conceivably ever have wouldn't be able to fit in this delivery vehicle anyway, pal.
Well, exactly.
This is the conflation of two very different things, which the unnamed, obviously Israeli, interlocutor gave to the Senate committee staff.
And, you know, had the committee staff either had its wits about it or had the political will to distinguish truth from falsehood, they would have recalled the New York Times using the same phrase, nuclear warhead, to refer, in fact, as you point out, to reentry vehicle.
And that's exactly what this foreign intelligence official was trying to do.
He was trying to confuse the matter by suggesting that, in fact, Iran did have blueprints for a nuclear warhead at a time when, you know, this was supposedly part of an Iranian nuclear weapon project.
So what this reveals, the real story here, what you're saying is that this is not new.
That's correct.
What is new, however, is the revelation by this unnamed official that we had the same blueprint from other sources.
That's a rather interesting revelation.
And what it does is to reinforce other information that I've gotten, which indicates that Israeli intelligence is, in fact, the source of what we've been calling the laptop document.
And I'm saying that because, in the story I report, an analyst on nuclear weapons based in the United States refuses to be named, but who is very familiar with the laptop documents or the alleged studies documents and who tells me that, in fact, these documents were not found together, originally, on this laptop that supposedly turned up in a European country, which was given to U.S. intelligence.
Which, you know, pretty much anybody had already been able to deduce anyway.
Scott Ritter wrote that great article about, if this is so legitimate, why won't you let the computer forensics team have a go at it and see when these files were created and saved and all these things that a computer forensics team at the CIA can tell you.
They don't want a record of that because they know it's a bunch of bull.
This is the other side of the picture, which is that there are very serious doubts about the veracity, the authenticity of these documents.
And, in fact, even the Senate report itself said that U.S. or rather foreign intelligence analysts and IAEA officials warned that there is no way of assuring that this collection is not, in fact, a massive fraud, a fundamental fraud.
I have one more question, but before I get to that, I know your time is short here.
I just want to mention real quick, again, it's Dr. Gareth Porter at IPSnews.net.
The new article is called, Report Ties Dubious Iran Nuclear Documents to Israel.
It will certainly be at original.antiwar.com.
Porter, if not already, very soon, probably by the time anybody hears this, in the archive format anyway.
And also I just want to recommend you can put in your Google Iran laptop Porter and also Iran laptop Prather and come up with some pretty good stuff there.
And one of the things that you'll find is the association of a terrorist group called the Mujahedin Al-Khalq.
And apparently, Gareth, you're reporting that they've been used as a front.
As Scott Ritter indicated in his book, Target Iran, and in other places has been indicated, the NCRI and the MEK basically are a front for Israeli intelligence when it comes to laundering this so-called evidence against Iran.
Is that right?
That's right.
This is what two Israeli co-authors of a book on the Iranian nuclear program, Yossi Melman and Javed Anfar.
His first name is Meir Javed Anfar.
They published that, I believe, three years ago.
And what they reported was that based on interviews with U.S., British, and Israeli officials, the Western intelligence, in this case, meaning Israeli intelligence, although they were not willing to say that outright, was laundering intelligence that they had, meaning information they wanted to get to the IAEA and thus to the public through the MEK or the NCRI.
They were using this Iranian armed resistance group and its political arm, essentially, to be a cutout so that they would not be identified with the information, because, obviously, it would be recognized.
But it's tainted by the political agenda that the Israelis have, and they wanted it to come from an Iranian group, even though that group has terrorist ties.
They believe that it was better to have Israel itself associated with the information.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter again, original.antiwar.com slash porter and IPSnews.net.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Dr. Porter.
It was a pleasure.
Thanks, Chuck.