08/26/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and you know, pretty good chunk of the time when I say that, I follow it up with our next guest on the show today is Gareth Porter.
He writes for Interpress Service and we feature all of his articles at original.antiwar.com slash porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm good.
Thank you for testing the tolerance of your listening audience for listening to me.
Well, you know, the thing is this show is not really about them.
It's about me and what I want to learn and then I just somehow finagle the way where I get to ask questions of the authors of all the interesting articles that I read and that's a great deal.
If they like to listen too, then somehow that's just, you know, gravy on top.
I'm sure that works very well.
Yeah, well, and the reason I have you on the show all the time is because you're always writing about what I wish you would write about, which makes it really easy for me.
This one is very important.
It's in the top headlines on antiwar.com today, El Baradei foes leaked stories to force his hand on Iran.
Now, this is a little bit inside baseball for the audience, but it's extremely important stuff.
First of all, who's El Baradei?
Who are his foes and what stories are they leaking to force his hand in what way there, First of all, I guess I should edit the first of all out of that question.
Well, that's right.
Mohammed El Baradei is, of course, the outgoing, the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, which is, you know, the world, the UN's nuclear observation agency.
It was originally created not to prevent countries from getting nuclear power, but to encourage them to use nuclear power and to actually provide assistance, technical assistance for a nuclear industry in the developing world, primarily, and of course, it has evolved under the influence of U.S. and other states, basically dominating the board of the governing board of the organization into an organization that essentially decides who can have nuclear power and who can't, or who's allowed to enrich uranium and who isn't.
Now his foes are simply, quite simply, the Western countries, United States, Britain, France, and Germany, and Israel, of course, who are the primary countries attempting to force the IAEA and El Baradei to come down as hard as possible on Iran, even harder than they actually have, and to endorse their views on Iran's nuclear program, to endorse their interpretation of, more specifically, their interpretation of Iran's intentions with regard to nuclear weapons, which are pretty much to say that, yeah, we know that Iran intends to get nuclear weapons, and therefore we have to use all forms of pressure, including, of course, the military option, to try to force Iran to give up that uranium enrichment program.
And the stories that complete your three-part question, the stories that are involved here are two stories that came out last week from Associated Press and Reuters, the Associated Press story written from Vienna, the headquarters of IAEA, and the Reuters story from the United Nations headquarters in New York, which both, in a very interesting sort of parallel way, indicated that the Western powers were eager, were using these stories that they were being published to try to force El Baradei to publish a summary of Western intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program that would be supposedly devastating, that it would show that the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear program, which concluded that Iran had given up any work on nuclear weapons, was mistaken.
So that's the essence of the story.
All right, so you have the IAEA.
Their job is to safeguard Iran's nuclear program.
They have this guy, El Baradei, he's the director of the IAEA.
He has continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material to any military or other special purpose the whole time he's there.
And you explain in your article, there's this faction fight inside the IAEA.
And I know that Gordon Prather has written a bit about this in the past as well, about this guy, Ali Heinonen, and how he's always leaking the most hawkish information to the press.
And I've come to even learn the name of this AP writer, which I usually don't.
I guess I'm pretty familiar with the guys at the Times.
But this guy, George John, is basically just a mouthpiece for the Likud party, every time he writes anything for the AP about Iran.
And he's one of the guys who's the recipient of the selective leak here.
And so now explain to the good people, Dr. Porter, why is it, or what is it that's this annex that's so important?
And why is it that El Baradei won't just include it, if after all, it's official government paperwork and everything?
What exactly is the dispute about?
You mentioned that it supposedly would debunk the CIA's NIE, or not just the CIA, but the National Intelligence Council's National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, which said that the Iranians are, in fact, not making nuclear weapons.
That's right.
I mean, that according to the AP story, if I remember correctly, I mean, you know, sometimes it's hard, hard for me to remember which of these two stories said exactly which thing, but they're both, interestingly, sort of fit together and constitute a clearly a single strategy of leaking against El Baradei and accusing him of essentially being responsible for a cover-up of this supposedly damaging evidence, intelligence evidence that is summarized by Ali Heinemann's outfit, the Safeguards Department of IAEA.
So the point here is that there's something, you know, we don't know exactly what's in this summary that was written within the IAEA in Ali Heinemann's department, but we do know that it included material or information on the so-called alleged studies, that is, the documents that, some of which were laptop, allegedly laptop documents, came from a purloined laptop from Iran.
In fact, we have reason to think that they were amassed by a foreign intelligence agency.
Well, hold it right there.
What indications do you have that Ali Heinemann's report, this suppressed report that El Baradei is refusing to publish under his name, is based on that laptop, Gareth?
Well, this is what is stated in the leaks, that is, the Western countries are actually making it known through AP, Associated Press, and Reuters, that this is the case, that they want this published because it includes, in part, analysis of the laptop documents, as well as other documents which were not electronic documents, but which were supposedly showing, allegedly showing, that Iran was indeed involved in a covert research program that involved nuclear weapons.
Well, it's like life in a comic book or something.
Don't they know that Antiwar.com, for example, has debunked this laptop over and over and over again for years on end now?
I mean, come on!
It seems unlikely that either the Western powers or AP or Reuters have actually read those stories in Antiwar.com.
I guess not.
I mean, not even Scott Ritter can get a TV appearance these days.
Yeah.
In fact, I think you're pointing to at least part of the structural problem here, which is that all of this information is so stove-piped from the Western powers in Israel through the news media to the newspapers and news sites online, without regard to anything that might come from other sources that are not accepted by the powers that be, that they sort of go ahead without having to acknowledge that other information has been shown, that there are vast inaccuracies and lies involved in the stories that have been published about the so-called laptop documents or the alleged studies documents.
Well, now, let's go through this a little bit for people who aren't already in the know.
What is this laptop?
What does it contain?
What evidence do you have that the documents are forged, Gareth?
Well, first of all, as I intimated a moment ago, part of the myth about the so-called laptop documents is that they were found on a laptop that was stolen in Iran and secreted out of the country by unknown parties and then taken to U.S. intelligence outside of Iran, obviously.
What I think is pretty well established to my satisfaction is that these documents were never on a single laptop in their origin at all.
They were collected, brought together by a foreign intelligence agency and put on a laptop, which was then delivered to U.S. intelligence by the MEK, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the terrorist organization, terrorist Iranian exile organization, which U.S. military and intelligence agencies had unfortunately been using to provide intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program for some time, not just the nuclear program, but also Iran's control in Iraq.
We know that MEK has been used by Israel to launder intelligence that the Israelis wanted to introduce either into the IAEA, into IAEA reports, or into the news media in a way that would not indicate that it came from Israel.
So MEK was a convenient way of getting information out that the Israelis did not want to be traced to them.
This clearly appears to be the case with regard to the alleged studies documents.
As I mentioned, many of these documents are electronic documents.
The most important electronic documents appear to be those which appear to describe a series of studies of different ways of redesigning the nose cone, the re-entry vehicle for the Shahab-3 Iranian missile.
According to press accounts, because nobody outside the powers that be has actually seen these documents, these electronic documents include a slide which shows the rocket blowing up something like 300 feet or 600 feet above the ground, the target, which is supposed to be the ideal place for a nuclear weapon to be exploded, and therefore is an indication that this nose cone was actually being redesigned to fit a nuclear weapon.
There are various reasons, and I won't go into all the details, why these electronic documents, which are supposed to show revised versions of a nose cone, are probably fakes.
One of the reasons that this can be surmised is that the Sandia National Labs, as I mentioned in my story yesterday, was asked to actually analyze these documents.
They looked at them and said, whoever did this is not very expert, because none of these designs would have worked.
They don't make any sense.
That shows, at the very least, that this was being done by an outfit which was not really fully cognizant of the properties of the rocket and what would have to be done to arrange it.
I can't even have a conversation with Dr. Gordon Prather about the green salt accusations without him breaking out laughing.
He says, here's this forged accusation, and all the accusation is that they had a plan on paper to build a place wherein they might create a laser enrichment facility to churn out green salt, which is uranium tetrafluoride.
When you need uranium hexafluoride gas to introduce into the centrifuges that the IAEA is monitoring anyway, and they have a uranium hexafluoride making plant right down the street.
So what a big, ridiculous joke that whole accusation was, too.
Well, that's absolutely true.
There was no reason at all for Iran to have redesigned a completely new facility for the making of so-called green salt, because, as you say, they already had a plant which was up and running and that they were fully satisfied with, and had every reason to be satisfied with.
But beyond that, I've also uncovered further evidence that the documents which represent these flow sheets, these two one-page flow sheets, which are supposed to represent the work of a company called Kimia Madan, a private contracting firm in Iran, which was, according to these alleged studies documents, the company which produced these flow sheets for a green salt plant.
There are a couple of fundamental problems here.
One of them that I mentioned in the story is that there are technical mistakes in the one-page flow sheets, which the Iranians, despite the fact that they weren't even given the documents to study, pointed out to the IAEA.
They were able to spot them immediately.
They were so obvious.
And not only that, Ali Hainan, the head of the Safeguards Department, actually admitted in his briefing for member states in February of 2008 that the Iranians were right, that there were what he called technical weaknesses in the two pages of flow sheets.
So, again, it strongly suggests a fabrication rather than a genuine document.
My question is, now that ElBaradei is on his way out and the new guy is coming in to the IAEA, is this guy, Ali Hainan, and the war party inside the IAEA, going to be able to push him around, or is he going to be a stand-up guy like ElBaradei, or what?
I don't know for sure.
It's difficult to say at this point.
I don't think anybody knows how the successor to ElBaradei is going to deal with this set of issues, this set of pressures on him.
He's a Japanese fellow.
The only thing I can tell you about him so far is that an Israeli journalist who has been taking, of course, the Israeli government position on the Iranian program, and who blasts ElBaradei and reports that the United States and Israel haven't given any of their intelligence documents to the IAEA in the last few years, and is afraid that he will leak them to the Iranians, which is, of course, an absurd way to describe the situation.
This Israeli journalist, Yossi Melman, just wrote a piece in which he warned that the Israelis and the Americans might not be any happier with the Japanese successor to ElBaradei than they were with ElBaradei himself.
Well, let's hope that's true.
Yeah, let's hope so.
And also, I wanted to say one more thing, too, about the laptop.
I had Scott Ritter on this show, and as you know, he's a former United Nations weapons inspector and was Marine Corps intelligence and all these things.
And I asked him about the laptop, and he said, yeah, well, if it's real, let's see it.
And he said there ought to be a trail evidence from here to way over the horizon, and the CIA ought to be able to take their computer forensics people, and they ought to be able to go back and recreate the time and place these files were created, and every little thing down to the ones and zeros.
And yet, it's all being hidden away, and in such a way that everybody knows it's bunk.
Well, it's absolutely true that the CIA never authenticated the documents, as Ritter points out.
And as he told me a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, and I published at the time, they have the forensic capability to establish whether those documents are authentic or not for whatever reason.
You have to assume that it was because the powers that be wanted to avoid the likelihood that these would be found out to be fakes.
That was never done.
And so that's yet another reason for believing that these are almost certainly, not just almost certainly, but they are certainly fakes.
Now, let me point out one more piece of this puzzle, which, again, indicts the so-called laptop documents, although this is not an electronic document, but a paper document, that these are fakes.
The most important single document of all, of all these documents, the prize for the IAEA's safeguards department and its supporters outside, is a letter that was sent by an engineering firm to this Chemium and Don company, which has handwriting on it.
Of course, the document has never been released.
Nobody's ever seen it outside the charmed few.
But it's been described as having handwriting on it, and as evidence that links the Chemium and Don, which, again, allegedly was the company that did the green salt study for this alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program, and the reentry vehicle studies.
So that's very important, because it's the only thing that they have that could supposedly authenticate the reentry vehicle studies.
So they regard they, meaning the people who are pushing the laptop documents, the alleged studies documents, as evidence, believe that this is the closest thing they have to a smoking gun.
Well, this was blown out of the water in 2008, because the Iranians gave the IAEA a copy of that letter, which had no handwriting on it.
In other words, the original in the file has no handwriting on it, and it shows that this is certainly a fake, which was put together by presumably Israeli intelligence, because they're the ones who had the connections with the MEK.
They're the ones who had the program for disinformation on the nuclear program of Iran.
They're the ones who have the greatest stake in trying to prove this.
So it was the Israeli intelligence which fabricated this document by putting handwriting, which talked about the need, the desirability of turning over certain information about a particular technology to the folks who were doing the reentry vehicle studies.
Well, now, what if one guy wrote up the document, sent out copies to a bunch of people, and one of those got the handwriting on it, and what they turned over was the original?
What's wrong with that?
Yeah, the problem with that thesis, which is what I've gotten from certain defenders of the United States and the Safeguards Department position on this, the problem with that is that this was an important document.
If you had multiple copies, you'd have numbers on the copies, which were assigned to specific people in Kimi and Madan.
Now, if that was done, of course, that would make it easy to identify who was the person who turned over the copy to the intelligence agency.
And that is exactly the opposite of what has been argued by the United States and its allies.
They're saying that we couldn't turn this document over to the Iranians, or to the IAEA, because it would allow them to figure out who gave the document away, who was the one who turned the document over to foreign intelligence.
And so, if you follow my logic, if there were numbers on the document, if there were multiple copies of the numbers, the Iranians would be able to figure it out anyway.
This argument is completely phony, in other words.
And so how is the Mujahedin al-Khalq doing these days?
Well, they're not doing as well as they used to, that's for sure.
As you know, the Iraqi government, increasingly showing its Shia bias and its links with Iran rather than with the United States, cracked down on the base which they had been allowed to occupy freely for years and years by the United States military occupation forces in Iraq.
Just a few weeks ago, and with several dozens of people hurt, and apparently some killed, apparently there was a violent conflict that erupted when the Iraqi troops came in to establish a presence within the camp.
And there was open fighting, and with some casualties.
But at this point, the Iraqi government is no longer obeying the U.S. diktat on questions like this, and so they are treating the MEK as a hostile force which has to be brought under control.
Wow.
Yeah, I just, I don't have anything personally against the MEK, but I kind of feel like I was picking a fight over American support for these private terrorist groups, which are supposedly the enemy, no matter where they are in the world.
We have to stop all private terrorist groups, except this one which works for us, after it worked for Saddam Hussein, after it worked for the Ayatollah Khomeini, and which is some kind of weird cross between the Heaven's Gate cult and communism and some craziness.
Well, this is what's so interesting about the MEK issue.
Even George W. Bush, as right-wing as he might be, when this issue came up at the White House in 2003, the military wanting to protect the MEK and not wanting to have a trade-off with Iran, which was being proposed at that moment in the spring of 2003, you know, we'll turn over information that we have about Al-Qaeda people, and even Al-Qaeda prisoners that we have, if you will turn over a list of MEK that you have and agree that you'll turn over the MEK people that you've captured.
The U.S. wouldn't have anything to do with it, and the bureaucracy was explaining this to George Bush, and he was saying, well, wait a minute, this is a terrorist organization.
I thought we were saying that all terrorists everywhere are the same.
We don't distinguish among terrorists.
And they said, no, George, that's just your line.
That's not the policy, dummy.
That's sort of the way it went down, I guess.
But in any case, we know that there were proposals at that point coming from the Pentagon to use the MEK, certainly as intelligence agents to continue to work against Iran, and more likely not just intelligence, but also covert operations against Iran.
Well, in fact, we'll be talking about American support for anti-Iranian terrorist groups a little bit more with Philip Giraldi at the bottom of this hour, but before I let you go here, I wanted to follow up real quick one more thing about the forgeries.
The laptop, the phony, obviously Israeli-forged, Iranian-smoking laptop.
What has ElBaradei said about it?
I mean, you make the point that he's keeping the other guy, Ali Heinonen, and his faction's report, so-called, in the drawer and not attaching it to his mandate to the U.N. or whatever, but has he come out and said, yes, this is all obviously bogus?
The way he did the aluminum tubes and the Niger uranium documents before the Iraq war, for example?
I mean, deep, deep divisions within IEA have existed for a while between those folks, particularly in the safeguards division, who are pushing the alleged studies documents and that issue as a priority and wanting to use that to indict Iran, on one hand, and people led by ElBaradei, but not just ElBaradei himself, who have been skeptical of the documents and who believe that IAEA should not be pushing a line that they show that Iran is hell-bent on getting nuclear weapons because they couldn't be authenticated.
And what I haven't mentioned, but which I think is important for people to know, is that in 2008, particularly after the information which was received from Iran showing that this one letter was a probable fake, and also showing that Kimi and Madan never worked for the military.
They worked for the civilian atomic energy agency on an entirely different aspect of nuclear energy, which was an oil processing plant.
They had a contract with the civilian atomic energy just to do one thing, which was to set up an oil processing plant.
And after all that information was received, there were specialists within the IAEA who had been working on Iran who believed now that it was time for the IAEA to come out and say, we cannot authenticate these documents.
These are not authentic documents.
They should not be treated with credibility.
And there was pressure coming from the other side, in other words, within IAEA, to do precisely what you suggested, to say publicly, these documents cannot be trusted.
And, of course, Berdai did not do that.
And I think he felt he was subject to such intense political pressures from outside and inside that he decided to just keep the whole thing quiet.
But in any case, it's clear that he does not believe that these are authentic, never did believe that they were authentic, and has never been willing to do what the United States, Israel, and the others want him to do.
And clearly he's not going to do that in the report that's due out this week.
We'll see sort of a continuation of this compromise line, I suspect.
Well, I guess we'll have to wait until... when's his exit date?
Maybe we can get an interview?
It's in October, as I understand it.
Yeah, because he won't... have you tried to talk to him personally yet?
I have.
I've tried to get an interview with him, and I've failed.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
Maybe we can work on that.
Maybe after he's out of here.
I wouldn't mind one bit having you co-host that day, if I could get an interview with him on this show.
Well, I mean, you know, I will let you know if I have any luck with that, but I don't think it's going to happen before he leaves.
Once he's out of the organization, maybe he'll be able to speak more freely.
I don't know.
Well, yeah, I sure hope that that's the way this pans out, is that once he's out, he says, Alright, here's all the things I wanted to say before, but I kind of couldn't for political reasons, but now I'm free to do so.
We'll see.
We will see.
Now listen, I'm sorry to do this to you, but I have a whole other line of questioning here, but it all depends on your schedule.
I'm going to have to take off now.
Sorry.
Okay, yeah.
I don't want to talk further.
No, that's my bad.
I always ask too many questions about one thing.
But you know Abdul Aziz al-Hakim died, so we need to talk about that sometime real soon, the faction fight going on in Iraq.
Of course.
We will talk again.
Okay.
Thanks, Gareth.
Alright.
Thanks, Scott.
Alright, everybody.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We'll be back, I don't know, right after this?