09/15/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

All right everybody, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, and our regular guest, Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.org, and from Antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com, slash Porter, has a new article today that makes a bold accusation, I think, right there in the headline, IAEA Conceals Evidence, Iran Documents Were Forged.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks, Scott, always glad to be back.
Well, I'm happy to have you here, now back up that extreme declaratory accusation you make.
Well, I have to tell you, frankly, I was surprised and even shocked at the degree of sort of cynicism that I found expressed by a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who insisted they would not be identified as the condition for an interview.
This was last week in Vienna.
What I heard from this senior official, who is familiar with and obviously has been involved in some way in the IAEA treatment of the Iran dossier, is that they are not really interested in pursuing what the Iranians have had to say, and in fact, evidence they've actually physically brought to them, suggesting, not just suggesting, but pretty strong indications that these documents, the alleged studies documents, were forged.
I'm referring specifically to two things in particular, but not limited to them.
First, the question of the Iranian observation from the beginning, as soon as they saw these documents, both the paper documents and the electronic documents, that they did not have any official security designations on them.
There's no security markings of any kind.
Now, bear in mind that these are supposedly the most highly secret, covert documents that the Iranian government could possibly possess.
And now, to quickly review real quick here, everybody, to get everybody on the same page here, there's a whole separate IAEA investigation into Iran, separate from the investigation, the constant safeguarding under the safeguards agreement, that is mandated by the Security Council, that is based on the accusation that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, at least up until 2003, between some previous time, and 2003, based on the documents in this laptop that accused the Iranians of having a program to enrich uranium to uranium tetrafluoride, the Green Salt Project, a bench-level experiment, supposedly, accused them of making a warhead that could be a re-entry vehicle for a nuclear device, and a couple other things.
And Gareth Porter, the smoking laptop, it's called, Gareth, this is his, what, 10th article or something about it.
Now, you've actually been to Vienna, you got an anonymous interview with a high-level IAEA official, and you're saying that you found out while you were there, on top of all the other stuff you've uncovered about these documents, leading you to believe that they're forgeries, Gareth, that they don't even have the basic security seals on them.
They do not, and this was what the Iranians have been saying for some time, and this official did indeed confirm that that is the case, that they did not in fact have security markings of any kind, both the printed, that is to say, paper documents, and the electronic documents.
Now, you know, what I would have expected was some sort of nuanced attempt at an explanation.
What I got was, well, we can't say whether they actually had any security markings on them originally.
Maybe they were taken off by the governments whose intelligence agencies possessed them and passed them on to us, or at least showed them to us, because the IAEA never actually had physical possession of any of these documents.
In other words, he was saying, oh, we can't really make any judgment because the governments which possessed these documents could say that they had extracted the security markings before they passed them on to us.
Now, that is just not a credible kind of argument to make.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
Were they acknowledging, did he acknowledge to you which intelligence agency he got them from in the first place?
No, no, of course, the official premise of the IAEA is that they cannot identify any of the governments who provided these documents to the IAEA, or at least showed them to the IAEA and insisted that they do something with them.
But I thought we knew, is it true that we know that this laptop came to the CIA?
Was it the CIA got it first from the Mujahedin al-Khalq, right?
The National Council for Resistance in Iran?
It appears that that's the case, that in fact the Mujahedin, as I have reported in the past, obtained them from somebody, obtained the documents from somebody and passed them on to the United States.
This was the account that was given to the IAEA as well as to some American journalists in the past by U.S. officials.
Now, this is quite interesting.
This is something I did not publish in my story, but I can give an exclusive to antiwar.com.
I was told by the senior official that the original explanation that these all came from a single laptop was, quote, walked back, unquote, later on.
In other words, the official source, we obviously know it was the CIA that made this statement, later on recanted and said, well, maybe they didn't all come from the same laptop.
Maybe they came from different sources.
And this was obviously a way to explain why more than one government is giving or loaning or whatever you want to say, these documents to the IAEA, because this is part of the conceit here that the IAEA is continuing to repeat over and over again.
These documents have come from different sources, from different time periods, and they're consistent in content.
And that's supposed to be a way of saying, well, we think they're credible.
And it was revealed to me, interestingly, by this senior official, that this is not really to be taken too seriously, because one intelligence organization could have easily collected these in one place, then passed them out to other states so that they could be, it could look like they came from different governments.
Well, so, yeah, that's quite an exclusive.
The IAEA, it's too bad you can't name him, but this guy basically just admitted to you that, oh, yeah, the reason there's no, you know, credible chain of custody for this so-called smoking laptop that supposedly belonged to this now-dead Iranian nuclear weapons scientist is because, oh, yeah, we just compiled it all and put it on a laptop.
And, yeah, in fact, it did come from all different sources.
So that's the end of the lie, right?
The guy admitted that the whole thing is a charade, and so forget about it.
He effectively confirmed that these documents were, in fact, the United States government admitted at some point, or stated at some point, that they were coming from different sources, and then they were compiled, they were brought together.
So in other words, the whole history, as this official said to me, there are holes in the story, quote-unquote.
There are holes in the story.
And that tells me that what's really going on with the IAEA is that they do not, for political reasons, have freedom of action.
They do not have the independence required to carry out an objective investigation into this matter.
In fact, what I learned was that they're not really carrying out an investigation at all.
They are not, you know, the guy actually admitted, in effect, that they had not even asked the United States and these other countries, you know, okay, what about these markings?
Where are they?
What happened to them?
Did you take them out?
And if not, why aren't there any markings here?
It was very clearly implied that the IAEA has not even bothered to ask that question.
Well, you know, there were reports last week, the warmonger George John from the Associated Press, and then a companion article, I forget.
Right, right.
And there, and we talked about this on the show, how they were going after Al-Baradei for refusing to append his official report with their warmongering lies.
But you're telling me, even with that understanding, those fault lines and that faction fight within the International Atomic Energy Agency, that Mohammed Al-Baradei didn't do due diligence here at all?
Well, I mean, the question of what role Al-Baradei is playing in this, of course, is one that is very interesting, but ultimately, I simply don't know the answer.
Whether he has genuinely been trying to do this and is meeting resistance that doesn't really control his own organization, or is playing a double game by saying one thing publicly and doing another thing privately, I'm simply not able to say, unfortunately.
But the fact is that either one or the other is true, that either he doesn't control his own agency, or he has been playing a double game.
Well, and now he's pretty much gone.
So does it look to you like the more warmongering Ali Heinen types are going to become the dominant power faction inside the International Atomic Energy Agency?
I did hear one report that there are already people leaving the agency who were aligned with Al-Baradei because they essentially believe that the policy is going to be more hard-lined.
That's perfectly credible.
I simply don't know for sure whether that's true or not.
In other words, I don't know if it is indeed anticipated that his successor is going to be in line with the Ali Heinen position, but I would have to say that on the basis of what I've seen so far, that's very likely.
Now, I don't want to waste time if there's more important stuff to address that you've uncovered in your original reporting here.
I'd like you to be able to get to it.
But I wanted to take this time to note that the Obama administration has got all screwed up on their talking points.
And as we've noted, especially in interviews with you on this show over the years now, the propaganda about Iran's nuclear program kind of switches back and forth.
Sometimes they imply that there's a secret nuclear weapons program somewhere that we've got to bomb in order to destroy.
Although I don't know how you're going to bomb if you don't know where it is, because that's how secret it is.
But never mind that.
And then the other side of the spin is that the nuclear program at Natanz, which is safeguarded by the IAEA as per the safeguards agreement and the nonproliferation treaty.
And as ElBaradei has continued to report, they have not been diverting any of their nuclear program.
They're trying to just imply that, look, you're dumb and you don't know anything about nuclear stuff, so just trust us.
That basically amounts to the nuclear weapon danger from Iran, as the New York Times likes to say.
They now have enough low enriched uranium to make a bomb.
And then in paragraph 14, oh, by the way, they would have to turn it into super duper highly enriched weapons grade uranium above 90 percent to make a bomb out of it.
And it's not like flipping a light switch or anything.
But the Iranians would have to kick out the entire IAEA inspection apparatus at Natanz in order to carry out such an operation.
And that would be the signal.
Right.
We don't need any intelligence operation to try to tell us whether Iran is moving toward a bomb.
They would be signaling that by doing that.
Right.
They couldn't possibly enrich it to weapons grade in the presence of the IAEA.
They would have to announce to the whole world.
But now Robert Gibbs, the mouth of Sauron up there on in Washington, D.C., says that, listen, we have got to get the Iranians.
What's at issue here in our so-called negotiations with them that were very pessimistic that they will go anywhere anyway, is that what's at issue is their illicit nuclear weapons program, which is a throwback to the propaganda line that the Bush crew abandoned about, I guess, a year and a half, two years ago in favor of the be scared of the safeguarded program.
We're not asserting a secret one anymore thing that they did there.
Well, I mean, you have to take into account the reality that the kind of language that is used by official spokesmen in the U.S. government or spokesladies in the U.S. government is so dishonest and so loose that when they say illicit, it doesn't really mean much of anything more than, well, we disapprove of it.
I mean, we don't accept it.
In other words, illicit doesn't really have much of a real meaning apart from the politics of U.S. policy.
I think that would be the point that I would make.
You can't make too much of it simply because of the way words are used so loosely by this and every other administration.
Unfortunately, that is the case.
It's sort of difficult to base too much analysis on the words of certainly White House spokesmen more than anybody else.
They are so totally politicized, they really pay no attention to the relationship between words and reality, whatever.
All right.
Well, now, and back to this article here, you talk about Daphne Linzer's reporting in The Washington Post from, I think, three years ago, where she talks about how the Sandia National Laboratory took the so-called schematics for this reentry vehicle, so-called warhead, according to Broad and Sanger in The Times, and Sandia Laboratory ran a computer test kind of thing on it and said, there's no way that this would work.
And is that, I guess I'm asking you, it seems like in your article you're saying, yeah, that's because it's made up.
But, well, what about that's just because the Persians are lousy at designing reentry vehicles?
How can you be so sure?
Well, I mean, I think the point is a little bit more subtle, although, you know, it's a reasonable question.
Let me just tell you what happened in that interview.
I raised the question of the Sandia National Labs running computer simulations on this to find out whether these are real and whether they're authentic.
That was the whole point of the exercise.
I asked, this is the senior official, the IAEA.
His response was, well, you know, what Daphna Linzer reported in The Washington Post was that the Bush administration sent these Iranian documents to three different national labs.
Two of the three, he said, found that they were authentic, that they were credible.
The third one didn't think that they were authentic.
So he himself, first of all, was saying that the, you know, it was not simply a question of whether the Iranians were effective or not.
These were such weaknesses as to suggest that this was not really a serious effort by the government's top scientists.
I think that that was implicit in what he said.
Now, you know, I came back and I talked to Daphna Linzer.
I said, did you ever report that these documents were sent to three different national labs?
She said, no.
And, of course, I never reported that.
I only said it was sent to Sandia Labs.
They're the only ones that have the capacity to do these sorts of tests, to do computer simulations.
The other ones wouldn't have been able to do that.
And she said, you know, she doubted very much that these were, you know, sent to two other labs.
And so what this suggests to me is that the Americans were handing a line to the IAEA and they swallowed it.
They've long since forgotten how, where they got it.
They were attributing it to Daphna Linzer.
And again.
So it's one of these nine out of ten doctors agree, but it's the one who doesn't is the actual doctor and the rest of them are just kind of.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And my real point here was when I asked him, well, you know, did you ask for the computer simulation data from the Sandia National Lab?
Obviously, this would be due diligence by the IAEA to get the evidence to confirm that this actually was what happened and to find out, to talk to people about the implications of that.
And he would not comment on it.
We can't comment on that, except I'll say our people follow up, which is, which is a pretty weak, a pretty weak answer.
So, again, it falls into line with a series of statements or omissions in the interview with the senior official of the IAEA indicating that the IAEA is simply not carrying out a serious investigation.
They're simply not doing it.
And what I did in the article was to contrast the absence of any interest in really investigating evidence of fraud in the case of the so-called alleged studies document with the obvious alacrity with which the IAEA pursued the so-called Niger Gate or Niger uranium documents with regard to Iraq in 2002.
You know, they actually carried out their own forensic test, their own forensic examination.
They brought in outside specialists to help them.
And very quickly, they said, no, these are fraudulent.
We can see that.
And so, you know, I find it very, very significant that the IAEA simply is not doing anything of the sort with regard to the alleged studies document.
And it's very clear that this is for political reasons, that these are documents that have been blessed by the powers that are in the United Nations Security Council, and the IAEA has no intention of bucking them.
Well, all right.
Now, ElBaradei is gone, so I guess we can't even count on him continuing to verify the non-aversion of nuclear material anymore.
I guess it's just up to you, Doc.
Well, I tend to agree that we can't really count on the IAEA to be at all honest in regard to the Iranian program from here on in.
It's likely to get worse rather than to get better.
All right.
We're all out of time.
I got to go.
But everybody, please go look at IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Documents Were Forged.
And it's original.antiwar.com slash porter.
It's Dr. Gareth Porter, historian and independent journalist from IPS News.
That's IPSNews.org.
Thanks again very much for your time on the show today.
Thanks, as always, Scott.