11/03/13 – Nima Shirazi – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, November 3rd, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there.
More than 3,000 of them now.
Going back to 2003.
Introducing today's guest, Nima Shirazi.
He keeps the blog Wide Asleep in America.
At wideasleepinamerica.com.
And lately he's been writing for muftah.org.
That's M-U-F-T-A-H.
Muftah.org.
The latest piece is Propaganda and Ignorance in Reporting on Iran.
In other words, same song, different day there.
Welcome back to the show, Nima.
How are you doing?
I'm doing alright.
Thanks again for having me, man.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And this is a really great article that you've done here.
I always like reading your stuff.
But in correcting this terribly shoddy report in the USA Today, in a sense they gave you a great opportunity to really get to the bottom of what's going on here on many different aspects of Iran's nuclear program, the international treaties and obligations, and all the propaganda, and of course in the context of the current set of talks toward resolving this so-called crisis anyway.
And, you know, they could have done a half-bad job and they wouldn't have given you as much to correct.
But they went ahead and did a completely bad job.
Really went for it on this one.
That's right.
So Orin Dorell in USA Today report Iran may be a month from a bomb.
So go ahead, Nima, and take this thing apart.
Well, yeah, so this article appeared on October 24th, USA Today, like you said, Scott, written by a reporter named Orin Dorell.
And basically it reads a lot like a press release issued by the well-known Washington, D.C., think tank and it seems kind of hysteria engine called the Institute for Science and International Security, known better as ISIS, in reporting on this.
ISIS is run by a former nuclear inspector named David Albright, who is kind of ubiquitous in the Iran alarmism industry and is often cited in media reports.
He's a common feature in Capitol Hill hearings about Iran's nuclear program.
And Albright really kind of has a stranglehold on reporting about Iran.
He's cited all the time.
And basically what he has done, he actually did a lot of this before the invasion of Iraq as well.
He has these worst-case scenario reports about potential Iranian capability to build nuclear weapons and to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels.
And what he winds up doing is providing a lot of ammunition in the propaganda network of the mainstream media and also for our politicians.
So by citing Albright as an expert, it gives a certain level of pseudo-credence to these claims that are made, while the context of what Albright is actually saying is often completely missed, deliberately so, that his speculation, let's say this report from USA Today, which Mr. Dorrell really, really jumped upon, and then there's this crazy, alarmist headline that Iran may be a month away from a bomb, has absolutely nothing to do with the reality, which is that, hypothetically, Albright has said in this report that he has issued, that if Iran were to make a decision to build a nuclear weapon, which they have not, as all of our intelligence agencies have said constantly for years, if they were to do so and run their current levels of enrichment at full capacity, in addition to potentially having a secret site that no one knows about with really advanced centrifuges that they don't even really have, and that if all of this stuff were the case, that maybe then, within a month, Iran would enrich its current uranium stock to a level that could potentially be used in a nuclear weapon, but none of that has anything to do with reality.
It also doesn't take into account having to make the so-called nuclear weapon deliverable, having to mount a warhead on a missile, which they don't have, which can't travel distances that intercontinental ballistic missiles go, which they don't even have a program to do that.
All of this is pure speculation and hype, and then it's picked up by people like Mr. Dorrell in the mainstream media.
This happens all the time.
George John does this as well, of Associated Press.
Really gets into a pattern of saying outrageous things with the imprimatur of experience and expertise and really gravitas on something where they're really just making things up.
Right.
Yeah, I like all that.
Well, you know, if they had a secret, separate centrifuge facility that we don't know about, then they could be doing all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, well, if I was married to Jeannie, I'd be an astronaut too, but what does that have to do with anything?
Exactly.
None of this is based on any kind of evidence or reality.
It's pure speculation, and then it's used in the press to write these articles that are pure hysteria.
So within this context, we then look at this particular USA Today piece, which really could be one of hundreds that are published on a regular basis.
It just so happens this one stuck out to me as particularly egregious.
It kind of went point by point.
All of these ridiculous talking points that are often stated in the press and by our politicians, none of which have any basis in reality.
And even when there are measures of half-truths, the context is completely missing.
So, for instance, there's the allegation that Iran does not allow inspectors into its nuclear facilities.
This is completely untrue.
Iran has always allowed inspectors into its facilities, as it is legally required to do under its IAEA safeguards.
They have never rejected a visit.
They have never prevented inspectors from entering their declared nuclear facilities.
So that is simply a lie, which is published in the press as a given truth, as an unchallenged fact.
In this case, the reporter, Dorrell, initially wrote that Iran has refused to let international inspectors into its nuclear facilities to verify that they are being used for peaceful purposes, as their international agreement requires them to do.
So again, like I said, this is untrue.
In its nuclear facilities, Iran has always allowed inspection.
I actually brought this up with Mr. Dorrell via a little Twitter back and forth.
He claimed that he was correct and effectively cited a number of reports, which, if you actually read them, have nothing to do with Iran's nuclear facilities.
They have nothing to do with a military complex called Parchin, which the IAEA is seeking access to, but have to work out a framework in which to do that with Iran, because legally they are not permitted to visit this site.
And even so, in 2005, Iran voluntarily allowed inspectors into this site twice, and they found nothing suspicious.
So again, this is just a presentation of something which is not true.
I brought it up to Mr. Dorrell.
He tried to hem and haw about the fact that it was true.
Clearly it's not.
And then went along to change his own USA Today report, without even an official correction noted on the report.
So he changed where it said that Iran would not allow inspectors into its nuclear facilities, which basically is implying that Iran refuses all access.
That's the only way you can read it, the way that it is written.
So it's like this blanket accusation that Iran allows no inspectors into its nuclear facilities.
Once that was debunked to Mr. Dorrell, he then changed his report to read that Iran has blocked international inspectors from some suspected nuclear facilities.
Now again, Parchin is not suspected of being a nuclear facility.
At most, it is alleged to have been the site of a research project where research was conducted through a detonation chamber, which I know has been discussed a lot on your show.
Dr. Mohammad Sahimi and Gareth Porter have often spoken about this.
This bogus allegation through U.S. and Israeli leaked documentation for which there's no authentication process, that effectively nuclear research has been carried out there.
But that doesn't mean it's a nuclear site, and no one has actually accused Parchin of being a nuclear site.
And again, the IAEA has no legal right to be there.
So even in Dorrell's changing of his own report, without even noting that he was doing it or why, he still managed to get the facts completely wrong.
Well, at first I thought you were going to say he just changed because he meant to say Israel refuses all inspections, and he just had the one word he needed to fix.
Yeah, exactly, and yet he wound up not doing that.
Yeah, no, he changed it in an entirely different way, and still not satisfactory.
Imagine that.
Now, so part of the problem here is that, and you made this point, and this is the real reason I have you on here to review this USA Today piece, is because this is just a cookie cutter.
This could have been in any newspaper in America at any time in the last 10 years or something, as far as all the false assumptions in there.
But part of the problem is that lazy reporters have trouble understanding the difference between the IAEA's mandate under the safeguards agreement with Iran, that the Iranians have signed up for, as is mandated under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which they're voluntary members of, and the separate mandate on the IAEA put on them by the UN Security Council to go and investigate hither and yon, this, that, and the other thing, ask 10,000 endless lists of questions based off Israeli forgeries and whatever else, and those are the lines where the Iranians have refused to continue cooperating, but you couldn't, an objective person, you know, one, looking at the situation, could see why.
I mean, this whole thing, it's actually rigged to make them stop cooperating so that there's an excuse to point a finger at them and say they're not cooperating.
But meanwhile, they're not in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, or their safeguards agreement, and that's what counts.
That's the proof that they're not making nuclear bombs.
Exactly.
I mean, unless it is assumed that Iran, alone amongst all nations on this planet, is held to a different standard than everyone else, unless that is acknowledged and affirmed by the entire international community somehow, and that that is agreed to by Iran itself, that it is the sole outlier on Earth that can be treated differently than anyone else, and have different standards of evidence, and have to admit to things that everyone knows it's not doing, including the accusers, unless that has been established, which obviously it has not and will not be, then none of these accusations make any sense.
And they are all set up, as you noted, Scott, they are all set up so that this, quote unquote, crisis, which is no crisis, is perpetual, it is permanent, there is no solution that can possibly be figured out.
I mean, this then allows Iran to be the enemy number one, the number one scapegoat of the United States, of Israel, of even Europe sometimes, when it suits certain purposes.
And so without this boogeyman of Iran, if you establish that all of this is bogus, it's not based on any credible evidence, they are following all of their legal obligations, inspectors have a firmness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, once you figure all this out, once you realize that this is true, not only does it completely change how you view the current, quote unquote, standoff, which has been going on now, if it's nuclear related for 10 or 20 years, if it has to do with Iran and the U.S., then it's for the past 34 years, and that really there is no basis for all of this alarmism.
Right, that's the whole joke here.
I mean, this is like that scene from Robocop where the Ed 209 is insisting that the guy drop the gun, that he already dropped, his hands are in the air.
You have 30 seconds to comply, and Iran has always had 30 seconds to comply, and has never been doing anything, and yet we're now decades later, and Ed 209 is still saying you have 30 seconds to comply.
That's what we keep saying, it's this endless game over and over and over again, where years ago we heard Iran was 5 to 7 years away from a nuclear weapon, then we heard they were 2 to 3 years, then we heard they were 1 year, then we heard they were 6 months away from having the capability to build a nuclear weapon.
We've heard 6 months for years and years now, and now we have this new report to get back to our original point where the timeline, it looks like, hypothetically, theoretically, has dropped to a month to build, quote, a bomb.
And this is untrue.
I mean, as we've realized, it has nothing to do with building a bomb.
It has nothing to do with Iran's decision to make a bomb.
They've done none of that, they are not doing that.
And so it's just this perpetual hype machine to keep the world terrified, to keep the American public terrified, to keep the Israeli public terrified and aggressive and militant in what their own governments are pushing.
And the agenda is purely political.
It's not technical.
It doesn't have to do with Iran's obligations under international law.
Iran is following its obligations under international law.
Even when the UN Security Council resolutions against Iran are cited, what's missing is, again, legal context and the fact that Iran's right to have a nuclear program, a civilian, peaceful nuclear program, which has been attested to for years and years and years, that is an inalienable right, meaning without discrimination, meaning that the UN Security Council, even as the legal arm enforcer of the UN, cannot take away Iran's inalienable right, which every nation has, even if they're not signatories to the NPT.
Israel also has an inalienable right to a peaceful nuclear program.
That is true, regardless of whether they allow inspectors, regardless of whether they're actually signatories to the NPT.
They have that inalienable right in international law.
It's just that they decided to not sign on to the treaty, so there are no inspectors, there are no limits, there's no monitoring, and they actually have nuclear weapons.
Iran, however, has done the opposite of that, and Iran is the one that is viewed as the threat to the world, and so none of this actually makes sense.
These UN Security Councils have actually no legal basis because they can't be enforced because Iran's program is legal under international law, cannot be dismantled without Iran doing it itself as a voluntary measure.
And so we're just in this endless cycle where the shorthand of the media, using these phrases that they're in violation of this, that they refuse to allow this, that they're suspected of that, etc., etc., using these shorthand phrases because they don't want to take the time or they don't care to, or it doesn't suit the agenda which is at play, but they do not take the time in their reporting to get out short, quick bursts of writing which speak to exactly what they want to speak to, which is Iran may have a bomb in a month.
Not true, but it sure does play well in the international press.
And so if the truth were told, a lot more progress would be made if people spent the time to learn about these issues.
I'm not saying they're easy things to learn about, or to parse, or to learn about the safeguards agreement, to learn about international treaties, to learn about inspections, to learn about the difference between enrichment levels, between what can fuel a power plant, what is used for medical isotopes, what can be used in a nuclear weapon.
All of these things take time and they take energy, and it's a drag, and I get it.
But when we have reporters using their platform and not explaining these things truthfully, that's really, really dangerous.
And we've already seen what happened when the same thing happened in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
This has happened again and again and again in our own history, and it's happening again.
It's been happening for decades.
Well, and the problem is, too, is when you're talking nuclear, it means, one, too complicated for you if you're not an expert, so don't even bother.
You better start deferring to experts.
And, two, really scary.
Like Connalisa Rice pointed out, one of those things can kill a whole city.
So are you sure you want to risk anything at all?
If it's just one percent, maybe go ahead and do something about it if the government says that it's really important.
So the lessons that, jeez, you just can't believe these scaremongers about the things that they say.
Remember the lessons of the last few wars and more.
That gets pushed to the side.
You can't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud.
So you're right.
I mean, this is where people have to arm themselves, inoculate themselves against the lies.
Seymour Hersh reported back a couple years ago that not only do the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command and the rest of them agree with Nima Shirazi, they're certain that Iran is not making nuclear weapons, that there is no parallel program, that what the IAEA is safeguarding is all there is to safeguard, etc.
Like that.
They judge that with high confidence.
You've got to look into these things to know that, because they're never going to say it on CNN.
Or, you know, you could read Why to Sleep in America, this great blog.
And, by the way, let me just mention, because I thought of it while you were talking there, about the years on end of this propaganda, Nima.
Ladies and gentlemen, Nima Shirazi is the author of the single greatest debunking of all of this.
It's a catalog going back 30 years of claims by the Israelis and their American friends about Iran and their nuclear weapons threat.
For 30 years.
It's called the Phantom Menace.
Meaning, yeah, it's not there.
It's all just a bunch of rhetoric.
And who's the threat?
The people doing the lying are the ones who are really the problem.
It seems like to me.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And, I mean, thank you for pointing out the piece.
I don't know.
Oh, actually, you're the one who told me that a rather good Newsweek cover piece used the same title as mine.
Which, you know, I absolutely forgive them for.
Because it actually is a very, very good piece.
And it's such an obvious title for this threat that's not real.
Although, in the case of Star Wars, they were talking a threat that you just can't see.
Because he's pretending to be your friend.
But anyway.
In this case, maybe they're referring to Israel.
This is even more dubious because the threat doesn't even exist.
I mean, speaking to the idea of a smoking gun, which you were talking about.
In this article that I've been discussing, the USA Today article, quotes David Albright.
Again, ISIS's expert, David Albright, as saying that after going through this kind of fantastical notion in which Iran has some clandestine site with, as I said, advanced centrifuges churning out weapons-grade uranium, totally out of the purview of the international community and IAEA inspectors, which is something he just literally made up to include in his report.
In that scenario, he says to the reporter, and it's quoted, if they did that, meaning Iran, if they did that and they were caught, it would be a smoking gun of a nuclear weapons program.
So he himself uses the Condoleezza Rice phraseology in his own alarmism.
I mean, the parallels are so transparent, whereas also no dissent or challenging opinion, alternate view, is ever presented in this media report or others like it.
There is no other voice, and I'm not saying a voice like my own, an independent media voice.
No, I'm saying other people of great experience, of great expertise, of great stature and respectability.
Like Robert Kelly, the former IAEA inspector.
Nothing whatsoever.
So let's talk about the talks, because that's what this is about, is trying to undermine the talks, where I don't know how hard Obama is trying, I'll let you answer how hard you think he's even trying, but there's certainly people trying to stop him from making a nuclear deal right now.
Indeed.
I mean, we're about to see talks resume in this coming week on November 7th in Geneva.
There has been a lot of talk about positive overtures made by both sides, about a different tone.
This can be parsed back and forth.
We can get into the fact that the Iranian proposal remains effectively unchanged for the past decade.
We keep hearing that, oh, finally Iran is willing to sit down and talk.
Actually, they've been willing to sit down and talk for quite some time.
They just rely, and it's been consistently stated, and it's stated again, and only now is it being able to be listened to, probably because the leadership of Iran is now a palatable, or at least more palatable presence than what was assumed to be under the previous administration.
But now Iran is still saying you must at least acknowledge and affirm our inalienable right to a peaceful program where we can domestically enrich uranium ourselves for our own needs under the strict supervision of the IAEA.
And without this acknowledgement, without saying yes, Iran has the right, just like every other country on the planet, to do this, the talks will not proceed positively.
And so we are seeing kind of a hedging on the side of the American negotiators, led by Wendy Sherman, who are really kind of refusing to acknowledge that that right exists, however, maybe kind of leaving, to use a common term over the nuclear issue, leaving a window of opportunity open for them to obviously allow, quote-unquote, even though the U.S. has no legal right to allow or disallow anything that Iran does.
The United States is not the legal authority over Iran.
But nevertheless, so that negotiators can effectively say that Iran's right to domestically enrich is acknowledged, is affirmed, it will continue as any part of any reasonable deal.
And so we're getting closer to that point.
And as you say, there are tons of spoilers, whether it's Israel, whether it's Netanyahu's fans in the Congress, whether it's the Saudis, there are plenty of actors here which are trying to sabotage these talks.
I obviously am usually not an optimistic person.
I think the U.S. has its own agenda here, obviously, as does every player in this, including Iran.
Iran wants sanctions removed, but obviously is not back to the, quote, negotiating table because of the sanctions.
Because as we've seen, the offer they are proposing is identical to what was in place before the sanctions were imposed.
Yeah, and they built the whole program under the sanctions all along.
Yeah, exactly.
And their nuclear program has expanded exponentially under sanctions.
If the U.S. had allowed a deal to be made a decade ago, when it was first proposed, the Iranian proposal, if the U.S. had allowed that to happen, rather than continuing to warmonger, continuing to propagandize, the Iranian nuclear program would be a shadow of what it is today.
And that was before sanctions.
You wouldn't have the Fordow enrichment facility.
You wouldn't even have Natanz.
Natanz didn't start to spend centrifuges until 2005.
Right.
And so basically there would have been a low level of domestic enrichment.
There would have been international cooperation.
You would have seen Russians and Americans and the French and potentially the British, Germans, whoever else, inside Iran helping them with their peaceful nuclear energy program, which is required under the NPT, international cooperation for peaceful purposes.
All of this was rejected a decade ago.
And so here we are.
Iran has capacity that it never would have had had a deal been struck earlier.
And the Iranian people are suffering as a result of this collective punishment that the sanctions have imposed.
They don't have access to medicine.
Their economy is destroyed.
There's rampant unemployment.
All of these things are the result primarily, not solely, but primarily of this sanctions regime, which has been in place basically since 2006 regarding the nuclear program.
Obviously there have been sanctions going back 30 years.
But were the U.S. to have acknowledged Iran's rights a decade ago, this would no longer be an issue.
And so basically what the U.S. has to do is pat themselves on the back and say, ooh, see how sanctions have worked so well.
We crippled their economy.
And now they come back to the table begging us to relieve them of sanctions, to ease sanctions.
But then if you look at the actual facts of the proposal, Iran hasn't come begging for anything.
They're asking the exact same thing they asked a decade ago.
So the sanctions have done nothing except hurt Iranian people and allowed the United States to act as a bully in the world.
Well, I say let the Americans tell themselves whatever they have to if they're willing to make the deal.
Only I regret that they would learn the wrong lesson there, that sanctions are this wonderful kind of half a war sort of substitute policy for getting things done.
Exactly.
And we'll just see the same thing happen all over again, unfortunately.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're over time here.
We've got to go.
But thank you very much for your time on the show.
It's good to talk to you again, Nima.
Always a pleasure to be here, Scott.
Thanks so much.
All right.
That is Nima Shirazi keeps this great blog wide asleep in America and follow him on Twitter.
He's wide asleep, Nima.
And please check out this excellent article.
It's extremely well sourced.
He's got hot links to all the proof propaganda and ignorance in reporting on Iran.
It's at muftah.org, M-U-F-T-A-H.org.
That's it for Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We'll see you next Sunday here from 830 to 9 Pacific on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.