10/06/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
So I'm happy to welcome Gareth Porter to the show.
Gareth Porter is our most regular expert guest on this show.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He writes for IPS News, which is an inter-press service.
You can find their website at IPSNews.net.
We keep all of his stuff at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
And for very good reason, the same one that I'm bringing back to the show right now.
Hey, Gareth, how are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Well, I'm glad to have you here.
So let's talk about the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Iranians.
There's a whole lot to talk about.
I think, actually, before I get to your story here, which is very important, there's a screaming New York Times headline I have here that I'd like you to address.
So first I want to ask you about, so far, what are the progress in the talks with Barack Obama has sent his people to actually sit down face to face and negotiate with the Iranians at a pretty high level.
I guess Nick Burns had met with them a couple of times over Iraq policy.
But these are the first real full-scale meetings between the Americans and the Iranians since the revolution in 1979.
And there's been all kinds of developments.
I don't know if I can keep track of them all.
It seems like the most important was an agreement that they would ship their uranium to Russia for further enrichment, not to weapons grade, but to 20-something percent uranium-235 for use in their medical facilities and so forth.
That's right.
And this is a problem that Iran has brought to the attention of the international community, that they need to have 20% enriched uranium in order to serve medical needs of Iran, and that Iran itself does not have the capability to enrich beyond the 4%.
And so it needs to have an arrangement with suppliers to get that 20% enriched uranium.
They raised that issue before the talks began.
And lo and behold, we now have this deal which is being discussed.
The details, I must say, still remain a little bit unclear, just how much of the low-enriched uranium is to be sent to Russia for this purpose.
I think this may be something that's subject to negotiation.
And the other issue, which still remains to be worked out, is how does this affect Iran's right to enrich?
And you're seeing now the pushback from those people who are saying, well, I mean, this is no good unless Iran is going to agree that it has to stop enrichment.
Well, pardon me, but it seems like it's a concession that, okay, go ahead and enrich up to 3.6%.
I mean, because doesn't it imply there, if Obama is saying it's okay with him if they ship the uranium that they've enriched to 3.6% off to Russia for further enrichment to 20%, then isn't he basically conceding in the premise there that it's okay for them, like he says in the propaganda, to have a peaceful nuclear program?
I think it is implicit, but I think we have to wait and see exactly how this plays out in terms of what the U.S. position is going to be on that.
You know, when I first read about this, I thought, you know, this does suggest clearly that the Obama administration has acknowledged that Iran is going to have to be given the right to continued enrichment at low levels with all of the IAEA-appropriate surveillance and monitoring.
But I think we have to just hold our fire here until we see exactly what the U.S. position is going to be, and this is obviously going to be the key question that we have to watch.
Well, you know, Obama, I guess, isn't really different than Bush, is he, when he says that we all recognize that Iran has a right to a peaceful nuclear program.
Bush would say that too, right?
Exactly.
I mean, just saying that is, I mean, it's always accompanied with the condition that they have to prove to us, you know, to our satisfaction that it's peaceful.
And in that condition resides all of the devilish details, which means that the Iranians have to agree, you know, to stop enrichment for a long period of time so that we can trust them.
I mean, that was the Bush administration's position, and I had assumed that that would be the Obama administration's position as well going into the talks.
Now it's not clear to me that that's the case.
So, I mean, I think we're going to have to wait and see.
Okay.
Now, Broad and Sanger have this report at the New York Times.
They really are earning the title that Gordon Prather gave them years ago, a neo-crazy media sycophant.
Well, I kind of like Steve Hines' churning of the NewsHoggers website.
His way of talking about Broad and Sanger is to call them Judy Man.
Judy Man.
That's nice, yeah.
Man-Judy, excuse me, Man-Judy.
Man-Judy, that's very good.
Yeah, I actually sent a tweet to the New York Times notifying them that Broad and Sanger have now actually surpassed Michael Gordon as the worst reporter at their lying rag of a paper.
It's true.
I mean, I really think that's true.
I mean, I thought Michael Gordon's reporting in many ways was atrocious on some of the specific issues that I followed.
But I really believe now that David Sanger and William Broad, but particularly Sanger, because he has sort of been the leader of the pack in regard to its coverage, the Times' coverage on Iranian nuclear program, have exceeded Gordon in the atrociousness of their stories.
I mean, this latest story- I mean, at this point, they really are de facto agents of a foreign power or something.
They're not reporters.
Well, I mean, it's certainly the case that they lean very heavily toward the most extreme position, which does happen to coincide with that of a certain small non-Muslim Middle Eastern country.
Yeah, well, the thing is, too, the reason I'm picking on them so heavily is because it's been years and years like this.
It's not like they have one article I don't like.
This is years and years and years of Broad and Sanger piping whatever neocom propaganda they can make up over at AEI right into our eye holes.
Yeah, and in this latest one- and by the way, I mean, the pattern that if you put all these stories on the intelligence regarding the Iranian nuclear program together over the last year and a half or more, what you find is that David Sanger and his associates are absolutely obsessed with proving- persuading, I should say- their readers that the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007 is utterly wrong, and that, of course, we all know that Iran is actually continuing to work on a nuclear weapon.
They have assiduously gone back to that theme.
Every time anything happened which would give them an excuse to do so, it's a blatantly politicized approach to the whole subject of Iran's nuclear program.
They have an agenda which is crystal clear.
Well, let me just give you a chance to mention here, or you can elaborate if you want, but this NIE that you're talking about that they are so intent on trying to refute, this isn't just some old document from now two years ago, coming up on two years ago, November 2007.
Admiral Blair, under oath, under cross-examination by John McCain in the Foreign Affairs Committee in March, said that they still stand by it.
It was reported by Newsweek, and I think somebody else right before Newsweek reported it two or three weeks ago, that basically the CIA has continued to reaffirm their NIE to the President.
They stand by it.
Not only that, General Jones, the National Security Advisor, on Sunday repeated that they stand by the NIE of November 2007.
In the face, I might add, of the notion that there was a covert Iranian nuclear facility, which supposedly, according to the briefing given to reporters on the 25th of September, could only be for, or it doesn't make any sense that it would be for peaceful purposes, but it must be for nuclear weapons purposes, which I think underlines the fact that that briefing was essentially propagandistic, rather than representing a real intelligence assessment.
So anyway, I think that it's very significant that the Obama administration is standing behind the NIE of 2007, rather than saying, well, we're in the process of re-evaluating it.
Well, now, maybe it does need to be re-evaluated here.
Maybe Bronson, you're onto something.
There's this annex.
Maybe the Israelis are right, and Mohammed ElBaradei is an Iranian spy, and there are forces of truth and goodness inside the IAEA who are trying to get out the actual facts to us that the Iranians sure are making nuclear bombs.
Okay.
First of all, what you're referring to, of course, is the leak of an internal draft report by the Safeguards Department of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which represents a group who really share the viewpoint of the United States and pretty much of Israel toward the intentions of the Iranians with regard to their nuclear program.
It has the deepest suspicions of Iran and takes advantage of any possibility to press those suspicions in its public presentation of its case against Iran.
So this paper that has been leaked is the subject, of course, of the New York Times headline saying Iran already knows how to make a bomb.
Also, an Associated Press story that was published more than two weeks ago, I think it's almost like three weeks ago now, which had a similar headline.
What's interesting about both the Times story and the Associated Press story, I want to mention this while I'm thinking of it, is that neither story refers specifically to the fact that this internal IAEA draft report is based almost exclusively on the so-called alleged studies documents, which you and I both know as the laptop of death.
Oh, no.
You've got to be kidding me.
This whole annex is based on that.
Now, wait a minute.
You're not kidding me.
We talked about this, I think, even before that AP article, didn't we?
Of course.
Yes, of course.
We've talked about it more than once.
Hold on a second there, Gareth, because, of course, you're an independent historian and you've got all this academic way of parsing all these details.
But let's just make this real simple.
The Israeli government manufactured a laptop pretending that what it was used to belong to a now-dead Iranian scientist, and it said that the Iranians had all these different programs.
One of them was, I believe, had something to do with testing implosion.
Another was about delivery vehicles for missiles.
And another was about a bench-level study to enrich uranium up to tetrafluoride level.
And anyway, as you have debunked over and over again, this whole thing is a big pile of lies, and it was obviously manufactured by the Israelis and funneled through the communist terrorist cult, the Mujahedin al-Khalq.
And so how in the world could anybody at the IAEA base an annex of any report on what the whole world knows to be forgeries, Gareth?
Well, this is really the $64,000 question.
I mean, how is it possible that these supposedly technically sophisticated, very intelligent people in the safeguards department could be deceived by these documents which have so many characteristics about them that scream out, hello, we're fraudulent.
And I think the answer is that there's a great deal of cynicism in the political world, and people are willing to go ahead and use documents which they have to be well aware are extremely suspicious documents for purposes which fit their agenda.
And I think that's undoubtedly what's going on here.
Okay, well, we can refer people back to your archives, to those of Gordon Prather, to Scott Ritter's great article at truthdig.org.
There's a ton of great stuff.
All you've got to do is search Iran laptop, and it will be debunked in spades for you.
But now tell me this, Gareth.
How do you know that the annex that the AP and Broad and Sanger at the Times are pushing here is based entirely on that Israeli-forged pretend smoking laptop?
Because the excerpt from this internal report of the safeguards department were published on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, which is a Washington, D.C.
-based think tank that is very close to Ali Heinemann and the safeguards department.
In fact, this is the think tank that has leaked the IAEA reports on Iran days or even a week or 10 days before they are officially available to the general public.
He has a pipeline directly into the safeguards department, which he takes advantage of to enhance his stature and the stature of his.
By his, I mean David Albright, the director of the ISIS, seeks to enhance his own prestige and the prestige of his organization by having these reports posted on the website.
The excerpts essentially representing the conclusion of this report are now available on the ISIS website.
If you read these conclusions, you find out that they explicitly state that they are basing their judgments on the alleged studies document.
Just astonishingly, one of the conclusions that they managed to reach is not much of a conclusion, but they make the statement, the assertion, that based on these alleged studies documents, they know that Iran carried out these studies on a vehicle, a reentry vehicle, not just a reentry vehicle, but fitting a nuclear device into a Shahab-3, and that it may be continuing to work on that.
And the same thing is true for the idea of a design of a bomb.
So what they're saying, I mean they're telling us quite directly in the excerpts printed by or published on the website of the ISIS that they are basing their judgment on these documents.
The only other evidence that is cited in these excerpts for any of the conclusions is the 15-page so-called uranium metal document.
And that is cited as somehow related to, although not by itself showing, that Iran is presumed by the IAEA Safeguard Department to have done work that gives them knowledge, or has received the knowledge of how to build a nuclear weapon.
And so one of the things that I've tried to report on in this latest article is what is it about this 15-page so-called uranium metal document that somehow makes it evident that would sustain or support the idea that Iran has received, probably from abroad according to this excerpt, the knowledge or the plan...
Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait, pardon me, pardon me, pardon me.
Let me make sure I understand what we're talking about here.
Is this uranium metal document, as you call it in quotes here, is this the brochure that was stuck in a box somewhere, and the Iranians said, yeah, we never did anything with that, it just came with the equipment.
That's exactly the one, yeah.
So this is years-old BS.
Gordon Prather wrote about this and debunked all of this, I don't know, seems like a decade ago, I guess it was half a month.
I wrote about it as well.
I mean, I pointed out that, you know, it's clear that this is not a nuclear, you know, a plan for a nuclear weapon, design for a nuclear weapon, or anything of the sort, it simply outlines the necessary procedures that it was a come-on, it was explicitly a come-on, you know, placed in the hopper after the Iranians had made a deal to purchase centrifuge design.
It was thrown into the deal as a freebie by the AQ Khan agent in order to give the Iranians some incentive to purchase the technology that they would need to actually...
And now, if it sounds, you know, strange to people that AQ Khan has brochures and what have you, I'll refer them back to that Jane's Defense article, I think it's from the late 1990s, about how they went to this giant arms bazaar and their AQ Khan labs had a whole setup there.
There was nothing covert about this at all.
It was as open as could be.
And they would sell nuclear technology to whoever wanted it.
Right, and by the way, I mean, you know, the IAEA is not claiming in the draft report that there's somehow, there's something about this 15-page document that by itself indicates that the Iranians know how to build a bomb.
They're claiming, and I don't have the wording right in front of me, but it's rather abstruse wording, saying that based on the content of this document we have reason to believe that they may have gotten other information.
Now, you know, that's simply not a very honest way of approaching this question.
And I think that this is one of the many indicators that this document is written again with an agenda in mind and that the approach taken is not intellectually respectable at all.
All right, now, two things here real quick.
I shouldn't have said that Gordon Prather debunked that because I'm sure he would prefer that it would be described as, well, he raised a lot of reasons that people might be skeptical because he doesn't really make conclusions in his articles.
He just lays out the facts for you.
So that's one thing.
The second thing is he did debunk, I don't know what else to call it, the Sunday Times article from, what, a month or two ago now or something about supposedly Iran's, and this is not too difficult to explain, I don't think, for the audience, the Hiroshima bomb they didn't need to test because they just knew it would work.
It was a gun-type nuke.
You shoot a uranium pit into another uranium pit.
It explodes.
It kills a couple hundred thousand Japanese.
The Nagasaki bomb they had to test.
And the reason why is because it was an implosion bomb, which is much more difficult to set off.
And you can do an implosion bomb of uranium.
And presumably, I guess, the part of the narrative here is if the Iranians were going to be able to make a bomb that's made out of uranium and small enough to fit on a warhead, then it would have to, or in a delivery vehicle or whatever, be made into a warhead, then it would have to be an implosion bomb.
A gun-type nuke has to be too big for something like that.
It weighs too much.
So it would have to be an implosion bomb.
But then they leaked this whole mess in the Sunday Times, where else, saying that the Iranians had this way of setting off an implosion bomb that involved cutting all these grooves and setting all these prima cord explosives and whatever.
And Gordon Prather, who actually used to make nuclear bombs for a living, our nuclear scientist at Antiwar.com, he is just laughing at this.
This is absolutely ridiculous.
He says, if you're going to set off an implosion bomb, you have to test it over and over and over and over again with maybe natural uranium, not fissile uranium.
But you have to set off the explosions over and over and over and over and shoot x-rays at it and watch it in super slow-mo.
And it's incredibly complicated to set off an implosion bomb.
The Iranians can't just do this.
Certainly not the way the Sunday Times described it.
And they certainly can't just make, I don't know, a half dozen or so warheads, put them in delivery vehicles on top of missiles and shoot them at Tel Aviv without testing the thing over and over again.
And they can't divert any even natural uranium to do tests like that because it's all safeguarded.
And the IAEA has continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material, declared nuclear material, in Iran to any military or other special purpose.
Well, I think you've covered that admirably.
What more is there to say?
I think you've absolutely scored a bullseye in terms of the knowledge that Gordon Prather almost uniquely brings to the table on this subject, which I did not cover in my story because it involves a lot of details that I was afraid I didn't have the space for.
But I'm glad that you've been able to put it on the table.
Yeah.
Well, and I hope that you can maybe follow up with Gordon Prather and make that the subject of a future article because that's got to get out there further.
Absolutely.
Okay, now, Garrett, can I keep you like three more minutes here?
Sure.
Okay, now, real quick, I guess this is only going to take about 30 seconds.
I want you to hear this.
This is Elliott Abrams on Fox News.
As far as you know, 59% of the respondents to our Fox News poll say that force should be used.
How would Tehran react to that?
It's a very big question, Alison.
My own view is that most Iranians now, after June, after the sealing of the election, would not rally around the flag.
People used to say that, that if there's an attack on Iran, the population is going to get patriotic.
But that's what Americans would do.
I don't know that it's what Iranians are going to do, considering the way that regime is painted in Iran.
So there you go, Garrett.
Where have I heard that before?
Well, from every neocon who ever said or wrote anything anywhere, I think.
Yeah.
Isn't there another country that sounds, is written sort of like the same as Iran, where we heard that about?
Let me think back.
Everybody, put on your thinking cap, turn on your flux capacitor, and let's go back to 2002, 2003, and you're talking about the country next door.
Am I right?
There you go.
That's it.
So if we bomb the Iranians, Garrett, you think what?
That they won't rally around the United States?
Well, obviously the...
Sorry, I was going to try to do that subtle and not laugh, but I couldn't help it.
No, this is obviously a point that the neocons and their ilk simply are never going to be able to grasp because it doesn't suit their purposes.
The sociology of knowledge tells us that these people will never understand that.
Well, and the neocons, they really don't care what the truth is.
They want a war with Iran.
But this does bring up the question again of why, because as we've covered over and over again and right here in this very interview, there's no nuclear weapons program in Iran, not that anybody has any evidence of whatsoever.
So it's not that Israel is scared of getting nuked, right?
So what is the deal?
Is it just about selling airplanes at this point?
These people are crazy or something.
No, not for the neocons.
I mean, at least for somebody like Elliott Abrams.
Now, there are neocons, obviously, who are in the business of selling airplanes, no doubt about it.
But I think you have to see the type of mind that we're dealing with with regard to people like John Bolton and Elliott Abrams.
I mean, these are people whose lives are so dominated by the idea of projecting power and the use of force.
I mean, I think that their mentality is very much close to the mentality of the Israeli political military elite, which is dedicated to the use of force.
And it's a way of life for them, without which they cannot function.
Neoconservatism is not an ideology.
It's a mindset.
It's a mindset.
It lets you go die killing people.
Right.
No, it goes beyond an ideology.
It's deep into the very fiber of their personality.
All right, everybody, that's Gareth Porter, PBSnews.net, antiwar.com, slash Porter.
Thanks again.
Thanks for having me, Scott.