10/22/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And we're going to start off the show about the best way I think we possibly could by welcoming Gareth Porter to it.
Hey, Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
How are you, man?
I'm doing great.
Thanks a lot for joining us on the show today.
Everybody, you know Gareth Porter.
When I recently passed my 1,000 interview threshold, I went back and counted.
It turns out more than 500 of them are interviews of Gareth.
No, that's not really true, but it's better than 50 of them.
And he is our regular guest on this show, independent historian and journalist for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net, I think, and .org?
Oh, is it just .net?
IPSnews.net.
Oh, there you go.
And you can find what Gareth writes also at antiwar.com.
And I think it forwards on, but really the address is original.antiwar.com.
And you've been doing some really good work lately here on the Afghanistan escalation.
But if it's okay with you, Gareth, before we get into that, I'd like to ask you about progress on the Iranian nuclear talks.
Sure.
Of course, it's been, I guess, about 30 years or so.
For the first time, well, I guess there were some talks about Iraq, like some lower-level talks.
This is the first time they've had real high-level official talks between the United States and Iran on, you know, I guess with the nuclear issue and other issues on the table.
I don't know.
Are we basically right where we were at the last time I talked to you, which is that, praise Barack Obama, he's basically accepted a deal with the Iranians that implies that they can go ahead and continue enriching uranium?
Well, you know, there is a degree of ambiguity about this, which we simply have to accept for the time being, exactly how the Obama administration is going to play this.
I think that it's still, at this moment, the administration is still determined to go through an exercise that says to the Iranians, you may not enrich uranium.
We're not going to recognize your right to enrich uranium.
You have to stop as part of a deal.
It's unacceptable for you to continue this.
And this, I believe, is going to be, at least in large part, for political show to satisfy the Israelis, to show the right-wingers in this country that the Obama administration is tough, to continue, in other words, this pose that the United States is somehow, you know, going to force the Iranians to bow to our will.
I do believe that there's more and more reason to understand that the Obama administration knows that it's not going to be successful in that and that this is simply playing for time, that eventually it's going to have to come up with a plan B, or perhaps it's C, I'm not sure.
So we just have to watch this play out, watch the string be played out.
But I just heard James Dobbins, who's the head of national security studies at the Rand Corporation, and an interesting guy.
I mean, you know, in some ways he's still very conservative, still very distrustful of enemies, so-called, of the United States.
But on the other hand, this is a man who really, as a matter of strong principle, believes in diplomatic engagement with everyone who we have differences with, including particularly Iran, and who's very critical of the idea of coercive diplomacy, of trying to use the threat of force as a diplomatic instrument.
He makes the argument, I've heard him make it before, and I heard him make it again this morning, that it doesn't work, that it's likely to backfire, it's counterproductive, and the United States shouldn't do it.
And I heard him this morning at a symposium at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., say that he's convinced that the, I think he said convinced perhaps, that he believes that the Obama administration will go to the table in the next round of talks with Iran on the nuclear issue, and lay out its zero-option demand, at least for the record.
So I think that's where we are.
I could be wrong, but that's my best guess.
Well, you know, the war party apparently re-energized, they apparently have been re-energized by the Iranian notification to the IAEA of an empty warehouse that one day will have centrifuges in it, and I'm sure you're a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal, and you saw in there about the pressure that is being put on the National Intelligence Council to go back and rewrite the National Intelligence Estimate that was released in November 2007, which says that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
And I just want to remind the audience here real quick, too, that it was just on September 16th that Mark Hosenball of Newsweek reported that the intelligence agencies had just put a new stack of papers on the President's desk saying that they still stand by that.
There have been reports that they, I guess the American CIA, had gotten a big argument with the Germans, the French, and the British, and the Israelis, and insisted that, no, we're not changing our assessment, our assessment stands, we don't care what you say.
So this is purely political.
It's just like the war with Iraq, only an even slower motion than that.
It's purely political.
Go back and rewrite your intelligence until it says what we say we want it to say.
That's right.
It is very political in terms of the positions taken by the various governments on this question.
It's just remarkable how little sense of integrity, or how completely absent there is any integrity in the Israeli, British, French, and I'd say German governments as well.
So I just wanted to say that, yes, I think that, obviously, those intelligence agencies and the governments that are calling the shots in each case are acting completely in political terms, not in terms of what the objective facts should be telling them.
And it's true, the U.S. intelligence community has reasserted, reaffirmed, its November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.
It's now, I think, this is the third or fourth iteration of that reaffirmation, of the accuracy of what was said in the 2007 estimate, that there is no evidence that Iran has resumed work on weaponization and no new information that would suggest that the estimate was incorrect in expressing moderate confidence that no other element of the nuclear program, that is to say uranium enrichment or conversion, covert uranium enrichment or conversion, had been resumed, which is a usually overlooked, I would say almost always overlooked aspect of the 2007 estimate, which is very relevant.
In fact, it's very important to understanding that point in regard to the Qom enrichment facility.
And I do want to make that point, that what the intelligence agencies were saying in November 2007 is that they found no evidence suggesting that Iran was trying to put one over on us that there was a covert facility for enrichment.
And this is despite the fact that we know from multiple sources now that U.S. intelligence was photographing regularly that site at Qom, had its eyes on the site, was constantly watching it for any evidence that it was indeed a nuclear site.
So, I mean, this is, in my view, really sort of nails down the case that U.S. intelligence has known all along, that Iran did not start construction on that site in 2007, that it was indeed after the estimate of November 2007 that construction on the Qom site began, just as the Iranians have said.
Well, and in context, now that everybody knows that here's this building at Qom and they plan on putting centrifuges in it sometime in the future, hell, even if it was secret, even if they hadn't declared it to the IAEA, it doesn't necessarily mean they're churning out weapons-grade uranium, but here they have notified the IAEA the whole thing will be safeguarded when it's under operation and they won't be able to churn out enriched uranium at any higher degree than they already were at the time.
And it's not, again, the point I want to underline as well is that this was not a case where U.S. intelligence forced the hand of the Iranians in informing the IAEA of the existence of this site.
It's quite the opposite.
That was certainly the claim, but never proven.
U.S. intelligence was taken by surprise.
I can now add to the story that I've already done a couple of times in different iterations on the Qom site that the talking points which were issued by the State Department on the very day of that briefing, which was September 25th, actually had a question and answer.
Question.
Why did the Iranians inform the IAEA of this site at this time?
Answer.
We do not know.
That was from the State Department briefing the day of the big accusations being leveled, that Thursday when Obama and Sarkozy and Brown gave the big speech.
Exactly.
Incredible.
It was clearer than ever before that the high official who anonymously briefed the press that day was clearly simply lying.
This was a prevarication to say we know that the Iranians began the construction before the IAEA was informed that they were going to withdraw from their modified 3.1 code commitment and revert to the earlier version of it, which was the 180 days before the introduction of nuclear material.
And they knew that it was a lie that the Iranians did this, informed the IAEA four days before that because their security had been breached.
That simply was not the case.
Well, you and your facts, Gareth Porter.
I'm sorry, there's a narrative here in this society, and everybody knows it.
It was trumpeted by the president himself and then, of course, by the New York Times and all the official media organs, and it's just the case.
I mean, if this was a discussion on cable TV news right now, for example, it would just be an established fact that we all know that Barack Obama busted them for having this secret facility.
And, you know, all the truth that you've ascertained to the contrary, notwithstanding, has nothing to do with it, Gareth.
Yeah, this is an alternative universe of information, you're correct.
Yeah, exactly.
It is our world, indeed.
Since we're talking about narratives, I want to very, very quickly offer a completely separate narrative here, which no one has heard yet.
And as far as I know, I'm the only one to put this together.
It's in a story that I'm now writing.
It may or may not be out today.
But the narrative is this, that the Iranian decision to begin to think about at least a backup set of nuclear facilities in case of a U.S. or U.S.
-Israeli attack on those facilities came at the end of March 2007.
What was happening at that point in the U.S.
-Iran relationship?
Well, I'll tell you.
What had happened was, for the previous six months, was a series of public leaks and moves by the Bush administration trying to convince Iran that we were serious about planning an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Including the big one, which was sending David Wilmser around to the American Enterprise Institute and other places, saying that Cheney no longer had confidence in Bush to do the right thing and start a war with Iran.
So he was trying to work a deal with the Israelis to start it for him, to box Bush in.
That was in March, wasn't it?
It was in March.
I thought it was April-May.
But in any case, it's part of that narrative, no question about it.
But the point is that clearly the Iranians were responding to a very public and very aggressive campaign to convince them that they were under threat.
And the response was to say, we're not going to inform the IAEA immediately upon the decision to construct a new nuclear facility.
And they also, at the same time, withdrew the permission for the IAEA to visit the reactor at Arak, which was another signal that they were going to tighten up on information, which of course would be useful for targeting an attack on Iran's nuclear sites.
Now, the additional point about that narrative that I want to make is that only three or four days, five days, five days after the letter to the IAEA at the end of March 2007, the head of the armed forces, chief of staff of the armed forces of Iran, made a public statement in which he said there's going to be an attack by the United States and Israel in the summer of 2007.
And on the same day, the head of the international affairs office of a party aligned with Ahmadinejad and the government said that Iran was not going to give out public information on its nuclear sites because it would be used or misused by the United States.
And he added, he specifically pointed to the fact that U.S. military deployments, naval deployments in the Persian Gulf were now at the same level that they had been prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
So that is really the narrative that we need to start to talk about and to use as the basis for understanding the recent developments.
Well, it is an important point, and I guess, you know, it's been pretty fair to say that America and Israel have been threatening Iran with attack for years on end now and that, well, hell, even if you go back, why did they buy their nuclear centrifuge equipment and blueprints and so forth from A.Q.
Khan and the Pakistanis instead of from China or Russia?
Well, it was because Bill Clinton and his dual containment policy, you know, turned the screws on China and Russia to prevent them from selling turnkey nuclear facilities to the Iranians.
We forced them into the black market in the first place.
It's the same thing all the way through.
Of course, if you are determined to have even a peaceful nuclear program and Israel is threatening to nuke you every day or every other day, I guess, then, yeah, you're probably going to want to dig out a base on the side of a mountain.
Still doesn't mean it's for nuclear weapons.
As Gabriel Kolko pointed out in his recent article at Counterpunch, the only real nuclear threat to Israel is that Iran would shoot conventional missiles at the Dimona nuclear weapons factory in Israel and they would have blowback from their own radiation.
Well, if Iranian rockets or Shahab-3 were that...
Yeah, it's that accurate.
Well, I'm thinking that maybe the problem with your journalism, Gareth, is that you're just too one-sided and that you don't have enough sources inside the Israeli Mossad to tell you what's really going on.
Well, my problem with you, Scott, is that you never seem to say anything I can disagree with.
Can't you make this more interesting?
Well, I mean, the thing is, obviously, you're so biased against the American empire here and you just disregard things like this anonymous quote of an Israeli official in Ynetnews.com today.
The great fear is that this kind of agreement will make it appear that Iran is indeed showing a reconciliatory attitude while it continues the basic enrichment of uranium in Natanz and in the secret site exposed in Qom through the West Intelligence work.
The expected deal takes care of Iran's openly available uranium, which it enriches for seemingly civilian aims, while it continues to secretly enrich uranium for military aims.
Now, this whole interview so far, you have not addressed their secret military enrichment program, Gareth.
You are correct as usual.
I am going to ignore that statement.
So what?
That's just absolutely meaningless, then, if an anonymous Israeli official says that in Ynetnews?
It does not really add anything new to the story, I guess I would suggest.
Well, I mean, this is pretty important.
If they're saying that, listen, Gareth is doing all this reporting about the Natanz facility and the Qom facility and the safeguards agreement and all these things, but if there's a secret, separate, underground military uranium program, Gareth, that you're not reporting on, well, then all your points are moot.
You're not touching the real issue, which is that they're making nuclear bombs, it says here.
Perhaps there's a story there that needs to be written, which is apparently that the Israelis believe that U.S. intelligence has been subverted by a traitorous group of officials who are refusing to acknowledge the truth and who are undermining the security of the United States and Israel.
Well, you would think so.
It does seem strange to me that the Israelis always make accusations like this, but they never provide their intelligence to the IAEA and say, here, go and find it.
Or I guess sometimes they do.
What they do is they feed ideas or encourage the MEK, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, to take their claims to the IAEA.
And as you know pretty well, they've done that many times in the past.
The problem is that they turned out to be so embarrassingly wrong, I think they stopped doing that at some point.
Well, now, so forgive me, but let me ask you about the David Sanger view here.
I'm sure, well, you know, I don't know, maybe he doesn't write the headlines, right?
There might be a separate headline writer at the New York Times, and it's not his fault.
Presumably there is.
Yeah, so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that.
But anyway, the New York Times is screaming this morning that the nuclear deal that's been reached for, again, just very basics, it's for them to take their 4% enriched uranium-235 and export it to Russia to be enriched up to 20%, which is technically, I believe, called highly enriched, although it's hardly weapons grade, which has to be above 90% purity.
And then they're going to reimport this further enriched uranium from Russia for use in medical isotopes and experiments and things like this.
And what David Sanger is saying, even though he's saying, oh, well, this could slow down their progress on nuclear bombs as though they're making any.
And, in fact, that's not just the headline.
It's kind of in the text of the thing, too.
But to boil it down into actual English, what he's saying is that the fear that the Iranians could withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty, kick the inspectors out, and begin to enrich the uranium that they've already got up to 4%, up to weapons grade 90-plus percent, that danger would be severely lessened if major portions of this uranium was outside of the country in Russia at any given time.
So I guess all that setup is just for me to ask you the question, do you think that this will kind of tamp down all the hype coming out of Israel and America's war party if the actual uranium, the physical uranium itself, is not in the country anymore?
Or are they just going to revert to rote here that, well, there's a secret military enrichment program that makes all this beside the point?
Everybody's going to continue to make the same charges.
This is not going to take care of that.
I think we can predict that safely.
And, indeed, it's undoubtedly true that there are ambiguities in this agreement that are still going to have to be worked out.
We don't really know exactly what the phasing of this is.
Does it all go out of the country at once?
That's what hardliners are insisting must be the case.
If that's not written into the agreement in specific language, then it's no good and it needs to be denounced.
And we just don't really know what the answer to that is because we don't have the text of it.
And you can't, I mean, there is no reliable reporting on it at this point.
So we just have to wait and see.
I mean, but what I will predict with great confidence that I will not be wrong is that the right-wingers in this country, including David Sanger, will continue to make the same charges and raise the same hue and cry that they have been for years.
Yeah.
Well, we'll keep refuting them and it won't matter.
They'll continue to win the argument anyway.
Well, let me ask you about this, and this goes back to the same thing we always talk about, which is that when Barack Obama says that the Iranians have to prove that their intentions are peaceful or whatever, there's already law for that.
It's called the Safeguards Agreement, and their nuclear facilities are safeguarded, and that's the end of that.
Their nuclear program is peaceful.
We all know it.
There is no secret nuclear weapons program there.
There ain't a shred of evidence for it other than anonymous quotes and Ynet news.
And so then the question is, well, what is this all about then?
If the entire nuclear thing is just a big smokescreen, what's it a smokescreen for?
And I guess I'll work into my question here.
Did you see Larry Franklin in his article, My Secret Plan to Overthrow the Mullahs, at Foreign Policy today?
No, you have to be kidding.
No, no, seriously.
Larry Franklin gets to write on foreign policy?
Yeah, well, of course.
Right there with his buddy Steve Rosen.
Oh, no, I guess Rosen's over at Commentary.
Okay, well, I don't know.
Yes, Larry Franklin convicted an American of passing classified information to Israel by way of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, anyway.
Well, gee, I guess if Larry Franklin can get on foreign policy, it's time for me to put in my bid.
Yeah, obviously.
I'd like to see the head-to-head matchup with you and what's-his-name, Petraeus' butt boy over there at the Post.
You mean Tom Ricks, yes.
Yeah, yeah, Tom Ricks, of course.
Absolutely, we should go head-to-head.
I haven't seen that, quite frankly, and I'm glad you've tipped me off to it.
I will try to read it sometime.
All right, well, we'll put off that part of the question, and I'll try to rephrase it.
What the hell is the point of this?
If they're not making nukes and it's all a bunch of lies, they can't obviously have a real full-scale war like one-third of the American people want and invade the country with ground forces and take it over Iraq-style.
If they bomb it from the air, that's only going to solidify the power of the government that they're trying to regime change.
Is this the Israeli hallucination that there's actually a nuclear threat, or is it all smokescreen entirely for something else?
And if so, what?
The answer to that has to be somewhat complex.
I don't think it's either all of one or all the other.
I think both things are involved in this.
In other words, there is an element in the Israeli government that absolutely believes everything that they've ever said about Iran.
They are really, truly paranoid, I mean, in a clinical sense, and we might as well just face that.
There are people who are clinically paranoid.
But then I think there are others across the spectrum from Israel to the United States who are more calculating and for whom this is a useful narrative.
It puts them in their view.
It puts them in the driver's seat.
It sort of supports everything that they've done and said in the past.
Whether a bombing attack is a practical matter or not is really of not that much concern to them.
It never has been.
These are not people who count the cost.
They're not going to pay the cost.
It doesn't matter to them how many people die, how much instability is caused.
That's not of concern to them.
I think the bottom line is that for the calculating element in this picture, in the neoconservative movement both in Israel and the United States, and indeed the right wing which is allied with the neoconservatives, these are people who really do not care about the public interest of the United States or the American people.
They're really interested in the psychological and other payoffs that come with taking the hard line.
That's the best way I can summarize my understanding of the situation.
I guess out of all of them, only Ledeen's son is actually in the military and risking his life, right?
None of these neocons have any military experience, nor even their nephews at risk in any of this.
I think that's pretty much right, yes.
There may be an occasional exception to that, but for the most part that appears to be the picture.
I've got an idea.
I think that we should carpet bomb the Taliban with the population of the foreign policy initiative and the American Enterprise Institute.
We'll just drop Kagan's on them until they give up.
Fire them out of cannons, something like that.
A 500 pound bomb, you know, Fred Kagan.
I think we could call them then cannon fodder, couldn't we?
Yes, we could.
And then we wouldn't have to read what they write at Foreign Policy anymore.
Which would be certainly a positive development.
Indeed.
Listen, I'm sorry that I didn't give you a chance to talk about all your great reporting about Afghanistan, of which you've got a lot, at original.antiwar.com.porter.
But I really appreciate your insight on Iran again today, Gareth, and I hope I can have you back on the show soon.
No problem.
We'll do it.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter, Interpress Service, IPSnews.net, antiwar.com.porter.