03/21/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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On to our next guest.
It's Gareth Porter, the great independent historian and journalist, primarily for InterPressService at IPSNews.net.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
Hey, I'm good.
Thanks very much for having me again.
Very happy to have you here.
This will be interview part six on Gareth's brand new book, Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
We're basically going through chapter by chapter here.
Thanks very much.
You're very gracious with your time and your expertise on the show.
I want to know...
I think we're setting some sort of a record for a radio interview on a book.
Yeah, I think so.
Well, and on this subject too.
I mean, give me a break.
Is there anything like it in world history?
Probably not.
So, well, let's see.
I've interviewed you.
When we changed with the date in the title, it ruined it.
But it used to be that the title of each interview at entry at scotthorton.org, it would say Gareth Porter number 125, Gareth Porter number 126, for using the same title over and over again, right?
So we lost track somewhere right around 150.
And then probably, well, I don't know what about half of those are on Iran.
And then, of course, lots on Iraq and Afghanistan and other issues as well.
But yeah, we sure have covered this a lot.
And I'm still learning all kinds of things.
And that's why I have you on.
Because I want to know this stuff at least almost as well as you do.
Because, well, it's very interesting to me.
And of course, it's a very important issue for peace on planet Earth and all of that too.
So now the best I can do is read what you write and interview you about it.
Manufactured Crisis.
Everybody go and buy this book, would you?
In fact, buy 10 of them and give them to people that you know and care about and are associated with and have met before.
Manufactured Crisis.
The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
All right.
Now, so this chapter, chapter seven is IAEA comes up empty.
I just love the way you did this.
You just case after case.
I almost want to feel sad and a little bit empathetic with the IAEA guys.
I can sort of see why they might be suspicious.
Oh, I think we got them on this one.
And then just case after case after case of hyped up accusation after hyped up accusation about Iran's nuclear program falling to pieces once all the documents are finally come forward.
So just take us through because I think people remember, if anything, they're confused because, man, don't they know that Iran has a nuclear weapons program?
We're surprised they haven't nuked us all to death already, Gareth, because they've been making nuke bombs for years, I heard.
And what it is is what everybody heard is each and every one of these stories standing alone as more smoking gun evidence of what these guys have been up to that we've heard over the last decade.
Yeah, I mean, this whole story about the IAEA investigation of Iran's nuclear program that began really around 2000, well, late 2003, I guess you could say is the starting point and went up until the beginning of 2008 or the end of 2007 is really a very important part of the whole narrative because that's like four years of steady drip, drip, drip of stories.
Like every three months you get an IAEA report that has, well, I mean, for a period of time, nothing new was coming out, but for a while in 2004, 2005, you had a series of reports that almost every new report had something new that cast suspicion on the Iranian nuclear program because of some kind of issue that had arisen because of a discovery that the IAEA had made about some activity that had taken place or a suspicion about one of the documents.
So, I mean, they varied in terms of how it came about, but you've got one case after another where the IAEA was suspicious of something that had happened or that Iran had turned over to them and decided that they were going to launch an investigation.
And as you say, I mean, they clearly thought they were going to come up with some evidence in one or more of these cases that would indicate that they had evidence of a nuclear weapons program and in every case they had a negative in the end.
So, yeah, I mean, this is an important part of the whole storyline in my book, which is that they did everything possible to come up with any shred of evidence that they could use to indict Iran as having a nuclear weapons program and it just, it was a failure along the line.
Yeah, it's just like I remember my friend back in 2002 talking about before the war in Iraq, but talking about the case for a war with Iraq and saying, you know, if you give each one of these a one or a zero, first of all, for even being true or not, but even accepting that they're true, give them a one or a zero for whether they're good enough as an excuse to go to war, you end up with zero times 10, maybe zero times 20.
Boy, that's a lot of excuses, but none of them are good enough.
In this case, it's the same kind of thing with this evidence where it's just, you know, zero times 20, you know, nothing but endless accusations, lots and lots of smoke, but then, oh, you know what?
That's not even smoke, that's steam.
There's no fire at all.
Steam is good, steam is good.
That's terrible.
All right, so let's go through this laser enrichment.
What are they doing with their lasers then, Gareth, huh?
Defend that.
Laser enrichment was, of course, something that they had started to look at in 2003 and, you know, this was part of the report that was put out in late 2003.
They were reporting on the fact that Iran had carried out both centrifuge enrichment and laser enrichment, and we've talked about this before, over a period of nearly two decades, was the general impression was given.
And, in fact, what if you look very carefully at the IAEA report that was issued first in November 2003 and then later in early 2004, the first one on the centrifuge, very specifically, and the second one adding an important detail on the laser enrichment, what you found, if you read those reports carefully, is that there was no real enrichment taking place before these reports were written.
That, in fact, the only thing that had happened was that they had tested the centrifuges with uranium, which is the only way you can do it, to make sure that they actually would work before they intended to actually begin any enrichment.
And by that time, as we've talked about before, in fact, they had not enriched any uranium.
So that's what they reported in late 2003.
And in the spring, I forget the exact date, 2004, they added a very important detail on the laser enrichment program, which was that, in fact, they did some experiments, but that, in fact, the experiments failed to achieve the result which was the minimum necessary to have a viable program.
It was like only one-third of the enrichment that was necessary that was actually achieved, and they basically realized that it wasn't going to work.
So they had to give it up.
That's what was actually reported in the 2004 report.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
And then, so what about the highly enriched uranium?
I remember this one being a real big deal back in the Bush years there, 2004 or 2005, about, man, they found, they didn't say weapons grade, 90-something, really above 94% to make a bomb out of it.
They didn't say that, but they said highly enriched uranium and no reasonable explanation for this.
Right.
Now, this was a very important one because this was the first time that they thought that they had caught the Iranians doing high enriched uranium, HEU.
And what happened was that when the Iranians tested their centrifuges at the Calais Electric Company in mid-2003, they had made some low enriched uranium there, but the IAEA, when they took environmental samples, found traces of HEU, high enriched uranium.
And so almost immediately the IAEA put out a report saying, oh, look, we found evidence of HEU.
This looks really bad.
And it can't be, as you said, it can't be explained by anything that the Iranians have claimed.
Now, the Iranians said almost immediately that this must be some imported parts that were contaminated.
That was the explanation they gave.
And the IAEA safeguards department people who, of course, as I think I've indicated on your show, and we'll talk about it again, I'm sure, are really hard liners.
The first one, Goldschmidt, was somebody who had criticized ElBaradei for refusing to refer in his IAEA report in September 2004 and June 2004 to the satellite photos that John Bolton wanted to have referred to in that report.
In other words, you have Goldschmidt siding with Bolton in an issue where it was not real evidence of nuclear weapons intent or anything of the sort.
It was simply photos of potentially conventional explosive facilities.
And so that indicates Goldschmidt's bent.
And I talk about that in the book.
And then you've got Ali Heinemann, who did not like the Iranians, did not trust the Iranians, and did everything possible to try to find evidence to show that they were having a nuclear weapons program.
And this is a very good example of it.
So Heinemann and Goldschmidt were still determined that they were going to prove that the Iranians, in this case, had produced high-risk uranium, and that must be evidence of a nuclear weapons program.
Well, to cut to the chase here, it turns out that they finally had to call in an external group of specialists.
And I think the circumstantial evidence is that ElBaradei and his allies realized that Heinemann and Goldschmidt were really working against the interests of an objective investigation here, and they couldn't be trusted with this issue.
And so they called in some external specialists to look at the evidence.
And the external specialists very quickly came to the conclusion that this was indeed a case of contamination of parts that had come from abroad, that the Iranians had been telling the truth.
Right.
And I remember that from back then, too.
Oh, it turned out just like they had tried to explain.
Oh, this came from the Pakistani equipment that we bought.
Well, this apparently was not the Pakistani one.
This was apparently Russian.
Well, there were two different ones.
Yeah, there were two different ones.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Gareth Porter in just a sec.
Manufactured Crisis is the book.
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Hey, guys, I got his laptop.
All right.
All right.
Commercial break.
Get out of my way.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter.
He wrote Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare now for sale at a Web site near you.
Just type it in.
Manufactured Crisis by Gareth Porter.
And so we're talking about the highly enriched uranium residue on some Iranian equipment that Ali Heinen and I forgot his first name, Goldschmidt, Goldsmith.
Yeah, that they thought was going to be such a big deal.
And it turned out not to be.
And it was the 36 percent stuff came from Russia and then the 56 percent stuff came from Pakistan, from the A.Q. Khan network.
Is that correct?
And which piece was which?
Does it matter?
Not really.
All right, let's go.
So and then the Telex is now just before just a few weeks ago, before I got the book, I guess after the book was out, you wrote a piece about this and I interviewed you about it.
So maybe we can give this a little bit of short shrift here.
But this is another one where you could really see how some CIA guys might go, wow, look at seven things in a row that are dual use items.
I think maybe there's a front operation going on for the Iranian military here.
But you say not only is it not right, but is it that they really should have known better to Gareth?
Well, of course they should have known better.
I mean, you know, this is a clear case of, you know, a little small tidbit or a few tidbits of ambiguous evidence.
I mean, how can it be more ambiguous than dual use, dual use equipment or dual use technology?
All of these cases that the intelligence analysts had in front of them, these Telexes, involved the effort to procure either, you know, some bottles of fluorine that can be used in, you know, a nuclear program, but obviously can be used for, you know, innumerable other applications.
And the same thing for the other types of technology or equipment that were at issue here.
I mean, you know, there's no inherent reason to go off half cocked and say this is evidence of a nuclear program, except as I've, you know, argued in the chapter that we'll get to later, that the intelligence community was primed to try to find information or analysis that would support the policy of the United States that suspected that Iran was trying to get nuclear weapons.
So that's what was really going on.
Now, in addition to that ambiguous evidence that I've just referred to, of dual use equipment being procured on these Telexes, there was also the telephone or the Telex number of this physics research center, which, you know, Iran never denied the fact that that was a defense ministry related outfit.
So, you know, that was seen as the smoking gun.
Oh, you've got the Telex number.
That must mean the military is using, you know, Sharif University, which was ostensibly where these things were being ordered for.
They're using for Sharif University as a front to carry out a military nuclear program.
And that became the sort of mainstream idea that supported the policy of the United States to accuse Iran of intention of having nuclear weapons for a full decade in the whole, during the 1990s.
And it turned out, as the IAEA finally found out in 2007-2008, when the Iranians turned over all the documents at the end of the work plan that had been agreed in 2007 with ElBaradei, it turned out that, in fact, the head of the, for the former head of the PHRC, Physics Research Center, had been a faculty member of Sharif University and had been asked by all these other faculty members to help them get things for their students and for their own research.
And the documentation was impeccable.
The IAEA could not question any of it.
And so this closed the books on this.
Unfortunately, as I've suggested on your show, I think, before, David Albright continues to try to put out the idea that this is evidence of a secret military nuclear weapons program.
Right.
All right, now...
Still doing it today.
Well, why not?
Indeed.
So now I want to talk about the mine and the suspicions of military involvement in opening up a new mine instead of expanding the old mine and this kind of thing they thought was suspicious.
But also, I'd like you to focus, if you could, for us a second on this uranium metal document, which you say is sort of the engineering document for how to make hemispheres for uranium nuke, but it's not the specific manufacturer documents of exactly how to do it.
So what is the significance of this?
Where did they get it and what were they doing with it?
Doesn't it say that they're guilty of something or something?
Right.
No, this comes back to the episode that we discussed, I think, on the last program, or maybe there was one before, where the Iranians were dealing with the AQ Khan network, trying to get centrifuge technology, trying to get the blueprints for centrifuges and some parts to see how it worked.
And the AQ Khan network threw in to the deal this 15-page paper, one page of which had the sort of general outline of how you would create the hemispheric structure that is part of the process of building the contraption with which you use for nuclear weapons.
And this is a formed metal, a uranium metal form that is part of a nuclear weapons apparatus.
So what the AQ Khan network was doing was trying to interest them in buying the actual specs, the specifications for how to do this.
This was basically an advertisement for that.
It had none of the detail that would be necessary in order to know how to do it.
So in other words, it's just the same old answer, is they have it because we drove them to the black market to get the equipment for their civilian nuclear program, which is safeguarded and verified and everything else.
And it came from the salesman from that black market.
It came from the salesman.
And I asked Heinonen when I interviewed him, did anybody ever contradict the Iranian position that they did not ask for this?
He told me, no, nobody ever contradicted them.
And never mind any credible assertion that they did anything with it or have a secret stash of uranium that they've diverted somewhere and that they've been practicing with the metallurgy involved in actually forming it.
No, nobody has ever claimed, the IAEA and Ali Heinonen have never claimed anything of the sort.
In fact, Heinonen, when he initially addressed this question in a briefing, if I remember correctly, for member states, he was quite forthright about it.
He said, no, look, this is not a blueprint for a nuclear weapon.
It's not something that can actually be used to build a nuclear weapon.
It's something much far short of that.
And so he was basically saying, don't get too excited about it.
But I think the politics of this were such that he changed his mind.
And one has to believe that he talked to the Israelis and the Americans, and they convinced him that he should beat the drum about it, because that's what he ended up doing.
And so it was turned into a political issue, despite the fact that he knew very well that there was no real significance to that document.
All right.
Now, we've got to skip the mine, but suffice to say that the mine and the plutonium, well, those two specifically, those were just dropped as issues, which we can only conclude means that they were satisfied.
They just didn't really say anything about it.
Yeah, I mean, this is a good indication, I should say, a good indication that essentially Heinemann was encouraged clearly by the Israelis, because the Israelis were the ones who knew that there was a connection between the Gashin mine and this firm called Kimia Madan, which they intended to introduce into the laptop document.
So they wanted the IAEA to launch an investigation of the Gashin mine, and specifically the ore processing part of the mine operation.
And that's because, as I say, they had already caught on to Kimia Madan having a contract for that ore processing center.
And they had a document that linked Kimia Madan to some procurement request for something that was a dual-use technology, but that they were going to argue was very incriminating.
So that's the origin of why otherwise mysteriously the IAEA wanted to look into this Gashin mine.
Nobody could figure out why they would want to do so, because there was no indication that there was anything amiss about it.
And there was no indication that Iran had told Afib about the mine or anything like that.
But it turns out, we know from Jackie Sanders, the U.S. representative to the IAEA at that point in a speech, she later said, well, we think maybe it's not clear whether the Iranian military was really in control of this mine.
So that was the secret agenda that was at stake.
And as you said, the IAEA found nothing to support that idea.
In fact, well before 2007, Iran had turned over documents which showed very clearly that there was no military involvement in the Gashin mine.
You know, the Khemian Madan was simply made up of people who had worked for the civilian atomic energy organization before on the oil processing.
All right.
And then the next interview will be all about the alleged studies.
That's the next chapter of the book here.
But we've got to end up with, to finish up this chapter here very quickly, Gareth, ElBaradei had this so-called work plan with the Iranians, where by the end, you say, of 2007, they had resolved all of these issues.
And that's the same time that the NIC put out the National Intelligence Estimate saying that the CIA and the American government was satisfied that they didn't have a nuclear weapons program at all there.
And you showed just how panicked the Americans were about that, you know, about these issues being resolved when they were.
Yeah, this is one of the things that I'm proudest of about the book is that I was able to show that through the documents, the WikiLeaks cables, right, that that the U.S. was very determined to prevent the work plan success from having any political impact.
Yeah, it just goes to show what they're about.
And then, of course, it's interesting that it's Jeffrey Pyatt, who is now the ambassador to Ukraine during this current crisis, is one of the guys quoted in there.
And again, thanks to Chelsea Manning for leaking those documents.
People should never forget, you know, how grateful we got to be for the source of thousands and thousands of great news stories that have come out of those docs and and and, you know, proof of suspicions like yours that have come out of those documents.
And so, all right, with that, I'll let you go.
And I'll thank you very much for your time.
And I will have you on KPFK on Sunday to cover the alleged studies, documents and the smoking laptop.
Garrett, thank you very much for your time.
Thank you, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right.
That is Gareth, the great Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
And he writes at IPS News dot net and at Truthout dot org.
And he won the Gellhorn Prize.
And he will be my guest on Sunday morning on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
And then probably, I don't know, next Monday and Tuesday, we're going to cover this whole damn book.
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On March 7th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first ever national summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Giraldi, McGovern, Kutowski, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Alcin Weir of If Americans Knew and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's the national summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Friday, March the 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
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