For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome back to the show our regular guest, Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He writes for Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net, and you can find everything that he writes at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
It's actually original.antiwar.com slash Porter, but I think it'll go ahead and forage you on there.
The last two articles were Giraldi, U.S. Intel Found Iran Nuke Document Was Forged.
Of course, we've talked with Phil on this show about that twice since then.
The brand newest one from yesterday is New Revelations Tear Holes in Nuclear Trigger Story.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
Thanks again.
Thanks for having me on again, Scott.
Well, I'm so pleased to have you here.
And man, you know, the Israelis just can't tell a lie about Iran without you debunking it, so you just go right ahead here.
What are we talking about?
Sunday Times of London, December 14th, 2009.
Big lies.
Front page.
Well, it's both a simple and a complicated story.
I mean, the simple part of it is that, interestingly, once the IPS story about the CIA considering the nuclear trigger document that The Times published, a forgery, was published on December 28th.
There were a few days passed, and then this online columnist for The Times of London, Oliver Cam, came out with an attack, of course, on both myself and Phil Giraldi, calling Phil a Lindbergian, which is a very nice touch, and going back to my 1976 or 1977 statement about Cambodia and portraying me as an apologist for Pol Pot.
So that was The Times' riposte, apparently, to the initial story.
Okay, wait, wait.
Well, let me stop you right there.
So London Times publishes some forgeries.
Phil Giraldi talks with his, we have to assume, I guess, CIA sources or whoever exactly, intelligence community sources.
They tell him, oh, those forgeries?
We already decided those were forgeries.
Don't quote me by name, but go ahead and tell Gareth I said so.
So then he talks to you, and you write up an article saying, the American intelligence community has already disregarded these bogus documents because they're forgeries.
And then the London Times' response was, you're a commie, and Phil's a Nazi.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, right.
That's one way of putting it.
And said that the fact is, you're not a commie, and Phil's not a Nazi.
So maybe they should try again with a better excuse than that.
Well, that's what I suggested to Mr. Cam in my response.
But here's what's interesting.
Other people weighed in as well, including George Mashki, who is a Persian linguist and former U.S. military intelligence analyst, intelligence officer.
And he pointed out some weaknesses in the story about the document as well.
He pointed out some anomalies, which would lead one to be very suspicious of that document.
In response to all of these, Cam then comes back and says, well, George Mashki, you're wrong about this because this document was not the original.
This was not the original Persian language document.
This was a retyped version of the relevant excerpt from the document.
That's the words that were used by Oliver Cam in his report.
Okay, so now we're nearing Three Stooges territory here, okay?
So your article where you quote Philip Giraldi saying that the U.S. intelligence guys have already disregarded these forgeries, you also point out in that article, there's no dates.
There's no security markings.
These don't seem to be legitimate documents here.
And their answer is, oh, that's because they're not.
We faked it, but trust us, we have the real one?
Well, what he's saying is, of course you have to interpret it a little bit, is that we were given a retyped version of the document which represents the relevant excerpts, the relevant portion of the original document, retyped.
So obviously this means that whoever gave it to them, and we can play guessing games about that, of course, really had the opportunity to tailor it to the political message they wanted to send.
And obviously revealing this through the Times of London was exactly for the political purpose of trying to raise the tensions with Iran and to further the political atmosphere that has been created over the years of enormous suspicion that Iran is trying to get nuclear weapons.
So this really further throws just the greatest suspicion on these documents.
They are certainly much less to be taken seriously than before Oliver Cam tried to defend them.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you this.
I don't know why I haven't looked, but what's David Albright saying about these documents over there at ISIS?
Well, this is very interesting indeed.
The same day that my article came out, the second article, David Albright came out with a commentary that was really quite cautious, to say the least, on these documents.
He basically suggested that it's very troubling that it's now been admitted that these documents were in fact retyped, and in the process, of course, excerpted from the original.
In other words, the idea that this is not in fact a full document, this is just what whoever decided to leak it decided to put out.
And I don't have an exact quote for you, I don't have it in front of me, but I would say that Albright is telegraphing, because he's somebody who tries to remain loyal to his friends in the IAEA, the people in the Safeguards Department and Ali Hainan's group, this is a sign that he does not trust these at all.
I mean, he doesn't want to get caught defending these documents at all.
By the way, when the document, the original, supposed original Persian language document was posted, I called the ISIS because there was also this second document, which is part of my story, but it's more complicated, posted with it, supposedly an original Persian language document.
Now, this is a document which is supposed to give greater credibility to the nuclear trigger document, and I will go into more detail in a moment, but the point is that in addition, there was given to ISIS a couple of charts which were for the purpose of trying to make the case that the name which appears on this second document, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist, is the guy who runs the covert nuclear weapons program of Iran, and that it was within his organization that this nuclear trigger document was authored.
That was the point of this second document.
But the charts that they gave to ISIS, which were published on the ISIS website, were supposed to make the parallel, to draw a parallel between an organization that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh worked for in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the present organization that he works for.
It's a very weak argument indeed.
But the point is, when I called up to ask about this chart, I also asked David Albright whether he was quoted correctly by CNN when he said that this document, the nuclear trigger document, had been edited.
And he said, no, no, I didn't say that at all.
But now it's clear to me that he did say something indicating that he knew that there was something wrong with this document.
Well, and see, this is funny.
Well, I'm sorry, I've got so many things to say, I'm trying to put them in order.
First of all, everybody, you're listening to the great Gareth Porter, the man who just debunks war party lies like it's brushing his teeth.
He's wonderful.
And here he is, he's doing it again for us.
Now, the other thing is, here's another Three Stooges reference.
This is really stupid, this document, this forgery.
This really was not hard for you to debunk.
As you explain in this article here, I want to get into a little bit of detail about this chart of which Iranian scientist is in charge of what office and what agency.
I mean, you explain in here that these agencies aren't even the same thing, that they're conflating different agencies together.
Yeah, let me start with that point.
Help me pronounce this guy's name.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, I don't know how you pronounce it.
Fakhrizadeh, that was better than I could have done.
Tell us about this, because this is really fun stuff, everybody.
Yes, indeed.
This is the first point.
The author of the Times of London story, Catherine Philp, P-H-I-L-P, clearly did not do any original research, didn't ask questions, just basically handed a story by the leaking intelligence agency and told, here's what we want you to write.
And she wrote it dutifully without basically doing any fact-checking at all.
She was handed this chart or these two charts, one of which has a list of offices which are supposedly under Mohsen Fakhrizadeh's present department.
It's an advanced military technology outfit within the Ministry of Defense.
The overall organization is not named, but Fakhrizadeh's organization is something with the development and deployment of advanced technology in the title.
In any case, Catherine Philp mentions that the nuclear trigger document was written by an organization that belongs to the Institute of Applied Physics.
And this is an organization that's a standalone organization.
It has nothing to do with this outfit that Fakhrizadeh works for, and I know that because the IAEA has referred to it in its report.
It's never linked to Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
The key point here is that the original Persian language document, which is also posted by the Times of London, which lists the recipient for a memo, which is signed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, does not include this organization.
And therefore, if Catherine Philp had gone to the trouble of actually checking the Farsi language or the Persian language document, looking at an English translation of it, she would have seen that it's not there.
She completely misunderstood it.
This is further evidence that the leaking agency here is playing games, simply using the Times of London to put out a story that a real professional outfit would not have published.
That's all there is to it.
Ouch.
Dang.
Poor Oliver Kahn and the rest of them goofballs.
It must really hurt to be ridiculed this publicly over and over like this.
Well, let's focus on the pretty obvious reason why they chose this guy, Fakhrizadeh, to pick on him and say, yeah, he's probably the guy in charge of this thing.
This goes to a story of some dual-use technology.
This is where it gets really interesting.
I really like this.
I think this is so much fun.
It's even more important, Scott, because it sheds new light, really, on the whole alleged studies or laptop of death document.
The reason is that these documents are pinned on the storyline that this Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is indeed the head of the alleged covert nuclear weapons program in Iran.
This program that supposedly took place in 2002-2003, maybe 2001-2003.
They have in this collection of documents at least three or four letters or memoranda which were either to Mohsen Fakhrizadeh or issued by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
Therefore, it's clear that the intention here was to try to give verisimilitude to the other documents, the sort of electronic documents, which were in some cases so clear that they could be easily fabricated that they understood that they needed something to be added to the collection to try to give them some credibility and to link them to the Iranian government because all of these technical studies, there's nothing in them that links them to the Iranian government, nothing whatsoever.
And so it's clear that it was terribly important to have a personality who they could include in the document through some documents which would arguably be linking the Mohsen Fakhrizadeh name to these documents that they had nothing else to pin to the Iranian government.
Now, why did they pick him?
They picked him because the IAEA had singled him out, they didn't name him by name in their original report, but they singled out the former head of the Physics Research Institute in Tehran, sorry, Physics Research Center, I got it wrong, Physics Research Center.
And he was singled out because he had been the one who put his name on some requests for dual-use items, to import dual-use items.
Dual-use means this is technology that could be used in a nuclear program, but it has other uses too, and when you're talking about importing stuff like this, the big national governments like the U.S. keep a very close eye on who's doing what with what.
Sort of like they sold Saddam Hussein germ weapons and called it farm loans.
Well, exactly.
The list of dual-use technologies is enormously long, incredibly long, and it includes things that are used in manufacturing of all kinds.
So the idea that Iran would import dual-use technologies means that they import things to build anything, to have a science sector or a manufacturing sector, because without dual-use technology, you couldn't do anything.
So the point is that there's a list of dual-use technologies that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh tried to import, in some cases he did import them, they were imported, and the IAEA started to quiz the Iranian government, what about these things?
So the Iranian government, as I've asserted a number of times on your program, always uses everything that the West wants to know as a bargaining chip.
And so they held on to these questions until they could forge an agreement with the IAEA, which they did in 2007.
The agreement was that the Iranians would turn over, would answer all the questions that the IAEA had been asking over the years since 2004, but they wanted in return to be given a clean bill of health, and they wanted this in writing.
They wanted the IAEA to say that that's what would happen if they were able to resolve all these issues.
So an agreement was reached by ElBaradei and the other parts of the IAEA with the Iranian government in August of 2007.
In the remainder of 2007, the Iranians very quickly provided all kinds of documentation, and also allowed the IAEA missions to come in and visit places to see for themselves if what they were saying was not true.
And on the case of the dual-use technologies, they completely satisfied the IAEA that there are innocent explanations that Bakhrizadeh had been...
He was also a professor of physics at Imam Hossein University in Tehran, and he had been asked by various parts of the university to get these technologies, these dual-use technologies, for their own academic purposes.
And so the Iranians turned over all this documentation.
So the forgers, do you think the forgers just weren't hip to this development?
The last they'd heard there was some suspicion about him, but they didn't know that the IAEA had already checked him out and figured out that actually his dual-use was legit?
These documents, the alleged studies documents, were forged in early 2004.
No, no, I mean these new ones.
These new ones, it seems like they're...
The new ones, it's too late now.
It's too late now.
Most of Bakhrizadeh's narrative was completely firmly established from 2004 to 2008.
Unfortunately, you know, the IAEA then, in February 2008, had to issue basically a back down.
I mean they backed away from their suspicions that they had previously expressed about the dual-use technologies.
I mean that's what I'm getting at.
What it's too late for is for somebody to forge new documents that this guy's in charge of a nuclear weapons program.
The IAEA's already checked on this and said, nah.
Well, I mean this is where it's either sloppiness or a degree of political, a sense of political confidence that this Mohsen Bakhrizadeh narrative is still firmly established.
Nobody's bothered to debunk it.
Nobody's bothered or successfully has been able to get the word out that it's not true.
My article, I think it's fair to say, is the first one which has reported on the fact that this whole dual-use technology suspicion had to be withdrawn by the IAEA.
The corporate media in this country has refused completely to report the fact that the IAEA backed away from virtually all of the charges that they had been bringing since 2004 because the Iranians gave them the documentation that they needed to show that it simply wasn't true.
Right.
In other words, and that applies to the British media as well, in other words they're hoisted on their own petard.
They never did the investigation about this guy and they don't pay you the big bucks to go and write for them.
They don't read antiwar.com.
They don't know.
They don't have a Gareth Porter to tell them what the hell is going on.
So when they're putting lies in the Sunday Times of London, I guess their fact-checkers just aren't clued in enough to what's verifiable to know how to construct their lies.
So you, just like Mohammed ElBaradei in 2003, you debunked these forgeries in three minutes on Google.
Scott, excuse me, did you say fact-checkers?
Oh, they don't even have those at all?
They don't even pretend?
I don't think so.
I don't think that position exists in this area of coverage.
Maybe on sort of crime, local crime in London.
Not on this, that's for sure.
The other thing though, just let me point out, the other thing is that it's very possible that this is a document which was in fact forged back in 2005 or 2004 and is just now being released because the timing seems good.
I don't know, I don't know that's the fact.
I think that's probably right.
I wanted to mention here that Philip Giraldi's interview, his article today on Antiwar.com is called Where's the Beef, Mr. Murdoch?
Don't Believe All You Read About Iran.
And wow, he really goes through and catalogs just the recent lies, right?
He's not even going back in time.
He's just been going through like the last year of lies about Iran in the Sunday Times or the London Times.
They're supposedly different papers, but whatever.
Yeah, the Times of London.
We need more of this.
We need more of the catalog of the kind of coverage of Iran which has been done by various newspapers.
It's time now to do it for the New York Times.
Yeah, oh man.
Let me at him, Uncle Scooby.
I'll get him.
Well, let's start with this.
How come you don't have, is this going to be in an article coming soon or something?
Gordon Prather explaining about uranium deuteride and how you wouldn't use that to set off a nuclear bomb anyway, dummy.
I mean, that's got to be in some of this reporting here.
No, I agree.
I mean, it's time to do a more technical analysis of why this is a dopey idea.
From my point of view, it was important to establish at a higher level why it's clear that this is forged rather than to go to a more technical level which most people will not understand and which it's simply more difficult to communicate the significance of it.
And therefore, I haven't gotten to that point.
But it's an important story, no doubt about it.
Well, I'm no physicist, but Dr. Gordon Prather is.
And for the record, for people who don't know who Dr. Gordon Prather is, he's our in-house nuclear physicist at Antiwar.com.
He made nuclear bombs, worked in the Navy at Lawrence Livermore and Grand Sandia National Laboratories.
He was the chief scientist of the Army and an advisor to Senator Henry Bellman and others on the international treaties and all that.
If this was a just society, he would have got Bolton's job as undersecretary of state for nonproliferation in the first Bush administration.
And he's awesome, and he knows exactly what he's talking about.
He's paid his dues.
He's got the letters that come after his name.
He says, listen, they tried to do experiments with uranium deuteride to see about maybe using it as a trigger back in the day.
And what they discovered was uranium deuteride is an inhibitor in that you might use uranium deuteride in your nuclear reactor in order to slow down the fission, in order to boil your water and get your steam and turn your turbine.
You would never use it to set off a nuclear bomb.
Well, I believe he's right.
I understand the historical evidentiary basis on which he's basing this.
What is amazing to me is that if you look at these scientifically oriented policy blogs, they don't get it.
These folks who are part of the arms control community are totally unwilling.
You're talking about arms control won't.
I'm talking about arms control won't.
The folks who write arms control won't do not get it, and they refuse to get it.
They're not interested in getting it.
And so it gives me pause, the idea of trying to put forward a technical explanation when even the technically trained people refuse to look this straight in the face and face the truth.
I'm a little bit afraid.
This is sort of making an argument that the Iranians are not stupid, and therefore they wouldn't simply repeat an experiment that they know the Americans tried and didn't work.
That's a good point.
I'm just worried that that will just run into a sort of blank stare.
That's a good argument.
I accept that.
The fact of the matter is that we live in a whole world of BS.
When it comes down to, especially once you're getting technical, who's supposed to even understand what you're saying to refute it or not, or think it's important or not?
It's a much more difficult story to write, obviously.
And secondly, you just have to anticipate a kind of collective shrug.
What are you talking about?
It does give me pause in terms of the torrent of stories that comes at me from week to week.
Right now, as we speak, I'm working on a story based on, not based on, but the timing is determined by the New York Times story by Broad yesterday.
Well, it's almost the top of the hour, but I've got time.
If you've got time, let's go ahead.
We can leave the uranium deuteride thing for this interview.
I got to paraphrase Gordon Prather, and that's good enough for me.
It's on the record.
It's true.
Gordon Prather knows what he's talking about, and the rest of these assholes don't.
So that's the end of that.
But let's go after Broad and Sanger, because these guys deserve it as bad as the London Times.
But let's not start with the new one about the tunnels.
Let's start with the one from the second.
Well, I'm clicking here.
U.S. sees an opportunity to press Iran on nuclear fuel by David Sanger and William J. Broad.
I usually like to say it the other way around.
And I've identified two major lies in here and one piece of real bad news.
Maybe you have more.
But the two lies were that Barack Obama exposed a secret uranium enrichment plant at Qom.
That is a lie.
And then the other lie was that these Times of London forgeries have the slightest bit of credibility to them whatsoever.
And based on those two lies came the bad news.
Although I think this is based on anonymous sources they talk to.
It's not official yet.
Well, I'll go ahead and read you the Times, Gareth.
It says, Mr. Obama's top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed national intelligence estimate about Iran published a year before Bush left office, which said the Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.
Yeah, I mean, this proves two things.
I mean, at the meta level, OK, let's start with that.
Important to get the bigger pictures.
The first thing that it underlines, once again, is that the Obama administration is no different in the basic way in which it approaches issues such as Iran from the Bush administration.
I mean, there is like a millimeter difference between them, but not much more.
You know, the fact is that the Obama administration is opportunistic, wants to get credit for sort of defeating Iran, sort of dominating Iran, coercing Iran.
And that is the basic thrust of its policy.
That's what it's all about.
So in that sense, there's just not a dime's worth of difference between the Obama administration and the Bush administration.
The second thing that it underlines is that just as the New York Times was basically sucking on the tit of the Bush administration on Iran and Iraq and published really what the White House wanted it to publish, it's doing the same thing on Iran.
I mean, clearly, it's serving the agenda here of the Obama administration.
And by that, I mean the pretty conservative advisors who have won the day with Obama and convinced him to take a hard line on the issue of negotiating with Iran instead of trying to really seriously explore the broader context, the broader set of issues, which everyone knows really have to be negotiated in order to reach any kind of serious agreement with Iran, any kind of agreement with Iran.
They're simply practicing diplomatic coercion and trying to force Iran to accept something they know is not going to be acceptable.
They know it's not going to be acceptable.
It can't be acceptable.
I mean, even the people representing the Green Movement, the leadership of the Green Movement denounces the proposal that Obama has put forward.
Well, let me see if I can sum up real quick.
You correct me if I go off the story here.
But basically, there's a reactor that the U.S. built in the 70s for producing medical isotopes.
Right now, the Iranians have electricity-grade, industrial-grade uranium that they've enriched up to 3.6 percent.
In order to run it in their medical isotope reactor, they need it enriched up to 20 percent.
So the deal, the broad outlines of the deal is we'll swap you some 20 for your 3.6 so that you don't have to change your centrifuges in any way to enrich up to anything higher than 3.6 because we don't trust you.
And so the Iranians are saying, fine, you give us some 20 and we'll give you some 3.6 and we'll make an even swap, we'll meet in Turkey and we'll switch it out.
And the Americans are saying, no, you give us your 3.6 percent, then we'll enrich it up to 20 percent for you, turn it into fuel rods and give it back.
And the Iranians are saying, no, because you'll just keep it.
So let's just make a swap.
And this is basically the deal.
The Americans will not accept what is obviously a perfectly acceptable, reasonable deal.
I mean, Turkey's a NATO ally of ours for the last 60 years, after all.
This ought to be perfectly acceptable if the actual motive is to somehow weaken Iran's quote, unquote, breakout capability.
Their uranium will be at 20 percent, but it will be in the form of fuel rods for their IAEA safeguarded reactor.
So if we were paranoid about Iran's nuclear program and thought they might want to make weapons out of it, their version of the deal is perfectly reasonable.
The American version of the deal is made to fail.
Well, I think it is made to fail, but I'm not sure that there isn't another element to the offer about Turkey, and that is the timing question.
It's not clear.
I may be wrong about this, but my understanding is that the Iranian position has not been stated clearly that they're willing to just give everything, basically to let it be exported to Turkey, and then whenever it's ready to be returned is when they'll get back the 19-point-something percent enriched uranium.
I think that there's also...
Well, wait a minute.
I'm not confused.
Is that not what I just said, that they wanted to swap it rather than wait to get their own stuff back?
Okay, but I also think that the Iranians have, at least up until the most recent proposal on Turkey, part of their proposal was that it would be in phases.
It wouldn't be a single transaction.
And this, of course, does relate to the point that I made in an article in Le Monde Diplomatique, which is that everyone across the board, whether it's Ahmadinejad, the traditional sort of conservatives in the government, and the Green Movement people, the leadership of the Green Movement people, are all saying that they don't want to give up everything in one fell swoop, because basically this is their currency for negotiating with the United States.
This is implicit, it seems to me, in the position that everybody is taking on the Iranian side.
Okay, now let's go after Broad Sands Sanger in the New York Times from yesterday.
Iran shielding its nuclear efforts in maze of tunnels.
Yeah, I mean, what's interesting to me about this is that, you know, it's really a recognition, in large part, of what I wrote months ago, back in October.
I think it was October, correct me if I'm wrong, maybe it was November.
The Iranians revealed this whole business of the relationship between the Qom facility and the background of the passive defense strategy that they were following ever since 2002.
And I pointed out that there was, in fact, tunneling that had been going on since 2002 as part of this passive defense strategy in response to the threat of bombing, which was really introduced in a new way through the Axis of Evil speech, wasn't it?
By George W. Bush.
Now this is, in a way, in a backhanded way, this is being acknowledged by the Times, that what they're calling now the Fordow facility, what used to be called the Qom facility, is really part of, I mean, it grew out of the original intention, which was to have a nationwide set of tunneling facilities to hide and to protect important facilities of all kinds in Iran from an aerial attack by the United States and or Israel.
So I think that's really the important, to me, that's what stands out in this story.
Of course, they sin it that these tunnels actually conceal covert nuclear weapons-related facilities, that that's what's really going on here.
They don't provide the slightest bit of evidence for that in the story, but that's the lead.
As my colleague Jim Loeb has pointed out, I mean, the lead is completely misleading and is not supported by anything in the story itself.
Right, I mean, that's the whole thing.
They even bring up how the Iranians say, I'm trying to find the quote here as I flip through, something about, yeah, this is part of our passive defense strategy, it's much cheaper than trying to get the very best Russian anti-aircraft missiles, and instead we just build everything under a mountain.
That doesn't mean that they're secretly making bombs in there, and after all, well, tell me this, how many places has the IAEA tried to go to inspect for, you know, nuclear technology and been turned away by the Iranians, Gareth?
Never.
They've never been turned away.
When there's been a request, when the MEK has said, Oh, we think that there's a covert nuclear facility at this coordinate.
And they have, more than one.
The MEK being the Mujahedin, all called the communist terrorist Heaven's Gate cult that used to work for Khomeini and then Saddam Hussein and now the CIA.
They have, on a number of occasions, told the IAEA that we think that there's, we know, they say, that there's this covert nuclear facility at this place up in the mountains.
And the IAEA dutifully sends a mission, and Soltaniyeh, now the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, goes with them up into the mountains, and what do they find?
They find some outhouses of a company that's moving boulders.
And this has been repeated more than once.
So, yeah, I mean, this is a pattern that's very familiar now.
Yeah, I mean, this is, right here, this ought to just, this is reading William J. Broad from the New York Times here.
This ought to just remind everybody of Don Rumsfeld, that's what it does for me.
No one in the West knows how much or exactly what part of Iran's nuclear program lies hidden.
Still, evidence of the downward atomic push is clear to the inquisitive.
What in the hell are you talking about, Broad?
We don't know what they might have.
Well, maybe there isn't anything.
Well, my story, I can tip you and your listeners off to the fact that my story is going to offer, I think, rather convincing evidence that the Iranian intention all along, when I say all along, since the beginning of the construction of the Fordow facility, the intention has been to basically convince the West and Israel that, in fact, Iran might indeed have a whole set of hidden nuclear facilities because they believe that that will confuse the targeters, who are, in fact, actively thinking about an attack on Iran.
And the more they can confuse the targeters, the more likely it is, or more unlikely it is, that Israel and the United States will attack Iran's nuclear program.
I think that they're being relatively successful in this.
And it may, in the end, make the difference between Israel attacking Iran and not attacking Iran.
And so I think that's exactly what's been going on.
I think there's all kinds of evidence, which I'll sort of hold on to for the moment until my story is published.
Well, so you're saying you think that they actually are stashing stuff in all these places, or they're just building more tunnels than anybody can effectively bomb, and nobody knows whether there's anything in any of them?
Exactly.
I don't think they have nuclear facilities in those tunnels, but I think they hope to confuse the West and convince them that they do.
I mean, this is where we get to what's clear to the inquisitive.
I mean, it seems pretty obvious that they, starting with the axis of evil speech in 2002, threw their hands up and said, don't shoot.
Look, here, our books are open.
Yes, it's true.
We bought some centrifuge equipment on the black market, but that's only because you wouldn't let us buy it from China.
But who cares, man?
No big deal.
It's all good.
Come on in.
We're only enriching to 3.6%.
Here, tell you what, we'll even work with you in Iraq, and we'll put pressure on Hamas and Hezbollah to start shaping up and acting right.
They've been doing everything they can to try to not get shot by us this whole time.
That is what is clear.
That is the pattern that emerges to the inquisitive over on this end of the microphone.
It is part of the pattern, I agree.
I think that sometime after 2005, I think the Iranian strategists began to think, hmm, you know, one way for us to really turn the suspicions that the United States and Israel have about the nuclear program, which basically they could see that whatever they did, it wasn't going to help to get the United States to agree to really negotiate with them.
That wasn't what was going to happen, and therefore they decided to turn that to their advantage strategically, and I think that's exactly what they've done.
I think they care more about deterring attack at this point than they do about convincing the United States and Israel that they don't have any interest in pursuing nuclear weapons.
I think they've seen that that didn't work.
Well, it's not like Israel and the U.S. have threatened publicly to bomb them 75 times since 2002 or anything.
You know, what are they, paranoid conspiracy theorists or something over there?
Wow.
Okay, well now listen, we've talked about this before, and I've played this for you on the show before, but I think this is an important thing.
I know most people haven't heard this.
I hope I have it queued up at just about the right spot.
But this is from former unconfirmed recess appointment ambassador John Bolton, who was before that the assistant secretary of state for keeping a leash on Colin Powell or something like that, and over there with David Wilmes during the first Bush Jr. term.
But this is John Bolton on the telephone with the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, and what's happening here is he's explaining to them, Gareth, that the Iranians disappointed him, because what he was trying to get them to do was withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty and kick the IAEA inspectors out of the country, that way to better justify a war.
And damn those Iranians, they keep cooperating.
All right, now let's hear it.
I think the Iranian reaction to the sanctions resolution has been very telling in that respect, although they've passed a resolution in parliament to reevaluate their relationship with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
They have not rejected the sanctions resolution.
They have not done anything more dramatic, such as withdrawing from the nonproliferation treaty or throwing out inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which I actually hope they would do, that that kind of reaction would produce a counter-reaction that actually would be more beneficial to us.
Yeah, I mean, that's a very nice summary of the basic strategy of the Cheney-Bolton axis within the administration, which really was interested in setting up the war that they hoped would eventually take place against Iran.
Now, well, when we talk about all the poison pills built into Obama's so-called deal here, are they basically following the same strategy that they're trying to get the Iranians to just throw up their hands and say, fine then, maybe we will make nuclear bombs, or what is it that they're trying to accomplish?
And it doesn't seem like they want a deal.
Well, I think at this point, you know, the whole internal division and unrest in Iran has started playing into the Obama administration's policy as well.
There's no question that they don't want to be in a position of being perceived as being, or even substantively, in fact, as being diplomatically interested in trying to strike a deal with Iran at this point.
That's now off.
I mean, they're openly, I would say, taking a posture that says, no, this is not a time for us to try to make a deal with you because we hope you're going to be overthrown.
So we're back to regime change.
You may say it's regime change light, maybe it's regime change heavy.
I don't know.
But in any case, I think regime change has obviously risen in the pecking order of objectives for the Obama administration since June.
Oh, man.
Well, I mean, here's the thing.
I can see why, you know, at least politically or whatever, you know, making a deal with the Republicans screaming that, here, their government's about to fall, and you're legitimizing them and dealing with them and whatever.
But that's not really true, is it?
I mean, this Green Revolution thing, the people are pissed over there, and the theocrats, they're not giving up their power.
I mean, that's the whole thing about an uprising.
It either works or it doesn't.
And this isn't, obviously, this is not former Soviet Georgia or Ukraine over there, where the CIA can just come in and do a color-coded revolution and have it their way.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, this is a much, much more fundamental split in the society.
And as some analysts have pointed out about Iran, the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not going to pull up, like the Shah and his generals, his top associates in the regime of the Shah, pull up and leave the country and go to Paris or to L.A. or whatever.
These are people who are going to fight it out.
It's going to be a very long and, I'm afraid, bloody conflict within Iran that's not going to be easily resolved at all.
And I must say that I think it is, like everything else about U.S. policy toward Iran, since the beginning, this policy of basically saying, no, this is not a time to reach agreement is, of course, stupid and immoral.
Because, you know, in the first place, it seems to assume that, or at least one of the implications is that somehow if there's regime change, then we could reach agreement with the new government.
But certainly we would not be reaching agreement if we're going to insist on saying that Iran cannot pursue the enrichment of uranium, because that is a firm consensus position across the political spectrum in Iran.
Right.
And, of course, the idea that they must not be allowed to is the consensus here.
But let me ask you this, Gareth.
Are there or are there not a couple of hundred thousand American soldiers within missile range of the Iranians right now, and not because they're here, but because they're occupying Iraq and Afghanistan on either side of the Iranians?
I mean, this is not a country that in these particular circumstances is helpless to fight back.
Well, I would, yes, I would say it's accurate in a general sense to say that there are a couple hundred thousand U.S. troops which are in range of Iranian weapons.
But, of course, their means of retaliation are fundamentally not missiles at all, but rather local allies who can strike at U.S. bases.
Local allies, meaning the Iraqi government and the majority of the people of that country?
The Iraqi government, but particularly, of course, Shia allies in the Batter Corps and to some extent, to a lesser extent, I would say, the Sadrists, the Mahdi Army.
But, of course, across the Middle East you have Shia communities which are certainly allied with Iran against American presence.
Do you remember years ago, it was preparing the battlefield, I think, by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker.
There was a quote of a CIA guy saying that the Iranians could take the south of Iraq with one imam and a sound truck.
No, I mean, the point is that they are, in a sense, the Iranian influence through the Shia leadership who had been trained and financed and sponsored by Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and afterwards were already in control of southern Iraq and still are, of course.
It's a hugely Shia-dominated area.
And there's no doubt that Iranian influence through its relations with all of the Shia groups.
Essentially, there's no Shia faction, political faction, that Iran does not have very good relations with at this point.
Well, now, as long as I'm keeping you way over time here, you're going to go ahead and make an hour out of this, it looks like.
What do you think about America's role in manipulating or financing or having anything to do with the Green Revolution?
It's clearly not as easy as we talked about as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine or something, but is this going on right now part of all that covert money that Bush and the Democrats in Congress decided to allocate for covert operations in Iran?
I can give you a very quick answer.
I have not gotten into this at any level that would allow me to give an answer that's informed.
All I can say is, at a very general level, I think you were right in the first place that the Green Revolution is an expression of a fundamental division within Iranian society.
It's well-established.
There's no mystery there.
Well, I mean, there are plenty of divisions in Serbia and in Georgia and in Ukraine and in Kyrgyzstan and every place that they successfully carried out a color-coded revolution, too, right?
I don't know that it's the case that you have the same sort of split down the middle that you have in Iran.
I'm not an expert on those countries, so I will not try to analyze them, but I will say that in the case of Iran, I think we were fairly on safe ground saying that there's fundamental social support for the regime of Khamenei, for the Supreme Leader and the IRGC, that there's a very strong segment of Iranian society that do support that.
But I also think that there's a very large segment of that society that are now very strongly opposed to that regime for a number of reasons.
That's all I'm saying.
That's all I know.
One thing is certain, too, is that any help that we do give them doesn't help them.
It only makes them worse, only makes it easier for the grand Ayatollah to accuse everybody who opposes him of being a front man for the CIA.
I agree completely.
This does not mean that intelligent people, covert operators, who are not mucking around there trying to do something, I just don't know the answer to that.
But I think you're absolutely right that if they did, it was not crucial, it was not that helpful, and certainly in the larger picture of things, it's harmful.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter.
He is an independent historian and journalist who writes for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
Of course, you can find everything he writes at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
And the next time that the London Times and the New York Times write lies about Iran, we'll have him back on the show to debunk those, too.
Thanks again, Scott.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
Bye.
