06/23/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Well, now I wonder if Gareth is going to make it in time.
Good old Gareth Porter.
Gareth recently took a trip to Iran and to Israel.
And you probably heard me talking on and on and on about that great interview in Haaretz, where here's the guy that writes for Haaretz who actually gets it and asks Gareth, I don't know, the seven most important questions to ask him in a row.
And it's perfect.
And right there in Haaretz where everybody can read it.
And the whole point being that, yeah, Israel and Iran have manufactured the Iranian threat, where there is no threat for their own interests and their own reasons, as Gareth shows in his great book, Manufactured Crisis, just out.
And then also, he wrote all these articles while he was gone.
And I thought I had them here, but I don't.
So I'll have to Google them in a second.
But one of them is based on his exclusive interview with the foreign minister of Iran, where he had breaking news, which, as I mentioned earlier on the show, we covered in the interview that aired yesterday on the KPFK show about Iran's offer to oxidize all of their uranium so they cannot enrich it up to a higher grade, which we might talk about a little bit.
There's also an IAEA investigation, what needs closing.
And there's another news story that he did, I think this time for The Nation, about the so-called smoking laptop and the Israeli forged alleged studies documents and all this great stuff, the great journalism of Dr. Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks very much for having me again, Scott.
Very good to have you here.
You're the best of the best.
So I'll Google it and pull up the proper title for everybody here.
But go ahead and tell us this story about the one that you've written up for IPS News about an IAEA investigation into Iran's nuclear activities that you seem to be conveying, like you agree with the Iranian point of view, that this case is closed and should be closed.
And yet for political reasons, the IAEA is keeping it open.
Do I have that right?
Yeah, you've got it right.
I mean, the short of this story is this, that Dr. Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, gave me an interview while I was in Tehran.
And in the interview, he said very specifically that they had an understanding with the IAEA, with officials of the Safeguards Department, as well as other high-ranking senior officials of the IAEA, that once Iran had provided the necessary information, had met the requirements given them by the IAEA under their framework agreement of last February, that the IAEA would then close the investigation, would close the books on that specific issue as part of the broader investigation of the so-called possible military dimensions issue.
In other words, the charges that have been made against Iran on the basis of both the smoking laptop, as you described it, as well as later documents and intelligence reports that came directly from Israel to the IAEA, according to former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.
So this is the context in which Dr. Salehi said to me that, in fact, it's time for the IAEA to actually close this because they, in fact, were given to understand informally.
It was not made public, but, you know, after the Iranians turned over or showed, I think it's more precisely correct that they showed the IAEA officials a document or more than one document, which made the case very explicitly that Iran had legitimate civilian applications for its EBW, explosive bridge wire development program, which involves high explosives detonators, that the IAEA has expressed questions about or had doubts about on the grounds that similar types of detonators could be used for a nuclear weapons program.
So what Salehi was saying to me was that there were two understandings, one that once Iran had turned over the information that had been requested by the IAEA, that the file would be closed on the specific issue in question.
And in this specific case, that is the question of the exploding bridge wire detonator development program of Iran, that Iran had, in fact, satisfied the IAEA, that it did, in fact, have legitimate requirements or legitimate application for the program that it acknowledged that it had.
But it was simply a different program.
It was a different set of exploding bridge wire detonators than was identified in the laptop documents.
And I can go into that in more detail.
But it's very clear that Iran never acknowledged that the laptop documents were accurate in the sense that they depicted something that Iran itself had done.
So there are two understandings that Salehi was saying that they had reached with the IAEA.
And now the IAEA, instead of closing the file, Amano, Yukio Amano, the new director general of the IAEA, no longer new, but the successor to Mohamed ElBaradei, is saying, well, we'll answer when we feel like it.
But for the time being, we're just going to remain silent and wait until we get an understanding of the entire PMD issue.
So that's really sort of going back on the understanding, the agreement that Salehi is saying was reached with the IAEA in February.
Now, the context of this is that the February framework agreement was never made public, unfortunately, for those of us trying to understand what's going on.
Unlike the work plan agreement of August 2007 that ElBaradei reached with the Iranians, that was published in full.
But this one, there's no there's no public text that gives us the actual agreement.
And so basically, I queried the IAEA spokesperson, the spokesperson for Yukio Amano, and said, what about this statement by Salehi?
Is it, you know, can you confirm or deny it?
But instead of confirming or denying his statement, the spokesperson for the IAEA simply repeated what Yukio Amano had said, which is that we prefer to wait until the entire issue of PMD is is clarified or resolved.
Right.
And yeah, while they're in the middle of the talks.
And now so but if you go back now, I guess even during the Amano times, are there is there precedent for this, where this specific level of investigation has really been concluded?
And then is it supposed to be in the paperwork?
Does it say it should be automatic then that they go ahead and close each case as they, you know, finish it?
Or is this within his purview as director to go ahead and leave all this stuff open in this way?
Is there any other explanation other than politics and, you know, attempting to undermine the deal here?
I think the answer to that is, as I said, there's there's no there's no published text.
But Salehi is saying that that was indeed the the agreement that was reached in this in this February framework agreement.
And so so the refusal of the IAEA to confirm or deny certainly, you know, has to be viewed as a an indication that they're not prepared to deny that what Salehi is saying is the truth.
And so never mind the precedent.
They have a deal.
He's saying they have a deal, a specific one this time.
Well, there is no precedent.
This is the first time this is right.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We've got to take this break.
Everybody, it's the great Gareth Porter, IPS News dot net.
And we'll be right back in a second.
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So we got the great Garrett Porter on the line here and we are talking about, again, the possible military dimensions.
The IAEA's refusal to deny the Iranian the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization's assertion that they had put to bed this explosive bridge wires issue and that they keep making it a deal as part of their investigation of the possible military dimensions of the Iranian nuclear program.
That's an official title with all capital first letters.
They're possible military dimensions.
And you're saying that this is based on, first of all, the smoking laptop, which you've already shown is very likely to have just been a bunch of documents.
The alleged studies documents manufactured by the Israeli intelligence services, the Mossad, and then funneled through the Mujahideen.
Communist terrorist cult.
And then you said these telexes are also just these came directly from Israel.
No hiding it.
They just handed this stuff right over to the IAEA and claimed it was real.
And I wonder the intelligence of the E.B.W.'s here, the explosive bridge wires, the dual use technology, whether you know for sure which of the was it the smoking laptop or the telexes?
These were one of the three major types of documentation that were in the original laptop document collection.
That's what I thought.
So there was the warhead.
There was the laser green salt enrichment program, which didn't make any sense.
Well, not laser.
It was not even enrichment.
It was a conversion facility.
It was a bench scale conversion facility design, which was the third one.
And they already put that issue to bed back years ago now, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that simply made no sense whatsoever.
It never made sense at all.
And in my book, I show that the real function of that was to link this Iranian company to the alleged nuclear weapons program by having them supposedly be the one that designed this conversion facility for conversion bench scale.
A flow sheet is what it was.
And the way they did it was because there was an actual letter from a high tech company to the Iranian company.
It was legitimate.
It was a real letter.
It had nothing to do with the covert nuclear weapons program.
It had to do with something entirely different.
But there was handwriting on it from some mysterious source that suggested or mentioned the individual or individuals who supposedly were in charge of the part of this covert nuclear weapons program that had to do with redesigning the reentry vehicle.
So that was the reason for having that.
Otherwise, it made no sense whatsoever for that to be part of this.
Right.
Yeah, it makes sense to just as a dot to be connected, because why enrich or convert to uranium tetrafluoride when you need uranium hexafluoride, a gas not as it looks like they call it green salt because it's like the texture of salt, right?
The tetrafluoride, you got to get the hexafluoride in order to put it in your centrifuge.
And they already had a conversion facility making the uranium hexafluoride gas up and running at Isfahan or however you pronounce that the whole time, again, safeguarded by the IAEA all along.
Right.
And they had worked on that on the design for years and years.
They tested it.
They made all kinds of investigations into what would be the best kind of design.
And they finally decided that was the best one.
So, you know, there was no sense whatsoever in this.
And furthermore, as I point out in the book, there were all kinds of technical flaws in this.
Even in this one or two page, I've forgotten, was it one or two pages of this flow sheet?
Very simple flow sheet.
There were all kinds of technical glitches in it, which gave away the fact that this was clearly done by somebody who was not really the top flight technical scientific person that supposedly was involved in this in this program.
All right.
Now, when it comes to these explosive bridge wires, you say that, yeah, no, they admit that they have explosive bridge wires, but they have another explanation.
What is that explanation and why do you believe it?
Well, you know, one has to understand that EBW technology is a very common part of all kinds of missiles, ballistic missiles, and particularly ballistic missiles for anti-ship purposes.
And of course, one of Iran's key defense systems is the anti-ship missile.
It's exactly what the U.S. Navy is most afraid of, as far as Iran's concerned.
That's one of the reasons that the Pentagon and particularly the U.S. Navy have been so wary about the whole idea of getting into a military conflict with Iran.
So anti-ship missiles involve EBW detonators.
And there's no question that Iran has anti-ship missiles and therefore has applied EBW technology to their defense, conventional defense sector.
But of course, they're not going to turn over evidence of their, you know, provide the technical papers on their anti-ship missiles to the IAEA.
That's simply not going to happen.
And in fact, back in 2008, the IAEA was demanding that Iran turn over both blueprints for its Shahab-3 missile and to show, to give them technical papers that show that Iran was actually using the EBW for a different purpose.
And so I think that was the reason that Iran stopped cooperating with the IAEA in 2008 on its investigation into the so-called, at that point, alleged studies.
Later on, they called it a possible military dimension.
And only later did Iran finally, you know, come up with this evidence.
I think they were basically, they were able to turn over evidence of civilian need for EBW technology as well, because it's useful in the mining sector, which of course is very important in Iran.
But, I mean, they chose to hold on to this until they thought they had a deal with the IAEA that would actually result in, or could result in, ending the investigation of Iran so that there would be something they would get in return for turning over this information.
But we now see that the IAEA is still up to its old game.
Well, and do they have anything else besides this case to keep running with if they close this file?
Well, I mean, this was, of course, the first issue on the list of issues to be resolved in the February framework agreement.
I'm assuming that because back in 2012, when they first started negotiating with the IAEA, that is, Iran started negotiating with the IAEA, I was given, I wasn't given, but I was shown the partial negotiating text, partially completed negotiating text by the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA.
And it showed very clearly that the EBW issue was the first one to be resolved.
And so, in addition to that, what they've got left, essentially, is the, I mean, the big one, of course, is the reentry vehicle studies.
Right, which you've already debunked as far as...
I've debunked it, and I think it's very clear that there's something fundamentally wrong with those documents.
It just doesn't add up.
Again, technical problems with it, as well as the fact that it was the wrong missile being shown in those papers.
All right, y'all, that's the great Gareth Porter.
Thanks again for your time, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Hey, you own a business?
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See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scotthorton dot org.
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