09/10/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, next up is our good friend Gareth Porter.
He does award-winning work for Truthout.org and interpress service, IPSnews.net.
And of course, he's the author of the book, Manufactured Crisis, which is the penultimate debunking of all Iran nuclear program propaganda anyone has ever been subjected to.
This is Manufactured Crisis for sale at Amazon.com right now by Gareth Porter.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, you got two important stories I want to talk about with you here.
One of them general, one specific.
In IPS, Hamas rocket launches don't explain Israel's Gaza destruction.
And then for Truthout.org exclusive, Israel's video justifying destruction of Gaza hospital was from 2009.
So which subject would you like to tackle first, more specific or bigger picture?
Well, let's start with the first one, which was the one in Truthout on the fake video which the IDF peddled as a justification for destruction of the Al-Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital in Gaza a month before.
Because this was a story that I really worked very hard on for several days, actually a couple of weeks, and was struck by the fact that the video itself was, first of all, was very clear that they had spliced together scenes from different times of day.
Now, that was that was kind of suspicious from the get go.
And when I showed it to a former U.S. intelligence official who had a lot of experience looking at these kinds of things, videos and photographs of military matters, he said the same thing that that was clear that that they were they were doing something here that they hadn't they hadn't owned up to.
But it was not really until the very last day that I worked on the article when I finally was able to interview the the head of the hospital, the director of Al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza.
And he, you know, I asked him about, you know, whether there's any evidence of, you know, having somebody having fired from this was actually the annex to the hospital, wasn't the hospital itself.
And he said, no, but he said, I can tell you that it's been confirmed to me by people that there was firing from that building in 2009 during Operation Cast Lead.
Well, of course, that explained everything that put it all together.
And so then I went to the the the Goldstone report of the U.N. fact finding mission report on Operation Cast Lead, which, you know, actually has in it.
And I'd missed this.
I just hadn't consulted it before.
It has in it the fact that on, I believe it's July 16th, sorry, not July 16th, January 16th, 2009, the IDF had fired on and caused minor damage to that same building on the third and fourth floors.
Well, that's exactly where these flashes of light appear in the video.
So open and shut case.
I mean, you know, there's no way that that that is not a 2009 video that they peddled as being documentation that they could use to suggest that there was firing from the hospital in this in this latest operation.
Yeah, sure.
It looks like you got them.
But let me ask you, though, because wasn't there some discrepancy about whether this was the hospital at all?
I remember a picture on Twitter that they had put out.
I forget if it was supposedly from that same video or what.
And then other people were saying that's not even the right building.
Look, this hospital is shaped like this.
And you're looking at something else.
That was some annex.
But nearby or what?
That's correct.
It's very nearby.
It is an annex.
So they bombed the hospital and then they showed footage not just from 2009, but footage from the annex or that was what they bombed.
Well, they bombed.
They destroyed both of them, destroyed both buildings completely.
But but it was, yes, another level of deception that that they justified it by what what happened five years earlier in another building.
I see.
Yeah.
And now, OK, so what's the point of because, you know, decent people think things like, look, no military is really going to blow up a hospital full of elderly people.
You know, it must have been an accident.
These are our allies, the wonderful Israelis, the most moral army in the world.
So it must have been a terrible mistake.
And then, geez, they tried to cover it up.
Gareth, what about that?
Well, we have to be clear about one thing.
I mean, there's a back story within the the last operation about a lawful hospital.
And that is that starting as early as July 11th, that is three days after the the Israeli operation began, the IDF began to warn the staff of a lawful hospital that they had to evacuate.
They began by shooting warning rockets on July 11th, which which is a signal normally that everybody has to evacuate because they intend to destroy it.
And then, I mean, they didn't evacuate because, you know, they have they have especially patients who cannot easily be evacuated.
They're very difficult to move.
So they stayed.
And on the 16th, sorry, the 17th of July, then the the real shelling began in earnest.
And they they actually fired some 15 rockets into the hospital itself.
Essentially causing a fire on more than one floor.
The halls were filled with smoke and they they simply had no choice but to evacuate and everybody cleared out and they locked the doors.
So so that this was not a matter of the idea of, you know, killing a lot of patients and staff.
They knew that had been evacuated.
It was a symbolic destruction by not just symbolic, of course, but they were using this to show we are not afraid to destroy your civilian facilities.
Right.
And it's a it's a symbol of the punishment of the population of Gaza by the Israelis for supporting Hamas, essentially.
And that's the official policy then of the Israeli government then is, as they say, oh, look, we give them warning shots.
We call we send them a text message on their cell phone.
Run.
We're about to bomb you.
And then they only use the most precision.
I mean, we hear so much propaganda about the extra care taken by the Israelis to protect civilians.
But you're saying the entire policy is the opposite.
It is to target civilians deliberately.
They're having it both ways, Scott.
They are, on one hand, claiming, of course, to be the most moral military in the world because they fire the warning shots and so forth and tell everybody to get out.
Well, you know, that has to be qualified by the reality that normally they give them five minutes or less.
Now, you know, if if they're very lucky, everybody can get out.
And if they're all, you know, fast enough and and ambulatory enough, they can all get out.
But very often they can't.
And in many cases, as I think I reported in a different story, the the reality is that people in Gaza, in the heavily populated parts of Gaza, do not see anywhere to go, because, in fact, if they leave their house, they are subject to being shot by IDF troops.
And this happens very often.
And, you know, there are many cases in the past where people trying to flee by car have been hit by rockets or gunfire.
And so in many cases, they figure we might as well die in our house rather than outside our house.
Right.
And so that's another reason why many people are killed despite the fact that the IDF gives them warning.
So on one hand, as I say, the IDF is claiming this high ground.
On the other hand, they do indeed make it clear that they have a policy, a strategy of punishing the population for its support of what they call a terrorist regime.
All right.
More on both of these very important stories with Gareth Porter on the other side of this break.
Stay tuned.
This is Scott Horton Show.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for hanging in there.
Thanks to you, too, Gareth.
Happy to have Gareth Porter on the show here again.
He's writing for Interpress Service and for Truthout dot org.
The first one is Israel's video justifying Israel's video justifying destruction of Gaza Hospital was from 2009 and Hamas rocket launches.
Don't explain Israel's Gaza destruction is the second one over here at IPS News dot net.
And so I'm sorry for jumping around back to the smaller picture again.
But one thing that I didn't give you a chance to mention there in in your story or from your story about the attack on the hospital here was how you got Richard Silverstein to translate the Hebrew of the audio and how if people think that, you know, the pieces you put together of the proof of what really happened there in 2009 and what happened this time around putting those together is an ironclad.
It seems like this is I guess this this is maybe the least ironclad part of the argument, but it does seem to be another major piece of circumstantial evidence here, a weighty piece of circumstantial evidence.
Gareth, if you want to talk about that.
Yeah, it's certainly it's certainly evidence that there were manipulations of both the video as well as the audio.
And the audio clearly is not from an incident that is at the hospital at all, whether the main hospital building or the annex, because, as you suggest, what Richard Silverstein was able to do for me was to listen to the audio, which, of course, is in Hebrew.
And it sounds like, you know, to a drone operator and somebody else talking about, you know, what's what they're seeing or what they have seen.
And the two voices both refer to a house rather than to a hospital building or hospital.
And this is this is clear evidence that this audio had nothing to do with the incident at the hospital, had nothing to do with seeing firing from a building at the hospital grounds.
So it certainly does add another layer of evidence that the IDF was was being deceptive in more ways than one.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, again, for people, you know, maybe tuning in, catching up, maybe you had the summer off somehow or something and you don't know Israel waged this massive war on Gaza for what, six weeks there, some five or six weeks.
Two thousand people were killed, including 600 children, I think 600 and something.
And if you go on YouTube, you can see drone footage.
I love this brave new world we live in now.
You can see drone footage, overhead aerial footage of the Gaza Strip and the just widespread, the massive destruction that was way rained down upon them.
That's the propaganda about all the Hamas rockets raining down on Israel, except, I guess, like rain out in the high desert.
It never hits the ground.
It evaporates before it gets hits.
That's a very good analogy, I think, really.
Yeah.
Poor Israel under siege.
They're hiding from rockets that never hit or kill anyone.
But anyway, the Gaza is completely one sided match here.
Fish in a barrel or whatever you want to call it.
Massive destruction.
And so before the break, we were talking about the discrepancy between the propaganda, which has kernels of truth to it in the precision of some strikes at some times, because, of course, the IDF is highly technological and they can do precision strikes if they want.
But also versus the doctrine, the Da'iya doctrine.
Is that how you pronounce it, Gary?
The Da'iya doctrine, yes.
And where's that name come from?
And what does that mean?
The Da'iya doctrine is named after the suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, in which Hezbollah has its headquarters.
Basically, its political center is there in the Beirut suburb.
And during the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon, that was where they chose to focus their great damage, the great destruction that they would wage against Beirut.
It was focused on Da'iya and they basically leveled whole blocks of high rise apartment buildings as well as office buildings.
And they did so, again, quite deliberately in order to make the point that, you know, you are going to have to pay a serious price for your policies.
That is to, you know, Hezbollah will have to pay a serious price and the population which was affected by that.
And, of course, there were tens of thousands of people whose homes were in those complexes.
You are also going to suffer from having supported Hezbollah.
So that was that's why this idea of the Da'iya doctrine continues to be mentioned.
And it has, in fact, been mentioned since the Lebanon war by IDF and civilian officials as the model for what Israel would continue to do in future wars.
Yeah.
Well, you know, what's funny about this, too, is just how they're lying on their face on the face of it when we all know that they're using tanks and whatever they call their version of howitzers to just shell Gaza, you know, all day and all night.
You can read on Twitter all day.
People going, oh, my God, they're shelling again.
And none of that's laser guided, none of that.
You know, all of that.
It's called accurate if it hits within, what, a couple of hundred feet?
Exactly.
No, a couple hundred meters, a hundred meters, 150 meters is the.
So, in other words, if you miss, that counts.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
I mean, it's not it's not expected to be accurate.
It's an area weapon.
A hundred fifty five millimeter artillery piece is simply an area destruction weapon.
And they have used it quite liberally, as well as 120 millimeter artillery in the most recent war.
And in fact, you know, what's interesting is that the Israelis have actually put out rather detailed information about the relative use usage of precision guided munitions in the last three wars of 2008, 2009, 2012 and 2014.
And in each case, well, there's a there's a big difference among them.
The 2012 war was the most precise.
Nearly, I don't know, 90 to 95 percent, if I remember correctly, of the munitions were precision guided munitions.
But in the most in the most recent one, they haven't they haven't used a comparable figure.
But it's clear that it would be much, much lower than that.
And I think the point that needs to be understood here is the point that you began with.
The Israelis do indeed have very precise missiles, particularly drone launched missiles, that they can use to hit a target as small as a door, a house, a regular house door, and not harm any target within a few meters up.
So so they're perfectly capable of hitting, say, a Hamas launching site, if you will, on that is just, you know, a very few steps away from a house without damaging the house or the or the mosque.
And in fact, as I point out in my story, they have a video in one of their collections of documents that I cite in my story, which shows precisely that kind of strike where they hit a launch site that is just a few steps from the mosque and wipes out.
I don't know if it wipes it out, but I mean, it certainly does not harm the mosque because you can see the mosque is completely intact at the end of the strike.
So they have that capability.
But, you know, the fact is that they chose to use very imprecise munitions and weapons for a lot of the operations that they carried out for most of the operations that they carried out, including, of course, the destruction of entire blocks, large blocks of Shujia district in Gaza City, which was the single largest use of artillery, the entire operation that was just completed.
So so this is this is the contrast between their capability to to use very precise munitions when they want to and their decision to use munitions that are clearly area destruction rather than for for the hitting of a precise a precise target.
And that's why this whole notion that people, including Elizabeth Warren, have been using to justify the Israeli destruction and killing in Gaza is completely bogus, because the fact is that that the Israelis chose to use area destruction weapons, which which have nothing to do with any launch site or any other military target.
Yeah.
Well, and also thank you for in this article, bringing my attention to this piece by Mark Perry, where he talks about the the American D.O.
D.counted seven thousand artillery shells fired at residential areas on the night just on the night of July 19th.
Yes, including including an astonishing and appalling four thousand five hundred shells fired within seven minutes called Blitzkrieg minutes.
That's that's just beyond belief and beyond the pale.
Yeah.
Amazing.
We'll follow up later.
Thanks, Gareth.
I sure appreciate it.
Bye bye.
All right.
That's a great Gareth Porter, but I'd be right back in just a second.
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