10/17/14 Gareth Porter: the Ayatollahs’ Fatwas Against WMD

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, author of the book Manufactured Crisis, writer for Interpress Service, as well as Truthout.org, where he's won awards for his work on the war in Afghanistan.
And here he's got a brand new one at ForeignPolicy.com.
And for whatever reason, they'll let you pass the paywall for this one.
It's a big one and exclusive.
And I think maybe Gareth's first at ForeignPolicy.com, but I can certainly see why they took it up here when the Ayatollah said no to nukes.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me again.
Very happy to have you here.
So, wow, this isn't even about this Ayatollah.
This is about the mean old Ayatollah Khomeini, twice as bad as Khomeini, right?
Well, that's right.
I mean, Khomeini was the one who really played an extremely central, key role in establishing the fundamental position of the Islamic Republic of Iran on weapons of mass destruction.
And that's really what this story for foreign policy is all about.
And now you went to Iran and now they're publishing your book in Farsi over there, right?
Which is great.
Exactly.
Yes.
That was one of the things that I did while I was in Tehran last month and into this month for about a week or so.
I did have the launch for the Farsi edition of my book.
I did some interviews.
I had several very interesting interviews and was also participating at least for a few minutes in this rather strange conference that you may or may not have read about it, I'm not sure, as a result of which I have now been targeted by the 9-11 truth movement as an enemy and a presumed Zionist agent or something of that sort.
Because of what now?
Oh, you disagreed with the truthers at the thing.
There is one article that I just seen this morning recalled a conversation that had been taking place in the backseat of a car coming from the old U.S. embassy in Tehran.
I was sitting next to one of the leaders of this movement and hearing his argument and I wasn't buying it.
And so it didn't end well.
Well, those things don't.
I saw you on the other side smeared by Rosie Gray over at BuzzFeed for participating in a thing that would include people like that at all.
They went on and on with their guilt by association, which I thought was really hilarious.
I defended you on Twitter where it really matters, Gareth.
Let's talk about this awesome journalism that you've done, because while you were in Iran, you interviewed at length in his office, the former head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
And you learned some things.
Is that right?
Well, he was not he was not head of the of the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
He was the minister of SEPA, which is the Minister of Revolutionary Guards.
And that's a slightly different position.
But he was a very key person with regard to the the supply of weapons for the war against Iraq, for the Iran-Iraq war.
So rewind everybody back to the Reagan years when George W.
Bush's father was the vice president and Saddam Hussein worked for us against Iran because they'd overthrown America's sock puppet dictator in 1979.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
So so this was a very interesting interview, as I knew it would be, by somebody who had actually met with Khomeini on two occasions.
He may have met with him on other occasions as well.
But there were two occasions which were crucial to understanding the wartime policy of of Iran on the question of chemical weapons, first of all, because, of course, this issue arose because the Iraqi forces began to use chemical weapons to attack Iranian forces as early as 1982 or 1983.
And then a little later in the war actually began to use them against civilian targets inside Iran.
And so as a result of the the Iraqi use of chemical weapons against the Iranians, the ministry of SEPA, the head of ministry of SEPA, his name is Mohsen Rafik Doost.
And of course, he's now retired from from the government.
And I met him in his office of the foundation.
And he recalled how he had prepared a report for Ayatollah Khomeini, then supreme leader of Iran.
He prepared a report in which he had organized groups of specialists on different kinds of military needs that Iran had for its war against Iraq.
And one of the groups that he had organized, young specialists with with various technical expertise was, as he put it, biological, chemical, biological and nuclear.
And so he went to see Khomeini to ask his reaction to to this list of special groups.
But particularly, of course, he was interested in that particular group because he wanted to do something to respond to the Iraqi use of chemical weapons.
And what happened in that meeting, as he related to me, as he related to me, was, first of all, that Khomeini said, what's this when he saw this this mention of the chemical biological nuclear group.
And so Rafik Doost explained his plan to have this group work on various kinds of weapons that might be needed against against Iraq.
And the first thing he said was, well, forget about nuclear weapons.
We're not going to we're not going to do nuclear weapons.
That's that's forbidden by Islam.
And and as for the chemical weapons, he said, no, you can you can work on you can work on defensive means to defend against the use of these weapons by Iraq, meaning to have sort of gas masks and other things that would detect the use of the weapons and give some some protection against the weapons, but not not chemical weapons.
So that was a key decision by Khomeini.
And he based it again on Islamic doctrine, Islamic jurisprudence, or Shia jurisprudence, saying that it was not consistent with Islam.
So so then time passed.
And in 1987, the the Iraqis used chemical weapons against the civilian targets in a place called Sardasht in a city of some 10,000 people, as I recall, named Sardasht.
And at that point, then he went into action again.
And this time, he went further, he actually pre got the precursor chemicals for the chemical weapon, mustard gas, and actually set up a facility with which to manufacture the weapons.
And at that point, then he went back to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini, to ask him whether he would approve the manufacture of chemical weapons.
And in that second meeting, then Khomeini again said, this is haram, this is forbidden by Islam, you cannot do it.
And that was the end of the work on chemical weapons, they were never weaponized.
And this was recorded in a document later on, which was made public in a Wikileaks cable, diplomatic cable, that reproduced the entire document that Iran had passed on to the United States government in 2004.
All right, well, I'm sorry, we got to stop there.
When we get back, follow up questions with our hero, the great Gareth Porter.
He's got the top story today exclusive at foreignpolicy.com.
When the Ayatollah said no to nukes.
Huge.
It's the spotlight today on antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the thing here, man.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show. scotthorton.org slash interviews for 3500 interviews going back about 11 and a half years or so.
They're talking with Gareth Porter.
He's the author of the book Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare where, boy, oh boy, does he debunk every last bit of reason to believe that they were ever making nukes over there.
No doubt about it.
Read that book Manufactured Crisis.
You can get it just worldbooks.com or at amazon.com, of course.
And now, as far as I know, Gareth, the latest in-depth and I think the best study of America's support for Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons in the war against Iran is also at foreignpolicy.com.
It's written, I think, a year ago by Matthew Aide and Shane Harris, and it's called CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam As He Gassed Iran.
And for people unfamiliar, these guys have real fact checkers.
This isn't even antiwar.com.
This is foreign policy.
It's published by The Washington Post, and they don't publish articles like that.
Ain't fact check.
And Matthew Aide and Shane Harris, if you've never heard of them, are both very mainstream, incredible, acceptable reporters.
This is not any sort of alternative media.
Not to indict alternative media, just that some people like to dismiss things that don't come from The Washington Post.
And I'm just saying that, yeah, Aide and Harris and now Gareth are here published at foreignpolicy.com.
And Gareth's story is about the Iranian side of things.
He just got back from Iran where he interviewed one of the leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps there, who, when America was helping Saddam target Iran with those chemical weapons, he went to the Ayatollah twice and said, let me please use chemical weapons and or nuclear weapons and was told no.
And this is by the Ayatollah Khomeini, not Khomeini, but Khomeini, the one who was involved in the coup back in 79 that people think of as the great Satan himself or whatever for thwarting American will and embarrassing America so badly with the hostage crisis and all back then.
But anyway, so I want to make sure I understand this right.
I believe what you said, Gareth.
I'm sorry, I didn't get a chance to reread it this morning.
I read it last night, but I think what you said was the first time he brought up nukes too.
And the Ayatollah said, forget it.
And the second time he went back to him, he was really only asking about chemicals.
Although, as you say, he had already gotten some of the precursors together and was really hoping for a green light here.
But he didn't even really try nukes at that point.
Or did he he brought up nukes again at that point?
And the Ayatollah told him no again.
My recollection is that that the nuclear issue was not on the table in this in this conversation.
Maybe maybe I've forgotten that he he may have he may have raised it or Khomeini may have said something in this conversation as well, that that that was that that was also off the table.
But anyway, in 1987, late 87, which is when I date this second conversation, second meeting with Khomeini, the primary purpose of it was clearly to try to get Khomeini's okay to go ahead and actually weaponize to produce mustard gas in order to respond to the Iraqi attacks on Iranian civilians.
And and I think here that he he cited as reasons to say no to chemicals and nuclear weapons, that he cited religious reasons that this is haram, you can't do it.
But he also even cited the relationship with the United States.
And are we going to have a bad relationship with America forever for 1000 years, something like that, he says here, he knew that if they embarked on a chemical weapons program, that that would just be making matters worse as far as any possible rapprochement with us.
He really cited that, huh?
That's right.
I mean, this was this was not necessarily something that was said in that same meeting.
In fact, I don't I don't think it was probably at that meeting that he stated that it was it would have been soon after the revolution, when Rafik Dost was looking for a place for headquarters for the Revolutionary Guard.
And that's when Khomeini said to him, why why go there?
Why should we do we expect to be have a hostile hostile relationship with the United States for 1000 years, just don't go there.
And so that was an indication of Khomeini's pragmatism, even at the very beginning of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
So the conservative argument here is going to be, yeah, right.
Politicians say lots of things and theocrats even more.
But that doesn't mean that it's true.
And so why should we believe some fatwa is actually legitimate rather than just the cover story?
Yeah.
And of course, the reason that we should believe this fatwa was real and effective is precisely the fact that Iran did not go ahead and weaponize the the precursor chemicals for mustard gas, which clearly they could have easily done to respond to retaliate against the Iraqi chemical weapons or even to say, OK, we now have the chemical weapons, Iraq, you cease and desist or we will strike back.
They didn't do either one of those things.
And in fact, to the very end of the war, Iran was unable to essentially pose even a threat of use of chemical weapons against Iraq.
Now, that is a situation which cannot be explained in any other way and has never been explained in any other way than the effectiveness of the fatwa by Khomeini.
And to me, that is a very convincing argument that that it was indeed Islamic jurisprudence that determined Iran's policy toward weapons of mass destruction during that war.
You talked about in the article the difference between a religious fatwa about, you know, how you should pursue your courtship or whatever, as opposed to the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic issuing an actual religious edict over the political government.
Talk about that really fast.
Exactly.
That's an extremely important point.
I'm glad you've raised it, Scott.
There's such a lot of nonsense that has been published about the question of fatwas where people argue, oh, look, all these ayatollahs have put out many fatwas where they change their mind later on or they just put out obvious nonsense and therefore fatwas are not to be taken seriously.
Well, I'm sure that's true.
I mean, there are plenty of fatwas that are not worth anything and which are only, in fact, binding even in the theory of Islamic legal practice.
They're only binding on those people who choose to follow that ayatollah.
But in the case of the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, which, of course, is a unique institution, a unique situation, the supreme leader's fatwas on matters of government policy are binding on the entire government.
They have a status which is higher than legislation in the Islamic Republic.
So that's a very different situation.
And all those arguments that have been put forward for paying no attention to fatwas simply don't apply in that situation.
So it's like the whim of an American president.
They can just do whatever they want.
It's the highest law of land.
Got you.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
Thank you so much.
Congratulations on your great scoop.
I'm looking forward to the rest of them soon to come.
Gareth Porter at foreign policy dot com today when the ayatollah said no to nukes.
Thanks, Gareth.
Thanks very much, Scott.
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