10/20/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show on the line.
I got the great Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net, IPSnews.net.
He also writes for truthout.org.
We rerun virtually all of it at antiwar.comoriginal.antiwar.com slash Porter is where you can find that whole archive.
And, of course, he's the author of the book Manufactured Crisis, literally wrote the book on it, the so-called Iranian nuclear weapons program, which Gareth shows never existed.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Glad to be back.
I'm good.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
And, of course, we spoke just the other day about your interview with a former very high level member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Forces about the old Ayatollah Khomeini's edict that chemical and nuclear weapons were banned.
Now, your next piece, it's sort of old news, but just because you debunked it before doesn't mean they quit trying.
And so you've had to now at IPSnews debunk again.
So we're here to give you a platform to do a little bit of that debunking, too.
The headline is History of Key Document in IAEA Probe Suggests Israeli Forgery.
Now, this is extra super important because we're right in the middle of talks trying to get a final nuclear agreement with Iran, where America will back off the threats of war, repeal the sanctions, and the Iranians will allow for these expanded inspections, so expanded that it makes the Americans happy enough, maybe disconnect enough centrifuges, divert a few projects to different purposes, that kind of thing, so that there can finally be an agreement.
And yet in the midst of this, the IAEA says, hey, we've got some serious unanswered questions that the Iranians have not completely fessed up about, about experiments on nuclear weapons technology, Gareth.
So it seems pretty damn important if that in fact is true, but you seem to think not.
So first of all, can you tell us about what is it exactly that they're referring to?
And then secondly, we'll get to why it is that you're so skeptical the origins of this evidence.
Well, this document, which is the focal point of the article, is what I call the high explosives document.
It's also referred to in that way in a lot of news media coverage.
It is a document that appeared on the scene in 2008, which the IAEA, as usual, mysteriously obtained without ever naming officially the source of the document.
It showed up on the list of documents in the May 2008 IAEA report, which had been shown to Iran and was briefly described as, and I'm not going to try to sort of review or to make sure that the wording is the same, but essentially it was said to be a description of experiments with high explosives that involved a multipoint initiation concept.
And the implication was left that this was a very strong indication of a nuclear weapons related experiment.
And that of course has been the IAEA claim ever since.
And then it went on in subsequent months in the next IAEA report in September 2008, the very scintillating, shall we say, detail was added to this previous report about the high explosives document that it was reported that a foreign expert had helped the Iranians carry out these experiments.
And that the Iranians had been asked to explain themselves with regard to this foreign expert.
And of course, we now know that the foreign expert was none other than the Ukrainian scientist, Vyacheslav Danilenko.
And we've talked about him on your show before, but you know, he now, I think is, is again, relevant to understanding what's going on in the politics surrounding the IAEA role in relation to the nuclear talks.
And I just want to very quickly, before we lose sight of this or before it gets forgotten, make sure everyone understands that the IAEA and the P5 plus one are taking the position that Iran must explain all of these, these documents.
And particularly at this point, the one that's on the top of the agenda is the high explosives document.
Or otherwise there will not be a comprehensive agreement that the Iranian explanation to the satisfaction of the IAEA is a precondition for or a condition for the successful negotiation of the comprehensive agreement.
In fact, I've even seen a report suggesting, it seems credible to me that this is the case, that the P5 plus one is taking the position in the talks that if the Iranians are not able to explain satisfactorily the various claims that are made in these documents within the first phase of the agreement, that then the P5 plus one would not withdraw the sanctions in the subsequent phase of the agreement.
So that's the significance at this point of this document.
Right.
In other words, it's absolutely huge and could could sink the deal.
It could sink the deal indeed.
And that is why it's extremely important that some understanding of what this issue is really all about gets a broader audience.
All right.
Now, so before we get back to all of that and we will, let me ask you this.
It seems to me there's a very small number of reporters who covered this kind of topic in on, you know, in America's national security, but you got Laura Rosen, you got Barbara Slavin, you got Scott Peterson and, you know, the guys over at NIAC.
And, you know, that's just about it.
Right.
And, of course, the hacks.
Right.
George John and David Sanger.
But don't forget Reuters as well.
Reuters always files every time there's a turning point in the IAEA Iran saga, they always file a story or two.
So they have to be included.
But all those people that I name by name at first, they're those are people who they're not perfect necessarily all the time or whatever, but they're pretty damn good on this stuff.
And I believe it was Scott Peterson reported as well as you did that Robert Kelly from the IAEA wasn't buying into this.
So my question for you is that never mind whether Israel forged the document for the moment, we'll cover that.
But for the purposes of these other reporters, have they not been shown enough reason to be under the consensus now?
Are they not under the consensus now that, yeah, that story had already fallen apart because simply Kelly didn't believe it.
And Kelly didn't believe it.
And that's it.
He was the guy in the position to know at the IAEA.
So they wouldn't have to go necessarily be as good as you on Danilenko or on the origin of the document or anything else to have reason to just.
I'm sorry it's taken so long, Garrett.
I'm trying to ask you is isn't it the consensus among these few Iran nuclear reporters in America that they already don't believe this story and yet it's still going on?
I mean, the government is still treating this as though it's a legitimate deal breaker for these talks.
Two points about that.
One, the first point is that I would I would say that most of the reporters that you've referred to have not written debunking or questioning the high explosives document.
Certainly, the monitor has quoted Bob Kelly, Robert Kelly, and he did have a piece in Bloomberg, you know, in 2012, certainly debunking the document.
He's really good on this stuff, too.
There's a writer who's good.
Right.
But but most of the most most of the journalists that you you've mentioned have not indeed debunked this or questioned it.
And the second point is that the the coverage of the recent developments in this storyline, that is what has happened in the meetings between the IAEA and Iran since August, have uniformly suggested that Iran has been remiss, has been stonewalling, has been refusing to cooperate, has failed to provide the necessary information that the IAEA has demanded about this document.
So I see even if there had been some debunking in the past, it has now been forgotten.
It's never brought up.
It certainly has not been brought up.
Unless the document is debunked, they're going to carry on under the impression that the whole line of questioning is legit.
I see.
Now, I'm sorry, because I already screwed us up and we got to take this break.
But hold it right there, Gareth.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
History of key document in IAEA probe suggests Israeli forgery.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm sorry, I ran us all into the break there.
So I was asking Gareth, but don't the other reporters know better than this now?
And his basic answer, that was my question in a nutshell.
And his answer in a nutshell was as long as the documents aren't debunked, they think that the IAEA and the member states of the UN and the P5 plus one, this and that, that they have, the UN Security Council, that is, that they have a presumed reason to legitimately complain here, that the Iranians are not coming out with everything.
So that's what we talked about there during the break.
And then very quickly, that most of the coverage in recent weeks, that is, since August, has been Reuters reporting on this story.
Reuters and AP, it really has not been the subject of reportage in major newspapers at all.
So we have been depending on reporters who have certainly had less of a record of looking into this question in the past.
That's for sure.
Yeah, less experienced ones.
Yeah.
Okay.
And that's important on this story, because you've got to be able to remember back and go, huh, well, but what about David Kelly or Robert Kelly?
Historical context, no historical background at all.
Okay.
Now, so tell me if I'm right about this.
What you're saying is that there are is it two or more hard reasons to disbelieve what this document claims is right.
And one is that we already know who the scientist is they're referring to.
And he was a nuclear weapons scientist.
He was a nanodiamond scientist.
And that accounts for the implosion system.
He's not trying to split uranium atoms.
He's trying to make tiny little carbon atoms into the shape of nanodiamonds.
And that then this guy, Robert Kelly from the IAEA, agrees with that.
And that and then the other thing is that the IAEA had their pick of places to inspect there at Parchin, where all this took place.
And back in 2005, and they were satisfied then that there was nothing to find there.
What else am I missing as far as that?
And then I want to I want to let you go on all the reasons that you believe that it was forged by the Israelis kind of as the separate question in a second.
Just on the 2005 IAEA visit to Parchin, there's a point that relates to that, that I believe I made in my book, I'm pretty sure I did, which really needs to be repeated and expanded on.
And that is that if the Iranians had anything to hide at Parchin, and the presumption that you've just talked about, of course, is that that the Iranians did in fact have something to hide, which was this gigantic alleged cylinder for testing nuclear weapons designs or whatever, but somehow related to nuclear weapons research.
And had they had something like that to hide, they never would have allowed the IAEA twice to go into Parchin to pick out whatever sites they wanted to visit in one of the four quadrants on two different occasions to visit five sites in each case of their own choice.
And none other than Ali Heinonen has said that the Iranians didn't know which sites we were going to choose until we arrived on the site.
So that to me is the absolute verification of the fact that Iran had nothing to hide, certainly had no bomb test cylinder to hide at Parchin.
Well, and I got something to add here too, which is I'm friends with Gordon Prather, who's the former chief scientist of the army and had a career making nuclear weapons and working at Sandia National Laboratory, et cetera, et cetera, a real experts expert at literally fusing hydrogen atoms together.
He could kill your whole city.
And he said, that's not how you test an implosion system for a nuclear weapon anyway.
Inside a chamber like that, you got to do it out in the open.
And and then you need all this super high speed X-ray film in order to play it back at extra super slow mo.
And then you got to repeat the test hundreds of times to get it right.
And they don't have the technology to do this.
And that's not even what the accusation is.
So just forget it.
Bob Kelly said exactly the same thing.
So, I mean, there's no question this is a completely I mean, it makes no sense technically whatsoever, that whole story.
But in addition to that, I make the point that the history of this document, the origins of the document show that there's no question it came from the Israelis.
First of all, you know, I just found this out since my book was published that there was a an article in Jane's in it was the May 1st, 2008 edition, but it was actually dated March 14th, 2008, which said, well, I've just been shown by a source connected with Western intelligence, these documents which show that that Iran was experimenting with, you know, some sort of multipoint initiation system or language, which which was similar to that.
So he's clearly talking about the high explosives document.
And then he said, and what this shows is that the NIE of December 2007 was wrong, which, of course, was the Israeli propaganda line.
So whoever was showing him that was making the argument on behalf of the Israelis, if it wasn't the Israeli intelligence people themselves who passed it on.
And so that's the first clue that this was indeed an Israeli document.
But the second thing, of course, is that the the Israeli that that our friend David Albright, who was close to Ali Heinemann, who was a good friend of Ali Heinemann, told me in September 2008.
Slow down one second here.
Ali Heinemann and everybody is a very hawkish anti-Iranian type individual, formerly at very high levels of the IAEA, now a professor at Harvard.
And he's always leaking hawkish stuff to the media.
That's the subtext there.
Go ahead.
Correct.
So so Heinemann told David Albright, according to this interview that I had with Albright in September 2008, that there was a certain document that was very important to him, which had come to him in earlier that year in 2008.
Well, there's only one document that coincides with that description, and that's the high explosives document.
And so and Albright said to me, it was probably Israel that gave him the document.
And of course, all of the evidence indicates that the documentation that has come since 2008 has been from the Israelis.
Mohammed ElBaradei said so in his own memoirs.
And ElBaradei, you know, is not going to say that unless it's well founded, because he he was not trying to make enemies of the United States.
Believe me, he was he was trying to keep on the good side of the United States.
But he felt so strongly about what the Israelis were doing that he had to tell the truth in his memoirs about this.
Yeah.
And he, of course, also said he never saw any indication that the Iranians were pursuing nuclear weapons.
So never mind.
You know, all the the atom count was still always the same when it came to non diversion.
But he just in other words, he never was under the impression that they were.
It never seemed to him that they were as loosely as you could define it.
The former director of the IAEA.
ElBaradei knew very well that the Israelis were passing him false documents.
And he says so in his memoirs that some of the documents that they they examined at the agency, they had very serious questions about their authenticity and they queried the Israelis about that.
And and it's you know, I've had word from a previous from a former IAEA official saying that that they were a number of people there knew that there was something wrong with these documents, that they were not authentic.
They just it didn't add up.
Right.
Well, here's one more big reason to think that this document must have come from the Israelis and maybe probably even created by them.
And that would be all of your other journalism on the laptop, the so-called smoking laptop or laptop of death.
That's a bunch of crap, which you're reporting in your book.
And for IPS News Dotnet has completely deconstructed and destroyed for all time.
So would seem to indicate the same sort of deal here.
I'm sorry we're out of time, but that's the great Gareth Porter, everybody.
IPS News Dotnet history of key document in IAEA probe suggests Israeli forgery.
You can also find it at original dot antiwar dot com slash Porter.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
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