01/27/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show, everybody.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All right.
Now, our next guest is our good friend, Gareth Porter.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Thanks.
Very happy to have you here.
First of all, it's been a few days, and I know this is a complicated story, and I won't ask you to give everybody the backstory of any kind of thing or anything, but you famously have debunked the Iran-had-Hezbollah-blow-up-the-Jewish-Community-Center-in-Buenos Aires-in-1994 story.
And all the current narrative is that the prosecutor who bravely told the truth that it was Hezbollah has been murdered and made to look like a suicide.
And then the reporter who broke the story had to flee the country in terror.
And so my question is, have you had cause to rethink your previous journalism in any way, or is there anything that you would like to tell us about the story that you have learned or added context or any kind of thing?
Well, that, of course, we could spend a lot of time on, for sure.
Let me just start out by saying that there is nothing that has happened with regard to Nisman's death changes one iota.
The story that we, I think, have, I have great confidence that the story that I have written about the lack of any evidence that Iran or Hezbollah were involved in the bombing of the AMIA community center in 1994, or for that matter, the Israeli embassy in 1992, that remains unaffected by any of this that has happened in the last couple of weeks with regard to Nisman.
There are some things that I feel very confident about.
There are a lot of things that I'm not confident about.
The things that I am very confident about include the fact that Nisman did not have any evidence whatsoever that Iran or Hezbollah were involved in that bombing attack.
And so, I mean, the Nisman report is still what it was before, which is that is the 2006 request for the arrest of seven senior Iranian officials for that 1994 bombing.
That report remains a highly politicized, shabby piece of work that should have been exposed at the time as what it was.
It took a long time to become clear about this, that it was indeed a really hack job.
So the short answer is that my view of that has not changed a bit.
I think what we're looking at in regard to the events in Buenos Aires more recently is the reality that in Argentina's government politics, you have no real confidence in the justice system or in the security apparatus of that country or in the government.
And therefore, anything is possible.
Nothing can be ruled out at this point in terms of who is responsible.
I certainly don't know.
I don't know if we'll ever know.
And there are obviously different theories that have been put forward about his death, including, of course, that the government itself at high levels was behind it, that rogue operators in the intelligence service were behind it.
There's also a theory, which I think we have to take seriously and watch, that a former senior high ranking intelligence official named Jaime Stuyuso, who was was fired a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, roughly, you know, who had obviously plenty of motive to blacken the present government's name, certainly has the capability to arrange something like this.
So I just want to emphasize that we don't know what happened.
It's going to be difficult to put it together, if if if not impossible, and that that this has a lot to do with the the essential nature of this Argentine system from basically going back many, many years to the to the dictatorship.
OK, right on.
And I'm sorry to waste so much of the time of a Syria interview on this subject, but it's very important.
I think I'm sure.
And I wasn't sure whether you'd have a different answer than the last time we spoke, which admittedly was just a few days ago.
But it's a developing story.
So, you know, but anyway, so check this out.
You wrote an article for Middle East Eye.
We ran an antiwar dot com as well.
An Obama untangle from Syria's civil war.
And to go along with this, a couple of footnotes here.
Major New York Times piece by Anne Bernard, U.S. signals shift on how to end Syrian civil war that came after your piece, I believe.
And then the news is that Kerry says he supports Syrian peace talks in Russia.
Those are talks toward the having of talks, maybe, which is apparently I guess that means they're they're scrapping Geneva 2 and its parameters and they're going to start again.
And then one more headline before I set you loose here would be Obama cuts off Syrian rebels cash, which is Jamie Detmer at the Daily Beast today that, you know, finally Obama has decided to go ahead and and switch back to Assad.
George Bush's old policy of paying Assad to fight the Mujahideen for us.
What do you think?
Right.
Yeah, I think you're correct in suggesting that there are indications here that the Obama policy towards Syria, which was always highly ambivalent, to say the least, about supporting providing arms to, quote, moderate rebels and so forth, is is now essentially, you know, it's finished.
There's another story that you didn't mention in The Wall Street Journal that recounts the pretty much complete failure of the limited arming of of the so-called moderates and points out, among other things, that some of those individual commanders who were lining up for arms really wanted to use them to fight al-Nusra, not the Assad government, to to make al-Nusra the the priority.
And according to The Wall Street Journal article today, the the CIA folks who were in charge of this said, no, they wouldn't.
They wouldn't support that.
They wouldn't support people to to fight al-Nusra, which is a rather interesting, although not terribly surprising, sidelight about that about that program.
But but it is apparently now recognized as a failure by just just about everybody.
Everybody agrees on that.
And that's one of the several indicators that the Obama administration is going through a very serious reappraisal of its Syria policy and trying to come up with something that is a bit more realistic.
And among the things that that is included in that reappraisal and an effort to to try to reorient the policy is this idea of supporting local ceasefires, which I wrote about.
All right.
Well, we'll have to pick that up on the other side of this break.
And I'm going to hunt down that Wall Street Journal article that I guess I missed at the moment.
And here's one more.
I forgot to mention Assad's interview in Foreign Affairs, which is worth taking a look at as well.
We'll be right back.
Everybody with Gareth Porter in just a sec.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I found it.
It's linked in the Daily Beast article about Obama cutting off the funding there.
I'm on the line with the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from Interpress Service.
He writes also for Truthout some award winning work there on the Afghan war, et cetera.
And he's the author of Manufactured Crisis, their true story, the untold story behind the Iranian nuclear scare, which is the book on the subject.
And right now.
So we're talking about the mess of American Syria policy.
And I think we've joked about this before, because that's the only way really to discuss it.
But it's been absolutely insane and almost well, depending on your point of view, maybe call it lowercase t treasonous for the Americans to have been backing the Mujahideen against Assad for the past three years.
It was always the Nusra Front with the leadership before ISIS split off from them.
And whatever so-called moderate groups were always very marginal in this thing, they always have been.
And yet that's what Israel wants and what Saudi wants and what Turkey wants, whatever.
So now the ship of the American empire is so huge that it takes, you know, nine months or something, eight, nine months to turn the thing around, to go back to war against the Mujahideen because the Islamic State thing got so far out of control in eastern Syria that now, come on, you've got to go back to back in the Baathists.
Obviously, non-intervention isn't an option here for these people.
So they switch back to the equally evil and also counterproductive, but not outright treasonous policy that they had been the track before.
And they're switching back to Assad.
But it's taken them a while, it seems like.
And that's what all this stuff is about, you know, trying to figure out which rebels to back or how much to pretend they're training up this army of 5000 men who are going to take on all comers or, you know, whatever kind of thing they're pushing.
But then, as you say, at the same time behind the scenes, they're pushing for some kind of or actually for small ceasefires and hopefully toward larger ones.
Right.
Well, this is let me just make make one basic point about the the arming of the so-called moderates that that Obama finally agreed to.
I mean, it's very clear.
And this has been I think it's actually in the Wall Street Journal piece or maybe it's the Daily Beast piece.
I can't remember which one that, you know, he agreed to go along with that reluctantly, only under pressure from the regional allies.
I mean, I think this policy that we are now seeing sort of peter out and, you know, an effort to come up with something different is really an artifact of this reflection of the degree to which the United States national security state is is really tied up with these regional states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Israel, of course, the two big ones.
But, you know, I mean, to some extent, there is the relationship with Turkey is is involved in this as well.
And maybe you as a you know, you as a security partner in terms of bases, in terms of sales of military sales to you and so forth.
All these things add up to an enormous degree of influence over U.S. policy in Syria.
And I think that is, you know, the hang up here.
What is is the the problem that the Obama administration now has trying to move to something that is rational, which is, you know, to to somehow have a an understanding that that we are going to in some indirect fashion or direct fashion work with the Assad regime to stabilize things and and not try to really work directly against our interests of continuing destabilization in that part of the Middle East.
In Syria, it's Assad there.
It's a body in the government in Baghdad that George Bush put in power there.
So at least it would be consistent.
Right.
But of course, the difference there is, as you know, well, is is that in Iraq you have a regime that, you know, the the Saudis don't like, but particularly, but they have not been committed to overthrowing at this point, you know, in the same way that they have in Syria.
So it's, you know, it's slightly less pressure on the somewhat less pressure on the United States to to follow a policy that is directly against U.S. interests.
All right.
And now I'm sorry, please tell us about the ceasefires and all that.
Yeah, I mean, the point here is that the article that I wrote, I guess, now to two and a half weeks ago was taking off from the very interesting information that came out in December, in November, excuse me, and then early December that the Obama administration had been talking with and reading the author of a very interesting paper that was calling for U.S. support of local ceasefires between the Assad regime and the rebel forces of some some rebel forces in places like Homs and particularly in the Damascus region, in the area around the capital.
Now we know that dozens of these local ceasefires have, in fact, been negotiated, obviously with varying degrees of success in actually stopping the fighting, but that they have been effective in some cases.
And Homs is is one example that that is extremely significant in terms of pointing towards a way in which there can be at least some minimum of sort of slowing down the violence in Syria and allowing the the civilian population in these places which have been suffering tremendously from the war to at least begin to recover some degree of normalcy.
And so there were signs that the Obama administration was interested in this after the NSC director for the Middle East, Robert Malley, had met with Nir Rosen, who was a very talented, very serious veteran Middle East correspondent, Middle East journalist who's covered all of the wars in the Middle East.
He met with him sometime in November.
And after that, we know that the White House held a series of meetings, one of which was presided over by Obama himself, which were discussing basically what to do about U.S. policy.
And so there's reason to believe that there was a serious consideration being given to this.
Nothing has been leaked since then, to my knowledge, since November, early December, about the Obama reconsideration of policy, including this point.
But it seems pretty clear that that is something that is now at least under discussion, if not actually being undertaken by the Obama administration to give some kind of indirect support.
The United Nations, by the way, is very much involved in that process.
And one of the ways to do it is for the United States to work with the U.N. special envoy on that.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
Hey, I got Garrett to stay on one more segment with us.
Hooray.
Talking about the situation in Syria and Iraq and the Islamic State and this and that.
So like I was saying, Garrett, earlier, I find it kind of ironic that America is so bogged down in this policy of doing what Israel wants and fighting Assad because Assad backs Hezbollah and his friends with Iran and all their priorities, even where it ended up favoring.
And I know that Obama was much more reluctant than Hillary and Petraeus and Panetta, as Hillary herself accuses Obama, to make matters even worse.
But he still has been, you know, always insisting that Assad must go, must be a part of any talks with anybody and all this for all these years and help make it this way.
But so now they're and I've actually taken it as kind of an ironic relief that they're so bogged down in this treasonous policy that it's difficult for them to just outright back Assad, just like they back Abadi and the Iranians and for that matter, join up with the Russians and kill these Islamic State guys, which is what I think they would like to do, since it's basically Osama bin Laden incarnate standing up there on a balcony like Mussolini declaring himself the dictator of, you know, former Iraqi Sunni stand there, which is a gigantic PR disaster for the empire, probably incomparable to anything else.
And so now I'm worried that they got the ship of state turn around and now they're going to start backing the Baathist army.
And now they're going to have much more of a real war.
They don't want to send in the 3rd Infantry Division, but maybe they'll, you know, switch back to the Bush policy of really backing Assad against the Mujahideen, since the moderates always have been a fantasy, as the president says.
And now I'm worried they'll get their act together and make matters that much worse, because even though it wouldn't be outright treasonous, it would be horribly counterproductive.
I mean, that was what Michael Shoyer said was for America to now come in outright as the air force of the Iranian Quds Force and Hezbollah and Shiite, Alawite, Baathist, Assad against them is good for their movement.
It just proves how right they are about all of their enemies in their own public relations is just as bad, even though in an indirect way.
But so do you think my fears are right that this could help pave the way to an even worse war?
I think you're right to be very anxious about that point.
Absolutely.
There's always going to be an important element within the Pentagon that are ready for it to escalate military involvement in a country, particularly when it's air power.
And I think that's the situation that we see in Syria.
So absolutely, if there were an understanding, an informal understanding, the United States was now going to tolerate the Assad regime and reach at the very least an implicit deal that Assad would would allow U.S. bombing, would agree to U.S. bombing, and that there would be coordination, tactical coordination, intelligence sharing and so forth.
There's no doubt that that would be very, very welcomed by very important parts of the Pentagon, particularly, of course, the air force, and that that would almost inevitably result in the kind of escalation that I think we all have to be afraid of because of, you know, we know what the consequences of that are going to be.
I mean, I'm not I'm not saying that, you know, it's great what we're doing right now.
I'm saying that it could get a lot worse.
And that's something definitely to be to be concerned about.
Well, you know, I was just speaking right before you with Mitch Prothero again, and we were talking about, again, the relative strength between the Islamic state in Iraq, as it exists in Iraq, especially as part of that discussion now versus AQI back when, say, 2005 or six or whatever.
And and he's just saying, you know, it's magnitudes more powerful and the ability to create any kind of awakening movement.
And in Iraq, we've seen them do it, build up the so-called moderates, the tribal Sunnis against the Bin Laden nights.
And we've seen that work.
But it took a lot of American intervention on their side to do it, as Prothero was explaining.
And so where Obama seems to rightly call it a fantasy in in Syria, it seems to be there still their policy, I guess, in Iraq and Syria.
Right.
Because they I mean, I admit to you, I even though it's the thing I'm worst afraid of, it doesn't seem like they want to send in the 3rd Infantry Division again like W. Bush did.
That's the one lesson Obama has learned of what not to do.
But what the hell they think they are going to do?
Because as Prothero says, the Shiites aren't going to fight for Mosul, Fallujah and Tikrit.
They're just not going to go and die for Mosul.
And neither are the Kurdish Peshmerga either.
And nor can they really.
Well, it's a formula for endless war, isn't it?
I mean, that's that's what is absolutely going to be the the result of whatever the United States does or doesn't do as long as, you know, it has a hand in the fight.
We're going to have a war that cannot have any termination.
I mean, there's nothing and no no possibility in sight for defeating the Islamic State by military force.
And so it is, as I say, a formula for endless war.
And, you know, that in itself is something that appeals to the national security state of the United States.
That's what they're all about.
So that that is not a negative from their point of view.
And, you know, at the same time that they are, you know, taking advantage of this in all kinds of ways that, you know, you are familiar with and I know your listeners are familiar with by now.
They're also, you know, taking advantage of all their ties with the Saudis, the Israelis, the UAE, Qatar and so forth.
You know, all of these extremely important relationships that the NSA, the CIA, the Pentagon, military services have with the regional countries that have been pushing the United States, you know, in the direction of the most irrational kind of policy from a historical, strategic point of view.
Those are still very much a vital part of the calculus that goes into U.S. policy in both Syria and Iraq.
Right.
You mean like Israel bombing Hezbollah and an Iranian general in Syria in a in the airstrike last week, for example.
They haven't changed their policy just because Obama, just like Michael Oren said before he finished being ambassador, that, hey, we prefer these bad guys to those bad guys.
In other words, we don't care who's the butcher of New York and who's not.
We hate Iran more.
And so therefore you do, too.
No doubt about it.
Yeah.
And I just what I'm trying to do here is to keep drawing people's attention to the sort of invisible links that exist between all of these major national security bureaucracies and the regional countries that are very much influencing the U.S. policy.
They're both ties that have to do with programs, with formal programs that benefit the bureaucrats and their ties that that are very, very profitable for the people who are either retired from these agencies like the NSA and the CIA or who intend to be retired in the future.
So in the corporations, too, I've heard it said, I forget who to give credit to, but that Israel is just a money laundering operation for Lockheed is all they are.
It's just American tax money bounces off Israel and goes back into their bank account all day long.
It's Lockheed's of the world, but it's also the Booz Allen's.
And, you know, that that looms much, much more important now than it did a decade ago, obviously.
Yeah.
Like in the shadow factory by James Bamford.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's for everyone.
And that's in the Snowden documents, too.
The a bit of it is about the Israeli and American.
You're referring to the NSA surveillance techno technology state there, right?
Surveillance programs, obviously, all kinds of programs that have to do with the NSA are involved, but but also the contracts that are part of the the whole approach to the Middle East that benefit all these players outside the NSA and the other the other bureaucracies.
All right.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Good to talk to you.
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