07/31/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, kids, welcome back to The Thing here, man.
I'm Scott.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org for all the stuff.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
On the line is our friend Gareth Porter.
He's my favorite reporter.
I just love this guy, man.
He's also my friend.
He writes great stuff at truthout.org and at Middle East Eye.
And let me page through my goddang tabs here, man.
I got a lot.
I don't know what I'd do without the tab kit.
Ex-IAEA official uses misleading claims to attack Iran deal by Gareth Porter at truthout.org.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Very happy to have you here.
Hey, you know what?
You wrote a book called Manufactured Crisis, the real story or the true story behind the Iranian nuclear scare.
It's really good.
It's the book on the subject.
I hope that people will read it.
And you know what?
I get comments all the time from people saying, man, I'm reading Gareth Porter's book and it's so great.
Seriously, that happened just yesterday or the day before.
Yeah, no, it's really great.
You do the work.
And someone said, oh, there's no audio book of it.
You should do the audio book.
And I said, well, I can't handle the names, man, the Farsi pronunciations and all that.
But here's six hours worth of me interviewing Gareth about every chapter in depth of that entire book if you want to listen to that.
So there's that.
Anyway.
So, yes, let's talk about Ali Heinen.
He's got a reputation around here for always being behind hawkish sort of leaks and interpretations of things.
But then again, he's an ex-IAEA official, as you write here.
He must really know what he's talking about.
So how could you challenge his authority here, Gareth?
Well, as you as you know better than anybody else, Scott, I've been challenging his authority for quite some time, particularly in Truthout, where I did a piece last year, if I remember correctly, in which I revealed the role that Heinen played as director of safeguards.
He was deputy director of the IAEA from 2005 to 2010.
And in the 2008-2009 period, particularly 2008, he was working hand-in-glove with the Bush administration to carry out an extremely critical maneuver, political maneuver, to create, to sort of establish politically the credibility, quote-unquote, of the infamous laptop document.
And the key point here is that before Heinen made this move, in close cooperation with the Bush administration, the IAEA, under Mohamed ElBaradei, then director-general, had essentially refused to treat those documents, which the CIA got from the German intelligence agency, German intelligence agency got them from the MEK, MEK clearly got them from Israel.
The ElBaradei regime at the IAEA refused to accept these documents as authentic.
They pointed out they were not authenticated, they couldn't be used as evidence against Iran.
And so that was the status quo until 2008, when Heinen became much more aggressive, insisted that these documents had to be treated as credible, and that began to be the language that was used officially in the IAEA reports.
This was a sea change, and ever since then, the news media have been compelled, in a political sense, to treat these documents and this evidence, so-called evidence, as credible and really as unquestioned.
And so that's been an absolutely strategic shift in the politics of this whole issue, and he's the one who's really responsible.
And that's why, you know, I have been following him extremely closely ever since I interviewed him in 2010, late 2010, after he left the IAEA, and found that he really could not be trusted.
He's a very loose grip on reality, from my perspective, having talked to him as well as followed everything that he's said and written, he really has a very loose grip on reality, and that allows him to sort of make some very far-reaching, far-fetched flights of fancy with regard to Iran.
So that's the background of this piece, essentially.
And that's pretty much the same argument that you're making about his current statements on the Iranian nuclear deal, that he's way out on a limb, deliberately ignoring this, and that truth in order to make his case, which obviously falls apart when you look at the rest of the context.
Right.
And he has become the single most relied upon figure in terms of the whole, you know, what has become the central theme of the folks who want to kill the Iran nuclear agreement, which is that this verification system, the system of IAEA access to undeclared sites in Iran cannot be counted on to prevent Iran from cheating, that the verification system, the system of access, is too loose.
It allows Iran to be able to cheat.
It gives them a total of 24 days under the dispute resolution mechanism in the agreement, and within that three weeks plus three days' time, Iran can simply clean up any work that has been doing, even work that might leave some trace of enriched uranium or, you know, some nuclear material.
And that's the key point that Heinemann has been harping on in his recent public appearances, articles, testimony.
This is the contribution that he's been making to the propaganda movement to kill the Iran deal.
So that's what I focused on in my article.
And I think, you know, there's a few points to be made, but the one that I think is most important is that when he says that Iran, you know, can remove any traces in a small, what he calls a small project, as opposed to a large project, he doesn't indicate how he distinguishes a small project from a large project, but he simply says if it's a small project, then Iran could remove any traces of what it did in time to allow an IAEA inspection team to come in, because then they would clean up the site, they would, you know, repaint the walls, they would put new flooring in, they would do all kinds of things to hide the traces that might have been there from the work that they did.
And by the way, he even suggests that Iran could work on uranium components of a nuclear weapon and still accomplish this.
Now, you know, he doesn't elaborate on that, but, you know, if you look at the IAEA 2011 report, which is the Bible for those people who, you know, are following this closely in the news media and who think that they now know what the truth is, that report goes into some detail about this idea of uranium components for a nuclear weapon, and it makes it clear that these uranium components are to be manufactured from highly enriched uranium.
So, you know...
So in other words, what components?
Well, I mean...
Just like, yeah, the highly enriched uranium that I have that I'm manufacturing components for too.
As long as we're making up stuff, then yeah, they can do lots of stuff with the...
Well, they are undoubtedly making this up, and that's why...
I'm sorry, music's playing.
Gareth, we've got to take this break.
We'll be right back in just a sec and let Gareth finish his thought without interruption, y'all.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to The Thing here, man.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I got Gareth Porter on the line.
So the War Party says there's a giant loophole in the Iran deal, that if there's a secret nuclear weapons making going on at the military facilities, that they've got 24 days, almost a month, to clean it all up and sneak out the back door before any inspectors can get in there.
And so John Kerry's an idiot.
He gave away the store, and obviously the Iranians are going to make a secret nuclear weapon about it.
And they're through that loophole, and they're citing this guy, Ali Heinonen, former Mucky Muck assistant director, whatever it was, at the IAEA, who's saying, yeah, they could.
They could sneak some stuff out the back door and get away with it, even up to and including manufacturing and actual, you know, the metallurgy on manufacturing a nuclear warhead, and that they could clean up the radiation, and the inspectors would be none the wiser.
And so Gareth was saying he didn't buy that.
Is that right, Gareth?
Oh, I hit the wrong button.
I'm sorry.
I hit the wrong button like you were on Skype.
I get these things mixed up sometimes.
Start again, please, sir, and I'll be quiet.
Yeah.
What we were talking about at the break is what sort of a part, what component of a nuclear weapon he's talking about here.
And you said, well, you know, it's undoubtedly a lie, and that's certainly true, that this goes back to a fabrication that is part of the Israeli documentation that the IAEA, thanks to Heinonen largely, picked up and made, quote, credible, unquote, in 2008, 2009, but in 2011.
So what we're talking about here is this allegation that the Iranians were working on a system, a component of a nuclear weapon, which is a triggering mechanism, and this is the hemispheric form which has uranium metal as the basis of it.
And so that's what he's talking about here.
That's what he's claiming.
And the point I make in the piece is that he's completely all wet.
He has no ground to stand on whatsoever to make this claim.
And in fact, back in 2013, the head of the IAEA's Environmental Sample Laboratory told Reuters that it would be extremely difficult to remove every particle of enriched uranium despite whatever cleanup might be made in some sort of Iranian site.
So he said, quote, you cannot get rid of them by cleaning.
You cannot dilute them to the extent that we will be able, that we will not be able to pick them up.
And Heinonen actually, when he was asked for a comment on this, admitted to Reuters in this story, he was quoted as saying, quote, complete sanitization is very difficult to achieve if nuclear materials were actually used.
So he's now really contradicting his own statement only two years earlier.
Right.
And what's funny is this is the one thing that David Albright got right in the world, right, in South Africa, who's sort of the civilian counterpart to Heinonen and leaker of Heinonen's BS over the years, is that he went in there and found what the South Africans had gone to great lengths to bulldoze and change the entire landscape where they had a secret nuclear facility there.
And he went and found it because, you know, his little handheld radiation detector went off, I guess, whatever.
And it's impossible, as you say, to hide these.
And then the sensitivity of the instruments of the technology for detecting enriched uranium has increased enormously, enormously.
They can now detect one trillionth of a gram of enriched uranium.
And that's pretty fine.
And never even mind, again, we're just, you know, basically for the sake of their argument here, everybody, we're just closing our eyes and pretending that never mind what uranium got mined and milled and then transferred to uranium hexafluoride gas and then enriched up to weapons grade that now they have it to do this metallurgy on it.
Right.
This is the we just have to pretend in order to go along with even the bogus theory that they could get the remnants of such work out the back door when, in fact, they could not.
In fact, you know, in my story, I showed that that Heinonen's fabrication is his fibbing actually is even worse because in this in this testimony he gave before the House Financial Services Committee, don't ask me why he's testifying before them last week or was it a week before?
I guess it was the week before.
Now, Heinonen claimed that the the that the Iranians could frustrate the IAEA in their inspection efforts, that they had frustrated them, I should say, in 2003, because there was no trade.
There were no traces to be detected through environmental sample sampling in a case that he that he mentioned that took place in 2003.
Well, the only case where the Iranians attempted to frustrate IAEA inspection in 2003 was is something I write about in my book.
And it's a well-documented there's no controversy surrounding it.
The Iranians, you know, had had tried to cover up the fact that they had introduced some UF6 into centrifuges at the Calais Electric Company to test the centrifuges.
And so so they didn't want to admit that, that they'd done that in 1999 and again in 2002.
So so they thought they'd get away with this and they repainted the walls, refloored it and so forth.
The IAEA came in with their ability to detect one trillionth of a gram and they immediately spotted it.
So there was no problem there.
And this is what Heinen and Seitz says, yeah, that's what they could do.
This is the case that he completely, you know, lies about in his testimony before Congress.
Amazing.
And now so tell me about this other one, too.
This is huge that they could build covertly a small reprocessing plant so that under the nose of the inspectors, even under the expanded regime, so that they could again, you just have to close your eyes and assume all of his premises here.
They could somehow turn off the Iraq reactor, harvest the plutonium, which we all know be way polluted in light water stuff, not heavy water reactor waste.
That would be good for a plutonium nuke.
Be almost impossible even with an with a reprocessing plant to get weapons grade plutonium out of this stuff.
But they could just whatever, turn the thing off for a year, let the waste cool down, take the roof off, harvest all the plutonium out of there, then take it to their secret facility without anybody noticing.
And then they could make a plutonium core for a nuclear weapon.
Yes.
You precisely and very, very nicely summarized this ridiculous case that underlies this claim that he made last year in a paper that he wrote for this right wing pro Zionist Henry Jackson Society in the UK, in which he did, in fact, make the claim that that one could build one Iran could build a small reprocessing plant.
And it wouldn't it would be difficult to detect is the way he put it.
Well, so I found that very suspicious, of course, as you can imagine.
And I found the the document, this report that he cites in his in his report as the basis for his making that claim.
Well, it's a very long report done in 2005 by the by National Lab in in Washington.
And what I found that not only is there nothing in there that supports the point that he's making, there's no claim whatsoever that it would be easy to get away with this or that it'd be difficult to detect.
And in fact, the report actually mentions a an effort by North Korea to build a reprocessing plant, which was detected in, I believe, nineteen nineteen eighty seven.
So basically, again, he was simply lying.
I mean, you know, this is a guy who is absolutely unreliable.
You can't rely on anything that he says.
All right.
It's a great way to lie, though, where he says, you know, hey, there's this thing and then you have to double check the thing.
He's right that the thing exists.
It's just never what he says.
It says, you know, that's kind of.
So that's a great guy, apparently doesn't doesn't expect to be checked.
I mean, that's part of the deal.
And then there's Gareth Porter.
Exactly.
Now.
So I got to ask you this, man, because we're almost out of time here.
But the samples, this is the new big controversy is, oh, Iran gets to do all the samples.
So it doesn't matter, Gareth, whether you can find this or that radiation because you ain't doing the finding.
IAEA ain't doing the finding.
Iran's just going to hand over what they claim is a sample.
And that's going to be good enough for Kerry and Obama, those idiots.
Look, Scott, this is this is really about this whole new propaganda theme that there's a secret deal between the IAEA and Iran that, you know, this is this is where the where the Obama administration is hiding the secrets that need to be uncovered.
And, you know, I just want to observe that that there was never any problem with the secrecy of the IAEA up until now, because, you know, this was always the assumption was and they were correct that the IAEA was on our side and we could count on them to keep Iran in the dock.
And so, you know, the refusal of the IAEA to give out any information about anything that had to do with their contacts with Iran, what Iran had said or done to explain any of these issues in the past, that was just fine with them because the propaganda was intact.
Now, you know, there's a problem for their propaganda.
And, well, it's not a problem, but a challenge for their propaganda that they're dealing with by simply saying, oh, there's a secret deal.
And I think that's all there is to this.
Look, we don't we have no idea what the actual understanding is.
All we know is that some right wing fool in the Senate from Idaho is making this claim and that the administration, you know, is not going to respond because they are they're bound by confidentiality of this agreement between the IAEA and Iran.
Of course, the administration knows exactly what's in that agreement and they briefed members of Congress on it.
And this guy is clearly, you know, exploiting what he heard of and and turning it in a way that makes it look like it's extremely damaging to the case for the agreement.
I simply would regard it as lacking credibility until we find out.
That's all I'm going to say about it.
All right.
Well, now, yes.
So the AP had a story about it where they say, well, I'm trying to page down to the part where I think they kind of imply IAEA sources saying, well, they'll be watching on the cameras.
And that was the compromise.
But then again, that may actually be a paraphrase of David Albright's speculation to them.
There are all kinds of possibilities.
And again, you know, AP absolutely cannot be relied upon.
Oh, yeah.
This is a George John story.
Yeah, it's the George John.
By the way, when I was in Vienna, I actually met George John.
Oh, yeah.
I met George.
Hey, we're over time anyway.
Gary, so go ahead and tell me the story.
I want to hear this George.
John, the famous George John.
And he I shook hands with him.
He said to me, you know, we just sort of passed in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel across from the Pele Coburg.
He said, oh, I read your stuff all the time.
Enjoy it.
Oh, man, you should have went over there and interviewed him.
I didn't interview him.
I just I just shook hands.
Oh, man, you should say, hey, sit down.
I want to ask you some questions.
How long have you been working for the Mossad?
Yeah, really.
OK, I didn't do that.
I'm just.
All right, it wasn't that funny of a joke, but I try.
No, no, I you know, I probably should have if if I'd had unlimited time and you know, I mean, these people, these people who work for the big media, they were always busy.
They were always having their own confabs among themselves.
And once in a while I would have a chance to talk to somebody.
But generally speaking, the lines were pretty clearly drawn between the big media and people like myself.
Yeah, well, that's actually probably for everybody's benefit.
So we don't worry about it too much.
All right.
Listen, hey, thanks for doing the show and staying over and time and all this stuff.
But I appreciate you come back on.
My pleasure, Scott.
Thanks.
That's a great Gareth Porter, everybody.
He is at Middle East Eye and at Truthout.org.
This one is called.
I XIA official uses misleading claims to attack Iran deal, and he's got a new one coming out next week.
I guess I won't say where it'll be a surprise, but he's got a new one, all a big, deep story on the entire nuclear deal.
All right.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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