12/02/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Poor Gareth Porter.
I just can never get enough of the guy, man.
I like hearing him say stuff.
He's the author of the book, Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iranian Nuclear Scare.
And yeah, boy, is he good on this issue as well as many, many others.
And I had a question in the email yesterday in reference to...
I really ought to read more right-wing propaganda, but I just don't have the stomach for it anymore, man.
But this one is from townhall.com, State Department.
Iran never signed the nuclear deal, which isn't even legally binding anyway.
And this is a big right-wing talking point apparently right now on the radio as well.
So the emailer himself asked, hey, maybe you could get Gareth on to explain.
And I thought, hey, that sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
I'd be willing to bet the truth is going to be a lot closer to what he says than what this says.
But I guess we'll see.
Anyway, got Gareth on the line.
And yes, you're right.
It is a nitpick little thing.
But as you and I both know, Gareth, the war party never stops coming up with nitpick little things to say about the Iran nuclear deal and what they all mean in effect is that every right-winger, basically, no offense to the four who know better in our entire society, they get their ultimate confirmation bias on a regular basis.
See, I told you the Iran nuclear deal is stupid because one more stupid little false talking point came out and reaffirms them over and over again in all of the slogans that they've said before.
So tell us the truth, then.
Well, I couldn't agree more with what you just said, of course.
I mean, you know, the fact that this is a picayune, of course, false statement does not mean that it doesn't have huge legs within the extreme right affirmation.
So, you know, it's important to to respond to it.
But the point about this argument that Iran did not sign the agreement, of course, is that the United States never had any intention of making this agreement legally binding.
This was, I mean, there was a time, and, you know, one could look this up on the internet and see the precise dates when this occurred, that the Obama administration was reportedly planning to have the UN Security Council basically pass a resolution of the Security Council that would turn the non-binding JCPOA into a set of binding commitments.
In other words, to violate the JCPOA would be a violation of international law.
But when it came down to the final days of the negotiations, and I was in Vienna when this all happened, and so I got a little bit of the flavor of what was happening here, the United States pushed through a deal, essentially, that the Russians had to go along with, because it had to do with the snapback provision.
That is to say, the provision of the final agreement that had to do with the United States unilaterally being able to reimpose sanctions if it decided in its wisdom that Iran was not living up to the agreement.
Now, you know, I talk about this in my long, long article in the Nation magazine, about the fact that the Iranians were quite surprised by this.
But, you know, in that same UN Security Council resolution that essentially allowed the snapback to be unilaterally imposed by the United States, there was a provision that made the snapback, you know, legally binding international law, but none of the rest of the agreement.
And so, I mean, this was the opposite of what the Iranians understood would be happening in the final round of the negotiation.
So, in fact, of course, the truth is precisely the opposite of what the right wing is now circulating.
So, what you're saying is the Americans, it's not that they were getting steamrollered or buffaloed or whatever by the Iranians into letting them get away with having this deal that is not binding somehow.
It's that the Americans refused to be bound by any part of it.
And the one exception to that was they wanted to make sure that everybody understood very well that they had the right to impose sanctions unilaterally.
Nobody's going to prevent them from making sure that that is a matter of international law.
But for the rest of it, they didn't want the Iranians to be able to have the ability to say that we were violating our end when our government violates their end of the deal.
Is that basically it?
That is basically it.
And of course, what this means is that this was, in a legal sense, a massively unbalanced, unfair an agreement.
And the extremists...
And they signed it anyway.
Yeah, boy, that is kind of the opposite spin.
Hang on.
I'm sorry.
Drums are hitting here.
We'll be right back, y'all.
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Hey, Gareth, it looks here like the IAEA report is out now on Twitter.
Yes, I'm looking at it right now.
Cool.
I'm on page six and nothing really substantive has been said yet.
Well, OK, I just got the first point.
But anyway, I'm sorry I'm taking up your breaking IAEA report time here.
But wait.
So, OK, now for.
Yeah, people tuning in.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter.
We're debunking lies about Iran's nuclear program, as ever.
And so this time it's Townhall.com and they're saying, oh, boo hoo, the Iran deal is not law, which means all the Iranians can do whatever they want.
And Gareth is explaining, yes, it is a very one sided deal with all the benefit going to the Americans.
It's ten to one on this thing, basically.
I'm not saying all the benefit goes to the Americans.
I'm saying that legally it's an unbalanced, totally unbalanced agreement.
But of course, the fundamental underlying reality, Scott, is that, you know, the Iranians have a say in this.
They have the ability, if the United States refuses to abide by its side of the agreement and Iran has done its job under the agreement to say, OK, we go back to the status quo ante.
And that, of course, is the underlying dynamic that, you know, keeps this agreement alive insofar as it's not destroyed by plots from the right wing in this country.
Well, now, so I know you just got it and everything, but the headline here says that they're saying, oh, forget 2003.
I know, you know, of course, the CIA and the rest of the American intelligence has said they halted all nuclear weapons work in 2003.
Your book says, oh, come on, what nuclear weapons work at all?
All that's even trumped up.
And here the IAEA apparently is claiming that weapons work not only existed, but continued even after 2003.
And apparently they have a big problem with Iran's.
I'm only reading the headline here, they have a big problem with Iran's explanation of what all was going on at the Parchin military site.
What do you think of that?
What you're reading, what you're reading is George John of the AP.
And oh, no, no, it's not.
It's Lawrence Norman at The Wall Street Journal.
But still.
OK.
All right.
So I haven't seen that one yet.
I just saw the AP story.
But any case, I have not gotten that far.
I can't I can't address.
Well, we'll have you on again tomorrow.
That's all.
Yeah.
OK.
So so back to the town hall thing then.
But they say, but it's not signed.
And, you know, the parliament over there passed it, but it wasn't signed by the president.
So in other words, they're they're convinced here that, you know, Kerry got took after all the time, John Kerry.
And he got took by them wily Iranians.
And he agreed to a thing that's full of all kinds of loopholes.
It says here they'll even be able to refuse inspection at all of their military sites.
Yeah, well, I mean, this, of course, is recapitulating every single lie that the the pro-Israeli right has put forward over the last year or so or more.
And, you know, all of those have been addressed already.
And I know your listeners will remember at least a great deal of this, you know, including the whole idea that you've just you've just referred to.
But, I mean, believe me that this is this is another flight of fancy.
It has absolutely nothing to do with reality.
It's just the most extreme example of the kind of total la la land that these people live in.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so as far as the inspections, uh, what about I mean, see, they never discuss this part of it, you know, the good part, which is all their nuclear facilities are inspected as hell and including even the mines and the factories where they make the centrifuges, where they don't even have any nuclear material.
And so all that is expanded.
They're saying, ah, but it does leave some stones unturned.
And is that right?
And does that matter that they can't just go to any old military base whenever they feel like it?
The IAEA cannot go to any old military base whenever they feel like it.
Correct.
The fact is that Iran and the IAEA reached an agreement on exactly how the IAEA was going to carry out inspections and where.
And Parchin was clearly the main, if not the only case that the IAEA had to make that, you know, they needed to inspect a military site at the place, you know, within a military facility of Iran.
And that, of course, as we all know, you know, involved the taking of samples by Iranian personnel under the direct not supervision, but, you know, being observed in real time by the IAEA.
And so there's really no issue there.
And, you know, the background of that whole issue is that Supreme Leader Khamenei made a statement back in April of this year saying that we are not, you know, it's not going to be allowed that the IAEA can go wherever it wants from a military base.
Now, the reason for that was that there had been some very loose talk by American officials indicating or suggesting, I should say, that they could go wherever they wanted, the IAEA could go where they wanted.
And, you know, later on, the outrageous statement was made.
At this moment, I can't remember whether it was a person who was identified, but someone on the U.S. government said, this will make our intelligence on targeting better, because we'll have better intelligence on Iranian military sites.
And that, of course, is exactly what the Iranian military was freaked out about.
And they passed that on to the Supreme Leader, and he was registering that.
Yeah.
All right.
And now, let me see if I can think of any other focus points about the Iran deal.
I guess, you know, most of what I hear, unfortunately, is not very substantive, Gareth.
It's all just, you know what, we just get nothing out of this deal.
They get everything and we get nothing.
This kind of thing where, you know, it's a slogan that people hear and they hear reaffirmed.
And sounds probably right.
Again, we are talking about Barack Obama and John Kerry, not the most macho guys in North America.
Am I right?
So probably they got bulldozed here.
Seems like and sounds right.
And but then again, I mean, they did get the deal through Congress and it will be implemented.
And so I just I don't know how valuable these talking points and lies are going to continue to be.
I guess it depends.
Both sides got what they felt was the minimum requirement for their interests.
And I think that's the that's the central basis of this agreement.
And that's that's the bottom line.
And everything else that the right wing has to say about it is is clearly just politically motivated and shouldn't be taken seriously.
But I understand that it's necessary to respond to everything.
Yeah, it is.
Well, and you've done a great job of doing that.
Again, wrote the book on it and 10,000 articles, too.
And I'll let you go now to get right into that IAEA report.
I'm a half hour behind you.
That's the next thing.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, thanks very much again for your time.
I appreciate it.
All right.
Talk to you soon.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that's Gareth Porter.
He is usually at Middle East.
I dot net nowadays.
And IAEA report is just out.
I have the link yet.
All I have is Wall Street Journal and AP stories here.
I need the link to the actual thing, please.
Somebody.
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