12/17/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show here.
Ah, what a mess.
Uh, I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to get a hold of Garrett there for a second.
I was just going to talk about how much, screw you, I like the Ewoks.
I don't care.
For a whole segment.
I watched the de-specialized version of Return of the Jedi last night.
It was great!
And, you know, I hadn't seen Return of the Jedi in so long that it was really great, man.
It was almost sort of kind of watching it new again in a way, kind of a little bit.
It was good.
You can get it on the Pirate Bay.
The de-specialized version.
Anyway.
Um, yes, our first guest up today is, of course, the great Gareth Porter.
And I say of course because he's got a write-up, a full write-up now, not just on Parchin, but on the entire IAEA final report on Iran's possible military dimensions.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks again for having me on.
I'm fine.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Everybody, you know Gareth.
He wrote the book on the Iranian nuclear scare, as it's called in the subtitle.
It's, um, Manufactured Crisis.
Of course, Manufactured Crisis writes for Middle East Eye and for Truthout.
And this one is at Loblog.
And Mozilla updated without asking me.
And so now the tab is lost because it destroyed my tab kit.
Here it goes.
Loblog.com.
The IAEA's final assessment.
And so we talked already about, you know, kind of the ridiculous way they tried to defend their previous accusations while climbing down from them at the same time in regards to the pretended explosion chamber at Parchin.
But now you're kind of taking a more holistic approach to the entire PMD report here.
So I guess what's first on the list that you'd have people know, Gareth?
Well, in this piece, Scott, what I tried to do was two different things at the same time or together in the same piece.
First of all, trying to give some historical context to this final assessment by the IAEA.
Telling the story very briefly, again, of how the IAEA really became what I call the prosecutor for the United States and the coalition the U.S. has been leading.
The prosecutor against Iran.
And in the sense that, of course, what a prosecutor does is try to get a guilty verdict.
Or if you can't get a guilty verdict, you know, you use the news media.
You put out stories that make it look like the defendant is guilty.
And that means that you simply use all the tricks available to you to skew opinion in the direction of a suspicion that the target of your case is guilty.
And that's exactly what the IAEA has done since 2008 in particular.
I mean, there were some slight indications of that even before that, back in 2003, 2004, up to 2000 through 2007.
But really, you know, the story of the IAEA as prosecutor begins in earnest in 2008.
And I've written about that before.
And I'm sure we've talked about it on your show as well.
But, you know, what what they've done is to essentially keep Iran in the dock of world opinion under suspicion and under accusation of having dabbled in nuclear weapons development, research and development.
While the United States was carrying out a policy of maximizing pressure, and this is both under George H.
George W. Bush and Obama administrations, maximizing the pressure on Iran for a variety of reasons.
And, you know, to go to the Obama administration, part of this clearly the purpose was to try to force Iran to essentially concede its entire program of uranium enrichment to to give it up, which was what the Obama administration's aim was in the first four years.
The first the first administration.
And so so the IAEA really has fulfilled that mission by in all of its reports, continuing to repeat the same sort of mantra.
And in the final assessment, and here's the second part of my story, my article, what I do is break down the ways in which the IAEA, the tactics that the IAEA has used to keep the the idea that Iran is suspect of having carried out research and development of nuclear weapons without really explicitly making the charge in a direct sense.
And and I think this is very important to understand that distinction.
And they do it over and over again.
And I point out that, you know, one of the key tactics is to use the language of relevance or relevant to instead of saying that that Iran had, you know, technology or or an organization or research that that was, in fact, about nuclear weapons.
What they say, they use the language that that in in one way or another says that Iran was doing something that was relevant to the the nuclear, relevant to to developing nuclear weapons.
And that is a very interesting and obvious clue as to the modus operandi of the IAEA, just how deceptive and fundamentally dishonest their entire approach has been.
Yeah.
In other words, they're they're caught out just by their Fox News type speech where just series of implications that, well, look, they have this that could be used for this and they have this that could be used for that.
But so am I reading you right here, then, that you're saying that even in the final report, not only do they not show an Iranian nuclear program, but they don't even show an Iranian, I mean, nuclear weapons program.
Pardon me, but they don't even show an Iranian nuclear weapons research program.
Never mind making a bomb, but even a program to really figure out how to whether or not they could and this kind of thing.
Is that what you're saying?
Exactly.
They they do not at any point in this final assessment say that we have identified this evidence that Iran carried out this this research or development experiment or set a set of experiments that were for nuclear weapons.
Instead, they resort to this very deceptive language that that essentially is inconclusive, but is is written in such a way as to leave the impression that, yes, that it looks like Iran is Iran's behavior or institutions were highly suspect.
I'm sorry, before the break here, Gareth, I wanted to work in a correction here.
That's entirely my own error.
I got an email from Gordon Prather, who listened to our interview and said, no, man, I never said that they could test an implosion system with lead.
This is tangential to our discussion about parchment or whether they could use substitute metals in in the IAEA report.
They talk about tungsten, as you've already ridiculed in your other piece.
But I had thought that Gordon Prather had told me that it was possible to use lead for those kind of experiments, which was a red herring because it wasn't in the report anyway.
And then Gordon corrected me that that was entirely not right, that I must have been confused and some other reference to lead in our discussions and conflated it, something like that.
So sorry for to everyone who heard that.
And for the red herring, there is entirely my own screw up.
But anyway, we'll be right back with the great Gareth Porter to talk more about this final IAEA report on the possible military dimensions in just a minute.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
As always, I'm interviewing the great Gareth Porter about a thing he wrote.
It could be called the Scott interviews Gareth Porter show, really.
Well, you know, they claimed a thing and so he wrote about it.
So I'm interviewing him.
It's finally the final report of the International Atomic Energy Agency on the accusations known as the possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear program.
And Gareth, you're really right.
I wish I could figure out a way to argue with you a bit or something.
But I read the report and it is all a bunch of G's.
Well, they have a thing that is consistent with a possible use of this, that the other thing.
And they don't even really try much harder than that to say that, you know, this shows they really were pursuing nuclear weapons.
And so my question for you really is, you know, in your book where you go through and explain all the dual use technology in the possible military dimensions from the, you know, so-called smoking laptop or laptop of death or whatever, the fake laptop.
And then plus the other accusations.
Are these all the same ones that you've already shown that no dummy, the ring magnets are sitting on a counter at the university just like they said they were and et cetera like that?
No, no, they they have over the last few years.
I mean, since 2008, essentially, there's this other series of of intelligence documents and reports, all of which came from the Israelis.
And this, of course, directly reported by former director general of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, in his memoirs, 2011, that that the Israelis turned over a whole collection of these documents and intelligence reports.
And the although he revealed this in his memoirs that it was from the Israelis that they turned them over directly, the IAEA has never allowed the reading public to know, you know, who it was who turned these documents over.
And, of course, this is really one of the great unreported untold scandals of the IAEA.
So let me just make sure I understand.
You're saying there's if I understand right, there's kind of three big different batches of fake accusations here.
One is the intercepted teletypes.
One is the smoking laptop of fraud.
And then the third is the report that the Israelis handed over.
Is that right?
And we're talking about the third batch now is what's really under investigation.
Scott, you're one of the very few people in the world who would be able to to absolutely nail the complexity of the evidence that we're talking about here.
Yes, it's the third the third group of documents which which were turned over by Israel from 2008 and 2008, 2009.
And some then came a little bit later.
And so that that's really what's reflected in the 2011 IAEA report, which was the one that the United States and its allies badly wanted to be have attached to an IAEA report as an annex.
And Mohammed ElBaradei refused to do it because he said, look, these these materials, these documents have never been authenticated.
We can't vouch for them.
So we can't put out a report that is based entirely on this unauthenticated set of documents.
But, of course, Amano came in on he was he was a guy who the Americans chose to support as the successor to ElBaradei precisely because he had been enthusiastically on board in 2008 when the U.S. was putting pressure on ElBaradei to embrace these documents and he didn't want to do it.
So they supported him to to become the director general.
And it was on the assumption on the understanding, I should say, that he would in fact publish this compendium of intelligence reports, essentially blessing them, giving the IAEA's blessing that they're credible when the United States wanted him to publish them, when it would do the most good politically and diplomatically for them, which was, in fact, late 2011, when the United States was working on the essentially putting together the international coalition to support the crippling sanctions against Iran that we saw put in place in 2012.
All right.
So now when this report came out, though, all the headlines said, oh, man, see, yeah, especially all the neocons.
Oh, the CIA was wrong when they said that their nuclear weapons program ceased in 2003.
It continued all the way through 2009.
What specifically are they basing that year number on?
Do you know what's in there?
Yeah, it is very explicit that what they're referring to in the report is the the famous neutron initiator document, which I've written about, we've talked about on your show years ago, 2000, 2009, was it?
I believe I believe it was 2009, 2010.
And of course, that document was was a fake.
And even U.S. intelligence and European intelligence agencies recognized that it wasn't it wasn't authentic and wouldn't wouldn't really give it their blessing.
And in that document, it's suggested that there's a four year plan to carry out research on neutron using neutrons for various purposes.
And it's implied very strongly that one of them is for nuclear weapons.
It's not stated explicitly, but but that is clearly the implication that is that this was a four year program for relating to nuclear weapons.
And that's where they get the two thousand because this was supposedly 2006 document.
The judgment has been then rendered that there are indications, as they would put it, that the Iranians had continued activities as late as 2009.
That's what it's all about.
Right.
And then they refer surprisingly, I thought, in the piece to the graph.
And you mentioned this in your piece again at low blog dot com about this graph that they had previously leaked to George John at the AP that I had mistakenly believed that nuclear physicist Yosef Butt had successfully laughed off the face of the earth back when it came out with his article in Reuters saying that, listen, whoever forged this obviously doesn't know the first damn thing about fission.
So get the hell out of here.
Yes, you're absolutely right.
It was left off the earth.
In fact, you know, it was clear that this graph was done by somebody who didn't know anything about the technology or the numbers or the methodology to do such a graph.
It was a high school student or an undergraduate or something like that.
And, you know, the IAEA should have shamefacedly admitted it in a report.
But of course, they don't do that.
They are protected by the most powerful nation on earth.
And therefore they just continue to ignore it.
And I think I mentioned in my article that I actually questioned.
I didn't say it was me, but but Amano was appearing at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., and I asked him, what about this graph?
Is this the one that the IAEA was referring to in its in its report in 2011?
He refused to answer the question.
And of course, they ignore this entire issue in the final assessment because it's too embarrassing.
And instead, they, you know, again, use weasel wording to avoid the truth about this about this whole set of issues.
It's amazing.
All right.
So now what's left?
We've got the bridge wires, obviously, parching.
Maravon, we've discussed before that if there's anything to it, then how come the IAEA won't show up to go and inspect it?
You learn anything new about the Maravon accusations in here?
Or what else am I missing, Gareth?
No, absolutely not.
I mean, you know, they they they make the interesting observation that we have assessed that that they that the alleged experiments with high explosives that they suggested were related to nuclear weapons development took place in a site called Maravon, not a region called Maravon.
Now, what the significance of that is anybody's guess, because they don't give any further explanation.
But but they they do not respond at all.
Well, it sounds like what they're saying is, you know, sort of like there's a street named Austin Avenue in the center of Georgetown, Texas.
And they're saying, well, you know, Maravon, the nuclear site could be anywhere, not necessarily anywhere near the actual place.
Is that right?
Well, I mean, you could you could derive that from from what they said, but but there's simply there's no explanation.
So it's anybody's guess what they mean by that.
I think you're right that they're that they're I think what they're doing is covering up the fact that they were never really told where this was.
And so, you know, they couldn't even have visited it had they wanted to.
But they they look that the bottom line here, Scott, is that it's very clear to me that the IAEA has known for quite a while now that they were had, you know, there have been enough revelations by Robert Kelly, by other former IAEA officials, Tariq Rauf, things that I've written have have, you know, been part of the mix that show that the IAEA just, you know, got it wrong.
And that that they were given information that was false.
And of course, the IAEA doesn't want to admit it.
And again, they don't have to politically because they have this protection.
So that's really what's going on in the case of Maravon, as in the case of all these other issues.
But I do want to in the very little time I'm sure we have remaining, I do want to mention the one very interesting case where the IAEA really makes a major back down.
I mentioned in another article about part that they made a back down on Parchin, but specifically on the Greens, the so-called Green Salt papers, which part of the original laptop documents.
Right.
They admit for the first time that these papers were really there's something wrong with them.
They say they were of very low quality and not up to what they what the Iranians had available to them in their declared nuclear program.
This is an astonishing admission by the IAEA.
And to me, of course, it really signifies that they're aware that these that this set of documents on the bench scale process for what they call making green salt, but essentially preparing the the the gas gas form of uranium for enrichment.
What that's they were falsified and they aren't going to say it, but that's that's the clear implication of this.
Wow, that's great that they can see that in there.
You know, I'm pretty sure I'd hate to go misquoting the guy again, but I'm pretty damn sure that this is exactly what Gordon Prather said when the so-called smoking laptop was first revealed that it made no sense for these bench level experiments in in converting the yellow cake to tetrafluoride green salt because you can't do anything with that anyway.
It's got to be hexafluoride gas.
And they already had a facility for doing that.
That is.
So why in the world would they even have this in the first place?
I'm sure that Gordon did say exactly that.
And, you know, I've written that as well in my book.
And that's what the the Iranians were explicitly arguing at the time when when the issue was brought to them when when they were shown these these documents.
They said, look, this doesn't make any sense at all.
Plus, they pointed out that the documents were seriously flawed.
And and even Heinonen, Ali Heinonen, the then the head of the safeguards department, had to admit that they were right, that that there were serious flaws in the documents.
Hey, give him credit for even bringing it up again in this thing.
He might have just forgot about that.
Well, this is one of more clownish of their errors, but still.
And who knows why they chose to do that?
I mean, that's that's sort of in the area where I'm not able to really provide any any guidance or any clarification as to what what their motive was in doing that.
Yeah, well, I better let you go.
You'll probably want to watch Obama threatening the world right now live on TV.
And I got to get Daniel Harrison on the show to talk about American Saudi murdering Yemenis all day.
So thank you very much for coming back on the show, Gareth.
You're the best, man.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, child.
That is the heroic Gareth Porter.
This time, he is back at Jim Loeb's blog, loeblog.com, the IAEA's final assessment.
It'll be the spotlight tomorrow on antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
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