01/04/16 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I got our best guy, Gareth Porter.
Gareth, welcome back.
How are you, man?
Hi, Scott.
Happy New Year to you.
I'm fine.
Happy New Year to you.
Very great to have you on the show.
Everybody, you know Gareth.
The reason why is because I interview him every time he writes a thing because it's just great, man.
It's the subject matter and he's always right and they're always lying and he always sees right through the lies and tells the truth instead and everything is just great, man.
And you can find what he writes at Middle East Eye and at Truthout and he wrote the book, the book, never mind the rest of them.
This is the book on the Iranian nuclear program.
It's called Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare.
And it's the book on the Iranian nuclear program.
Trust me.
Okay, so we got two here at issue and I think I want to take the Truthout one second because it can sort of be chapter three of the two major points that you're getting to here in the newest piece at Middle East Eye.
U.S. military leadership resisted Obama's bid for regime change in Syria and in Libya.
Very complicated story.
Please go ahead and take us through it here, Gareth.
Right.
Let me just introduce this story by suggesting that the headline resisted may be a bit too strong.
I actually tried to use the language in the story that the military leadership in the United States, that is the Joint Chiefs of Staff specifically, actually tried to soften or to mitigate is the term that I actually used, the impact of the Obama administration's regime change policies in both Libya and Syria.
They obviously were not in a position to directly change or to prevent the Obama administration from pursuing the regime change policies that it did in Libya and Syria.
But what the military leadership did was to use means that it had at its disposal that were really beyond the control of the White House and the State Department who were really, you know, the State Department was leading the charge.
That is, of course, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was leading the charge initially in both Libya and Syria.
And then eventually, of course, it was John Kerry who took over the State Department and continued that policy in Syria.
But what the JCS and the Pentagon were doing here was using their ability to communicate with their partners in both the military and civilian positions in both Syria and Libya, either directly or indirectly.
That's a very indirect way of saying that they were sharing information or contacting people in those countries or friendly countries to the United States who had direct connections with, in this case, Syria.
So they were using those means to, in a way, undermine the policies in a partial way, clearly.
They could not overturn the policy.
They could only try to soften it or to mitigate it.
In the case of Libya, what the JCS did, and this is a story that came out, you know, in The Washington Times.
And I'm very glad that you're writing about this.
I don't think you and I have had a chance to discuss this, but this is and people you can find this on my blog, Scott Horton dot org slash stress.
And I have the links there.
It's just a few entries down.
I have the links there to all four or five parts of this great series.
They should have won a Pulitzer for this thing.
It's Kelly Riddell and Jeffrey Scott's Shapiro at The Washington Times.
And they've not these two, but that paper has published a lot of nonsense about Benghazi, this and that.
But this this series itself is just absolutely the most crucial information.
You find the links all again on my blog stress.
So I'm sorry.
Go ahead and sum up what we found out there, Gareth.
Right.
So what the what the JCS were doing in this case was, first of all, and not just the JCS, but the military generally, they have their own intelligence agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA.
And the DIA was basically putting out very strong indications at that point that that there was that there was no support, no substantial basis for the State Department's argument that there was it was necessary to use force against the Gaddafi regime in Libya, because if they didn't do that, there would be a terrible massacre approaching genocidal proportions, that innocent civilians would be killed in such huge numbers that it would be something like the genocide in Rwanda.
And of course, it was Samantha Power and others who were embracing this humanitarian argument for intervention, the responsibility to protect argument that was being put forward by Hillary Clinton and the State Department.
So first of all, the DIA was really countering that very sharply, saying we find no evidence to support this argument.
Essentially, they said, not essentially, specifically, explicitly, the DIA assessed that this was essentially a mere matter of speculation by the people who are arguing that within the administration.
So that was the first thing they did.
The second thing that the JCS themselves did was to authorize one of their intelligence assets to make contact directly with the Gaddafi regime.
And the primary contact was Gaddafi's son, Saif Gaddafi.
And in the process of those contacts, the representative of the JCS, indirect, nevertheless important representative of the JCS, was suggesting that the U.S. military did not approve of this policy, that it was beyond their control.
They were unable to prevent Obama from doing this.
And they were suggesting that the Gaddafi administration should do its best to make a deal, forget about the United States, they should make a deal with the French, the French were their best possibility for trying to mitigate the overall regime change strategy of the U.S. and NATO.
And in the process of doing this, the most important thing they did was to cooperate with the Gaddafi regime in putting forward a proposal, and this was after the NATO bombing had begun in 2011, early, I guess it was March 2011, promoting a proposal for a ceasefire in which the Gaddafi regime was prepared to meet the essential demand that Gaddafi step down.
And the only conditions on that proposal, or that offer to step down, essentially were three conditions.
One, that Gaddafi be given safe passage, that Gaddafi family have the sanctions that were being levied against it lifted, and that the Libyan army would not be deprived of its ability to resist the jihadists who were a threat to take over in Libya.
So essentially, if in fact, merely getting rid of Gaddafi and having a transition were the fundamental aim of the U.S. policy, then the U.S. administration, the Obama administration, State Department should have embraced this.
And that's the other huge part of it, too, that what you just mentioned, that they knew and they weren't under any illusion that Gaddafi was right when he said, hey, this fight is being led by Al-Qaeda and Iraq veterans against me.
Well, I mean, you know, I'm sure there are people in the administration who understood that.
But of course, I mean, that's in The Washington Times series as well.
That was what the D.A. was telling the Pentagon and was telling the White House.
Absolutely.
But of course, those people who were in thrall to the responsibility to protect who had this liberal interventionist bent and who were determined to carry it out would not hear anything of the sort.
So, I mean, I can't I don't think we can expect that they would absorb or accept the facts as as laid out by the D.A.
So so the point I want to make is that the the Obama administration, again, led by the State Department, rejected any negotiation with Libya, despite the fact that it would have, in fact, been a way out of the of the violence and could have prevented the chaos and the rise of the jihadist forces in Libya that followed.
And by the way, everyone, if you check out my Twitter feed, I just put out the link to that blog entry where I link to all the various and it's the printer version, too.
I know The Washington Times website is a mess, but I link to the printer versions of all of those really great stories.
They're really great stories by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro and Kelly Riddell there that you can find.
But anyway, so so once Gaddafi's gone, then they got all these guns.
Then what, Gareth?
Well, of course, you know, we all pretty much know the story that followed that, that that despite the the opportunity to to resolve this peacefully, the State Department and the others in the administration pushing regime change wanted to arm the opposition and were determined to go ahead with this with this war to to liberate Libya.
And as a result, of course, Gaddafi was captured ultimately.
And apparently I can't I have not found absolute proof of this, but but there are indications that he was tortured to death after immediately after his capture.
And of course, we know Hillary Clinton, when when she was told of Gaddafi's having been killed, joked, we came we saw he died and then giggled like a schoolgirl.
We came, we saw he died.
Yeah, you anticipated that one, I know.
Yeah, I got I got ready, loaded and ready to fire at a moment's notice.
I hope that some Republican run, you know, puts that in their campaign ads.
But anyway, well, this this issue definitely must be raised not only by Republicans, but by Democrats in the coming months.
So listen, you know, you explain everything in such detail.
I just want to kind of make sure that everybody's on the same page.
We understand what's going on here.
Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power and Susan Rice and and Sidney Blumenthal.
And what's her name?
Slaughter.
What's her name?
What's her first name?
Ann Marie Slaughter.
Ann Marie Slaughter.
All these people, they decided they're going to have this regime change come hell or high water.
The the actual military tried to stop them and worked with Dennis Kucinich to try to negotiate some kind of peaceful resolution.
And they got one and they had one.
And Hillary Clinton absolutely refused to accept the peace deal reached by the military.
She was the leader of the diplomats over at the State Department.
And it's and and I read this a few different places, too, that they actually had a lineup in the Oval Office with the chiefs and Robert Gates, the Republican secretary of defense on one side and all the women Democrats on the other side.
And it was all the military men were antiwar.
And Obama sided with them, not that the military guys all resigned or or refused or anything like that.
They went to war.
All right.
Robert Gates ordered it.
All right.
But just to add to that picture, it's interesting that Joe Biden was also against the Libya regime change war, as well as John Brennan.
So, you know, this was a pretty strong lineup against the Hillary Clinton's crowd.
And, you know, the it begs the question of what what Obama's calculation, his calculus was politically at that point.
And I think that's a story that needs to be further really mined for for a future examination.
OK, so now we have this situation.
I interviewed Seymour Hersh last week and I doubt you probably heard it.
But, you know, it's funny.
I actually went back and listened to it, which I hardly ever do with these things, but went back and listened to it.
And the giant hole in his theory is that really much of what he's saying.
I mean, obviously what the military was doing about it is new.
But the part about, yeah, you know, looks like the the jihadists really dominate and the the moderates are kind of marginal.
And this is the kind of thing we've been talking about on this show since 2011, not even 12.
Right.
I mean, this is the case the whole time that, you know, unlike the Iraq war, where al-Qaeda in Iraq was a small part of the Sunni insurgency in the Syria war, al-Qaeda in Iraq is the Sunni insurgency.
It's been like that.
Even David Sanger.
Here's my confirmation bias, but I'm right.
David, even David Sanger at The New York Times said in 2012, all the guns that the CIA give to the mythical moderates end up in the hands of the head shop and suicide bombers.
It's just a fact.
It's been how it is.
And everybody knows this.
Everybody who cares about it has been crying about it for going on five years now.
God damn it.
And then but no, Obama just he keeps trying to back the moderates, but somehow the jihadists keep getting the guns.
And sooner or later, we're going to figure this out and maybe get it right or something.
OK, but I just I just want to point out one crucial point here that that needs to be taken.
It needs to be understood.
And that is that these these arms to the jihadists and extremists in Libya were coming from Qatar in particular, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey, they were all three picking out their own favorites and competing with one another to pick a winner who they could pat themselves on the back about once the once the Libyan government was overthrown and they had a new government that they could claim was was their product.
And the Americans were essentially, you know, passive, but, you know, obviously not resisting this.
But they were not they were not happy with as they found out.
I mean, when I say they, I mean certain people outside the people who are really pushing the regime change policy realized that they were really being had by their so-called allies.
And this is part of this bigger problem, this bigger picture that I think has to be the primary the primary focus for analysis in these in these months.
And that is the way in which the U.S. has given its Middle East allies free reign to operate, despite the knowledge that they were undermining the security of the region, the stability of the region, essentially spreading chaos and threatening the the fundamental interests of the American people.
And I think that's that's the issue that we have to focus on.
All right, well, so what was really new to you?
It was a pretty groundbreaking, the Hearst piece about the military doing this kind of insubordination here.
Well, I mean, that that part having to do with Libya, that was not new.
And what what is new in the Hearst piece, of course, is about Syria.
And yes, that is that is new that that the military actually, you know, had this program to make contact with Germany, Russia and to my mind, strangely, Israel.
We can talk about that more, but that was the that was the clinker in this that I didn't quite understand.
But to to use those three governments to share information that they had reason to believe would end up going to the Syrian government and the Syrian military, that is intelligence on the jihadists in Syria.
And this was specifically a way of trying to strengthen the ability of the Syrian army to resist the very powerful pressures that were being brought to bear against them beginning in 2012 by al-Nusra Front and other jihadists, as well as then ultimately Islamic State.
Yeah, you know, we should mention that Patrick Coburn wrote in the summer of 2014 that the military was passing intelligence to Assad through the Germans.
But I don't believe in fact, I went back and checked.
And in that story, he doesn't say, oh, and this has been going on for a few years now, I believe, as far as he knew, it was new after the fall of Mosul and the declaration of the caliphate.
Right, right, right.
He did break that back then.
But that's a good point.
And this so so, you know, what has never been published before is just how early this this program began in 2013.
And now so and this gets a little bit into your your truth out story here.
Well, it's kind of off the main point of this story.
But, you know, anyway, on Yemen, I interviewed Mark Perry, the D.C. reporter who I guess nowadays writes mostly for Al Jazeera, America dot Al Jazeera.
Anyway, I interviewed him about the war in Yemen.
And he was saying that, you know, as you could expect, that the generals were pissed off again, not like they're all quitting and, you know, going on the Sunday talk shows about it or anything like that.
But they're mad that they're fighting for Al-Qaeda right now.
They've been fighting against Al-Qaeda only to Al-Qaeda's benefit this whole time in Yemen.
But but they've been bombing them trying to kill these guys at least.
And now Obama has America working with the Saudis flying as their air force against the Houthis for the most part.
And he even had a quote in there of one of these generals.
I believe it's a general said to Mark Perry, you know, John McCain.
Cries that we are flying as Iran's air force in Iraq.
Well, fine.
But we're flying as Al-Qaeda's air force in Yemen.
And they're really upset about that.
But are they doing anything about it other than, you know, typing in GPS coordinates for these Saudi pilots and holding their hands to their targets of innocent civilians or what?
Yeah, that's that's a great quote.
And it does, in fact, express precisely the situation that exists here, because I mean, and this is not what I talked about in my piece, as you know.
But we get to that in a sec.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The issue here of the United States government, you know, essentially not just providing the original bombs, smart bombs that were used by the Saudis beginning in their beginning in March of 2015 to bomb Yemen.
But when the Saudis ran out and after the Saudis were known to have committed war crimes targeting cities and saying that they were doing so because the population was known to be supporting the Houthis, the United States failed to do anything to prevent the Saudis from continuing that war, but instead made the decision to sell the Saudis more of the same bombs that were being used that had been used in 2015.
So, I mean, this is a remarkable record of complicity in Saudi war crimes.
And the Obama administration, you know, keeps saying, well, you know, we think that the Saudis should should be using both military and political means.
That's as far as they will go publicly in saying that they're not happy with what the Saudis are doing.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm sorry, because I should have better sourcing on this by now.
And maybe I could go back and refer to that Mark Perry piece as well.
But I guess the two best are still the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times about how it's Americans that are running the whole damn war basically for the Saudis.
I mean, we got Saudi pilots flying American bought planes, but it's Americans who arm them, who clean them, who maintain them, who basically launch them, who give them the midair refueling that they need to get to their targets and back and all of this.
And I don't see it seems like it's as much an American war as a Saudi one, because it doesn't seem like it even could happen if it wasn't being coordinated and run by the Americans.
Well, I don't know if it's being coordinated.
That would be going too far.
I think that somehow or other, the United States is doing something which has never been covered, to my knowledge, in any detail exactly what it is the United States is providing in terms of intelligence.
And, of course, the United States isn't eager to talk about that now because of the targeting of civilians and the terrible toll that has been reported widely.
Well, I think the closest is the L.A. Times and the L.A. Times did talk about that.
It's our guys who are doing the targeting, American spies and military men.
They they are not doing the targeting.
I mean, they are picking the targets, helping to pick up, not picking targets.
They're providing intelligence in some fashion.
But I'm not.
I thought it was more specific than that.
I have not seen anything actually indicating that they're involved in targeting.
In fact, they're explicitly denying that.
And obviously they need to do that because otherwise the United States is really in much worse shape in terms of complicity even than would otherwise be the case.
But but it's certainly it's serious enough at this point that this should be a major political issue.
And it's simply not being discussed at all, as you as you know, only too well.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, if it's OK, if I keep you just a little bit extra, can you talk about this very important article about Iranian support for the Houthis?
I mean, boy, talk about a narrative.
You could almost lies in a war with Saddam Hussein about, you know, over the certainty of this narrative in American society right now.
Well, I mean, this this story began when I learned that the the so-called expert panel named by the United Nations Security Council Committee on sanctions against Iran had issued a report last June.
And I first heard about it because there was a a Reuters story that involved a leaked version of the of this panel, this expert panel report in May or no, I think was late April of 2015, which described the report and, you know, in lurid terms, talked about how it found that that Iran had been arming the Houthis through their shipments, through the Gulf of Aden and, you know, that they had been intercepted.
And the panel had found the evidence that the the Iranians had done this beginning as early as 2009.
And then, you know, so I finally found the the actual expert report.
And I can tell you that it is one of the worst, most egregious cases of misleading, tendentious argumentation that I've ever seen in any kind of official document.
I mean, it's just astonishing that this group, which, by the way, is essentially representatives of the the United States and its Western allies, including and I include Japan there, as well as Russia and China.
And of course, that meant that the U.S. had a majority and and clearly exercised that majority to insist on a report that would support the U.S. policy.
So so this report, which indicts Iran for arming the Houthis, was was a political document that was obviously timed to serve the purpose of justifying the Saudi war in Yemen.
And so what I did in my piece was to go back and look at the actual facts and both the 2009 episode, which involved the alleged interception of a of an Iranian ship that had weapons on it.
It turned out that there were no weapons on it at all.
And this was documented in the U.S. in the Wikipedia, sorry, the WikiLeaks documents that were released in 2011.
So I was able to cite those.
Now, the 2013 was the episode there was more complicated.
It turns out that, yes, there were weapons, but the evidence strongly, strongly points to the fact that this was not from Iran and it was not to the Houthis.
It was from Yemeni businessmen who were intermediaries and it was going to it was going to Somalia.
So you've got to stop and love this stuff.
Sometimes it was the boat wasn't even coming from Iran to Yemen.
It was leaving from Yemen headed west.
That's right.
And just by the way, and I'll just just complete this thought, I didn't cover the most recent episode of an allegation, which the Saudis made in September, which was that they had intercepted another ship that was an Iranian ship that had weapons on it and it was intended for the Houthis.
Well, the U.S.
Navy itself has said, yeah, they they knew all about this ship because they had inspected it.
And it turns out that that was headed to Somalia as well.
Man.
All right.
And so but now let me make sure that I read you right here in this piece and hear you right here today.
What you're telling me is that the argument that even, well, you know, the Iranians have armed them some, even if what the war party says is overstated.
Yeah, there's a little to that.
No, there's not a little to that.
There's nothing to that.
This is the basis.
If you when you dig down to the bottom of the barrel of the talking points, you know, so called kernel of truth, it ain't true.
Scott, these are the two cases, 2009 and 2013, of the two cases on which there is the most information, not much, but the most information on any of the supposed episodes of Iranian alleged Iranian arming of the Houthis.
And in both of those cases, it's very clear that they were concocted by the government of Yemen for political purposes and that this is a pack of lies that the U.S. government knows very well is nothing but lies.
Man.
All right.
Now, on the previous point here from the L.A. Times, I may have overstated what they say here, but just a little bit, it says the U.S. has been providing overhead surveillance information, intelligence and logistical support, as well as setting up a command center inside Saudi Arabia for U.S. military personnel to work with the Royal Saudi Air Force for planning and launching the attacks, it says.
And then it says, too, it quotes this is a little bit less solid, but it's a spokesman for Kerry saying that, no, Kerry, it's oh, no, no.
Well, oh, it's Kerry spokesman, quoting Kerry, saying the U.S. would help with, quote, intelligence sharing, targeting assistance and advisory and logistical support for strikes against Houthi targets.
So that's I don't know exactly the degree to which that's really happening on the ground.
But those are their words.
What is the date on that one, Scott?
This is Los Angeles Times with U.S. help.
Saudi Arabia steps up airstrikes in Yemen, March 26th from last year.
So it's it's the very first days.
This is the very first days of the offensive when the United States was interested in publicly stating just how strongly supportive they were of the of the Saudis.
And, you know, I think that the point here is that the United States was just totally out of its how should I put this?
They were out of of their depth in getting involved in this from the beginning.
They just like everything else that the Obama administration has done, they didn't think through what they were doing at all.
They were they were primarily thinking of this politically.
They wanted to demonstrate that they were pro-Saudi and anti-Iranian.
And so, you know, the whole public policy here is leaning so heavily in that direction.
But I think in that case, Kerry is overstating the degree to which the United States was actually doing targeting.
I mean, I think that they were they were thinking of it as that we're going to support them in their targeting.
We're going to give them information that will help them target.
So I'm not willing to go as far as to say that I just don't think that the United States is doing the targeting for for the Saudis.
I think they're picking their own targets.
But but certainly with with some input of, yeah, aerial photographs from the United States, definitely.
Well, and, you know, I had a military guy say to me, I mean, all we're talking about here is typing in GPS coordinates.
You know, it's not like there's that much to it.
And it's bad.
You know, it's bad intelligence because there's nothing there except photographs.
You can't judge anything about a target from a photograph.
It's ridiculous.
It's the usual crap.
You know, it's it's a lack of serious effort to know what you're targeting, what you're what you're offering as information for to the to the Saudis.
And the United States should, in fact, take, you know, take the blame fully for this.
Well, and, you know, we might as well mention because it's the most important thing.
And I had the guy from Oxfam on the show last week to talk about it.
There are millions of innocent civilians whose lives are at risk right now.
Who are on the very brink of starvation.
It's the worst humanitarian crisis on the face of the planet as we speak.
And once again, you know, this is the crisis that the administration doesn't want to talk about in the news media, doesn't want to talk about.
They all want to they all want to talk about the two hundred and fifty thousand civilians who have been killed in Syria.
Right.
Yeah, because they can use that as an excuse to kill more.
But what's their angle here?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But the angle here, of course, is that the administration, you know, is embarrassed and they don't want this to be talked about.
That's the end.
All right, Gareth.
Well, you're the best.
Thanks very much for all your great journalism and your time here.
Thanks again, Scott.
Happy New Year.
All right, so that's the great Gareth Porter.
See why I've been interviewing him from nine years every week for nine years.
The great Gareth Porter.
He writes for antiwar dot com, for truth out and for Middle East.
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