Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
Listen to chaosradioaustin.org.
So I'm Scott Horton, it's Anti-War Radio.
We're going right to our first guest, my favorite.
This will be, I think, interview number 100 right here, maybe 99.
It's Dr. Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, original.antiwar.com/Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth, how are you doing, man?
Pleasure as always to be here with you.
Thanks very much, Scott.
So the IAEA, that's the International Atomic Energy Agency, has issued a new report on Iran and their nuclear program.
So, Dr. Porter, does or does not the agency continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose?
It does, it does continue to declare, to confirm.
Okay, so that's it, interview's over.
You heard him, everybody.
Every bit of that uranium is accounted for, none of it is weapons-grade, and the agency has continued to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran.
Right, of course, the agency also says, look, we can't say anything about undeclared stuff, and therefore we can't clear Iran of any possible charges that it's working on nuclear weapons.
Gareth, I have my Wikipedia page open here to basic logical fallacies.
Here we have post hoc ergo proctor hoc, that kind of thing.
Well, this one is the proven negative, right?
I can't prove that you're not making nuclear weapons either, but what I don't have is any evidence that you are, and that's really the question, isn't it?
Well, bringing logic into the work of the IAEA is obviously problematical for the IAEA, I agree with you there.
In fact, and have been for years and years, precisely doing what you're suggesting, that is forcing Iran to prove a negative with regard to the alleged studies, that is to say, of the allegations that Iran was working in the early years of the last decade on a covert nuclear weapons program.
And I think that does go to the heart of the problematique surrounding the Iranian nuclear program at this point.
It has been, in fact, all about the failure of Iran to satisfy the IAEA, meaning, effectively, to satisfy those powers that dominate the governing board of the IAEA, meaning the United States, the Europeans, and of course, Israel.
And so, this is the Rumsfeld standard.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
But then again, I guess nothing could possibly be evidence of absence unless you had, I don't know, John Bolton clones standing on every square foot of Iranian soil all at the same time.
It would take billions of John Boltons, I guess, millions, and then with all of those John Boltons standing around turning every single rock upside down.
Only then could you say that we now know for a fact that there is no nuclear weapons program in the country, that they're not diverting things that we didn't know they had to divert.
More importantly, the real test here is whether the IAEA has applied the same standard to other would-be or potential nuclear powers.
And the fact is, of course, that they have not.
They have applied an entirely different standard to Iran from the standard that they have applied to, for example, Egypt, South Korea, and on and on.
I mean, the fact is that in other cases, and I would cite South Korea, particularly because, as I wrote some months ago, a year, year and a half ago, there was a moment in the history of the IAEA in November 2004 when both Iran and South Korea were the subjects of reports by the IAEA in the same two-week period.
And on one hand, South Korea was given hardly even a slap on the wrist despite the fact that they had covertly, without admitting it to IAEA, enriched uranium to a level of about 87, 88%, which, of course, is very, very close to weapons-grade.
It is effectively weapons-grade uranium in an experiment, whereas Iran had never done anything even remotely close to that.
And yet Iran was subject to a new rule that said, we are going to harass you about every dual-use piece of technology that you ever import from now on.
You'll have to account for every piece of, well, not just in the future, but every piece of dual-use technology that we ever discover that you've gotten, meaning any technology, despite the fact that it might be used for everyday industrial purposes, that could possibly have some kind of application to a nuclear program.
So that's simply by way of saying that there is a very profound double standard that has been applied in the case of Iran and other potential nuclear powers.
Well, now, what truck do you have for this Ayatollah guy?
Because I heard on Sean Hannity that all these liberals, you know, like you, want America to be enslaved under right-wing conservative Sharia law, and that's your thing, is you're just taking the side of the bad guys here because you like them.
Well, first of all, I'm not a liberal.
Thank God for that.
Because my position on issues of U.S. foreign policy, national security policy, is much more fundamental than that, and liberals do not, generally speaking, share my views.
Okay, but still, you're somewhere on the left, and that means that you want America to be taken over by right-wing fundamentalist Muslim clerics.
I heard it on the radio, dude.
Okay, I believe that you did hear that.
And what else could possibly explain your apologia for the Ayatollah Khamenei?
Well, you know, I think the point, of course, is that it is not about the people who control Iran.
It is about the people who control the United States and its foreign policy.
The fact is that it doesn't matter whether the president of Iran is a relative liberal in terms of attitudes toward the United States and toward the West, as was the case with the president in the 1990s and the early 2000 period, or a harder-line Islamist-like Ahmadinejad.
The fact is that U.S. policy under George Bush and, in fact, even earlier, as well as Israeli policy, were just as opposed to the policy of Iran at that point as they were later on with Ahmadinejad.
And I think that the point here is that the problem that we need to address has been and will continue to be the aggressiveness of the U.S. government and Israel, in this case of Iran, which is completely at odds with the interests of the American people in terms of our security.
That's really the issue that I would pose to Sean Hannity and his ilk.
Well, as always, we run up against the same problem here, which is that nuclear technology, just by definition, you say the word nuclear and all of a sudden you're talking about something extremely complicated.
And how is the average guy supposed to decide that, okay, you know what, I guess it's time for me to learn the difference between a light-water reactor and the other kind, and what's weapons-grade uranium, and what the hell is a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency under the Non-Proliferation Treaty anyway?
And so it's left up to the experts.
They get to decide.
They get to tell us what's important and what's not.
And all the experts, I guess except you, seem to agree that, danger, look out, they're making nuke bombs, and then you know what?
Next they'll use them on us.
Well, you have, I think, identified the more realistic problem politically in the United States, which is not so much that the average person, the average man on the street, does not know the difference or know the basic facts about the Iranian nuclear program, but rather that the political elite, including the media elite, are fundamentally ignorant about some of the most basic facts surrounding this issue.
And this is the real problem that we have to deal with in order to have any traction.
It's really a matter of getting certain messages through the New York Times and the Washington Post and the major network filters.
And that is obviously a formidable problem, as we have talked about many times on your program.
Sure.
Well, as long as we're talking about David Singer at the New York Times, he's the guy assigned to this beat.
And I wonder whether you think that he's...
Is there a line somewhere between a journalist and a war propagandist, perhaps a government agent who happens to work for a newspaper?
Is David Singer a journalist, Gareth Porter, or is he just a man with a war agenda who's trying to get you and I, the listeners to this show, to believe lies so that we'll support another war of genocide in the Middle East?
I think the answer is, in terms of current U.S. journalistic standards, he is both.
U.S. journalists frequently have political agendas, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged.
And of course, for the most part, do not acknowledge those agendas.
But the fact is that for the U.S. political elite and media elite, what David Singer has been doing is perfectly acceptable, and therefore he is in full compliance with current standards in terms of his coverage of the Iranian nuclear program, despite the fact, as I have, I think, stated on more than one occasion, he has taken advantage of every opportunity since November of 2007 to try to make the case that the national intelligence estimate of that month, November 2007, must be wrong, has to be wrong, and should be replaced by a new estimate.
He has been absolutely fixated on this issue.
And I think probably on 20 different occasions, I'm estimating, because I haven't actually done the firm count, he has written stories which have had the same theme over and over again to suggest that this estimate was wrong, that basically all the people who really are in the know are aware of this, and it's only because of the unwillingness of the people who are responsible for the estimate that they were wrong, that we still have a problem in that regard.
Yeah, well, and all of it, just like all of his reporting, and really all war propaganda, and all just regular news, it's all based on the unproven premise, right?
It's all based on, oh, well, we all know this, that, or the other thing, and then they just elaborate from there without ever having to prove it.
So, you know, I mean, I guess I need to try again to get David Sanger on this show and see what is it that he would point at that is a nuclear weapons program that the CIA won't acknowledge exists.
What is he talking about?
They're the only nuclear program that anybody can prove exists, and Iran is safeguarded by the IAEA.
That, of course, would be a major coup to get David Sanger on your program, but I have to tell you that I did meet David Sanger at one point at a meeting at the Carnegie Endowment, as I recall, or maybe it was Brookings, and basically engaged in a little bit of dialogue with him, and sent him one or two of the articles that I had done on the Iranian alleged studies, suggesting that there were serious problems with the evidence that was being used.
And he said, he told me that he would read the stuff that I sent him and get back to me.
I never heard from him again.
And so, I mean, you know, I think the problem is that people who are in that sort of position don't feel that they have any real obligation to respond to alternative information, information that challenges their viewpoint, because, after all, they're the ones who are in power.
They're the ones who really have the influence over the public, and they don't intend to change that.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so let's make sure that the people in the audience get perfectly educated on this subject.
I'm reading from point number 37 of the brand-new IAEA report.
It's at ISIS-online.org, and it says, while the agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose, Iran has not provided the necessary cooperation to permit the agency to confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.
It's kind of sloppy language there.
If I understand it right, what this is referring to is, it's strange to me the way that they do this.
The verification of the non-diversion of nuclear material, that's under the safeguards agreement.
The rest of this proven negative is under a separate mandate to the IAEA from the UN Security Council, right?
That is correct.
The UN Security Council had directed the IAEA to get Iran to answer questions about the alleged studies documents, and that then became an official part of the IAEA rationale for their inquiry into these, what used to be called at one point the laptop documents.
Well, it seems like if they were trying to be fair, they would have that at least in a separate section and say, well, you know, everything under the safeguards agreement, that's all hunky-dory, but our problem is proving a negative as per your UN mandate.
Right, and of course fairness does not really enter into the IAEA's treatment of this issue.
But I'm glad you asked me to address that precise language, because people need to understand that what is being referred to here is that Iran had stopped sitting down and talking with the IAEA staff, the Secretary, about the issue of the alleged studies in September of 2008.
The reason that the Iranians, the explanation for that was quite clear and quite, it was officially communicated to the IAEA at that time.
The reason was that the Iranians complained that the IAEA was now asking Iran to provide access to workshops that were clearly in the Iranian military establishment.
That is to say, they were asking for access to all workshops that the IAEA might identify as potentially relevant.
And these were workshops clearly that the Iranians regarded as part of their national defense, and not for outsiders to come in and just poke around.
The IAEA did not have hard evidence that these workshops had something to do with nuclear weapons.
All they had was the fact that the alleged studies, meaning the laptop documents, included some footage which was supposedly coming from some of these workshops.
And so, therefore, the IAEA was saying, we want access to all the workshops.
They also wanted, effectively, they were asking the Iranians to make available to them their studies of the Shahab 3, to prove that they were not redesigning the warhead of the Shahab 3 to accommodate a nuclear weapon.
Now, that's where my own last story comes in, where I show that, in fact, we know that Iran was not working on the Shahab 3 anymore when these documents, which clearly were fake, were given to the United States and passed on to the IAEA, showing the redesign of the warhead of the Shahab 3.
In fact, they were working on an entirely different missile warhead and missile, which was improved greatly over the Shahab 3, and which would, for the first time, reach Israel.
The Shahab 3, of course, could not reach Israel.
And the idea that Iran would have been redesigning the warhead of the Shahab 3 precisely when they were working on an entirely new and improved missile and warhead that would reach Israel is really simply not conceivable.
It's not worth considering, as far as I'm concerned.
And I have not gotten an adequate explanation for this from Olli Heinen, who I interviewed at some length about it.
Olli Heinen being the guy from the IAEA?
He was the former head of the Safeguards Department of the IAEA, who basically was responsible for the line taken in all of those reports up until earlier this year.
So what I'm saying is that...
And he's the guy that wrote that annex to the IAEA report from two reports ago that ElBaradei refused to release, right?
Exactly.
It was written under his influence.
I don't know that he actually wrote it personally, but it was definitely reflecting his views.
And ElBaradei said, No, Dice, this isn't coming out under my name, not while I'm the director of this thing, because he didn't believe in it.
And he said, That's because we don't have any reason to believe that these are authentic documents.
We have not had any evidence that they're authentic.
And by implication, he was saying, I don't particularly regard these as authentic.
So here's the question.
Scott Ritter said years ago, that look, man, these guys know, maybe nobody else in American society knows, but at the State Department, they know what Gareth Porter knows, that this is all a bunch of nonsense.
They know that they're liars, and they know that there's not a nuclear weapons threat from Iran.
The point here is regime change.
Nuclear technology is simply an excuse.
Same thing they learned in the first Gulf War.
How do we get moms to support sending their kids to go fight a war against Iraq?
And they did their focus groups, and they tested everything.
And what it took to get a majority opinion for war was, this guy Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons, and he can nuke you in your jammies in the middle of the night.
And so whenever they need a regime change, wherever it is, they have to use the excuse of nuclear weapons.
But here's my thing.
How the hell are you going to get a regime change in Persia?
So what is the policy here?
It seems like Obama has septed all the same false premises of the Bush administration in order to push his insistence that Iran abandon their nuclear program, his insistence that their nuclear program represents some kind of nuclear weapons threat.
And yet, what's the end here?
I mean, nobody except Bill Kristol believes that if you bomb Iran, the people are going to rise up and install a pro-American dictator for themselves or something like that.
And probably he doesn't even believe it.
So what is the point here?
Where are they going with this after all this time?
Well, as always, I think we have to come to grips with the reality that you don't have a unified U.S. government position on this.
And, in fact, I think the major players in the U.S. government are very much opposed to any attack on Iran.
There are, however, those within the U.S. administration with some influence who are pushing for the continued use of the threat of an attack on Iran for political diplomatic purposes, to put pressure on Iran.
And specifically I would mention the people in the White House who are working on, who are specialists on nonproliferation, the weapons of mass destruction specialists on the National Security Council, specifically a guy named Gary Seymour who came in with the new administration in 2009, specifically aiming at trying to firm up the U.S. position of threatening Iran and even using the threat of an Israeli attack.
He had publicly called for exploiting the threat of an Israeli attack for diplomatic purposes before he went into the administration.
He is clearly one of the people who has been pushing for a hard line toward Iran because of his belief, and I've interviewed him, and I can tell you that he believes that Iran is dead set on getting a nuclear weapon.
He doesn't have any empirical evidence for that.
He just thinks that's the logic of the situation.
And I don't think he's alone in that.
I think that there are other people who take that position, not because they have any hard evidence or even soft evidence of it, but because they simply don't trust the Iranians and that's good enough for them.
I think that's true of weapons specialists in the CIA and the intelligence community, generally speaking.
That's the position that they have taken over the years, and I think they continue to take that position.
It's based on what?
Just, hey, I'd be making nukes if I was them.
Hell, they're surrounded by countries.
Exactly.
That is exactly the logic that they use.
They regard nuclear weapons as very important, and therefore they can't conceive of Iranian leaders who would not want to have nuclear weapons under the circumstances.
And that is the logic that causes them to say, we should threaten Iran so that we can force them to abandon their ambitions to have nuclear weapons.
I think that is the logic, that's the political dynamic that is at work within the U.S. administration.
As it has been for some time, apart from the real crazies, the people in the office of the Vice President, Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney himself, who were apparently really interested in trying to get a war with Iran.
I think that was the exception.
All right, now if I can keep you just another couple of minutes, I've got a quick question about North Korea.
Yeah, I'll do my best.
I'm not a specialist in North Korea, but I'll give you my opinion.
Well, here's how I'll set it up.
Everyone can go read a great article by Dr. Gordon Prather.
Doctors Prather and Porter, they're my favorite on these issues.
And Dr. Prather wrote a great article.
In fact, it may have been his last piece for Antiwar.com, second to last or something, before he retired.
It's called, How Bush Pushed North Korea to Nukes.
And it is chock full of footnotes, I know, because I edited the darn thing and put all the footnotes in there in hyperlink form for you.
But it's the story about how in the fall of 2002, the State Department came out and said that a North Korean diplomat had admitted to them at a cocktail party that, oh, yeah, we have a secret uranium enrichment program in violation of our safeguards agreement and our agreed framework deal that we worked out with Warren Christopher back in 1994.
And then the Bush administration used that, supposedly.
Now, Joe Cirincione on the show said he knows the guy that supposedly this was said to, although I don't know.
So then Bush said, well, that's it then.
You broke the deal, accused the North Koreans of breaking the agreed framework.
So he said, we're no longer bound by it either.
We're out of it, too.
And so then he added sanctions, and he created the proliferation security initiative that threatened to hold them hostage on the high seas and seize their boats and all that and promised to cease all the shipments of money and fuel oil and the supposed light water reactors they were going to get from us.
So basically the deal was off, plus sanctions and new threats of seizing their ships on the high seas.
And then only then, in the spring, early part of 2003, did North Korea finally throw up their hands and say, fine then, withdraw from the NPT, kick the IAEA inspectors out of their country, and then they began harvesting plutonium out of their Soviet-era nuclear reactors that had not been operational under the agreed framework.
They reactivated them, started harvesting the plutonium out of them, and they've made, people estimate, between 6 and 12 atom bombs, two of which they've tested to partial success, I suppose.
So now here's my question.
Big revelation now that an American scientist, I forget the guy's name off the top of my head, but he went back to North Korea.
You can tell them all about it in a second.
He went back to North Korea.
He's been there before.
And they said, hey, you want to see something cool?
Look.
He pointed down, and there was a giant series of 1,000 cascading centrifuges enriching uranium.
And so my question to you is, does this prove that the Bush team wasn't lying and that they really did have a secret uranium enrichment program back then?
Or is it indications that seem to show that this is recent development there, or what?
I don't know the answer to that.
But I would say this, that the situation regarding North Korea is much more complex.
I shouldn't say complex.
It is different from the situation in Iran fundamentally.
And that is because we know that, in fact, North Korea has said in the past that they are a nuclear state, a nuclear weapon state.
They have been treated as such.
And they have obviously derived security benefits from that.
No one is suggesting that the United States should attack North Korea militarily.
Why?
Because they are regarded as a nuclear state.
And that is, of course, the fundamental difference between North Korea and Iran, which everybody knows is not a nuclear state.
And that's why the idea of threatening to attack Iran is still on the table, despite the fact, by the way, that more and more of the national security elite outside the administration are saying it's time to get rid of the threat of an attack on Iran.
It doesn't do us any good.
In fact, it does the opposite.
And that's the recent report by the group associated with the U.S. Institute of Peace has come out with a statement saying we should stop threatening Iran, which is a major shift, by the way, something that people should know about.
It's a very important shift in thinking that is taking place outside the U.S. administration.
And I think it's worth noting that.
But to get back to the contrast between Iran and North Korea, clearly the North Koreans have understood that it would be to their advantage to be viewed as a nuclear power in relations with the United States.
That's the way they understood it.
And that is clearly differentiated from the case of Iran, where the Iranian government has never accepted that logic.
They don't think that it would be to their advantage to be viewed that way.
Right, because then they'll get nuked.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, not necessarily nuked, but they are much more likely to be attacked if they admit it.
No question about it.
Now, if you were on the National Security Council in Iran, I mean, okay, if you were one of these CIA guys, it would make sense to you, wouldn't it, that, I don't know, that it doesn't make sense for them to not be a nuclear weapons state.
If they want to keep America out, if they want to, you know, keep the Israelis from attacking them and whatever, they call it mutually assured destruction for a reason.
That's the big deterrent.
Once you have atom bombs, ask the Russians, once you have atom bombs, you can declare your independence from the American empire and they can't do anything about it.
Ask the North Koreans.
Well, I mean, I think that that's absolutely right.
And that is, I think you're correct in pointing out that that is why so many of the people associated with this policy over the years, policy toward Iran over the years, have a hard time believing that Iran could not, you know, be completely determined to have a nuclear weapon.
However, this is not a universally held view.
I heard Paul Piller, who was the National Intelligence Officer for Iran from 2000 to 2005, say once again this week that he did not believe that Iran had made any decision in favor of nuclear weapons.
He believed that that decision had not been made and that Iran was still holding to what is called by specialists the nuclear hedging option.
That is to say, to have a breakthrough capability that if the situation demanded it, they could go toward a nuclear weapons option, but to hold off on that unless it was absolutely necessary because they understood that they could have some existential deterrent from having the capability of going in that direction without actually having to suffer the negative consequences of taking the actions which would identify themselves as a nuclear power, which would make them more vulnerable.
And so, I mean, there is a degree of sophistication, if you will, in the Iranian view of this that is simply not appreciated by some of the people in the U.S. national security elite, but is appreciated by those people whose professional training give them a greater degree of ability to spot the nuances in the policy.
So George Bush's book has come out and basically confirms, I think, what you and I were already saying, which was that the NIE of 2007 really took the wind out of the sails of the war party's push for war back then.
And now Phil Giraldi, who has been a source for your articles in the past and, of course, writes for antiwar.com, among other places, wrote in an article on antiwar.com and also confirmed on this show or said on this show that he has a source somewhere in the intelligence community or close to it or something that tells him that inside the National Intelligence Council right now, there is this giant delay in the next national intelligence estimate on Iran's nuclear program and it's because there's been a fight going on and that what's happening, though, is that they're going to compromise, you know, like the Waco jury or something.
They're going to go ahead and say that, well, the facts haven't changed, but our assessment of them has.
And so it's going to have a much more Iran dangerous kind of spin on it, even though it will apparently admit that the analysts actually have no evidence that anything has changed since three years ago.
Well, I do have one source who is keeping track of what's happening with this national intelligence estimate that has not come out yet.
And I think that Phil Giraldi's assessment is roughly correct, but there's a nuance here, again, that's worth trying to clarify, and that is I think it's true that the next intelligence assessment will indeed say that there's been no major change in the Iranian policy, but they will raise questions about what we don't know.
For example, the GOM enrichment facility raises issues about how many other facilities Iran could possibly have.
You know, Iran has said we're going to have 10 more enrichment facilities.
Where are they?
We don't know.
All of these things, you know, they will suggest, you know, raise questions about Iran's intentions.
So I think that they will say no, no hard evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, but, you know, they will question Iran's intentions on that basis.
So, again, I think one reading of that is yes, that it's a political compromise with the people in the administration who want to have complete freedom to continue to take a hard line against Iran, while at the same time, you know, pointing out that there's no hard evidence of a nuclear weapons program.
So I think, you know, it's subject to interpretation as to exactly what it means, but I think that Phil is roughly correct.
Well, I don't know.
I had a great question, but I forgot what it was.
So I already kept you over time anyway.
I'll let you go.
All right.
Thanks a lot, Gareth.
I really appreciate your time.
