All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and it's time to talk again with Gareth Porter.
He's from Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net and, of course, Antiwar.com/Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How's it going?
It's great.
Thanks for having me back again, Scott.
All right, so your article here is, Russians Refuted U.S. Claim of Iranian Missile Threat to Europe.
So this is extremely important.
It's been the biggest headline made out of the WikiLeaks release.
But before we get into that, I'm going to ask you the same thing I asked Phil.
Whether you're suspicious about WikiLeaks itself or perhaps the origin of some of these documents and hidden agendas and things like this, I talked with Giraldi earlier.
He said, well, he didn't think the CIA was behind it, but it seems like somebody might be other than, you know, the typical story.
Bradley Manning and Julian Assange brought us this information.
I have a different viewpoint from those who would suspect that there's a plot here to use WikiLeaks to promote another agenda.
I think the problem is this.
I think WikiLeaks had an idea that they could influence the broad course of political atmosphere in the United States, let's put it that way, with regard to its global role by releasing a large number of documents, many of which would have devastating implications and consequences.
I think what they failed to take into account is that the communication system in the United States and, indeed, in the industrialized world as such, that it is inevitable that if these are filtered through the commercial news media, the result is going to be almost directly the opposite of the one that they intended.
I think that it was a strategic mistake on the part of the leadership of WikiLeaks to have a strategy that would assume that somehow the message would get through this filter.
The message that they intended to get through the filter would, indeed, get through.
That the truth wins in the end.
Well, exactly.
It doesn't in a world with the New York Times.
Exactly.
I'm prepared to now propose to WikiLeaks that they completely reconsider their strategy, and starting right now, stop releasing any documents to the commercial news media, and instead give these documents to alternative news media in the United States and in other countries, which they can have reasonable confidence will not do what the commercial media have done, which is to spin them in such a way as to produce precisely the opposite message in many cases.
Yeah, I mean, that's my thing, too, is no matter what these documents say, Michael Gordon and David Sanger at the New York Times are going to say, see, my lies were right, because here are some lies that agree with me.
Exactly.
Well, this is precisely what happened in New York.
You can never stop those two from doing that, no matter what.
Exactly.
You know, David Sanger appears to have extraordinary power at the New York Times to determine the line that will be taken in all New York Times coverage having to do with Iran.
I don't know why that is, but that is indeed the indication, on the basis of the coverage that they have repeatedly made of stories related to Iran and the role that Sanger has played in them.
All right, now hit them.
A disputed U.S. claim of Iranian missile threat to Europe.
What's that?
Well, this is a story about the WikiLeaks document, what I think is one of the most important, certainly, of those documents, a document which describes in great detail, it goes on for 19 or 20 pages, a meeting between Russian and American experts from various agencies, the State Department, and the State Department was, I think, the dominant one, if not the only one on the U.S. side, but in the Soviet side, it was certainly Defense Ministry as well as Security Council represented on the delegation.
And it was for the purpose of assessing the threat from Iranian missiles, specifically a threat to Europe and, you know, ultimately to the United States and Russia.
And the New York Times, of course, covered this as a front page story in which they made it sound like this was a report of a secret U.S. intelligence assessment, which had somehow been sent out to all U.S. embassies or something, which indicated that the United States had the hard evidence that Iran had acquired these mysterious so-called BM-25 ICBMs, or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, which could reach the United States and Russia.
Now, are these purported to be three-stage rockets, then, that go to outer space and drop a bomb on Houston like the Russians could?
Well, this is very ambiguous.
In fact, I've done some research on this, and at least at an earlier stage, this purported BM-25 was considered to be a single-stage rocket.
So, I mean, it's not clear how it was being played in the past.
But, you know, they were suggesting in this New York Times piece that Iran had acquired this, and U.S. intelligence was now quite certain about it.
Well, hardly anything could be farther from the truth than that story.
The reality of this meeting was that the United States said, we believe that Iran has acquired these BM-25 missiles from North Korea, but they did not have any hard evidence, and the Russians systematically destroyed that position of repeatedly giving specific information, which refuted the U.S. position.
Not only on that specific question of whether Iran had acquired the missile from North Korea, but whether the missile indeed existed at all.
The Russians challenged completely the idea that the United States had put forward that there was such a thing as the BM-25 missile.
They said there was absolutely no credible evidence to support that, that there had never been a test of such a missile either in North Korea or in Iran, that it was completely incredible that Iran would have purchased such a missile from North Korea without it ever having been tested.
I mean, what sort of leadership would be dumb enough to buy a missile that had absolutely no testing to support the idea that it would work?
And it went on and on.
Well, do the Americans in the documents report, in their report, that they said to the Russians, trust us, we know that this is true?
Or they just said, we kind of think this?
Or what is this?
There was no such confidence expressed on the American side.
See, that's what I thought, too.
I didn't find any in there.
Yeah, you get a distinct impression from this report that the American side was saddled with a position that they were not really confident of and that they had to go through the motions of putting it forward, but they did not have that much conviction behind it.
Now, so first of all, you know, you point out this is the big New York Times story, but this is the big New York Times story.
When the WikiLeaks came out, this is their lead.
Oh, my God, the WikiLeaks show that the North Koreans have sold these missiles to the Iranians that are way better than their old ones.
They can hit all the capitals of Europe now, and no wonder George Bush and Barack Obama agree that we need anti-missile missiles on the Russian border in Poland.
And yet here comes FAIR.org.
New York Times oversells WikiLeaks' Iranian missiles story.
There's you at IPS and antiwar.com.
Russians refuted U.S. claims of Iranian missile threat to Europe.
And even in the Washington Post today, there's a little bit of checks and balances for you.
John Pomfret and Walter Pincus say experts question North Korea-Iran missile link from WikiLeaks document release.
Now, does that mean that the New York Times is going to run a front-page retraction tomorrow and all the TV stations are going to say sorry that we told you that was true when it's clearly there's nothing to back that up other than a wild, unproven assertion?
Well, I would not hold your breath for that, Scott.
I'm certainly not going to hold mine.
Let's face it.
The New York Times is not going to admit that they pulled one on the public in this regard.
I mean, what they did was beyond anything that I've ever heard of being done by a so-called reputable news outlet, they gave a highly distorted, one-sided account of the story and then suppressed the document.
They refused to publish the document, which would allow people to compare what they said about the document with the document itself.
All right.
Hold it right there, Gareth.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service and Antiwar.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
This is Daniel, Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service and Antiwar.com.
Now, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about this Afghanistan war report that the DoD had to turn over to Congress.
It's a big year-end review, but it's won, right?
That story got lost in the shuffle, of course, because it was released the night before Thanksgiving, and there was virtually no coverage of it.
Yeah, well, and then the WikiLeaks thing came and blew everything out of the water.
But still, you know, here's the most important war.
We've got 100,000 soldiers there.
Just talk with Doug Bandow about what it's like to be in Kabul and the realization thick in the air that this is a big joke, that none of this can ever work, and what are we doing except killing people over there, basically.
But I guess we don't call it killing people anymore.
Now it's kinetic events.
That's what happens when somebody kills somebody else in Afghanistan or attacks someone else in Afghanistan.
According to this DoD report, that's a kinetic event, as Jason Ditz explained to us on the show last week.
So was there something in that DoD report about how we're winning and how the number of kinetic events is falling across the country and counterinsurgencies taking hold or securing and holding and building Kandahar and Marja, good stuff like that?
Nothing of the sort.
There's not a single actual fact in there that supports the idea that we are on our way to success, even in the most limited way.
I mean, yes, the first paragraph of the report suggests that we're making slow and steady progress, but the report itself doesn't support that at all.
In fact, I think there are a number of very significant indicators in the report that the effort is continuing to fail and perhaps at a faster rate than before.
I would point to particularly the security assessment, which is the heart of the report, the one thing which is supposed to be relatively concrete and precise and nationwide.
There are 121 key districts that have been identified to be tracked through the rest of the war in terms of the security status as well as governance and overall political status of each of these districts.
And so it is a valuable tool for actually tracking at least the way they see the trend in the development on the ground in Afghanistan.
And this report, which of course represents a kind of snapshot as of, I believe, mid-September, shows that contrary to the line that General Petraeus has been putting forward, that the Taliban are on the run and we're putting terrific pressure on them, there are two things that stand out.
One is if you look at the map of security status, it's a color-coded map.
Without going into great detail, I would say that if you look at the two key highest priority provinces, Helmand Province and Kandahar Province, what you see is that there are developments that directly contradict the narrative of success.
In Kandahar, you have one district that has deteriorated.
The security in the province has deteriorated, according to this report, from occasional attacks to frequent attacks.
In other words, prior to this report and the previous report, it was categorized as having occasional attacks, whereas this report shows that it has frequent Taliban attacks.
Well, but that just proves they're in their death throes, right?
We're winning, and so they're attacking us more.
Yeah, well, the only problem is that the district that I'm talking about is Kandahar District, and that is the absolute epicenter of, supposedly, the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan this year.
So that's one point.
The other point is that in Helmand Province, one of the key districts that they have been following is Kajaki.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but that's the way you would pronounce it if you looked at it, Kajaki District.
And in the previous iteration of the report, it was shown as having frequent attacks.
This time, it's categorized as dangerous territory.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, dangerous territory is hardly distinguishable from Taliban-controlled.
It means that they have absolutely made no progress in their effort to wrest it away from the Taliban.
So that's simply by way of looking at the map.
Now, the other indicator, which I think is in some ways even more devastating to the case, is that for the first time, DOD has released the fact that the number of direct fire attacks by Taliban forces in August of this year, that is the high point of the fighting on an annual basis, was 3,000 direct attacks.
Now, the way to interpret that is that a year ago, the Taliban mounted 1,500 direct fire attacks in August, which was, again, the high point of the fighting in 2009.
In 2008, the number was 500.
And so this is a very direct and very dramatic measure of just how rapidly the Taliban have been able to ramp up their attacks on U.S. and NATO forces.
Well, and you also say in your article, you point out that this DOD report from last April, which this is just the recent update, iteration of the same style of report or whatever from the same office, I guess it comes from or whatever, that in there they counted opinions of the local populace on a district-by-district basis as to see whether they supported the general government, supposedly, as it's so-called, I guess I should say, or the Taliban.
And now, rather than tell you the truth about that, they've just decided to, you know, disinclude?
Yes, they've discontinued.
They've discontinued.
Cut that part of the chapter right out.
Absolutely.
I think this raises some very big questions about what it is that they're suppressing from this report.
I mean, one has to believe that what has happened is that the data is showing that too many people in these key districts are indicating, by various means, that they are supporting the Taliban and that there would be too many of these districts that would be colored a different color compared with the last one to be compatible or to be, for the DoD, to be comfortable with that.
And so they simply decided to drop it.
Well, now, and you also highlight the fact that the Pashtuns make up only 3% of the army, or maybe I just read that in the DoD report.
I forget which articles I was reading when I took these notes.
3% of the army, Scott, it's that only 3% of the recruits in 2010 have been Southern Pashtun.
Right.
We don't know what the present ethnic mix in the army actually is.
So that's a question still to be investigated.
And it goes along with the question about, well, and thanks for that clarification, but it goes along with what Warren Strobel has written in McClatchy about the exclusion of the Pashtuns from the recent elections, that basically they were completely excluded.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, what it means is that the U.S. and NATO no longer have access to the Southern Pashtun population.
And they did have it a few years back.
All right, well, thanks, Gareth.
Bad news all around.
We'll be right back, y'all, on Antiwar Radio.
I'm Gareth Porter, IPSnews.net, Antiwar.com.
