All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, guys, on the line, I've got the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote Perils of Dominance about the war in Vietnam, and he wrote Manufactured Crisis about Iran's nuclear program, and he wrote the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Scare Threat thing going on right here, only he's not a CIA guy.
It's co-authored with John Kiriakou, so that's why CIA is in the title there.
But anyway, great book about current Iran policy, maximum pressure, and the rest.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks very much.
Now, how much is the Ayatollah paying you, Gareth?
Here you are, whitewashing his terrible crimes from the 1990s.
It must be that you have some nefarious motive that must be deconstructed here, sir.
Well, do your best, man.
Let's see if we can do that.
Let's see.
Your prejudice against bullshit, is that it?
I suppose one way to look at it would be that I'm prejudiced against bullshit, yeah.
That's pretty accurate.
I figured you out, Porter.
All right, tell us the story here, because this is a big one and a lot of bogus arguments hinge on this bogus claim.
Right.
This is a story about the reality behind the myth that the 1994 Jewish community terror bombing in Buenos Aires of July 1994 was the work of Iran and Hezbollah, which has been propounded by, of course, every U.S. administration, as well as the Israeli government ever since then, for more than 25 years now.
And we didn't get this out on the 25th anniversary, but it's on the 26th anniversary more or less of that event.
The story is really about what actually happened, at least according to the best possible source that we've had thus far.
And that source was a spy or an infiltrator of the Argentine federal police who was assigned in the late 1980s and through the 1990s to spy on the Jewish community in Buenos Aires.
And in that job, he became actually the person who was in charge of security for the AMIA, Jewish Community Center, which was bombed in July 1994.
Now, the key to this story is that this infiltrator was asked by the federal police, his boss in the federal police or his handler in the federal police, to hand over the blueprints for that building some months before the explosion took place.
And of course, after the explosion, this fellow who had actually become, he'd married a Jewish woman who was the secretary for a senior official in the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and had become thoroughly enmeshed in the Jewish community and had become somebody who had come to love the religion and the people and had taken the Jewish equivalent of his name, Jose, Yossi, as his name and was known as Yossi Perez.
So here's what happened.
He became so repentant, he was so repentant about his role in this, that he ultimately went to two Jewish investigative journalists in Buenos Aires to ask their help to try to figure out how he could get his story out.
And for years, the first thing they did was to try to find a way that he could find asylum abroad so that he could tell his story safely, because they were afraid for his life if he went public under the circumstances that existed at that moment.
And so they tried for years to do that.
And in the meantime, in 2006, he did a secret video with another investigative journalist named Gabriel Levinas, who I had met when I was in Buenos Aires.
And here's my personal note about this story, because I had known about this, although not all the details, from my trip to Buenos Aires in 2006.
Gabriel Levinas, who was my main source, who helped me, guided me through the thicket of documentation and issues around the bombing, because he had become the single most knowledgeable person in Buenos Aires about the whole issue.
He knew about it because it was he who made the video with Yossi Perez, the spy, the infiltrator, who was so repentant, who was so upset about what had happened.
So Yossi Perez told Levinas and told the two other Jewish investigative journalists the entire story about being asked to turn over the blueprints and furthermore, being asked to find out within the Jewish community what everybody knew about what was called the Andinia Plan.
Now, this takes us back to the whole previous history of anti-Semitism in Argentina in general and in the Buenos Aires area in particular.
And I have to tell you that ever since my trip, I was convinced that indeed this bombing was carried out by anti-Semitic veterans of the Dirty War in Argentina in the 1970s and early 1980s because of what I knew about the infiltrator and because of what I knew about the Dirty War itself.
And so there's there's another whole backstory there that I can't get into in detail, but just to say in general that Jews were singled out in the Dirty War in Argentina, the war against Marxists and leftists by the extreme right, because they believed that the Jews were the ones who had carried out the Russian Revolution and furthermore, that they had designs on Argentina.
They wanted to take over the the part of the region of Argentina that was unsettled, that was open to settlement.
And so they had this conspiracy theory about the Jews wanting to take power in Argentina.
And now, so stop there for a second.
So this is this plan.
This is the first I've ever heard of this.
This plan, this conspiracy theory, essentially Andinia.
Or maybe it's Andinia, I'm not sure.
Oh, yeah.
I'm sure I'm saying it wrong.
What the hell do I know?
I'm a Texican.
But so anyway, point being here, you reproduce in your article, which I negligently forgot to name at the start of this interview when I was talking about your book about Vietnam.
The article is at the Grayzone Project, the grayzone.com.
It's called How a Police Spy's Stunning Testimony Threatens the Official U.S.-Israeli AMIA Bombing Narrative.
That's at the grayzone.
And then you reproduce a picture of the cover of a magazine, I guess, that has this conspiracy theory.
And I'll remind the, you know, geographically challenged that Argentina is a very large country in the southern pointy part of South America there.
Right.
And so this plan was essentially the accusation was that Argentinian Jews or other Jews from somewhere else, or I'm not sure what, clarify, please, that they were going to essentially seize all of, I guess, what, the southern fourth of South America and make that an independent nation at Argentina's expense?
It would be a large, it would be a large chunk of present Argentina.
So it would be a significant, significant territory in general.
I don't have the.
I guess it would be Chile, too, on the West Coast there.
Well, I don't think they it's not clear that they would seize part of of territory that was outside Argentina, but I don't know the exact dimensions of this plot because I haven't read.
I mean, in the magazine article here, the the picture that they show, the map, they just have this big pink trapezoid that covers essentially, you know, a little bit more than the southern half of Argentina and includes both coasts of the continent.
Perhaps it was larger than than the Argentine territory.
But I only.
And now, do you know if there was anything to this at all or this whole thing was just made up by right wing, you know, paramilitary helicopter pusher types?
There's no reason to believe that there's anything to it.
I mean, they cited the fact that that Israeli IDF people have been cited there on vacation or whatever in the past and that Jewish Jewish visitors have gone there in large numbers.
And, you know, there may have been some.
But I mean, the idea that they're planning to take it over is so absurd that it doesn't deserve serious consideration.
So I didn't I didn't take it seriously at all.
And I don't think anybody else does outside the confines of of this ideological minority, but a significant minority within Argentina.
Yeah.
And even then, contemporaneously with the bombing, not necessarily through to this day, but obviously this never has played out in any way.
I would just add to to to that point that anti-Semitism continues to be extremely high in the Buenos Aires area.
For years, there have been elevated numbers of anti-Semitic incidents of of death, basically desecration of graves, of threats to Jewish institutions by phone, that sort of thing.
And that that's continuing.
I can't give you any figures, but I do know that it has continued to be high, particularly after the bombing that was very high.
And now these are all Lebanese Shia making these threats.
Well, yeah, exactly.
That's not really credible.
No, it's obviously people who were attracted to that to that point of view.
And and and that anti-Semitism was at its height during the 1930s when Hitler was in power for obvious reasons.
And then again during the Dirty War.
So that gives you an idea of the connection between the Dirty War and this.
And let me just make one more point that during the Dirty War, Jews were singled out.
They occupy about one percent of the population, but at least 12 percent and probably more of those who were seized, taken away to detention centers and tortured.
And so clearly they were being singled out because they were regarded as the number one enemy among the left, if you will, in Argentina.
And then now to bring it back to this case, your point is not just that it was some neo-Nazis from the neighborhood, but that it was some neo-Nazis among the police who did the attack.
And that was why they got away with it.
What I said was, and I think this is the case, that that was probably a network that involved a network of police intelligence and military veterans of the Dirty War.
And they all, you know, constitute a a a coherent group because, you know, they all cooperated on the Dirty War, providing intelligence.
The police were involved in the detention centers.
And so they were all they were all participants in it.
All right.
Now, so get back to cracking the case for us here with Nisman and the rest of the narrative about exactly what happened here.
Blueprints and names and dates.
And go ahead.
So so where we can go at this point is that the the intelligence service of Argentina, which goes by the acronym SIDE, S-I-D-E, is central to this whole story because they were the ones who were in charge of the investigation from the beginning.
It was the intelligence agency itself.
And they were honeycombed with these anti-Semites.
OK.
And and in fact, as I point out in my story, which is based on the investigation of a friend of mine who I met during my investigation down in in Buenos Aires, the the SIDE actually had both a unit that was in charge of the investigation in the SIDE headquarters, as well as a unit that was in the office of the judge that was supposed to be carrying out the investigation.
So, I mean, they were obviously in control of of the entire process from beginning to end.
And they were the ones who started the process of focusing on Iran Hezbollah by creating this issue that there were supposedly some people arrested.
I've forgotten where was it was in in Brazil.
I think it was in Brazil.
And they were suspected of being terrorists.
And then it was leaked to the press that they were suspected of being Hezbollah.
OK.
And that was being used as the bait to try to get the person who they arrested as a suspect in the entire plot, who was a Shia, who ran a chop shop, a shop that that was involved in getting parts of of old wrecked cars and recreating a car and then reselling it.
And he was he had a shady background of making deals with the police and so forth.
Anyway, they were suggesting that he was the one who sold the engine for the for what they regarded as the they claimed was the car that was used by the the bomber, the the the guy who annihilated himself, supposedly, according to their story.
So so he was in jail.
OK.
And they were going to get him to to finger the these people who they had arrested, who were arrested in in Brazil as people who were suspects in the bomb.
And he was going to say that they were the ones who bought the car from him.
So that was the key move to create the original idea that Iran was behind the bombing.
And then later on, the whole thing fell apart because the the Shia guy, the owner of the chop shop, refused to lie.
And and later on, they had somebody visit him, offering him a million dollars or four hundred thousand dollars, I guess it was, to to lie that it was two members of the Buenos Aires police who were aligned with President Carlos Menem's primary enemy at that point, primary rival.
And so it had become a domestic political thing by that time.
So so that's how this thing began to evolve.
And then after that was finally discovered to be a complete fake because they had videos of the judge actually offering the bribe to to this Shia guy in prison.
Then this man started the process all over again of creating this charge that Iran was behind it.
And I've debunked that, as you know, very well, better than anybody.
So they had an entire different narrative that Hezbollah, therefore, Iran did it besides pinning it on these two Lebanese guys that this other guy refused to falsely implicate.
Well, you know, let's let's go back a step and point out that Mossad was constantly feeding information to the C-Day people, the the Argentine intelligence agency from the beginning, anything that would help to pin it on Iran.
Right.
So over time, they had accumulated various false leads.
We can't get into them now, but a couple of people, just to be clear, though, they abandoned the case against these two guys, though.
Yes.
Yes.
They abandoned that case as completely fraudulent.
But don't worry, it was still Iran anyway.
We'll just figure out another way to make it was Iran anyway.
In fact, in fact, the the head of the C-Day went to prison and so did the judge in two thousand.
When was it?
2013, I believe.
No, it was even later.
I think it took them many years to put them in prison, but they finally did.
But meantime, you know, Nisman, the prosecutor, created his his new his new indictment of Iran based on the stuff that was fed to him by C-Day from Mossad and and M.E.K.
He relied heavily on the Mujahedini calc people who were making claims that were totally outrageous, that they couldn't possibly have had any basis for having knowledge of.
Well, and that's the whole thing, too, right, is that anybody who's using the M.E.K., they know that, too, that these guys entire reputation is that they're insane lunatics.
But on the surface, they get to say Iranian defectors or some kind of way.
They make them sound legitimate at the time.
They're telling the lie.
So it sounds like it's meaningful, even though they've been exiled from Iran almost as long as the USA has been.
In the case of Nisman, however, he didn't even make much of an effort to give their testimony much credibility because there was nothing that they had to offer.
He couldn't really cite anything in the case of these M.E.K. people.
Yeah, just they assure us that they know this is true, too, or, you know, some garbage, right?
No, it's true.
That's all.
Yeah, exactly.
OK, so now this guy shoots himself in the head, but TV and, you know, the papers say that, oh, no, I guess some horrible Shiite must have killed this guy because he was on to them or something.
What happened with that?
Well, you know, we don't know for sure, but the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Nisman did, in fact, commit suicide.
That's what most of the people who had a careful examination of the evidence had had concluded after very careful sifting through the evidence after a long period of time.
And he had written this this diatribe against the current president at the time claiming that she was in league with the Iranians to erase the the charge that Iran was behind the bombing.
In fact, there was no evidence of that.
But and it was based entirely on intercepted phone conversations that this guy who was in charge of counterintelligence at C-Day was feeding was was feeding Nisman.
And it it it would simply would not have holded water because it didn't make any sense.
It was not a coherent argument that was being made.
A lot of people pointed that out at the time.
Yeah.
And and then there was there were other things about Nisman.
He was he was a very opportunistic guy.
And it turns out that he was making a lot of money.
He was being paid by pro-Israeli outfits, a lot of money, and had bank accounts in the United States, which were uncovered later on.
And and perhaps somebody, maybe the guy who was at C-Day was on to him and he knew it.
You know, there are all kinds of possibilities here, which I don't want to get into because it's it's speculation.
But anyway, it's it seems clear that that he did commit suicide at this point.
And right now, the big go ahead.
Well, I was just going to go back then to the to what happened ultimately to the case that, you know, was was being made by by Yossi Perez, the the infiltrator.
He told his story to Miriam Lewin, who was one of the two investigative journalists.
The other one is Horacio Lutzky.
And they wrote a book laying out his story.
Of course, it's in Spanish, so I couldn't read it.
But but I was in touch with Miriam Lewin and she she can write and speak English.
And so so she gave me the inside story about exactly what happened when they went to the two of them went to Nisman and asked him to meet with this police spy.
And he refused to do it.
He he would only have three members of his staff meet with him.
And and then after they had a meeting, apparently he agreed to put his name on the the the statement that that they officially adopted from that meeting, which is in their files.
But he he would never agree to meet with Yossi at all to hear his testimony.
And and that was an indication that he refused to do anything about what he knew at that point was a false story.
He was going to stick with it.
Yeah, now, I'm sorry, we're just out of time, so I just wanted to point out real quick, you know, about part of your story here that I meant to say this before, but it's a big deal that this guy, Carlos Telladin, he deserves or I'm sure I'm saying his name wrong, too.
He deserves a lot of credit for being, you know, essentially falsely put in prison.
You know, if anything, he sold some cops a car they used or a truck they used in a bombing.
Right.
Then they go and put him in prison.
But they offer to let him out and give him a million bucks if he'll only lie on these two innocent guys.
And he refuses to do it and instead sits in prison.
That's pretty big.
Yeah.
Of course, he then did he did go ahead and lie in the second case when they offered him, you know, money and release and so forth as part of a political deal.
Did he lie about any specific individuals like falsely implicating?
He implicated the two policemen from Buenos Aires who were part of a group that was aligned with Menem's rival.
Well, at least they were cops.
So no collateral damage there.
Anyway, that was just a joke.
And listen, I'm sorry, we're going to screw our next guest out of a couple of minutes because I have to let you say a thing about how this is such a big deal that everybody in the world knows that the Ayatollah is the world's greatest sponsor of international terrorism.
Like, for example, that time he bombed the Jews in Argentina in 1994.
Well, you said it, and it's very true that this is an extremely important story that totally upsets the totally, completely destroys the whole narrative about Iran as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.
I mean, this is a complete fabrication, was from the beginning.
And it's indicative of a much broader problem that we've had with the way the United States government, the Israeli government, have created this whole story, storyline.
And people need to be more acutely aware of the whole toxic character of what has come out of U.S. and Israel about Iran.
Yeah, and you know what?
That's no apology.
I was just joking with you at the beginning there.
I mean, the reality is that the U.S. government, whenever they're accusing any country of anything, they're lying.
And a lot of times they're the ones who are guilty of the exact same thing that they're accusing others of.
But, you know, when they just the fact that they use the word terrorism and not al-Qaeda shows that they're trying to fool you.
If they had to say they're the world's greatest sponsor of Hezbollah, you might say, who's that?
Yeah, but if if they but they want you to think they mean they're the world's greatest sponsor of al-Qaeda terrorism, which threatens American civilians.
And that's why they use a deliberately vague term.
It's because they're trying to deceive you.
That's it.
Absolutely.
And they do make it explicit in many cases.
In many instances, they push that line explicitly that Iran and al-Qaeda are allies.
Iran has been supporting and involved with al-Qaeda, which is a complete lie.
And then an al-Qaeda bomb goes off in Iran and they don't cover it.
Because that might confuse the narrative a little bit.
But you have to go read that somewhere from the European continent or something.
Anyway.
All right.
We're way over time.
Got to go.
Great work as always.
Thank you so much, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
Glad to be on again.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Gareth Porter here.
And he's written a bunch about this in the past, too.
Just search Gareth Porter and Argentina and you'll find a bunch.
But this one is at the gray zone.
How a police spy's stunning testimony threatens the official U.S.-Israeli AMIA bombing narrative.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
