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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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All right, you guys on the line, I've got the great Gareth Porter, and he's the guy that wrote the book.
Two books on Iran, one on the nuclear program, the other on Trump's campaign of maximum pressure, and he's written 10 million great articles for Truthout and Truthdig and Antiwar.com and Consortium News and the American Conservative Magazine.
And this one is at the Gray Zone.
After Beirut blast, Israel revives tale of Hezbollah ammonium nitrate terror plots.
Oh, I'm shaking in my boots.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back again.
Yes, sir.
The Israelis making claims about explosives.
I'm terrified.
What might it be?
And, of course, you go through, you got the whole litany, and you unravel every bit of it.
This has been going on for years.
Is that right?
The Israelis have been trying to gin up stories of Hezbollah.
How do you say Hezbollah?
Infobombs?
I don't know if I say Hezbollah, but, you know, different pronunciations for different folks.
I think different strokes for different folks.
It seems like it should rhyme with Allah, right?
Hezbollah.
That would be one way of looking at it.
Possibly, yes.
I've been scolded before for calling it Hezbollah, but I just listened to, you know, I learned that from TV when I was a kid.
Sure.
Anyways, not that they ever told me who they were or what they were about.
They just said they were scary, so.
Yeah.
So Mossad has been pushing this line for years now on a piecemeal basis that Hezbollah has been, you know, acquiring and storing ammonium nitrate in various countries, always, of course, the Israelis claim for the purpose of planning eventual terrorist attacks, primarily against Israel, because they are deathly afraid, well, not deathly afraid, but they're claiming to be afraid of the Iranians and Hezbollah taking revenge against Israel for all of the things that the Israelis have done against both of them.
And so that's been the backdrop for a series of storylines that have come out starting in 2012 and continuing through the last eight years or so.
And now the Israelis have revived this series and packaged them for maximum effect politically and in terms of propaganda effect by getting this, putting the story together and having it become a major sort of propaganda theme now.
And you begin to see places like Die Welt and other cooperative magazines and newspapers allude to this theme.
And I note in my piece that even the Washington Post, not even the Washington Post, but especially the Washington Post, the day after the explosion in Beirut, I think it was at the end or toward the end of a piece that was sort of thinking about, well, what could have caused all this?
And the authors of the post piece said that Hezbollah has been known to have been acquainted with or I'd forgotten the exact wording, but to have acquired ammonium nitrate over the years for terrorist attacks.
So this is a one sentence nutshell of the Israeli propaganda line.
Nobody else in the corporate media in the United States has seen fit to do this story.
Surprised me a little bit that that's not happened yet, but I expect it'll still be seeping out in the coming weeks and months.
All right.
Well, so let's go back.
Tell us the story of Thailand and Cyprus and whatever else they claim to have here.
Right.
So, yeah, the first one in this very long series of incidents or alleged incidents, because in one case, absolutely nothing did happen at all to even cause a suspicion or to justify the kind of story that the Mossads have been ginning up.
But in Bangkok in 2012, the Thai police arrested a Canadian, sorry, in this case, Swedish-Lebanese joint citizen who had just arrived in the country.
And as soon as he arrived, they took him in and accused him of being a terrorist and being a Hezbollah terrorist and also of having ammonium nitrate for the purpose of terrorism.
Ammonium nitrate being an illegal substance in Thailand.
It looked like an open and shut case.
But there are a few problems with that.
And to begin with, they really had no evidence whatsoever, no particular reason to believe that the suspect, Hussein Atreese, even belonged to Hezbollah or certainly was a Hezbollah operative.
He stoutly denied it, denies it to this day.
And they did not have any evidence, direct or indirect, of that sort of affinity or affiliation.
And the second thing is that Atreese was able to show that he had the documents to prove that he had ammonium nitrate for the purpose of a legitimate export business, along with the export of electric fans and copy paper, which he had been storing there for the purpose of being able to export to specific places where he'd found the customers.
If I remember correctly, it was in Africa that he had, Liberia, that he had found a taker for ammonium nitrate.
And so, you know, there was there was reason to believe that he was legit.
He was on the level.
But of course, the Mossad people and their allies in the Thai police weren't going to have any of that.
They had somebody who they wanted to convict.
And they were determined to go ahead and do that.
And so they brought the charges against him.
And the only problem that sort of came up here, I mean, they basically convicted him and he served, if I remember correctly, something like two and a half, a little over two and a half years of a four year sentence in the end for owning an illegal substance.
Now, the problem here is that that ammonium nitrate was illegal, but the ammonium nitrate that he had was in the form of these ice packs or cold packs that have ammonium nitrate in them.
But it's in a water solution that means that it's not readily available for.
I mean, it can be turned into an explosive, but it's not easily used as an explosive in the immediate sense.
Sort of like busting him for having too much Sudafed and calling it speed.
This is a commercial product that's bought and sold all over the world.
It's obviously exported from various countries to other countries.
And so, you know, this is nobody had ever tried to suggest that the ownership of cold packs or the intention to export cold packs is somehow illegal or a sign of a terrorist intent.
But they did it in this case because Mossad was pressuring him to do it.
Now, the other thing that came up in regard to this case is that somehow or other, not just ammonium nitrate cold packs, but urea fertilizer showed up in this guy's warehouse where he stored the the other items that he was intending to export.
And he swore in an interview with Aftonbladet, a correspondent in Bangkok, that he never ever done any business with urea fertilizer.
This wasn't something that he dealt with.
And it makes sense because, you know, it was not in the same category as the other things that he did.
It was not a sort of small consumer item.
So the question is, where did it come from?
And Atreus claims, I think quite credibly, that somebody put it there in order to implicate him further because they were afraid that just having ammonium nitrate in these cold packs might not be viewed as illegal at all, as it shouldn't have been.
So so there's some reason to suspect, in fact, that Mossad simply acted on its own.
And once they had the information about the guy, they found his warehouse very easily.
And they they had slipped the urea fertilizer in there.
Apparently it was in bags that were kitty litter bags, supposedly.
But in any case, there's a lot of suspicious elements surrounding the case.
And in fact, very little reason to believe that this guy was planning, you know, was helping Hezbollah plan a terrorist attack or a series of terrorist attacks.
We say in the piece that a court ultimately found that there was no evidence to support the contention that he was in any way involved with Hezbollah.
That's right.
That's you are correct.
That's the other thing that happened.
They did.
They said explicitly that they didn't find any they didn't have any evidence that he was, in fact, Hezbollah, which simply puts the exclamation point on the point that I just made.
So he's got cold packs.
He's buying and selling some things that in no other case have they said, aha, you could somehow get the fertilizer or whatever chemical out of there and and make explosives out of it.
And he wasn't even tied to Hezbollah.
And so there really was no case at all.
Yeah, it's it's really highly, highly questionable, very, very suspicious case that that clearly involves Mossad as a primary, the primary agent behind it, because they're the ones and I should have prefaced my remarks by by mentioning that throughout all these countries where Hezbollah, excuse me, where Mossad has allies in the counterterrorism, police, intelligence services, they always have arrangements which allow them to pinpoint anybody that's coming into the country that they want the government to nab ahead of time.
And that is clearly what has happened in this.
What happened in this case with Latrice, you know, and you think they made a mistake at first and then they just finished framing them up or they just decided to pin some bomb plot on some schmuck.
Well, I mean, I think they picked him out as somebody who was Lebanese and, you know, was in business and therefore they wanted a tail on him.
And, you know, they quickly, you know, had the had the information that they needed to.
I mean, when they found ammonium nitrate in packs, they said, hmm, maybe we can use this.
Right.
I mean, this is my own mind at work, but I think it's a very reasonable set of suppositions.
World's greatest state sponsor of terrorism.
You hear that Hezbollah reaching all the way east to Thailand to blow up innocent people.
What a great story.
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All right, Cyprus, Cyprus, Cyprus is even more interesting because in some ways, because once again, you have a question of Mossad having played not just an active role in initiating the arrest of a Lebanese, in this case, Canadian Lebanese who had just entered the country, but somebody who they had started to put a tail on and continued to monitor all of his movements and his calls and everything.
They knew everything about him.
And again, quickly, you know, they knew where he was staying, of course.
And within a few days, he gets arrested.
And then after he's arrested, they find a, you know, this this load of of ammonium nitrate in his in the basement of this building.
Now, again, the the individual clearly, you know, at first he absolutely denied the entire story, denied everything they're accusing him of.
And again, we know that both Mossad and its allies always, always draw up a confession, which is what Mossad wants the individual that in this case, of course, Hezbollah.
They want the suspected Hezbollah person to admit to being a Hezbollah terrorist and to having ammonium nitrate for that purpose.
That's the whole point of the exercise, OK?
And in this case, you know, the the individual finally reached a plea bargain after roughly a month in which he admitted to having been a member of Hezbollah's overseas operations, admitted that he had ammonium nitrate.
And according to what was made public, admitted to the idea that it was for for terrorist purposes.
But the fact is that we never heard what his defense was.
We never heard what his own account was.
We never heard what he was forced to say by his interrogators or, you know, the extent to which Mossad interrogated him, which, in fact, has happened elsewhere.
We know it happened in Kenya, that for 14 days, Mossad had exclusive access to Iranian guys.
And this is a this is a pattern.
We know it's happened elsewhere.
So we just don't know what happened in the intervening weeks after he had denied the entire story.
What we do know is that his defense lawyer, who obviously advised him, well, you better take the plea here because they've got this evidence in the basement that makes it look like you're guilty.
The defense lawyer within two and a half years had become the defense minister of Cyprus.
So this is not your ordinary defense lawyer.
This is somebody who has political ambitions and was clearly on his way up in Cyprus politics and expected to get something like a defense ministership within a matter of some short relatively short period of time.
So that's one factor.
The other thing about this case that is very important and really helps to provide an alternative explanation for how this went down is an account in the Kuwaiti daily newspaper, Al-Jarida, which is significant because Al-Jarida is a newspaper that the Israelis have often used to leak stories to the Arab Middle East that they think are important to their propaganda line.
And in this case, Al-Jarida reported, clearly based on a Mossad source that they had, their account of how Mossad had helped to track down this guy and got him convicted.
And what the account says, unbelievably, is that basically Mossad had a tail on him from the moment he arrived or even before they were following his phone calls.
They knew who he was calling and everything.
And they did this for several days.
And then just before the conviction of this guy or the arrest of this guy, lo and behold, the load of ammonium nitrate arrives.
And you know, that's the wording in the Al-Jarida piece, which leads one to believe that there was a very strange coincidence here, that the arrival of the ammonium nitrate preceded just within hours or a day or so, the arrest of this guy.
So you know, it's just too convenient to be a complete coincidence.
And the other explanation would be that, in fact, it was Mossad itself that supplied the ammonium nitrate.
So that's a very fascinating little byplay that's part of this story about a guy named Abdullah.
All right.
All right.
So now there are two more, London and Germany, too, huh?
That's right.
Now we've got, first of all, though, we've got New York City.
OK.
New York City goes back to around 2015.
The storyline about ammonium nitrate goes back to 2015 or even earlier.
And that is a story that was cooked up by the FBI in order to help politically, obviously, the Justice Department come up with a conviction of this poor Lebanese named Ali Kourani, who is a very complicated story.
And I don't even know the full story myself.
But the guy was not really a genuine Hezbollah operative in New York City.
He was doing some things, you know, sort of pro forma in order to ingratiate himself with the FBI and in order to apparently impress his ex-wife as part of a very nasty divorce and settlement that involved kids.
And in order to be able to visit his kids, because he needed American citizenship.
So the FBI, trying to help get a conviction for the Justice Department, comes up with the information that this guy, Ali Kourani, soon after he became a U.S. citizen, he'd visited Guangzhou.
I believe it's the fourth largest city in China, a city of 10 million people.
And they then use that to try to prove that, in fact, he was there or to suggest that he was there in order to investigate the acquisition of ammonium nitrate, because that was the location of the same company that had provided the ammonium nitrate in the case of, I guess it was Cyprus.
But in any case, this was this absurd sort of assumption was all they had.
This was the only alleged evidence they had that he had anything to do with a plot to store ammonium nitrate or acquire ammonium nitrate for Hezbollah for terrorist purposes.
He went to that.
This guy had traveled to a city where they manufacture those cold packs that the other guy got framed up with.
That is correct.
And and they had no other information.
They didn't they didn't have any information that he actually visited it or that even went into the city.
They don't even know that he didn't use the airport in Guangzhou, which is where they say they tracked him to, that he didn't go from there to Hong Kong.
So it is really, you know, the sort of the most ludicrous kind of suggestion that I can imagine.
Crazy.
OK.
Now, England and Germany, both.
Right.
Right.
Now, these these two, you can sort of bracket together because these are two cases where Mossad went to the government and said, look, you know, we we know that you are weighing the question of whether you're going to outlaw, ban Hezbollah on your territory, but you haven't made the decision yet.
And we think that you should be aware of the fact that we have already done the work.
We've done the research, the intelligence work, and we have found the places where Hezbollah has been storing ammonium nitrate in the outskirts of London, in the case of the UK, and in southern Germany in the case of Germany.
And so in one case in London, it was 2015 in Germany, it was 2019.
And and and the the Israeli line, the Mossad line here, is that in both cases, the governments, of course, found that they had that that Mossad had been right, that they found that Hezbollah had indeed uncovered this plot in both in both countries to store ammonium nitrate for terrorist operations by the by the Hezbollah.
But in fact, there is not the slightest scintilla of evidence in either case that that's what happened.
It's obvious from the absence of any mention in official statements, documents or press leaks of any kind that from the government that the that Hezbollah had done anything of the sort.
And in fact, the only leak about Hezbollah having stored ammonium nitrate in London was from Mossad to the Telegraph, the the right wing, Rupert Murdoch owned or at least it was Murdoch owned newspaper that is relentlessly, you know, following the Israeli line on everything that has to do with Israel.
So in other words, because the because the police let these guys go, whoever was responsible for it, that means that either they weren't Hezbollah at all or they were working for Scotland Yard.
They were supposed to have it, I guess.
Well, apparently, reportedly, of course, we don't know for sure, but apparently there was one person who was arrested without any charges being made and then, you know, finally freed.
I don't know how long they kept him.
But obviously, they decided that they didn't have any evidence to support what what they're being told by Mossad.
And in the case of Germany, the day that Germany did, in fact, announce in 2019, I believe it was in May of 2019, that I'm sorry, no, it was May.
It was early 2020.
Excuse me.
It was early 2020 that Germany announced that they were banning Hezbollah from German territory.
They carried out a series of raids against mosques that were considered to be pro Hezbollah.
But they did absolutely nothing, made no statement of any kind, suggesting that there was anything that anything had happened involving ammonium nitrate within German borders.
So the whole story seems to fall flat on its face.
And in fact, just one personal note that I'll add, I called the German embassy information service and I said, look, I'm doing a story about, you know, the subject of it involves German Germany and Hezbollah.
And I'm wondering if there is you have any information whatsoever indicating that there were Hezbollah stores of ammonium nitrate in Germany at any time.
And the person who answered my call said, no, we've never heard of anything of that sort.
There you go.
So there you have it, everybody.
The world's greatest state sponsor of terrorism, Thailand and Cyprus and New York City here.
And of course, England and Germany, they're going to kill us all.
And the fact that not a single one of these is true matters at all.
Yeah, no, it's all still true, even though it's not.
It's not all the news that's fit to print.
It's publishing all the news that fits.
Yeah, exactly.
We got a narrative here.
We're sticking to it.
Don't forget Argentina.
And don't forget that time that they were going to blow up the Saudi ambassador in the restaurant in Georgetown.
No, not Georgetown.
Right.
Yeah.
Mass killings.
Mass killings.
Yeah.
Those only didn't make the cut because they didn't have info as part of those fake plots.
That was different.
But, you know, you got to hand it to them.
They've done a good job of building a narrative.
The fact that it's built out of a bunch of pieces of lies, notwithstanding, you know, it's part of the deal.
Yeah.
It's timely because of the Beirut explosion.
It's now the time to push this forward.
And so we'll see.
I got a lot of questions right away.
Is it true that it was Hezbollah explosives that happened with the thing?
So they got that narrative out there pretty powerfully.
Pretty quick.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's it's definitely it's definitely credible to everybody in the national security elite and in the media elite in this country, in the political elite in this country and and I suspect in other parts of Europe as well.
Not so much in Lebanon.
I mean, they probably don't care whether the Lebanese can see right through it or not.
They know what happened there.
They don't care about that.
And Hezbollah is part of the government that really dropped the ball on that one.
So they're responsible in that way.
But that's in the same way that the rest of them are, too.
And that's entirely different.
Yeah.
But I have to point out, Scott, that since, you know, my story was published, we have this these stories, particularly in the German press, that are coming, obviously, from from Mossad, from the Israelis, suggesting that now now we have evidence that the the invoice or invoices, I should say, for the ammonium nitrate that was shipped and was being shipped and ended up in the port of Beirut was associated with a bank in Africa that had Shiite ownership.
And therefore, it's linked to Hezbollah.
I mean, that is that's what we can expect to see more of the same of this sort of thing.
And so and you know what, I guess maybe I take that back.
I mean, maybe this information op really is meant to impress the Lebanese people and try to weaken support for Hezbollah there rather than just getting in the minds of the floor noise of the world.
Yeah, it's playing into politics in in Lebanon, no question about it.
But I don't think it's going to make any difference.
Man, well, there you go, guys.
Gareth Porter on the case of every lie told about Iran and their friends and allies in the interest of peace.
Simple as that in the interest of protecting this country from the most destructive aspects of our empire.
Thank you, Gareth.
My pleasure.
Thanks again, Scott.
All right, you guys.
And that is at antiwar.com reprinted from the gray zone after Beirut blast.
Israel revives tale of Hezbollah ammonium nitrate terror plots.
Debunked.
The Scott Horton Show antiwar 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.
