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All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio and our next guest is Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's a reporter for Interpress Service, an independent historian and journalist, author of four or five books which you can find on any book website other than amazon.com which all good people are boycotting.
He has an archive at antiwar.com/porter that is pretty much all-inclusive at least of his IPS pieces and a few others as well and that soon enough I hope will include this brand new one for the journal Middle East Policy which is put out by the Middle East Policy Council and it is called Evidence of Fraud in Alleged Studies Docs.
The Iran Nuclear Alleged Studies Documents.
The Evidence of Fraud is actually the actual title.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks very much for having me again.
I was reading the top bar not the big bold headline.
It's called the Iran Nuclear Alleged Studies Documents.
The Evidence of Fraud by Gareth Porter and it's basically the summation of all your reporting on this issue over the last few years basically.
I guess a few new you know bows tied with ribbons to seal the deal all together here but basically Dr. Porter you say here there are eight major indicators that something called the alleged studies documents are fraudulent.
So I guess first of all tell us what these documents are why we ought to care that they're fraudulent and then we can go through your eight reasons.
Sure yeah let's do that because I think it's really important for people to get a sense an overall sense of the number of indicators of fraud which is something that otherwise we might miss in this program.
So yeah to begin with the importance of the documents is that you know this is really overwhelmingly the primary and almost sole source of documentary evidence to support the notion that Iran has in fact actively engaged in nuclear weapons related research.
These documents allegedly pertain they are purportedly documents pertaining to the period from 2001 to 2003 or actually 2004 and in fact to be more precise the earliest date of any of the documents as far as I've been able to ascertain is in fact early 2002.
So it would be more accurate to say 2002 to 2004 and they're really centrally important politically in the issue because the Obama administration even today continues to assert that the the Iranians are not eligible for being treated as any normal state in regard to issues of diplomacy because they are not adequately cooperating with or not cooperating at all with the IAEA investigation quote-unquote of its nuclear program of specifically the military related aspects of its military program.
Now I just want to point out that there's an absolutely key point in my view because of the relationship to this of this point to the international politics of the issue.
The reason the Iranians ceased their cooperation with the IAEA in September 2008 is that they had been given a request a demand I think it's fair to say under the circumstances from the IAEA for the technical drawings the essentially the blueprints of their Shahab 3 missile on the grounds that it was necessary to discuss these designs for their missile in order to prove that they had not actually put put together designs for a re sorry redesigned a warhead for the Shahab 3 to accommodate a nuclear weapon which was the premise of some of the key documents in the laptop documents.
So the reason the the Iranians said no we're not going to cooperate anymore is that they were essentially crossing a red line which was to ask the Iranians to give them military secrets very highly classified highly secretive documents which the IAEA really had no business asking for and of course there's really no rationale no no reasonable rationale for a request of that nature if you are simply trying to figure out if these documents are fraudulent or not because asking the Iranians for the blueprints for the Shahab 3 would not be dispositive it would not prove anything whatsoever and I questioned people at IAEA about that and got I must say rather squirrelly answers not nothing very clear in response except for one senior official who off the record agreed that in fact they were asking the Iranians to give up military secrets and to compromise their security he said well you know they're going to have to do that in order to satisfy us so so that's the significance of the documents okay so in other words the International Atomic Energy Agency is asking the Iranians to come off with all this information that as Dr. Gordon Prather would say is none of the IAEA's beeswax under the safeguards agreement but they're going after them and telling them give us the blueprints to your missiles answer every question let us inspect where you make your centrifuges never mind you know whether actual material nuclear materials being introduced into them like would make it under the safeguards agreement part of the IAEA's business and the reason the the basis for the IAEA's extra investigations here are these alleged studies documents and these then the the Iranians refusal to go along with all this is what makes them the bad guy that can't be dealt with that maybe we need to bomb them because they just won't cooperate with the IAEA right and just one more point in regard to the to the request for the for the military secrets the Iranians actually were prepared to accommodate the the request for some of the other things that they want that the IAEA were requested to do that is visit some of the places that were mentioned in these documents at one point there was actually according to this is my interview with Olli Heineman who's now at Harvard University Kennedy School he told me that the the Iranians had agreed to allow them to visit some of these sites but then they changed their mind and I have to believe that this was a political decision based on the fact that the that the Iranian that the IAEA also requested these military secrets and that the decision was made that in order to safeguard the the position of Iran in in relation to its rights to to keep military secrets away from the IAEA and the rest of the international community but they had to draw the line and say you know unless the IAEA changes its stance we're not going to cooperate with them anymore well now people might remember back in November of 2007 the National Intelligence Council that's the head of the CIA and the other 16 intelligence agencies they came together and put out a national intelligence estimate that said the Iranians do not now have a nuclear weapons program they stopped it in 2003 now is there any other indication that they ever had a nuclear weapons program in the time I don't know how many years leading up to 2003 like it says in that NIE other than these alleged studies documents Dr. Porter?
What the NIE found or the what the intelligence community found in the process of doing the research on the national intelligence estimate in 2007 was multiple sources which indicated that the military people among others were military officers were upset with what was characterized by the Washington Post, New York Times and I think Los Angeles Times as well as a halt or as a stoppage of work on nuclear weapons but the question is what in fact they actually heard or saw in notebooks or intercepted conversations that's not at all clear all right well we'll have to pick that up on the other side of this break it's Dr. Gareth Porter journalist for Interpress Service and his new piece is out in the Middle East Policy Journal the Iran nuclear alleged studies documents the evidence of fraud we'll be right back all right y'all welcome back to the show it's anti-war radio I'm Scott Horton I'm talking with Gareth Porter for the 110th time or something on this show and we're talking about his new piece in a journal called Middle East Policy put out by the Middle East Policy Council it's called the Iran nuclear alleged studies documents the evidence of fraud and when we went out to break Gareth I had asked you was there any other indication other than these documents that you're about to explain to us why they're bogus that says that the Iranians ever had a nuclear weapons program even leading up to 2003 when the national intelligence estimate of 2007 said that they quit and you said yeah well they say that they heard a guy complaining that it had been shut down but is there anything else no nothing else and I just wanted to add with regard to that evidence that one had I mean you know we just don't know exactly what they in fact had in their hands because of the news coverage that only gives us one version of of what they found and we have no way of knowing how accurate that description of what they found is but it's a very vague description of of something that is supposed to correspond with a halt now I want to make a general point about the intelligence community with regard to the Iranian nuclear program the record of that intelligence community over the last two decades on this subject is so bad and and so in one direction that is to say so exaggerating the desire of the Iranian government for a nuclear weapon as fast as possible that it is impossible for me to believe that they were not in fact essentially reaching a compromise here that they would acknowledge that Iran does not now have a an active nuclear weapons related program or a nuclear weapons research program as long as they could say that yes we can now ascertain that they did in fact have one before that's very easy for me to believe because the entire history of national intelligence estimates and their findings their main conclusions is that they were negotiated they were negotiated uh sort of differences between two points of view one of which was more extreme with regard to its view of of Iranian intentions uh and the other was more moderate in terms of saying we don't really know what their intentions are so uh you know I think it's entirely not just plausible but likely that this uh finding that this this conclusion that they did in fact have a nuclear weapons program in this period uh was uh in the way of a compromise between these two points of view well sure and you know we've heard on the upcoming nie which has been put off and put off uh on iran's nuclear program that uh from uh phil drawley for example says he has sources inside the government who know about this and they tell him that they're still debating this they don't have any new evidence uh to say that things have changed but the politics are such that they need to compromise even more and basically put an even worse spin on the very same facts the ones that you know as you point out they were already spinning four years ago that sounds precisely right to me absolutely okay now so let's get into point one through eight because if all this hype about the iranians are being dishonest and they're not being forthcoming and they're refusing uh to answer our questions are very reasonable questions and they're stonewalling us and they must be preparing to wipe israel off the face of the earth if all that's based on these alleged studies documents and you say i shouldn't believe that they're real i want to hear why very good uh let's run through the eight points that i've laid out here and detailed in the study the study that has been published the first one uh the one that i think is really most important most dramatic if you will is that the so-called warhead schematics are the drawings of i think about 18 different ways of redesigning the uh the nose cone the warhead so-called of the shahab free missile uh is uh you know the these drawings were supposedly the the smoking gun evidence that they were uh about to come up with a a new uh missile that would uh redesign missile that would have a nuclear weapon attached to it and what i found uh from putting various pieces of information together is that these schematics actually show uh a the warhead of a missile that is shahab three that was no longer in development by the iranian uh government by the iranian defense ministry they had already abandoned the shahab three in favor of a new and improved version which was given in a completely different name the goddard one and which was first tested in july i believe it was or august 2004 and when they tested that missile there were pictures associated with it which proved that the new warhead was completely different from the one that was shown in these schematics that were alleged to be part of this this nuclear weapons program so uh long story short this is i think the most important piece of evidence that these were fraudulent documents well and you really explain in the piece too that nobody really knew uh you you went back and checked all the media and everything nobody knew that they were coming out with this new design it made perfect sense to think that someone forging these documents would say yeah here we're going to make it look like they're trying to fit a nuclear weapon on top of this missile that we all know they use but then meanwhile it turns out that nope they'd already secretly abandoned that old missile for this new one and so the people who forge the documents are just busted basically there's no way it doesn't make any sense and you really do deconstruct all this piece by piece in the article doesn't make any sense in the world to think that they would be making a nuclear bomb to fit a missile that they've already discarded they're entirely busted and and when i quizzed ollie heineman on this this is really the key point i think when i confronted ollie heineman to harvard a few months ago uh he really did not have an answer to this his first answer was well it's clear that this outfit which was doing the schematics was really not working for the missile program at all well okay how can it be that you're you know you're secretly doing a nuclear weapons program and the primary evidence of it is that you're redesigning the warhead uh for your missile and yet you're not even in touch with the the missile program you there's no relationship to the missile program well that doesn't make any sense at all of course um and then he went on to say though this is this could just be a kind of feasibility study you know nothing more than that um you know it's really quite lame and uh i think the the real uh importance of this is that uh the just as you said the the people who faked these documents had every reason to believe that the shahab three was still the missile there was no advance warning as uh the lead uh the lead author of the u uh sorry the iiss study of the iranian missile program pointed out to me uh before the test of august of 2004 so let's face it was the israelis behind this the israelis uh thought that they were on sound ground but they were caught off base here yeah well and as far as the israelis being behind it we'll get to that but now real quick well we don't even have time uh when we get back we're gonna spend uh the next half of this hour uh going over the rest of the eight reasons uh why people ought to question the credibility of these so-called alleged studies again the entire basis basically for the americans in the international community to beat the iranians over the head with the non-proliferation treaty and the safeguards agreement that they are entirely within and uh and uh obeying um and yet we get to sit here and pretend all day that they're in violation of something based on these documents uh that really have no credibility at all the piece again is called the iran nuclear alleged studies documents the evidence of fraud by dr gareth porter it's in the journal middle east policy put out by the middle east policy council we will be running it at antiwar.com and that'll be antiwar.com/porter hang tight we'll be right back y'all all right y'all welcome back to the show it's anti-war radio online is dr gareth porter antiwar.com/porter and we're talking about this new piece in the middle east policy journal it's called iran nuclear alleged studies documents the evidence of fraud and um well i guess if you missed the summary of what we're talking about here go back to the beginning i want to pick it up where we left off which is point number two and i guess you know from the look of it here gareth we could sort of make this point two four and six and and what have you because a lot of it has to do with an iranian company called kimia madan and how uh the fact of this uh kimia madan's existence means that the military in iran is making nuclear weapons and they're going to wipe israel off the map with it yeah kimia madan is a company that clearly did have a contract with the iranian government uh related to uh the nuclear program at least indirectly that is the uh in or uh the or conversion project the the or um uh processing uh project that the atomic energy agency of iran had hired this company to help set up uh but the key thing here about the laptop documents is that they include documents that suggest that there was such a thing as a project five which had a few uh sub projects in it one of which is a project for uranium conversion which is given the um the number of project code number project 5 15 this or processing project uh it turns out because iran turned all the relevant documents over to the iaea turns out that this uh code number was given to the project two and a half years before the beginning of this purported nuclear weapons related research project by the uh the atomic energy organization the civilian atomic energy organization not by the military and so the entire premise of the laptop documents that kimia madan was working for the military as part of this purported project is simply busted and as you show again in the piece it's perfectly reasonable to see how foragers would think that there's a hole in the information available big enough that we can fit a secret iranian military project in there it wasn't until after they forged these documents that more and more and more information came out to show that no it was the civilian atomic energy agency and not the military that had created this company to do this work well this is interesting you see i think that in fact i'm firmly convinced that the israelis did in fact believe that kimia madan was working for the military that the military was really behind the management of this uh uranium ore mine and that that they were simply acting on their own suspicions when they created uh these documents including this one specifically that had kimia madan working uh specifically for the military but uh what they didn't anticipate is that the iranians could prove that this company in fact was under contract only with the uh with the civilian atomic energy uh agency so uh that that's where again they were caught off uh off base and proven to be uh basically uh fraud and now do i understand right that this project uh was basically the bench level laser enrichment uh green salt project or this is also includes uranium mining and and conversion to yellow cake and everything i was i was not clear there there is more than one alleged project as part of this uh or sub projects part of this project five one of them was this ore processing project but then another one was uh just the one that you refer to the green salt uh sub project and in fact strangely enough the entire collection of documents were once called the green salt documents uh simply because of this one bench scale uh outline of a process for excuse me uranium conversion uh which which had kimia madan's name on it and uh the interesting thing about this bench scale uh setup shown in the drawing of course it's not available once you know you've never seen it unless you're part of the intelligence community or the iaea but the interesting thing is that the iranians took one look at it and they said hey wait a minute there's obvious flaws in this this doesn't make any sense and in this case had to actually publicly admit that the iranians are correct that this one page flow sheet actually contained fundamental errors indicating that the people who did it weren't really that sharp well you know i had a point of confusion actually about this part of the article because um i guess what i thought and i'm no nuclear scientist you know but i know doc prather and what i thought was that the laser enrichment i mean assuming the truth of this at all uh that the bench level um laser enrichment would be to convert uh the refined uranium ore into uranium tetrafluoride five fluorides uh fluoride gas attached to one uranium atom in the molecule and yet it's uranium hexafluoride six fluorides per uranium uh that is the gas that is needed to be injected into the spinning centrifuges in order to actually enrich the uranium and they already have a plant at ishifan which makes the hexafluoride and so why in the world would they want to enrich up to tetrafluoride green salt when you don't need that for anything they're already skipping that step down the street well i think that's absolutely correct i mean you know i'm not sure you make that point in the piece do you pardon i'm not sure you make that point in the piece because you make that i thought i read in there that you had hexafluoride would be produced by the laser enrichment maybe that was an editing mistake or i'm not sure maybe it's my mistake i'm not sure about that uh that specific point but the more general point that it was not necessary is obviously uh correct that the uh you know they already had this process for uranium conversion which they had tested you know time after time they had not just you know experimented with it they had uh they had tested it for years and they were satisfied that this was the way they were going to go and the idea that they were going to start all over again with another process is simply ridiculous and this is to me this is the stupidest thing in the entire collection of documents because it's just inexplicable that they the the israelis believed that they could get away with uh you know with such a uh an error uh such an obvious uh inconsistency with the known fact okay now in the program in a second and i mean pardon me in the last segment i want to talk as much as possible as much as possible about the indications of where these documents come from the israelis as you just indicated but i wanted to finish up in this segment we still have a couple of minutes left and i wanted you to please talk a little bit about the lack of official markings and any other of the major indications of fraud that you think need to be highlighted here gary okay so so pick and choose of the remaining ones which ones are most important let's begin with the uh lack of security markings and as well as official stamps on those documents that are actual letters from official uh offices of the iranian military setup um or to or to the iranian military uh this was the point that the iranian ambassador to the pointed out to me uh that was an obvious uh question mark about the documents from the very beginning how can you have documents that are supposedly part of a top secret uh nuclear weapons uh project which don't have security markings on and so i asked the senior official of the iaea remaining unnamed uh because he refused to be identified oh how what about this and uh the the official admitted that well that is an issue that does have some relevance here but he said uh we we don't know the answer we don't know whether there were uh such stamps on the originals because we have not been able to find that out all right hold it right there and we can pick up a couple more of the important points if you want on the other side of this break then we're going to talk about the communist terrorist cult the mujahideen al-khalq uh it was bo and t then bo died now it's just t rules that thing and their role in this as well as the israeli messiah it's gareth porter from interpress service on anti-war radio we'll be right back all right kiddos welcome back to the show it's anti-war radio i'm scott horton and i'm talking with dr gareth porter about his new piece the iran nuclear alleged studies documents the evidence of fraud and uh it's really the summation of a lot of reporting that he's done on this very question over the last few years it's in the journal middle east policy put out by the middle east policy council and i'm going to be calling them this afternoon for reprint right so we can run it at anti-war.com and now the the issue of these alleged studies is very important these are the documents that the americans and then therefore the so-called international community use to basically pretend that the iranians are in defiance of the legitimate demands of the international community that they uh you know be above board and stop violating their international agreements when in fact they're not a violation of their international agreements but for the evidence in this so-called smoking laptop and um the so-called alleged studies documents and so dr porter is going through the reasons uh why not to believe that these documents are even legitimate at all uh you know the core of the war party's case against the iranians and now when we left off we were at the uh stamps and seals that are lacking from these documents dr porter go ahead yes let me take you back one of the arguments of if not the main argument that is made about this issue is that well you know when you have these documents that have been purloined or captured or whatever from the other side uh you can't keep the original uh stamps and uh well you can't keep the security markings on there because they would be uh indicators of exactly which person had given the document to the uh to the intelligence community or gotten it out of iran and so forth and and that in other words that the lack of such markings would be simply a normal practice by the intelligence community to safeguard the identity of the iranian who might have provided these documents so the question then becomes let's just let's take that as a legitimate uh legitimate reason for not having the security markings on these documents as they are being circulated in the iaea the question then is okay is the iaea interested in doing a serious investigation of this or not if they're interested in doing a serious investigation did they ask the united states government for a copy of the originals to see whether they had the security markings on them in the originals and if not why not and so i asked that question to the uh this the senior iaea official uh and he admitted that they had admitted in effect that they had not asked the united states because he said they didn't know and uh i asked only heinemann the same question when i interviewed him he refused to answer the question and so i think it's very clear that the the net result of this is that the iaea was not really interested in doing a serious investigation because they they didn't ask the obvious question they didn't ask for the same evidence that they asked for in the case of a niger gate document they insisted on getting the original document so they could examine it and after two or three weeks the u.s government finally coughed it up they didn't do that in this case right now of course after two or three minutes they had finished debunking those niger uranium documents using google back at the time okay now um so tell me a little bit about the various narratives spun by the washington post and german newspapers and others around the world about how the americans came to possess these documents in the first place and and how where you think they really came from this is one of the most interesting aspects of the whole story of the laptop documents it's the it's the narrative as you correctly put it of how they came out of iran supposedly where did they really come from who brought them out uh whose documents were these the original cover story the one that was published by the post and the times in 19 excuse me 2005 was and this is of course from anonymous u.s intelligence sources was that these documents came from a laptop which had been owned by an iranian engineer who was part of this purported nuclear weapons uh program in iran well it turns out that that's really not true it turns out that uh these documents were not brought out on a laptop at least the current cover story is that uh they weren't they weren't on a laptop actually at all they were in some other form presumably as cds and they were put on a laptop by presumably the united states or somebody else after they came out of iran so you know then then the additional uh you know sort of new narrative is that the person who got them out of iran was in fact an iranian businessman who was doing business with the government doing construction on all of these nuclear facilities well that's interesting because uh somebody who was doing construction would never have been given the kind of access that uh would be demanded to have all of these various parts of this secret nuclear weapons program brought together in one place so the whole story just reeks of fraud from the very beginning all right now before we get into the positive evidence that you have uh of the involvement of the israelis uh the mujahideen al-khalq or uh inferences or what have you i wanted to get to the the one last negative which was that muhammad al-barad i never believed in these documents correct that is correct as far as we know uh from the very beginning when they first arrived he was very skeptical uh that that they were uh not authentic and never gave never lent his name uh to the documents as being a credible source of documentation on this question and uh you know this this was uh reported by the two israeli uh journalists the two israeli co-authors of the book on the iranian nuclear program uh published in 2007 if i remember correctly but they said uh that high officials of the iaea were uh were not believers in the authenticity of the documents from the beginning um and you know that the israelis pressed uh al-barad i very strongly through the their european allies particularly the germans and the french and the british uh to publish uh the a report that was based on the laptop documents essentially um and al-barad i refused to buckle under and that's when the europeans then leaked the document that had uh that he had supposedly kept in his drawer uh which which uh he refused to publish along with a one of their uh regular reports and so there was a sort of campaign through the news media particularly associated press afp publishing stories accusing al-barad of keeping all these secret uh the secret information secret intelligence about the iranian nuclear program away from the world's public and all this was orchestrated as the israelis themselves admitted by the israeli foreign ministry and the israeli ambassador to the iaea okay now so give us every indication you've got where these documents really came from how they ended up in the hands of the cia well look the the israelis are obviously the the main uh uh country the main intelligence service which had both the high degree of of motivation as well as the capability and the the opportunity to manufacture these documents and a key piece of information here which people should know about is that the israelis had in 2003 when these documents had to have been fabricated they already had in being a part of uh mossad uh international intelligence agency of israel which was devoted entirely to trying to influence the world's media and governments with regard to the iranian nuclear program they were leaking information including alleged or purported documents that were you know supposed to have been within the iranian government the documents of the iranian government on this subject uh that in my mind is very convincing evidence that this was simply the primary piece of work that was done by that office of mossad uh in 2003 and uh you know we also know that the people in the cia some of the analysts in cia were quite skeptical of these when they first came along and they figured that they were from israel because the israelis had been trying to pressure the cia to adopt uh the the israeli viewpoint on the iranian nuclear program uh completely and the cia was somewhat reluctant uh cia was a bit more objective than the israelis are about this and there was a lot of tension between the cia and mossad during that period when these documents first arrived george tennant did not like what the israelis were trying to do uh figured the israelis were trying to set the united states up for support for an attack on iran as as was reported by a pro-israeli uh uh news agency at the time so uh so we have you know a number of reasons to see the israelis as being behind this all right well uh also we didn't get to talk too much about the mujahideen i'll call but i urge everybody to look up this great article the iran nuclear alleged studies documents the evidence of fraud hopefully soon enough it'll be running at antiwar.com and just google gareth porter iran laptop and you'll find lots of great journalism on this issue going back years and years thank you so much thanks so much for having me scott that's dr gareth porter y'all
