All right, y'all.
Welcome back to this here thing.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my radio show, anti-war radio.
And our last guest on the show today is our friend, Gareth Porter, who just won this very important Martha Gellhorn award for his investigative journalism, two of them at truthout.org, the lies that sold Obama's escalation in Afghanistan and how McChrystal and Petraeus built an indiscriminate killing machine.
Congratulations, Gareth, and welcome back to the show.
Hey, thanks very much, Scott.
I appreciate it.
That's really a big deal, this Gellhorn prize, huh?
Well, it's not a big deal by the standards of, you know, the better known journalistic prizes for sure.
But I value it very much because it's associated with somebody who had genuine integrity as a journalist.
She stood for something throughout her career.
She was consistent.
She was anti-militarist.
She was anti-fascist.
She was anti-imperialist.
And from the very beginning, when she went to Spain and covered the Spanish civil war through World War II to the wars of the Cold War, United States war in Vietnam, and then later invasions by the United States of some very small countries in the Western hemisphere.
She covered them as well.
So, you know, it's really a great thrill to be associated with that.
All right.
Well, if I was some, you know, a mucky muck or something had a word named after me, I'd give it to you.
You're the number one, best, most reliable, most consistent debunker of the most important lie the war party is pushing at any given time.
And they push a lot of different lies about a lot of different wars.
And well, there's a reason that I've interviewed you more than 150 times by the WordPress web address count anyway, at antiwar.com/radio.
I didn't know it had reached that exalted figure.
Yeah.
Well, that's far more than anyone else.
And it's because I want to talk to you about everything you wrote.
And a lot of times about things you haven't written yet, but I know that I want to hear what you've got to say about it anyway, like our first topic today, the Moscow talks where, for some reason, our beloved leader failed somehow to reach an agreement with those intransigent Iranians on their nuclear weapons program.
Gareth, what do you say?
Well, you know, one thing that's so interesting about these talks, starting with the talks in Turkey in April, I guess it was, and then in Baghdad in May and now in Moscow in June is the degree to which the Obama administration has been leaking its position ahead of time to the news media.
I think it's rather unexampled.
I think it's quite unusual.
Perhaps there's no other example of quite like this, where the incumbent administration has basically told the news media before these very important negotiations exactly what its position is going to be.
I should qualify that perhaps by saying at least, you know, most of the position, what the Obama administration was saying ahead of time was that we will demand that Iran turn over its stocks of 20% enriched uranium, stop, of course, producing it, and then will demand that they essentially close down and ultimately dismantle the whole GOM or Fordow site for Richmond site, which, of course, was the cause of a lot of controversy back in 2009.
And these are positions, of course, as we've talked about in your program before, which were demanded by Israel ahead of time back in March when there were consultations between the Israelis and the United States and its European allies.
So I mean, it's very clear that the Obama administration was bowing to what it felt would be a minimum requirement demanded by the Israelis.
But what was not discussed, interestingly, and I mean, I think this turns out to have been probably the most critical question of all, the most critical problem of all, is the administration's position on what it would do to deal with the question of sanctions relief.
And, of course, the Iranians had made it very clear that this was one of the things that they would demand.
This was a minimum position that they would be demanding.
And the fact that the administration basically refused to say anything at all beforehand about what it would do on sanctions, I think, was really quite telling.
And the point that I'm trying to make here is that I think there's been virtually no change at all from the very beginning of these talks on the part of the Obama administration.
It's basically continuing to make the same demands and to offer nothing in return for these concessions by the Iranians, which I still believe the Iranians would be willing to make, except for the shutdown of the Richmond facility itself.
I don't think they're going to agree to that.
But to stop the 20 percent enrichment and to ship the 20 percent enriched uranium out of the country are things that they have more or less intimated they'd be willing to accept if, in fact, they're getting something significant in return, meaning at least a significant down payment on the essentially turning back the extreme sanctions against Iran, including the oil sanctions that have been imposed more recently.
So to what end?
They just want to put off the war till after the election or put off the peace till after the election?
Or what do they think they're doing?
Well, I think the end here primarily, I mean, the most immediate end is very clear that Obama wants to be in a position to be able to say, you know, there was no distance between my position in the talks and the position of Israel.
And, of course, he's going to be able to say that because there's not a single thing that he proposed in those talks that Israel didn't demand and didn't support.
You know, the Israelis now, since the Baghdad talks and through the Alaska talks, have started to say now, you know, they want the administration to stop sort of talking about a partial solution.
They want to go to the end product, which is to get a commitment from the Iranians that they will stop all enrichment.
Now, that's where this is going to be tough for the Obama administration, because that, of course, is going to be a point at which the talks will completely break down.
There'll be no future at all if they make that demand.
And that would be the signal then for a much higher level of tensions.
And I would argue, at least, that the result is likely to be an increase, a spike in the oil prices worldwide, which are going to affect the domestic political re-election bid of President Obama himself.
Well, you know, when it comes to all the manufactured controversy over the cleanup at the Parchin facility, this military facility in Iran, where, you know, when that alarmist IAEA report came out late last year, you took the lead, of course, in thoroughly debunking the claim that this Soviet nuclear weapons scientist helped them build the implosion system testing ground there at Parchin and all this.
But I wonder, is this just another, you know, one of a hundred different pieces of MEK level bogus intelligence in the, mostly in the media stream, or is this something altogether more important?
Is something important hinge that I'm missing on, you know, this particular lie?
I think this is a more important level of, of lie.
And I'll try to explain why.
Very little time before the next break.
Sorry.
Yeah.
I think what's going on here is essentially that the IAEA must function as a kind of a mechanism to keep the Iranians from being able to present even a minimum defense of saying, you know, we are in fact cooperating with the IAEA.
We are working on clarifying the, the issues, the, the charges that have been made against us, the IAEA is committed, as we know now from the WikiLeaks cables, to being in the American corner, I believe was the term that was used.
And I think that's what's really going on here.
And I'll try to explain why.
All right.
It's Gareth Porter from Interpret Service and from truthout.org, recent winner of the Martha Gellhorn award for his great journalism.
We feature every bit of it, of course, in his archive at antiwar.com/Porter.
And we'll be right back after this to finish up talking about Iran, their nuclear program and related issues.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Gareth Porter when it comes to a war propaganda about Iran, he's debunked each and every bit of it.
Find his archive at antiwar.com/Porter, IPS news.net.
And a couple of very important ones, of course, at truthout, just won him the Martha Gellhorn award about the, both of those about the so-called coin doctrine and its application in Afghanistan, a real tragedy and a real great journalism, all right.
So we're talking about, it sounds like maybe inside baseball kind of thing, but I think it's important because it's a great example of how it is that they do this.
It's always something.
In fact, a friend sent me a note that says, how come they just are always dragging their feet and acting such with such obfuscation and refusing to cooperate when it comes to the nuclear issue.
And it's not that it's just that they're accused of that every day.
It never stops.
And occasionally there's a new excuse for it, but people think, Hey, where there's that much smoke, there's gotta be some fire going on.
What is it with those Iranians anyway?
Well, there is, there is one point that I think is worth mentioning in regard to that person's note, and that is that, uh, you know, you're right, they, the, uh, Iranians get accused of things, uh, with great regularity and they mount up over the years and the Iranian approach to this is, is quite important to understand.
And that is that the Iranians don't immediately come out with all of the information that they could bring to bear to, to, uh, uh, refute and debunk these arguments.
What they do is wait until the opportunity comes along where they can do it all at once and make a maximum impact.
And at the same time, get promised something in return, some, something in the, in the form of, okay.
You know, in other words, we, we, the IAEA will give you a, some, some kind of passing grade here that you've actually, you know, you've actually done a good job here that you've actually answered these questions and we will agree that we're not going to continue to make these charges anymore.
So, so the Iranian approach to this is very much geared to the notion of, as I've said before, I think on your show, acquiring, essentially negotiating chips that they play in one big game where they can get the maximum return for, for their playing the chips.
And, and so that's very, very much the, uh, the essence of this, of this problem.
Now, when we come to this latest set of, uh, of charges, the idea that the Iranians have been, uh, cleaning up, sanitizing this, uh, Parchin, uh, site where supposedly there's a, uh, explosives containment chamber.
Of course, I don't believe that that containment chamber actually exists.
I think it was a fiction created by Israel.
Let's keep, keep that clear.
But, uh, that's what the IAEA reported in its November, uh, 2011 report.
So that's where we get the repeated news stories, uh, accompanied by, uh, or eventually followed by, uh, actual satellite images showing, uh, things like water trickling down, uh, from, uh, from within this building, it looks like, um, and, and earth having been moved, uh, from the site or near the site, um, and, and small buildings, uh, near the, the major building where they say not the major building, the larger building where they say the containment chamber was located, uh, having been demolished, all these things actually did happen.
Something happened on that site, but, uh, if you, uh, if you follow this closely enough, and you understand that the Iranians know that everything that's happening at that site is being photographed by satellites, maybe some spy satellites, as well as commercial satellites, and all this stuff is going to show up in the media within a matter of days, or at least a matter of weeks, you know, that they're doing this for a specific political purpose.
And that political purpose is to bait the United States, the IAEA, uh, the Europeans, uh, to, to, uh, enhance the, the, uh, the value of sending an IAEA delegation to Parchin to check it out and in return, then making some concession to Iran with regard to this agreement that's supposed to be negotiated between Iran and the IAEA on the terms of their cooperation, uh, to complete this investigation.
Because again, the, the IAEA refuses to say, even if the Iranians answer every question perfectly, they refuse to say, okay, we'll, we'll stop asking questions about that and we'll have an end point to the investigation.
They want to be able to continue it indefinitely.
And the Iranians are trying to find a way to negotiate, uh, from a position of strength so that they can, uh, stop the, the IAEA from doing that.
Yeah.
But are the Americans so blind that they're actually falling for this?
They're all a bunch of David Albright's running around like chickens with their head cut off, or they can tell just as easy as you can tell, because I don't think anyone, I don't understand how anyone is supposed to believe that the Iranians believe that if they get out a bulldozer and a hose, that they can wash away all radioactive evidence of their test of a sophisticated implosion system on radioactive material, whether fissile or not.
It's stupid.
It's absurd.
Uh, anyone with a minimum of understanding of this problem would immediately, as you indicate, no, any cab driver, any bartender, any, anybody who doesn't typically just believe what they're told is going to see right through this.
Come on.
So I'm, you know, I'm quite convinced David Albright knows perfectly well that that's a lie.
Okay.
I'm, I'm willing to say that, uh, you know, uh, in court, if need be, uh, because he, he understands that fundamental principle.
I'm not sure that, uh, people in the Obama administration are smart enough to absolutely grasp that, but I'm not sure.
They're just looking for an excuse anyway, is the point.
Of course they are.
Yes, exactly.
So, so that's, that's the set of dynamics that we're dealing with.
Um, you know, it's convenient for them to hit the Iranians with this, uh, from the Obama administration's point of view, they always feel, oh, well, if we keep up the propaganda offensive against the Iranians, it weakens them at the negotiating table and they're more likely to, uh, make a concession.
That's what they've been saying all along going back to 2009.
Uh, of course that's ridiculous, but that's, that is the kind of semi official doctrine, uh, negotiating doctrine of the Obama administration.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like if they really want the best deal, they probably already passed it up.
And the further they get from, you know, the original swap of 2009 offer, or even the, uh, Turkish and Brazilian followup to that, the worse the deal is going to be, and they're going to have to end up accepting it anyway.
Well, there's no doubt in my mind that the Obama administration would prefer to be able to negotiate with the Iranians on the basis of saying, okay, we know that, you know, we were going to have to, uh, honor, uh, and acknowledge the right of Iran to, uh, enrich uranium in their, on their home territory.
And therefore we'll begin with that as a principle for these negotiations, but they know that, uh, they'll get hit by the, uh, Israeli Bobby and, uh, by Israel they'll be attacked mercilessly.
And so that's off the table now until the election.
So, I mean, basically the, the whole possibility of, of any real negotiation went out the door as soon as the election campaign really began in earnest in March or April.
And then again, you were saying, did he say what your expectation is for after the election, if anything could be done, assuming that Obama wins, which I think is the default since it doesn't really matter what he does, his supporters still support him?
Well, I mean, certainly it improves the chances somewhat, whether he has the wherewithal to really be able to go back to where they were before the election campaign, as anybody's guess.
I certainly think that it's going to be difficult to rewind the clock here.
Uh, having committed himself to this hard line, um, walking it back.
It's not going to be easy, but who knows?
Maybe it's, and then they'll say, but the midterms are coming up.
Right, right.
Exactly.
There's always something.
There's always.
Yeah.
Uh, that's exactly the case.
That's the thing.
Um, when it comes to, uh, the Democrats excuses or whether it comes to the accusations against Iran, it's always something every day we hear.
It's always something every day with these.
Yeah.
And then there's more than ridiculous war hawks.
There's more than one factor that's working against an honest set of negotiations.
I mean, we've already talked about the Israeli, uh, factor in the Israeli lobby factor, but also you have, of course, the whole doctrine of, of the U S national security state, which is, uh, based on the idea that the United States can, and therefore must coerce anyone who is clearly weaker than the United States in, in any particular set of diplomatic, uh, talks.
I mean, that's kind of, uh, you know, the way these people, uh, think, uh, that's the way they're trained to think.
And, and even otherwise intelligent people, uh, will then, you know, say the most absurd things like, you know, for example, the idea that even though it's recognized that the U S, uh, threat to attack Iran, uh, saying that it's on the table makes absolutely no difference to the Iranians.
They don't believe it.
Uh, you know, these people continue to say, well, we have to keep this on the table because you never remove, uh, a, a point of leverage.
And of course that is, that's, uh, you know, a hegemonic power, a way of thinking, and they can't seem to break the habit.
So I think that goes against, uh, the possibility of, of real serious negotiations as well.
I admit, I'm a little bit surprised at how clumsy it is.
Uh, but I guess they really are that clumsy.
It's not that different really in kind from the, well, on timetable wise it is, but the Rambo-Yea accord of 1999, where Madeline Albright said to the Serbs surrender everything, including every square inch of your palace where you live and the rest of it or else.
And then they called it a peace accord.
It was the deal he could not possibly accept.
Well, this is, this is one of my hobby horses, the idea that, uh, uh, a power like the United States, which has been, has been, and continues to be for, for want of a, uh, alternative, the dominant power in world politics cannot help itself because of the way in which people are trained to think that the, the way they learn to think both in school, in, in, uh, national security institutions and in American politics to think about us relations with the rest of the world.
I just yesterday, you know, you have a quote, uh, in the Washington post outlook section attributed to the deputy national security advisor, um, uh, Ben Rhodes, uh, who says, uh, we're not here to preside over the decline of the United States as a world power.
We're what we're trying to do is to give the United States another 50 years of leadership.
And of course you can substitute the word dominance because that's what the, that's, what's really meant.
And, and this, I think is, is a big part of the problem that, uh, these people have been so imbued with the notion of, uh, the necessity for the, of the United States to be dominant and all that goes with that, that they cannot break the habit of all these notions that go with, with the idea of dominance in the world.
Well, you know, we're talking with Phil Giraldi earlier about how thin the veneer of this war on terrorism is getting when you talk about the invasion of all of Africa and it's always so obvious, you know, tissue thin, the excuse of terrorism there, when it's clearly all about choking off energy resources to other powers in the world and that kind of thing.
Um, it seems, you know, more and more obvious that the consensus, especially, you know, after George Bush and Obama, wasn't the opposite of that at all.
Really?
Maybe just toned down a little bit, that same kind of policy.
I think at least it's becoming more and more obvious to people that, you know, just because America's, uh, screaming and yelling about Iran doesn't mean that Iran necessarily did anything that really, Let me, let me come back, uh, on this question of, of what motivates the U.S. to, to get more, uh, militarily involved in Africa, for example.
I mean, I'm, I'm not, uh, ready to accept the idea that what's really going on here is that the military is going to control natural resources in Africa.
Um, I've heard that argument many times.
Of course, I know, I know that it's, uh, it's, it's easy to believe that, but on the other hand, um, you know, you have the Chinese who are much more successful about acquiring resources from Africa without having a single soldier there.
So it kind of raises the question, Hmm, what's going on here?
You know?
Um, yeah, I, the fact is we don't need a military presence, uh, to obtain, uh, the resources from Africa.
It's done through commercial means and the Chinese have shown us how to do it.
But I mean, the fact is, well, yeah, but that's the whole point is the Chinese are better businessmen than the Americans.
So the Americans pull out their gun and cheat because they're cheaters.
Well, I understand that argument, but I, I'm, I, you know, there's something else going on, which is that the military is feathering its own nest by doing this.
They're keeping themselves in business.
That's what they're really all about.
Uh, I, I just don't buy the idea that they're, you know, stand-ins for businessmen at all.
I don't think they care about that.
They don't care about resources.
Although I think that's oversimplifying.
That's kind of conflating two arguments.
One, that they're just the front, like for the men in Houston who just want to steal the oil.
But the other is I think more of a Pentagon ish point of view, which is we just want to keep the other guy from being in charge of developing it.
We want to control the root.
In fact, Michael Clare wrote that whole thing.
I interviewed him.
He wrote that thing for, um, Tom dispatch last week about how Chinese energy policy was all about just dominating as much as they possibly can in order to, uh, of course, uh, narrow Russia's ability to monopolize, uh, the supply to Europe and to keep China, which has very little domestic energy supply from being too dominant in, uh, developing it elsewhere in the world.
And the way to do that again is cheating.
You put your army men there instead of, uh, having a better bid Afghanistan where we're depriving the Chinese of their access to resources in Afghanistan.
I'm laughing.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, no, I mean, I think in Afghanistan, nobody's going to really, uh, develop anything there, but, uh, not so sure about that.
I mean, there's lots of Chinese activity, uh, mining activity, which is, uh, going on despite the war and, uh, will continue once the war is over.
And I mean, you know, the military will have been completely irrelevant, I guess is the point I'm trying to make to that.
And, and I'm just not convinced that the military really cares about, uh, natural resources, except as an excuse.
I mean, you know, they, they use it routinely as a justification for what they're doing.
I mean, they always have.
Let's never forget that.
Right.
Pretending that none of us will be able to have gas to get to work.
It's not for them getting that oil for us.
Always been the military's number one excuse for what it's doing that, oh, you've got to have us to protect resources where, which was of course, a complete lie.
Right.
They're the biggest waste of resources on the planet.
All right.
Well, we're way over time.
Thank you very much as always for your time, Gareth.
My pleasure as always.
Thanks.
God.
See it.
Everybody.
That's the great Gareth Porter.
Uh, truthout.org for his pieces, the lies that sold Obama's escalation in Afghanistan and how McChrystal and Petraeus built an indiscriminate killing machine.
Both of those, uh, won him the Martha Gellhorn award.
Uh, also he's written a million important articles for interpress service, IPS news.net and, uh, virtually all of this for anything other than, I don't know, a couple for, uh, the America prospect years ago or something.
All of it is available at antiwar.com/Porter.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks very much for listening.
