07/03/12 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm in.
Our next guest is Gareth Porter, the great debunker from Interpress Service, IPSnews.net, also Truthout.
He's been writing for them more and more over there at Truthout.org.
Welcome back, Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm fine, thanks very much Scott, glad to be back.
Good, well I'm happy to have you here.
This article is very important.
Some people might not want to understand why it's important.
It might sound a little bit too far inside baseball to some people, but I think it's so important the way each and every time the war party comes up with some nonsense about Iran's nuclear program and why it means at least it's another, you know, slight, another bit of smoke that must mean fire, another reason that someday we're going to have to bomb them.
It's so important that you just debunk it all and undercut it all.
And there's some very important, really this time around, some very important, very big accusations against Iran that, to paraphrase the CNN version, Gareth, aha, we caught them testing the implosion systems for nuclear bombs.
How do you explain that, Gareth Porter?
So that's where this article comes from.
This is the famous, what a friend of mine in the U.S., he used to be an intelligence official in the U.S. government, has called the Chamber of Horrors.
That is the famous bomb test chamber at Parchin.
Parchin, I guess, is the correct pronunciation.
This is the bomb test chamber that was reported by the IAEA last November and spawned a whole universe of press coverage of this supposed evidence that the Iranians had been testing components of a nuclear weapon in this test chamber at Parchin since roughly 2000.
And so this has been, I think, arguably the most important episode in this long history, stretching back several years, which I know you have talked about many times on your show, of the accusation that Iran had a covert nuclear weapons research program, both between 2001 and 2003.
And then, of course, more spectacularly, the Israelis have put forward evidence very indirectly through the IAEA that there has been testing since 2003.
So, I mean, this is, as you say, it's very important.
And I think what my story in Truthout has done is to marshal all of the evidence, the facts that show that this whole story about the bomb chamber, what I call the bomb chamber, the bomb test chamber at Parchin, is really a fiction, was from the very beginning.
It was fobbed off.
It was foisted on the IAEA by unnamed states, member states of the IAEA.
And we know that that really means Israel, because the Israelis, we know from ElBaradei's memoirs, we know from Robert Kelly, who's written about this, and from other sources as well.
The Israelis have made a very strenuous effort to influence the IAEA by giving them documents.
Of course, they claim that these documents were brought out of Iran by intelligence agents.
But, you know, there's no vetting, there's basically no evidence that these are genuine, and plenty of reason to believe that they are falsified documents.
And, you know, we can go into greater detail about that, but I don't want to get sidetracked.
The point here is that— Well, now, wait a minute.
Let me ask you, because I think maybe I thought I knew something, but you just confused me.
The bomb cylinder, there's bomb cylinder documents that relate back to the alleged studies, the fake laptop?
There's no document that's ever been referred to about the bomb cylinder itself.
Does the bomb cylinder have anything to do with the smoking laptop?
Not directly.
Of course, it's indirectly related.
It's the grandson or the son of the smoking laptop.
There's never been a claim that there's any document that was given to the IAEA that shows, you know, this supposed or this alleged bomb chamber being installed or having been installed at Parchin.
It's all based on some report that was given to, you know, an intelligence report given to the IAEA, obviously by the Israelis.
And, in fact, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA told me in the interview that I had with him in March that he was told directly by a high official of the IAEA in one of their meetings that some of the information that the IAEA has been asking the Iranians to clarify, quote-unquote, to explain, quote-unquote, is nothing more than oral information.
Information was passed on to the IAEA orally by this unnamed state.
So, I mean, this is really just the barest, you know, thinnest veil of so-called evidence that has been provided with regard to the bomb test chamber.
And so, you know, just to try to very quickly summarize what I have put forward as the evidence to debunk this, the first point I think people need to understand is that the document itself, the IAEA report of November, has a very significant admission in it, which has never been reported by the news media except for myself.
And that is that the bomb test chamber that they're claiming was installed there would be appropriate for a kind of test that they call the implosion test or a test of a multipointed initiation system, which they then go on to say was actually carried out not at Parchin but at Mar-I-Van, which is very far away from Parchin, near the Iranian border with Iraq.
And, by the way, the Iranians offered to have the IAEA go to Mar-I-Van, and the IAEA delegation refused the opportunity.
But this is a remarkable admission by the IAEA that this bomb test chamber would actually have been appropriate to carry out a test that was quite different from the one that is attributed to it in the headlines, which is that it was going to do hydrodynamic testing of a nuclear weapon, that is to say a test that do not use fissile materials.
In other words, they would not create a radioactive explosion, but which would use a substitute material such as natural uranium or a depleted uranium.
And this is the kind of test that supposedly showed that Iran was experimenting with nuclear weapons or doing nuclear weapons research.
In fact, what the report itself says is that this would have been appropriate, would have been able to carry out a test which was a multipoint initiation test, and that's a test that could either be a nuclear or non-nuclear kind of device.
So it doesn't show that it's not evidence of a nuclear weapons program at all.
So that's a very key acknowledgement that has never been reported and which I think shows that whoever wrote this report does in fact really understand that the evidence for this alleged bomb test chamber is very, very shaky indeed.
Then we move on to what Robert Kelly has had to say about the alleged bomb test chamber.
Well, now we'll have to hold Robert Kelly and the whole Danalenko story and all that until we get back from this break.
Stay tuned, everybody.
We're talking with the great debunker, Gareth Porter, about all of the rash accusations in late last fall's IAEA report, the final debunking and destruction of this war propaganda after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Anyway, whatever it's called.
I'm Scott, and on the line is Gareth Porter, this time writing for truthout.org.
How a non-existent bomb cylinder distorts the Iran nuclear issue, and we already covered the major discrepancy in the location where all of the nefarious activity was supposed to have taken place.
Nice line, guys.
Try lining up your ducks in a row a little bit better first.
Now, I think you're done with that, and you're ready to go on and tell us about what IAEA nuclear expert Robert Kelly had to say about these accusations.
I guess former IAEA expert.
Yeah, but it's not just that Kelly was a senior IAEA inspector, the guy who actually was in charge of the Iraq inspection team twice, not just once but twice, but also it's that he was in fact in charge of the Energy Department's Laboratory for Remote Sensing, which means that he was in charge of an operation that dealt with all forms of intelligence or means of detecting nuclear programs around the world.
He knows this subject as well as anybody in the entire world.
So, I mean, he's somebody that the IAEA really has to respect, and in fact even David Albright is worried when Robert Kelly speaks, believe me.
So what Kelly had to say as soon as he read this account in the IAEA was that it didn't make any sense.
Now, one more point that I want to make about something that Kelly responded to and reacted to immediately was that the authors of this report, based on the information they were given by obviously the Israelis, I can say that on your show I think safely, was that somebody made a big mistake.
They had basically copied the data that they had gotten from the containment chamber that Danilenko, you mentioned his name, the former Ukrainian specialist on nanodiamonds, who had built a containment chamber for the production of nanodiamonds, which is a very completely different affair from a bomb containment chamber to test a nuclear weapon.
They have very little in common for all kinds of reasons which we won't get into.
But what somebody did was to copy the dimensions of that nanodiamond chamber that Danilenko had actually gotten a patent for back in the early 90s and had put that information out as though it were a bomb test chamber for nuclear weapons development.
And that was what was published by the IAEA.
And they got the dimensions more or less right, but except for one thing.
They said that the Danilenko chamber would hold 70 kilograms of explosives, whereas in fact we know from a PowerPoint that was published by a corporation in Philadelphia that was actually going to work with Danilenko's design at one point, that his design was only intended to contain 10 kilograms of explosives.
That's only one-seventh of what they were claiming in the IAEA report, based again on their Israeli sources.
So somebody made a huge mistake, because as Kelly points out, there's no way that even 70 kilograms of containment could have been used for a nuclear weapons related test.
You can't do it.
You have to have several times that, like 200, 300 kilograms of containment, kilograms of explosives to be contained in that sort of experiment.
So Kelly immediately spotted one of the key problems.
And, of course, it's a dual problem.
On the one hand, they used a figure that had nothing to do with what Danilenko had had in his containment chamber, and then they used a figure that couldn't possibly be used for the kind of test they were claiming.
And so this is really at the heart of Kelly's objection to this whole story.
So, in other words, I think where you have us now is, well, and you didn't, unless you mentioned it just very briefly, you didn't really talk about how this guy, Danilenko, was no such person as the person in their caricature.
No, I haven't talked about that.
But already we have no reason to believe that they ever were testing an implosion system for a nuclear weapon at all.
No, I mean, there's no evidence on the record that indicates that.
And, in fact, you know, there's every reason to believe that the Iranians have, in fact, used various explosives, high explosives, to work on conventional weapons.
I mean, of course, there are all kinds of conventional weapons that they developed at Parchin that use, you know, high explosives in tests.
And in some cases they would use a system that could be called a multipoint initiation system for that purpose, such as I will give you an example of an anti-ship missile would require that kind of precision.
But it's very different from the kind of precision that would be used for a test on a nuclear weapon.
I mean, this is very clear, and the Iranians pointed this out to the IAEA.
And I have to say that the IAEA staff under Olli Heinonen was quite dishonest about this and tried to hide the fact that the Iranians were quite clear that they had done experiments with high explosives, but that they were very, very different from what would be used in the kind of experiment that the IAEA was claiming.
So this is part of the whole long, sad story of the IAEA basically putting forward propaganda rather than facts.
Well, and you know what's funny about all this, too, is James Risen from the New York Times wrote a book, I forget which one, where he talks all about Operation Merlin, where the CIA gave the Iranians ready-made nuclear bomb blueprints with just one error.
And this was all a big sting operation.
They were going to bust them for having the plans in their paperwork somewhere.
And apparently they took one look at it.
They said, oh, well, there's the one obvious flaw.
Whether they made photocopies and buried them somewhere, I guess nobody really knows.
But they didn't keep them in their files when the IAEA came to bust them.
They had apparently just threw the thing down into the incinerator and didn't want to get caught with that.
It was an obvious case of entrapment.
That's the closest they've ever got to knowing how to implode a nuclear bomb, Gareth.
Well, I think you make a very, very good point, Scott.
I think that's a very important fact that the Iranians probably got, undoubtedly got, their best clues as to how to put together a nuclear weapon from the CIA.
Right.
Why test an implosion system?
They've got it.
And, again, the IAEA had the temerity to use this as evidence of, you know, the Iranians' intent to have a nuclear weapon.
I mean, this is the degree to which they are extremely dishonest.
I mean, I just can't emphasize this point enough that, you know, was prone to accepting everything that the Israelis put before him and using it to make the case precisely as the Israelis wanted it to.
Now, I don't know why that's the case, except that he was in over his head and disliked the Iranians intensely.
And I think he was inclined to just think the worst.
And I don't know that there's any more to it than that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, when this story did come out, he had a quote in a David Sanger piece in the New York Times, who's, you know, very reliable to put the Ali Aynan and, you know, negative anti-Iran spin on everything.
But this was a case where the two of them seemed to conspire to admit that, actually, I sent my men there before and they didn't find a thing.
We combed the desert and there was nobody there.
There's no way that Heinemann could deny the fact that they did, in fact, visit Parchin twice.
And what is very seldom, if ever, pointed out, I think it's not well known to your listeners at all, is that in both cases, this is 2005, when the IAEA went to Parchin at the invitation of the Iranians, they were allowed to pick out one general area and to go to five different locations within that area of their own choosing.
And the Iranians did not know where they were going to choose.
They didn't even know the area, let alone the specific locations that they would choose.
So they had the run of the place twice.
The Iranians knew that, and that is the best evidence, as far as I'm concerned.
I defy anyone to suggest that this is not an iron-clad logical statement, that the Iranians had nothing to hide at Parchin.
And this was 2005, again.
Your last article and your last interview was about how the Iranians are now just messing with the Americans, basically, by creating a false little crisis for David Albright and people to cry about, just so they can give very little in the negotiation.
Yeah, they just want to have the IAEA give more attention, make this more important to the IAEA, so they'll be willing to reach agreement on their cooperation so that there will be an end point to it, and that the Iranians won't be forever in the dock, as it were, with the IAEA.
Alright, everybody check out Gareth Porter at IPSnews.net, Truthout.org for this one, how a non-existent bomb cylinder distorts the Iran nuclear issue.
Thanks.