Gareth Porter discusses the Israeli attack on Syria and how its purpose was to intimidate Iran and frame North Korea, John Bolton’s blustering, the failure of the U.S.’s abduction of Iranians in Iraq policy to provide any evidence of their involvement in the killing of Americans there, and Iran’s recent offer to move their uranium enrichment to Switzerland.
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Alright folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 92795.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our guest today is the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and investigative journalist.
He writes for Interpress Service, the American Prospect, the Huffington Post.
You can find all his IPS articles at antiwar.com/porter, including his last one.
Israel's Syrian airstrike was aimed at Iran.
It's at the top of the page in the highlights section today at antiwar.com.
Welcome, Michelle, Gareth.
Thanks as always, Scott.
Glad to be back.
It's good to have you here, sir.
And a very interesting article here, and I think we can probably go over this one pretty quickly here.
We've been talking about on this show this Israeli airstrike on Syrian territory on September the 6th, and we've had Philip Giraldi and Joe Cirincione and Loris Alexandrovna on to discuss this, the accusation coming from the neocon media that somehow the North Koreans and the Syrians are cooperating on some sort of nuclear weapons program and the Israelis bombed it.
And now you're saying in your article today that it doesn't seem like there's really any truth to that, but what this really was was a PR stunt aimed at the Iranians.
Is that right?
Well, that's right.
I mean, the essential purpose of this, as it now becomes clear, really was not about any specific nuclear program in Syria, although Israel had been making that argument before and the neoconservatives in the administration were also making that argument as early as 2002, 2003.
You know, that was a convenient ploy for having an excuse to attack a target in Syria in order to make a broader point, which was that Israel has the will and the ability to go after a target at will, and of course that was intended to convey to Iran that they could be the next target, that their nuclear facilities could be the next target.
Very interesting that you say in your article, and I guess as you just mentioned, that the neoconservatives, I guess led by John Bolton, they tried to push this lie back a few years ago?
That's right.
In 2002, Bolton was trying to make the argument, he wanted to make it publicly, that Syria was pursuing a nuclear weapon program, and the intelligence community would not go along with that.
It was called a stretch, quote unquote, by the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research analyst who was looking at the issue, and other intelligence community analysts also refused to accept that there was evidence to support that view.
So he was not able to publicly make that argument, and the neoconservatives, I think, have been sort of boiling inwardly ever since then, that they were stopped from making the kind of argument they wanted to.
And now you say in the article that this time Stephen Hadley decided they would just go with the stovepipe and take the intel straight, I guess, from the Israelis straight to the Vice President's office without stopping at the CIA for verification first?
Right, and it appears that what's going on here is that the site that had been noted back in 2002, 2003, because there was some superficial resemblance to what was consistent in some sense superficially with a possible nuclear facility, but really nothing else pointed in the direction of having a nuclear weapon, a purpose behind it.
That site was the one that was being cited as early 2002, 2003, and once again it surfaced this time around as the target for the, apparent target for the Israeli attack.
So in late October we have a series of photographs taken from satellites which were made public by a private company and which then were made available to the media and which showed that in fact very little had changed since 2002.
There was a parent pump house or pumping facility added to the site and a secondary structure, but nothing so dramatic that it would change the intelligence community's judgment in 2002.
In fact, someone in the intelligence community told the New York Times, I believe it was October 30th, that they had actually been aware of the same site in 2002 and they had not been impressed by the evidence that there was anything showing that that was a nuclear site.
So I quote Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear specialist, as saying that just because there's a pumping facility does not show that it's a nuclear related facility.
I mean, plenty of other types of industrial sites require pumping of water from the Euphrates River, so that is hardly a major piece of evidence to support the idea that this was a nuclear site.
And now, has there been any evidence delivered to the press or the people in any sense that does say that this was a nuclear station?
Don't tell me all they have is a pumping facility and a picture.
That's it, as far as I can see.
You know, there was a storyline, to be sure.
A North Korean ship had brought some cargo into Syria a few days before this, and the argument was that this was secretly some sort of nuclear material.
It was supposed to be cement.
And this is obviously the kind of argument that is the will of the wisps, that there's really no way of possibly being able to know that with any certainty.
So that is the only additional factor which has been suggest to the media supporting this Israeli argument.
And almost all this comes from current and former government officials off the record and so forth through the press, am I right?
There's been an official government press conference leveling these accusations, much less providing evidence.
There's been no public information made available.
The entire campaign has been through press leaks, obviously coming from neoconservatives within the administration.
And the main purpose of those leaks, in the context of the policy of the Bush administration pushed by Condi Rice to breach an agreement with North Korea, was to basically discredit North Korean policy as participating in nuclear assistance to Syria, which would violate their commitment against proliferation.
And it was designed, in other words, to sink a policy that had already been decided on by the Bush administration to reach a nuclear agreement with North Korea, an agreement involving fuel and food to North Korea in return for their dismantling of their nuclear site.
I'm sure you're familiar with John Bolton's accusations about North Korea, and he's basically been the main one pushing this Syria program, so-called joint program, with the North Koreans and has been criticizing the Bush administration, basically for intents and purposes accusing Rice of treason for making this deal with the North Koreans.
And I have to tell you, I was pleasantly surprised to read the headline two days ago in the Washington Times.
Bush says North Korea talks show results.
And I thought, oh, wow, good.
This is George Bush refuting John Bolton and saying, hey, man, back off.
We're doing a good job.
We're having these talks and everything's going fine.
But then I got deeper into the article, and it quotes the president as saying North Korea has agreed to provide a full declaration of all its nuclear programs and proliferation activities by the end of this year.
Full declaration is one of the steps North Korea must take to keep the six-party talks moving.
And then they quote Richard C. Bush, I don't think any relation, director of the Center for Northeast Asian Studies at the Brookings Institution, saying that the president appeared to be laying down a marker.
He says, I'm not sure that North Korea has agreed to provide a full declaration of its proliferation activities.
I suspect the words proliferation activities in Bush's, in the president's speech, are code for the Syria program.
And we have decided we need an explanation of what was going on in Syria in order to close any deals.
So here's Bush saying, oh, yeah, the talks are working great.
North Korea, you better come clean about this false accusation against you.
And if you don't, then we know you're lying.
Well, I think what we see here is yet another round of bureaucratic struggle between the neo-cons and the so-called realists, the people who are at least willing to try to reach agreement with North Korea within the Bush administration.
And I suspect that the question of just how far and how hard North Korea would be pushed to agree to the neo-con version of the truth still remains to be seen.
But clearly, there are people within the administration who are going to be continuing to push on that line to say that we won't accept their declaration until they agree to what we want them to agree to, to admit that they are proliferating.
Wow.
Yeah, it's just like the run-up to the Iraq war, right?
Drop your weapons, give them all up.
And if you don't give them up, then we know that you're hiding them still.
Well, there are definitely echoes of Iraq in a lot of things that are still going on today, no doubt about it.
That's the best they can do, I guess.
You probably noted that Bolton, in addition to taking the line against North Korea and saying that this whole Israeli strike was about North Korean assistance to Syria, also chimed in to say that, quote, we're talking about a clear message to Iran, Israel has the right to self-defense, that includes offensive operations against WMD facilities that pose a threat to Israel.
So, no, he was basically saying, look, this is really about a message to Iran.
It's obviously more than just a coincidence that you're able to hit both of those notes at the same time.
Yeah.
Now, real quickly here, last couple of minutes, your previous article for IPS, before this one, is about the seizure of Iranians in Iraq.
Basically, at the beginning of this year, America started abducting Iranians in Iraq.
And you say here that, despite all this effort, they have failed to validate the Bush line on Iraq.
What do you mean?
Well, I think what they really hoped for, apart from sort of sending a signal to Iran that we're on the offensive and that you'd better be afraid of us, which was clearly part of the intention in starting to receive Iranian officials in Iraq, they also hoped that they could interrogate these people and find out something that would be politically damaging that they could use against Iran, that they could show that Iran was meddling in Iraq.
So, you know, they went on fishing expeditions, basically, as soon as they had any word that there was somebody connected with the Quds Force or with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iraq, they immediately seized them and interrogated them in the hope that they could find out something that they could use politically.
And I think, you know, my piece was really intended to show that that simply didn't happen.
They were sorely disappointed.
I quote Wayne White, who was the State Department's deputy director of intelligence in the Bureau of Intelligence Research, who was the specialist on that part of the world, saying that he was convinced that that was exactly what the administration was hoping for in their interrogation of these Iranians, and that they basically got nothing that they could shop around, as he put it.
So I think this was really the story that has never been covered by the media about the whole campaign to seize and arrest and interrogate Iranians in Iraq.
And again, both those articles are available at www.antiwar.com.
I just wanted to mention real quick and see if you have a comment about this.
I saw the headline yesterday that the Iranians at the OPEC meeting made an offer to move all of their uranium enrichment facilities to Switzerland.
It would still be their enriched uranium, but they would have it enriched in Switzerland and then imported into Iran.
Did you hear about that?
What do you think?
I did read that.
It's quite extraordinary, and it's obviously something that will have to be explored.
What it means exactly, I'm certainly not clear at this point on whether that represents a major shift in Iranian policy, or whether the previous proposal involving an enrichment facility which would be outside the country had other strings attached which were unacceptable.
Certainly a very interesting development, and obviously will merit a lot of attention in the coming weeks.
OK, well, I'm not going to be able to watch it because I've got a radio show to do, but right now David Wums are the author of the Clean Break Study for Benjamin Netanyahu is on C-SPAN, Gareth, so turn it to C-SPAN.
Well, thanks for the tip.
Thanks a lot for coming on the show.
Appreciate it.
All right, I'm glad to be on the show.
Thanks, Dan.
