Gareth Porter discusses Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to pin the Burgas bombing on Hezbollah (to get them on the EU’s terrorist group list); why al Qaeda is more likely to conduct suicide bombings against Jewish targets abroad than Hezbollah; and how Syria’s dissolution could put a chemical weapons stockpile in the hands of dangerous people.
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All right, our first guest on the show today is the great Gareth Porter.
Turns out he did some journalism that I want to talk with him about.
Can you imagine that?
Welcome back to the show, Gareth, how's it going?
It's going well, thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me again.
It's been a while.
Right.
Well, I'm very happy to have you back on the show and talk with you again.
Israel pins bombing on Hezbollah.
Why?
To get EU terror ruling.
Well, I knew there was a reason that Benjamin Netanyahu didn't care at all and didn't care if the Israeli people saw him not caring at all, who got away with murdering those innocent students on the bus in Bulgaria.
He must have had a political reason, like he wanted to start a war or something.
He wanted to get an EU terror ruling.
What are you talking about here?
Well, I mean, the interesting thing is that, of course, the United States has long considered Hezbollah a terrorist organization, but the EU has not gone along with that.
And the Israelis clearly have wanted to change that for a long time, and I think they see they now have this opportunity because of the world's focus on a terrorist bombing aimed at Israeli tourists in Bulgaria.
They can now take advantage of this if they can somehow make it stick that Hezbollah was behind this.
And that's why, clearly, Netanyahu has been so insistent that he has this, what he calls, rock-solid intelligence to claim, on which to claim the culpability of Hezbollah in this case.
Otherwise, it seems to me, you would not have seen this thing of going so far as to claim, you know, we absolutely know without any question, under circumstances that, you know, if you really look at it calmly, it doesn't really add up that suddenly they've got this ironclad intelligence, whereas the first day or so, the first couple of days, it was very clear they didn't have anything.
They were just guessing.
But doesn't he know that he looks like the boy who cried wolf?
He's like the worst truth.
He's worse than the worst truthers in America.
Well, I mean, there is this problem that the Israelis have that they do go so far in pressing their propaganda case that for anybody who cares to look at the pattern, it becomes very clear that they're not really very truthful or very honest.
But I have to say that they do get away with it for most people.
So I guess it works for them.
Yeah, it would seem like at some point, though, this kind of thing backfires because it's going to come out that whoever it was, it wasn't Hezbollah that did it.
Give me a break.
This is how Nasrallah is going to start the war?
He's going to bomb a bus in Bulgaria?
Come on.
Yeah, and of course, I mean, look...
Nasrallah's the head of Hezbollah, everybody.
Sorry.
Yeah, I mean, the fact is that despite the, quote, senior U.S. official, unquote, who was almost certainly our friend General David Petraeus, head of CIA, quoted by the New York Times saying that, you know, they could confirm the Israeli assessment that this was a Hezbollah job in Bulgaria.
And basing it on the idea that this is a Hezbollah M.O., that is a suicide bomber.
Suicide bombing is a Hezbollah M.O., whereas in fact...
Okay, quick historical pop quiz.
When was the last time an Israeli tourist target was hit by a suicide bombing?
I don't know.
November 2002.
It was in Mombasa, and it was an Israeli-owned lodge where, of course, Israeli tourists stayed in Mombasa.
It was hit by three suicide bombers who blew it up, killing three Israelis and ten Kenyans.
And guess who claimed responsibility?
Al-Qaeda.
So this was not a mystery in this case.
That is the last case where Israeli tourists were targeted by a suicide bomber, but this doesn't seem to make any difference.
And Hezbollah hasn't done suicide bombings since when?
The late 90s?
Well, the last time they did it was, of course, in Lebanon in resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Right.
You know, they haven't done anything since then.
And this reminds me very much of the Kobar Towers thing where, you know, Bin Laden actually claimed responsibility in a couple of interviews with Palestinian publications in London.
And, of course, the FBI, which was in charge of the case for the U.S., simply chose not to pay any attention to it, even though the CIA, as we've talked about before, had lots of intelligence pointing to Al-Qaeda.
And so this simply underlines, once again, the penchant of the U.S. national security state to, you know, constantly downplay Al-Qaeda as a threat to carry out terrorist acts against the United States in favor of blaming Iran and Hezbollah, which, you know, does not comport with the historical record.
All right, now, so what big differences is it going to make if the EU goes along with this crap and then decides they're going to add Hezbollah to some list?
Well, I mean, I suppose it would politically help the Israelis in their campaign against Hezbollah.
It would, of course, involve some kind of sanctions involving Lebanon, I presume.
Although, you know, I find it hard to believe that the EU is going to cave into this.
For one thing, I mean, they're going to demand some evidence, and he's not going to have it.
And as you say, it's very possible that information will come out in the future that shows, in fact, that there was Al-Qaeda behind the Bulgarian bombing, in which case that would, of course, wipe out whatever gains they had begun to make politically there.
Well, you know, it could be the so-called lone wolf, too.
Sometimes people like doing terrible, violent things.
It doesn't mean that they were told to by Zawahiri or Nasrallah or Benjamin Netanyahu.
No doubt about it.
This could very well be an independent group or an independent individual, for that matter, carrying out a terrorist action.
Certainly would not be the first or last time that that has happened.
Now, Scott McConnell made the point in a piece here at the American Conservative Magazine that it was that the Israelis used an attack by the Abu Nidal organization as an excuse to invade Lebanon to attack the PLO in the freaking first place, which is, of course, what led to the creation of Hezbollah, the natural Minuteman militia that grew up to resist that invasion.
The assassination of the Israeli ambassador.
Exactly.
So this is like, you know, you get attacked by some Saudis and Egyptians hiding in Afghanistan and then you invade Iraq over it.
Yep.
You know, one of those things.
The old Indirection game, you know, the three-shell game, the constant game of pointing to one thing and using it to do something completely different unrelated to it.
Yep.
Well, and I guess we'll see if we'll get if they'll get away with it.
You know, they've really I don't know.
You wrote a piece the other day saying that Netanyahu doesn't ever really talk about war with Iran, that Omer used to talk that way.
People think of him as less hawkish than Netanyahu.
But I guess what you were getting at with that is you think that he really knows better and doesn't mean to start a war to drag America into a war with Iran.
I think he never had any intention of actually attacking Iran.
I think that if he did, I could be wrong about that.
If he did, I think that he does not have the support of his security cabinet, the eight-member security cabinet.
In fact, there's just a new piece out today in the Israeli press pointing this out, documenting it again, that he does not have a majority.
In fact, he has a small minority in that security cabinet.
He does not have the power to do it.
Well, that's good.
All right.
Hold it right there.
You know how it is with these dang breaks.
It's Gareth Porter right now, IPSnews.net.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Wharton, scottwharton.org, scottwharton.org, scottwharton.org.
I was advised I should say that all the time, so that's making up for lost time there, scottwharton.org.
Also, slash donate.
All right.
We're talking with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, IPSnews.net.
When the American or Israeli government claim things, Gareth debunks those things, because it's never true what they say.
Zoe and I were just talking during the break about the Israeli laptop, the forged alleged studies documents, and how, you know, nice little Israel.
That was a very good try at forging some documents, and you guys made some really good educated guesses there about what some Iranian nuclear documents might look like if they were real, but you're not good enough to get it past Gareth Porter.
That's your problem is we've got Gareth on our side, IPSnews.net.
He will compare the markings on your documents with other known documents, and he will decide whether or not they are legit.
Just Google Gareth Porter and the Iranian laptop, and you'll have a great time, everybody.
There's four or five follow-up stories there.
Anyway, so we're talking about how Benjamin Netanyahu is just certain, even though we all know he's lying and has no actual evidence at all, he's just a liar, that Hezbollah must have been responsible for the bombing in Bulgaria that killed, I'm sorry, I forgot how many it was.
Five, I believe.
Five Israeli students in Bulgaria.
And then, as you say, because he's trying to twist the arms of the EU bureaucrats and adding Hezbollah to a terrorist list.
But now, let's see, there's so many different things I want to ask you about.
Let me ask you about Syria a little bit.
I know you haven't really been writing much about Syria, and I kind of wish you would, Gareth.
But I wonder if you can comment on your perception anyway.
I don't know if you can report facts to me about this, but at least you're kind of understanding and speculation about just what is the Israeli role in pushing America and the NATO allies and whatever on this intervention in Syria.
I mean, they're even talking now about Israel, their army itself is going to invade Syria to protect the chemical weapons.
And already they're talking about how al-Qaeda is going, or at least Islamist, Sunni, Jihadist, Iraqi insurgency types are going to come to power in Syria, and then their first target is going to be Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Right, exactly.
And of course, the excuse, once again, Netanyahu talked about this on Sunday on the same interviews in which he talked about his claim of having ironclad intelligence about Hezbollah and the Bulgarian hit.
He talked about how the problem, the danger, is that these chemical weapons might fall into the hands of guess who, Hezbollah.
That's exactly what he's saying is the rationale for a possible Israeli intervention in Syria.
And he says that this would only happen if, in fact, you had not a smooth transition in power, but a collapse of the regime in chaos.
Now, of course, this is indeed a serious threat, that the conflict in Syria could end in chaos because of the continued buildup of the rebel forces in Syria, that they would be able to cause the disintegration of the Syrian regime and of the military.
And that's exactly the situation that we're now hearing from Netanyahu would bring an Israeli intervention.
So I think this is the most dangerous situation that we have faced so far, the most dangerous possibility of all that we've heard about.
I mean, it seems to me, at least, clear that the United States is still extremely reluctant to become directly involved militarily, and that it is, in fact, worried precisely about the possibility of things getting out of control, even though it continues to provide arms and to further the dynamic which is causing this danger.
But I think that the most serious threat at this point is indeed the possibility of an Israeli intervention.
Well, I guess they say that the Turks and the Syrians aren't getting along so well anymore.
We've been talking with Pepe Escobar and Patrick Hoburn and others about the situation in Syria for the last year and more.
And I guess Pepe has really done a good job of explaining how the Turks have these interests, the French have these, the Americans these, the Qataris and the Saudis their own, and so they're all kind of coming together to push for this regime change.
And yet, it seems like if the Israelis wanted this to stop, then they would be insisting in Washington D.C., which might as well be a suburb of Tel Aviv, if you ask me, that you knock this off right now.
You tell the Turks and the Saudis and the Qataris to knock it off right now.
We want to leave well enough alone in Syria.
We don't like Assad, but at least he's not a group of suicide bombers.
You know what I mean?
Well, not only that.
I mean, the Israelis, of course, have in the very recent past had secret talks, very serious secret negotiations with Assad, and in fact believed that they might be able to reach an agreement, although I think they were unrealistic about expecting that the Syrians would be willing to give up the Golan Heights, and that would be part of the deal.
But in any case, I mean, they have in the past favored a settlement with Syria rather than trying to get regime change, but that has changed in the past year or two.
They've increasingly moved toward the much more tough position of destabilizing the regime and trying to change it, so no question about it.
I mean, their interests are in favor of destabilization, not in trying to prevent precisely the kind of chaos that they're saying would bring an Israeli intervention.
Well, yeah, it's crazy.
So I don't know.
Is the strategy then just to try to keep a constant state of Arab civil war in all of these states so that everybody's just busy fighting each other to expedite the chaotic collapse and all that?
Well, to some extent, yes.
I mean, if the Israelis can have some of their enemies fighting one another, that is desirable from their point of view, no question about that.
But I think more to the point, what the Israelis want is to weaken Iran's position regionally, and they have long regarded Syria as the linchpin of the Iranian security position in the Middle East.
Hey, that's what it said in the clean break strategy, right?
The road to Damascus runs through Baghdad.
I was about to utter the clean break phrase myself.
Of course, that was done by Feith and his friends, the neocon friends, more so than Netanyahu in 1996.
But what's interesting is, once again, Netanyahu, much more cautious than his predecessors as prime minister, did not take their advice.
He did not try to push for the kind of policy, the kind of solution that the neocons in the United States were pushing for at that point.
So it's kind of an interesting irony, if you will.
All right, and now, I started asking yesterday, and geez, we don't really have too much time, but can you talk real quick about the bombings a few months back?
Yeah, I was going to do this on my own, actually, to make sure we don't forget this, that in addition to the claim of rock-solid intelligence, what Netanyahu did in his appearances on television Sunday was to talk about how, oh, it's so obvious that this was Hezbollah behind the bombing in Bulgaria, because look what happened in Cyprus just a week before.
Same thing, exactly the same scenario, he said.
There was a Hezbollah guy who was trying to do precisely the same kind of operation.
Well, I'd looked into that, and it's a very murky situation, very little information available to judge precisely what actually happened.
But clearly, we know two things.
One, this guy may or may not be Hezbollah.
He says he was not.
There's no proof, as far as I can tell, that he was in fact Hezbollah.
Two, he was alone.
The Cypriot authorities believe that he did not come with any Confederates.
There was nobody else involved with him.
And three, there is absolutely not a scintilla of evidence that he had any access to or was linked to any explosives.
So any idea that this arrest in Cyprus in early July is somehow close parallel to what happened in Bulgaria is simply fatuous.
There's no relationship between the two.
Yeah, I read at Israeli Prison Planet that Iran and Hezbollah shot up the movie theater.
No, I'm just kidding.
All right, we've got to go.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
All right, thank you, Scott.
Gareth Porter, everybody.
IPSnews.net, antiwar.com, slash Porter for all his archives.
