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For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, August 31st, 2012.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.www.antiwarradio.com I'm Rich Hill.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
My website is www.scotthorton.org.
And you can find all my interview archives there.
More than 2,500 of them going back to 2003 at www.scotthorton.org.
Including a few from this week on my other radio show that might be of interest to you.
Thomas Mountain from Counterpunch on brewing civil war in Kenya.
Colleen Rowley on amnesty and humanitarian interventionism.
And Craig Corey on the Israeli government's killing of his daughter Rachel.
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Tonight, we're speaking with the great Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
That's www.ipsnews.net.
He won the Martha Gellhorn Award for his work in Truthout on the cover-up of civilian deaths in the war in Afghanistan.
And here he's written a three-part series for Interpress Service.
Again, www.ipsnews.net on the Delhi bombing last February.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Glad to be on again.
Well, very happy to have you here.
And this one might sound a little specialized, but I think it's a very important story.
And you did a lot of really good work on it here.
I want to give you credit.
It's evidence in Delhi embassy bombing suggests journalist was framed, part one.
And this is important not just because a cop told a lie about a bombing that happened somewhere, which is the world's got to be lousy with cases like that.
But this one fit right into Israel's propaganda campaign trying to drag the United States into a war with Iran.
And so, therefore, it deserves extra scrutiny and debunking capacities.
Thank goodness you're on the case.
Well, thanks very much.
Yes, you're right.
This is a story that on the face of it looks like just another local issue of human rights.
But, in fact, it is vital to understand this case because it is indeed central to the whole narrative that the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu has been spinning for months now, that Iran has been on and still is on a new terrorist campaign to attack Israeli government personnel, Israeli diplomats, as well as civilians all across the world, basically, is the way they're describing this.
And India, the Delhi bombing in February, that is the bombing of the Israeli embassy car in downtown New Delhi, is clearly the centerpiece of this whole political propaganda line of Israel with regard to the alleged Iranian terrorist campaign.
And so I thought it was very important to delve deeply into this case whenever the opportunity arose to find out what the truth is.
All right.
Now, so the police, as you say here, have released a lot of documents making their case public for their case against an Indian journalist.
And is it three or four Iranian cohorts who the police say are responsible for the bombing here?
It's four Iranian cohorts, if you will, alleged cohorts of the Indian Muslim journalist, who is the one accused person who is actually under arrest and formerly charged with a crime in New Delhi.
There are three Iranians who are named in this charge sheet, the so-called charge sheet, which lays out the case that has been made through the Delhi police investigation.
Three of them are in Tehran.
Supposedly they live in Tehran, according to the Delhi police.
They are not otherwise described in the charge sheet, except they're said to have rather bland-sounding jobs.
But that doesn't reveal anything more about who they really work for.
But the implication has always been that these three are working for the Iranian government, obviously, and it's even been leaked to the Indian press that they are, in fact, part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which carries out operations abroad for Iran.
Now, the fourth Iranian is a particularly interesting case, because this is one of the three Iranians who were arrested in Bangkok, or who either arrested or who escaped from Bangkok as part of that explosion that took place last February in Bangkok.
A very mysterious situation that has not been at all resolved in terms of what was going on and who these people are.
And again, according to leaks to the Indian press, the guy who escaped to Malaysia is involved, is supposedly related to this case of the car bombing in New Delhi.
It's said that he is, in fact, one of the four people who was involved in the plot.
But the evidence that has been adduced for that is the thinnest imaginable evidence.
It has to do with, supposedly, his phone showing that he was in touch with the Iranian government.
Now, hold that particular for just a second here.
It sounds like what you're saying is there's a convincing-sounding narrative being put forward by the Indian police here that they've got some suspects who they say are involved on their end in surveilling this target.
We'll get to the forensic evidence, supposedly, and all of that too.
And then they have them connected by way of phone records to the bombing in Thailand.
So it must be that they've made their case.
They've got their guys.
So what's your problem?
That is what they're suggesting, although it is not spelled out at all.
There's only just an allusion to the fact that the Iranian who they're naming, the Delhi police are naming as the bomber in the Delhi bombing case, was on the phone call list of this Iranian who was in Thailand, in Bangkok.
So, I mean, like all of the terrorist bombing cases that I have looked into, that is the Buenos Aires bombing of 1994, the Jewish community center there, the Hariri bombing, the bombing that assassinated the head of state of Lebanon in 2005, and this one in New Delhi, there's always a very critical factor or component of the case that involves a call list and trying to connect people through call lists.
And I think that that is a common denominator that bears very close scrutiny, to say the least.
Right.
Well, now, I mean, although it sounds like a really good clue anyway, right, if this was a cop show that, wait a minute, at least they say, and you don't take on the Bangkok bombing in this article, but at least they're saying if we take it face value, they've got a guy in Thailand and his phone connects to a guy who, would it be right to say that they're claiming they're already looking at in the case of the Delhi bombing?
Well, absolutely, yes.
That would sound like, hey, there must be something here smoking fire and all that.
They're making the argument that the Iranian, one of the four Iranians named in this case, was indeed the bomber, the person who affixed this magnet bomb to the embassy car in Delhi.
You know, there are very serious problems with that, however, and you alluded to one of them, that's the forensic evidence that the Delhi police are claiming is not just weak, but highly suspect in terms of having been planted by the Delhi police themselves.
And so, you know, it's worth just mentioning, making sure that that gets discussed very early in this whole account, because it is one of the keys, I think, to unraveling, to debunking, I guess I should say, the Delhi police case.
What happened in this instance is that the Delhi police were given this case officially on February 29th.
The bombing took place on February 13th.
They immediately, by that time, they had clues that were leading them, they believed, to somebody named Houshan Ahshar Irani, I-R-A-N-I, Irani, one of those three Iranians from Tehran who is more discussed in this case.
He visited, clearly, somebody named Houshan Irani did visit New Delhi, both in the spring of 2011 and again in January, early February, or mid-February of 2012.
And they tracked him to various hotels in downtown Delhi, and as a result then, they inspected the room that he had been staying in for a couple of weeks.
But the problem is, they didn't inspect the room until the 13th of March.
Now, they actually sealed off that hotel room on February 29th, but it was another more than two weeks until they actually sent a detail to go inspect the room and to try to find clues.
Now, that meant that actually an entire month had passed since the guy had left the hotel room on February 13th.
And that means that, of course, not only was the room cleaned up by the housing staff, by the hotel staff, but that even after the cleanup, another two weeks, more than two weeks, another month had passed.
And during that period, of course, the police had plenty of time to plot their strategy and to come up with a set of pieces of evidence that would incriminate this guy, Irani.
And so what exactly happened is that, lo and behold, they discovered when they inspected the hotel room that there were no less than seven small pieces of plastic or cardboard which had on them traces of TNT, the same explosive that was found in the bomb itself, in the Delhi bombing.
There was also, incidentally, what the British and the Indians call an electric torch, meaning a flashlight, and a charging cord, which the police argued, well, that could be used to set off a bomb.
But never mind about that.
I mean, the key thing is that they found all this TNT, traces of TNT on these clues, the problem being that they found it a month later.
Now, that violates every precept, every procedure that the police ever have used in a serious criminal case and would never pass muster in court.
It would be rejected immediately.
The question, of course, is whether the police actually simply planted this evidence as opposed to actually finding it.
And, you know, I think the evidence pretty clearly weighs heavily in favor of the evidence having been planted.
There's one more factor to take into account here, and that is that the police realized that this did look kind of suspicious, that it took so long to get the evidence and to actually inspect the room, and so they went to the hotel manager and they got him to come in with an account book that showed the occupancy of the hotel room, and lo and behold, what do you suppose?
There was nobody in that room for the two weeks, 16 days, between his leaving it and the time that the police sealed it off.
Now, you know, that is simply not credible.
I mean, it was the only room in the entire hotel that was never reused during that period.
And one, again, has to suspect that this was a police plant.
This was deliberately created fictitious evidence.
Right.
I would think that if it was true, then they'd be singing a song along the lines of, that's too bad we can't use it because, you know, the truth is we really did find some evidence at the hotel.
And of course, had it been true, they would have had it two weeks earlier, more than two weeks earlier, and they didn't have it then, and so it's pretty clear that this was simply recreated for the police by this hotel manager.
So I think that's a pretty important clue as to the truth here.
And then there's another problem.
There's several problems here about Arani as the bomber.
One is that the phone number that supposedly links him to one of the people who was involved in the house, which had an explosion in Bangkok, is the phone number.
And it turns out that if you look carefully at the charge sheet, you find that Arani purchased a scooter when he was there in the spring of 2011, a cheap one, albeit one very cheap.
And then he rented a motorcycle in January of 2012, and in both cases he put down different Indian mobile phone numbers that he obtained, and they were both different from the number that is attributed to him that's supposedly linked to the number from the guy in the Bangkok explosion.
Well, can they even really link him to those phone numbers at all, or are they just claiming to?
One has to be very suspicious about this phone link, that's all I can say.
In other words, they don't provide, in all the documents that you reviewed, Gareth, you didn't find anything that actually connected the phone number of the phone he had when they busted him with the phone numbers they claim belong to him and connect him to the bombing in Thailand.
They refer to a document that shows that he got a mobile phone number that coincides with this number that was called by the guy in Thailand, but they don't actually show that document in the charge sheet.
So that's, again, pretty suspicious.
I think one has to be very, very suspicious of the whole phone link business in this case.
I'm Scott Horton, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, IPSnews.net.
It's a three-part series beginning with evidence in Delhi embassy bombing suggests journalist was framed.
And you also talk about the money that supposedly was this journalist's motivation for participating in such a plot, and the way you describe him anyway, this is a journalist with a plenty decent career and a future in Indian reporting, and certainly has no apparent immediate need for $5,000 so badly that he would do this, right?
Absolutely.
I mean, the case just does not make any sense at all when it comes to the Indian journalist being a plotter of a terrorist bombing in Delhi.
It's true, the guy was a successful journalist.
He had his own program on Indian state television.
He did Urdu broadcasting for the Indian state television.
He had his own news service, and just generally he was doing very well.
He certainly didn't need the money.
The whole idea which the police propounded that he confessed to having been part of this plot, immediately agreeing as soon as it was supposedly proposed to him in Tehran on a trip in January 2011, to participate in this plot, to provide assistance to it for $5,500 is just ludicrous.
And everyone, I think, in the journalist community in Delhi agrees that that doesn't make any sense.
So that's the first point against his being a participant in such a terror bomb plot.
The second problem with this police case against Mohammad Kazmi, his name is, is that they have him confessing in five different, what they call disclosure statements, in March, from March 6th through March 24th, to all kinds of things, of which he, of course, says he didn't confess to at all.
He says that they basically coerced him into signing a set of blank sheets.
Now, one can argue that it's really stupid of him to have done that, but we don't know what kind of coercion was used, except that he says that his family was essentially, he was told that his family would suffer dire consequences if he didn't cooperate.
This is the entire part three of your series here, is about how, of all the cops in the world, the particular division assigned to this case in India here are about the least credible when it comes to coerced confessions and manufacturing evidence and the rest of it, and that's what the judges seem to think of him.
That's right, and this is the time to bring in the so-called special cell, which is the arm of the Delhi police, which handles the terrorism and major crime, has been doing so since the mid-1980s, and it does indeed have the worst imaginable reputation for all kinds of abuses, basically falsifying evidence, falsifying, coercing signatures on false confessions, and everything else that would go with those two primary forms of abuse in cases involving either criminals or alleged terrorists.
So, it's very credible, to get back to Cosme, it's extremely credible that that's exactly what happened, that he was indeed coerced into signing a bunch of blank sheets.
Other detainees who were later found to have been innocent also have testified that they indeed were subjected to either outright torture or other forms of coercion to get them to sign blank pages.
So, this is not at all unique in the history of this outfit.
Then, the third point that I think is very important to understand about Cosme, and his link to the alleged bomber, Housham Afshar Irani, is that the primary link, apart from the fact that they just outright claim that he confessed to having worked with Irani, is that Irani supposedly, according to the police, gave the scooter that he had purchased to Cosme for safekeeping in a meeting that they supposedly had in early May of 2011.
And then the police, of course, claimed that they seized the scooter, that they found the scooter in Cosme's premises, his home, and they have a seizure memo to show that they did do so, which has Cosme's signature on it, but there's no date on it.
Now, two of the three signatures of Delhi police special cell officers do in fact have dates on them, but Cosme's name does not have a date on it, so that's another clue that indeed what happened was that they used one of the blank sheets of paper with his signature on it to use for this phony seizure memo.
All right.
Now, Garrett, tell me.
I think you've done a pretty good job here of undercutting or seeing right through the police's case on this case of the bombing of this Israeli embassy car in Delhi last February.
Who do you think did it, if not Iranian-backed whoever these guys are?
Scott, I can't answer the question.
I mean, I have written a piece for Al Jazeera English, as I think you probably know, which was oddly enough published just three days before Cosme himself was arrested, suggesting that it would not have been in the interest of Iran to have carried out such a terror bombing against an Israeli embassy car.
It seems like a pretty silly way to start a major war between states.
Well, I mean, it certainly wouldn't have done them any good in all sorts of ways, including, of course, making it more difficult for India to continue to buy Iranian crude oil, India being, if not the primary buyer of Iran's oil, at least the second highest buyer of Iranian oil.
And we know that the Israelis were hoping to put pressure on India to cease purchasing or to sharply reduce their purchases of Iranian oil, which is, in fact, what has happened.
They have, in fact, reduced their purchases as a result, I'm quite sure, in part, of this bombing.
The second point about the bombing that has to be made is that whoever did this did so quite consciously in a way that would not have a very high chance of killing or seriously injuring the person inside that car, because it was a very small bomb.
It was really more like a pop gun in relative terms, which clearly was not going to kill anybody, was unlikely to cause serious harm to the occupant in the car.
And it was not placed in a place on the car that was likely to do the most damage.
There were a whole series of clues.
There was no shrapnel in the bomb.
It did not emit the kind of shrapnel that would be likely to do serious harm to the occupant.
So whoever did it apparently did not want to harm the occupant.
Or they were so small-time, they didn't have the ability to do any worse than that.
Well, even a small-time outfit can do a bigger bomb than the one that was used in this.
So that's not really credible.
So what I'm aiming at here, ultimately, is that there is a case to be made.
There is a case to be suspicious, let me put it that way, that this was indeed a false flag operation by the Israelis.
Well, these things happen from time to time, don't they?
This is the one place, this is the one place, Scott, where a bomb actually has gone off.
And obviously, as I said, it is the centerpiece of the whole Israeli propaganda line about Iranian terrorism.
Now, I'm sorry, we're running so short on time.
We've got two minutes, and I need you to comment very quickly on two things.
First of all, did you see that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has poured cold water all over an Israeli attack, talking about what a terrible idea it would be, and personalizing it and saying, I don't want to be complicit in such a thing in any way.
I want to hear your immediate reaction to that.
That's all we have time for.
Also, there's a brand new IAEA report out, and I wonder, I guess you could just give me a yes or no, whether it continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose.
Yes, to that question.
And on the Dempsey question, it seems pretty clear to me that Dempsey would not have made that statement without the approval of the White House.
I think that this is the White House using the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to make the point that the United States does not want to be complicit in any Israeli attack.
And frankly, I think the evidence is pretty strong that, at least at this point, the Obama White House does not really believe that Netanyahu is serious about this.
But I think that they still want to pour it on now.
So you don't think that indicates that Obama was really worried about it, and that's why he sent Dempsey out to say so?
No, I don't think that he's that worried about it.
I think that they now understand that what Netanyahu and Barack have been about is trying to make a deal with them to get them to sign on to the Israeli red line, which is, of course, no breakout capability.
The IAEA report says all the uranium is still sitting there.
In one sentence, I think the real story of the IAEA report is that it reveals that the actual stockpile of potential breakout material, that is, 20% enriched uranium that is available for breakout should they make the decision, has actually gone down between May and August.
Because they're actually using it for the purposes they said they were enriching it.
That's exactly right.
All right, the great Gareth Porter, everybody.
Interpress service is IPSnews.net.
Check out his three-part series on the Delhi embassy bombing, beginning with evidence in Delhi embassy bombing suggests journalists was framed.
And you can find them all, of course, at Antiwar.com as well.
Very soon, a new report on the new IAEA report.
Thank you very much for your time as always, Gareth.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
And that's Antiwar Radio for this evening.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.
This is Pacifica Radio, KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Check out my website, scotthorton.org, for all the interview archives.
See you next week.
