All right y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest today is physicist James Gordon Prather.
You can read all he writes at antiwar.com slash Prather.
He has served as a policy implementing official for national security related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Department of the Army.
He has also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Senator Henry Bellman, Republican of Oklahoma, ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee.
Prather had earlier worked as a physicist, a nuclear weapons physicist, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, and while they mention the Army here, he was the chief scientist of the Army.
Welcome back to the show, Dr. Prather.
Well, I'm glad to be back again, Scott.
Okay, so you're our in-house nuclear weapons expert and international treaty expert when it comes to the world's nonproliferation regime.
And lucky me, I have tomorrow's Gordon Prather article in front of me here.
And basically, you make the case that the Bush administration faced two problems in taking power.
One was they had to figure out a way to justify multiple regime changes.
And two, they wanted to get rid of the nuclear nonproliferation regime so that they could make it okay for them to use nuclear weapons on people in doing those regime changes.
Is that it?
No, not quite.
I thought that's what I read there.
No, what I tried to say was when they came in with this plan of establishing an American hegemony, or is it...
Hegemony, I think they said.
Hegemony.
Okay.
Empire.
They determined that about the only way that they could get Americans to go along with this establishment of this hegemony, or whatever the word is, let's call it the Fourth Reich or something like that.
The Empire.
Yeah.
It was to convince Americans that these regimes that existed at the time in the Middle East and in North Korea posed a threat to the average American.
Right.
That was their problem.
Then along came 9-11, which was even admitted by people like Paul Wolfowitz, was a heaven-sent opportunity.
Okay, now what they could do is they could claim that there were these state sponsors of terrorism, North Korea and all along the axis of evil, and that these regimes constituted a threat to American citizens.
That is, they were seeking nuclear weapons, and they would give them to terrorists, and therefore they would be a threat to the United States.
The problem was is that all of the nuclear programs in all of these states were subject to IAEA, International Atomic Energy Agency, safeguard agreements, which were required of them as signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Okay, now let me stop you there just to sum this up real quick.
We have this Non-Proliferation Treaty, which basically says if you're a nuclear weapons state and you're a signatory, you promise not to proliferate the nuclear weapons to anybody else, and if you're not a nuclear weapons state and you're a signatory, you promise not to attempt to develop nuclear weapons, and then the IAEA, this UN agency, their job, or part of their job, is to verify that these non-nuclear weapons states are in fact staying non-nuclear weapons states, right?
No, not quite again, Scott.
What the Non-Proliferation Treaty does is, as you say, it says that the signatories who don't already have nuclear weapons promise not to acquire them by hook or crook or any other way, but there's no enforcement mechanism in the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
So what the Non-Proliferation Treaty does is require these signatories that don't already have nuclear weapons to place all of their nuclear programs, make them subject to a safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
Now these safeguards agreements already existed before there was ever a Non-Proliferation Treaty, and in the IAEA statute, it says that in the event that programs, nuclear programs, that are subjected to an IAEA safeguards agreement, if the inspectors discover that any of certain prescribed nuclear materials, basically it's weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, but there are some other things that are thrown in there too, it says if any of these prescribed materials are diverted to a military purpose, the inspectors are to report to the IAEA board that this has happened, that some of these prescribed materials have been diverted to a military purpose, whereupon the IAEA board is to report to the Security Council that this has happened.
Then the Security Council is supposed to, upon receiving such a report, is supposed to make a determination as to whether or not this reported diversion constitutes a threat to the peace in the region where this country is, okay?
That's the procedures that are set down in international law, okay?
So I can see how this would be a problem for the administration, then, if Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, the three members of the so-called Axis of Evil, are all members in good standing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and all have safeguards agreements with the IAEA, that could make it difficult to accuse them of developing nuclear weapons, and accuse them of possibly one day handing those nuclear weapons off to Osama.
You got it.
So the whole structure was in the way.
The procedures, the Non-Proliferation Treaty itself, which had no enforcement mechanism, the IAEA safeguards agreements, the IAEA and its reporting requirements, and what is written into the UN Charter as to what should be done in the event that some signatory to a safeguards agreement diverts certain materials to a military purpose, okay?
And so, that's what they set out to do.
They set out with Iraq, which was clean as a whistle, no doubt about it, I mean, if there was any country in the world who was determined not to have a nuclear weapons program, and when Bush came into office, Bush II, it was Iraq.
My goodness gracious, I mean, for ten, let's see, by then it was ten years that the IAEA had been going under a UN Security Council mandate, had been going everywhere and interviewing everybody, and you know, practically they were an occupying power.
Well, you know, Gordon, one of the most famous Cheney quotes, one of the most famous Cheney lies in the lead-up to war is when he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press, we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons as though they had been constituted in the first place, and his next sentence was, well, I think that El Baradei, the director of the IAEA, is frankly wrong.
That's right.
He did say that, and that was in August, as I recall, of 2002, the quote you're talking about, or he made those kind of statements a lot of times.
By the way, I sat up and was just fascinated to see Scott McClellan, former press secretary for President Bush, on Olbermann, on Countdown last night?
I hope you saw that.
No, I didn't.
I'll have to find the YouTube.
Oh, gee, that was something else.
It was almost the whole hour, the interview with him, and it was very pleasing to me that everything that he said, or he didn't say anything, he, McClellan, didn't say anything that was at all inconsistent with the column I'd already submitted to you.
I mean, he basically said what I repeat in my column, which was the revelation back in 2003, in the summer of 2003, about the time that the invasion of Iraq was beginning to not look like such a cakewalk, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post revealed that a year before, that is in August of 2002, they had established this White House Iraq group that met in the Situation Room regularly, and it was done, basically, according to McClellan and to Walter Pincus and all kinds of other people, the basic job it was of this White House Iraq group, which included Condi Rice, for example, and Scooter Libby, was to launch a propaganda campaign against the American people, which is, of course, illegal.
Right.
And you know, Andrew Card, who was part of the White House Iraq group as well and the chief of staff at the time at the White House, told reporters that, well, we're waiting a little bit, you don't debut new products in August, you have to wait until after Labor Day.
Yeah.
Andrew Card, who was then chief of staff, set up that council.
Okay.
So they started their campaign, their blitz.
That was September 6th, I think, of 2002, and it was a propaganda campaign to convince Americans that Iraq, Saddam Hussein, posed a nuclear threat and that the threat would manifest itself in a mushroom-shaped cloud, you know.
But the point is, is that, you know, Cheney has to say things like, well, Mohammed El Baradei, however you pronounce his name, who is the director general of the IAEA, is just flat wrong when he says, continues to say, year after year, starting in 1997, 98, 99, 2000, 2001, and then in 2002, that there is no sign whatsoever that the Iraqis have made any attempt to reconstitute their uranium enrichment program, and of course they really didn't have a nuclear program, they never got around to even coming close to make, what would you call it, gram quantities of weapons-grade material.
And you need kilogram quantities of weapons-grade material to make even one nuke, you know.
Right.
And all the reports make it very clear that their nuclear weapons program, they had one, but it was pretty much a Looney Tunes effort.
And at the time the war broke out in 92, late 91 and the end of 92, their entire uranium enrichment program was shut down because they were trying to figure out how in the world can we ever make kilogram quantities of this stuff, when we're having so much trouble making gram quantities of it, you know.
Right, and now this is part of the lore about Dick Cheney, was that after the first Gulf War, they discovered that the Israeli attack on the Osiris reactor had driven the Iraqi nuclear program underground, and that the IAEA actually didn't understand how far along they were, which as you say, wasn't all that far along, but the lore goes that Cheney decided then and there that he would never trust the CIA's doubts again, and he would always assume that whatever they say isn't there, must be.
That could be, I don't know.
But again, once again, now that Scott McClellan is in all the news, his confirmation that – and he may even have attended some of the meetings of the White House-Iraq group, I don't know.
Media relation types did attend some of those meetings, but I don't know whether or not McClellan did or not.
I haven't read his book in its entirety.
But in any case, the principal thing that occurred yesterday, and is going to continue for days now, is that Scott McClellan is flat-charging that there was a conscious effort to propagandize Americans and to give them false information, lies really, about the threat that Iraq posed to the average American citizen.
And as everybody keeps saying over and over again, who hears what Scott has to say, what McClellan has to say, and Oberman said it three or four times last night, all the signs are they're doing exactly the same thing now with respect to Iran.
Right.
And that's really the important point, is that the lies leading us to war with Iran don't seem to really be any more credible.
The difference, I think, the major difference, Gordon, is that Iran at least does have a nuclear program.
They haven't been under blockade and sanctions and bombings for a dozen years straight like the Iraqis had been.
And trust me, I know you're a nuclear physicist and you dream in electrons and stuff, but the rest of us, we don't understand these things.
And when we hear nuclear program, as far as we know, if you have a nuclear program, you can make a nuclear bomb.
We don't know the difference a lot of the time between what this capability means and what that capability means.
And that's really the story that, especially in your last article for AntiWar.com, for example, you really get into what it would take for the Iranians to make a bomb compared to what it is, best information that we have, what it is that they actually possess by way of a nuclear program, and how unlikely it is that they can make a bomb, especially in the presence of the IAEA inspectors, right?
Right.
Now, in addition to the McClellan revelations, Scott McClellan, press secretary of revelations, we have had quite a bit of press coverage or almost no press coverage, but at least at AntiWar and a few other places on the website, we've been appalled at the way in which these retired military generals were essentially assembled into a cheerleading squad in the Pentagon and given talking points and then sent out to the networks, and these guys, some of them, were triple-dipping.
First of all, they were getting their retirement pay, which for a three- or four-star general is not trivial, okay?
Second of all, frequently they were on the board of directors or they had consulting arrangements with defense contractors.
Almost every general I've known who was a three- or four-star general who retired expected it as his right to get a relatively high-paying job on some defense contractor, but of course the unwritten rule was that if he didn't get them contracts after, let's say, three years, he was not on the board anymore.
So it was his job, even though he was getting retirement pay and he was on their board of directors or a consultant to them, his job was to get them defense contracts.
So that's the second pay.
But then some of these guys were even paid by the network.
They were on retainers to some of these networks.
And so here they were getting paid triple.
Yeah, making a killing off all that killing.
Hey, that's catchy.
You like that?
Well, at any rate, okay.
I lost my train of thought.
Well, the point is that they're lying us into war again, Gordon.
The media hype has been, until Scott McClellan took over with his revelations, has been the media, particularly George John, J-A-H-N of Associated Press, but then there's three or four other people by name who worked for Reuters or for the New York Times or for Washington Post.
And I won't go down all their names, but each of them, all of them basically reported the same thing, reported, if you want to put it that way, that there was this confidential report that Mohammed ElBaradei had just submitted to the IAEA and to the Security Council.
Right.
I have the...
So it was very critical of Iran.
Now, Gordon, I have the New York Times article here.
It says, Atomic Monitor Signals Concern Over Iran's Work.
I think that's one of the tamer headlines about this new report that's come out.
What's so shocking about it then?
Well, the report basically has three things, which I'm looking at it right now.
I didn't have it before, but I've now, thanks to a colleague, I've got it.
And it is on the Carnegie Endowment website.
Okay.
And I don't know how they got it, because it's a confidential report that ought not to have been circulated.
But we're now in a position to compare what these news outlets have said about this confidential report on condition of anonymity, you know, because the people who told us all this stuff had sworn on a stack of Bibles that they would never tell anybody what was in here.
And so that's why we're not telling you who they are, because they've done this terrible thing.
And you have to know this, because it's not set out clearly, but there are basically three reports here in this one report by ElBaradei.
First one has to do with Iran's safeguards agreement.
Okay?
That's the only thing that the Non-Proliferation Treaty concerns itself with, and that is, have any of the materials or activities that the IAEA has been monitoring been diverted to a military purpose?
And the answer is an unequivocal no.
The agency of, let me just say, I'll read this first line of the summary.
Sure.
The agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran.
Right.
And that's what they always say, right.
But that's it.
That should be it.
Right.
End of report.
Now, if you want some more detail about this, we'll provide it to you, but basically the agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran.
Now, I have to say, that sounds pretty good, as though ElBaradei's even proving the negative.
He's even saying, not only can he find no indication that anything has been diverted, but he can verify that it hasn't.
That's right.
That ought to be, so that's the end of the safeguards report.
And therefore, the IAEA Board of Governors has nothing to report to the U.N.
Security Council.
The U.N.
Security Council has not got, is not required to make a determination about what, whether or not there is a threat to peace in the region.
Okay.
That's the end of that.
Now, the second thing is, ElBaradei, who got a Nobel Prize for what he did in Iraq, even though he wasn't able to stop the war, but he was able to report to the U.N.
Security Council that he had not only verified that there were no materials in weapons, no prescribed materials in Iraq that could be diverted, but he said that he now had a comprehensive picture of the Iraqi nuclear program going all back two decades as a result of going into the files and interviewing this people and that people and verifying that the Iraqis had destroyed a lot of it, and verifying that under their supervision, the Iraqis had destroyed the rest of it.
And so by 1998, actually by 97, but 98, he was able to say, we've got a coherent picture which is consistent, and this is what it is about that program.
And this was in 98, and it was repeated again in 99, 2000, 2001, 2002, and then 2003.
Didn't do any good.
Bush went in there anyway.
Okay.
He's been trying to do the same thing for Iran.
The problem is, of course, is that the reason he was able to do that in Iraq was that he had a U.N.
Security Council mandate to do it.
This was in 1992, when the IAEA went in after the war, the first Gulf War, they discovered all this stuff, most of which had been destroyed in the war, and so they reported this to the U.N.
Security Council, and the Security Council then imposed sanctions, largely on Iraq, because of what the IAEA reported that they had found.
So in 1998, basically what ElBaradei said is, okay, you can list the sanctions now, because there ain't nothing there.
They have complied.
They've done everything they could to convince us that they don't have a nuclear weapons program, and that they never intend to ever, in fact, don't even have a nuclear program at all.
Sure, and in fact, Connelisa Rice and Colin Powell both affirmed that that was the case in the spring of 2001, before 9-11.
They both said that they don't have any weapons of mass destruction or any active programs.
We have them in a box, etc., like that.
Yeah, but again, you have to realize that they already knew, upon coming into office, or very shortly after coming into office, that nobody in this country much cared about anthrax or sweet smut or anything like that.
The only thing that bothered Americans was nuclear weapons.
And so they had...
Mushroom cloud.
So weapons of mass destruction became a code word for the Bush administration, and it meant nuclear weapons.
Right.
Even though they could say that basically anything counts as a weapon of mass destruction.
As prosecutors in this country have done already, charged people with handgun violations, as well as using a weapon of mass destruction.
It can mean anything, apparently.
Well, I read the law one time, and I think that that applies.
I think legally that's true.
There are all kinds of things that are in law in the United States that qualify as weapons of mass destruction.
Well, at any rate, I got a little off subject.
The first thing was the report on the safeguards agreement.
That was taken care of zippo, nothing more there.
But so ElBaradei then went to the Iranians and said, look, I'm getting a lot of crap from Bolton and the rest of this crew.
They've tried to kick me out of office.
They've done all these things.
They're probably bugging my phone, all that sort of thing.
It would really help me a lot if we could just, you know, you're not required to do it, but how about let's have a little work plan here.
And here are these concerns I have.
And these are all concerns passed down to him from the U.S.?
No, I don't.
I think some of them were generated himself.
One of them in particular was they found in the file, see, Iran agreed in 2003 to an additional protocol, which is not required by the Nonproliferation Treaty, but Iran wanted to, you know, be good guys and say, look, OK, we'll sign this additional protocol.
Go on the extra mile.
Yeah.
And this will allow you to make snap inspections undeclared and do all kinds of...
We will allow you, the IAEA, to try to get a picture of our entire nuclear program going back decades.
And so they opened up their files and all this other kind of stuff to ElBaradei, even though they weren't required to, because the Iranian parliament has never ratified this additional protocol.
Right.
OK.
So starting in 2004, ElBaradei had almost as much access to Iranian files as he had had in Iraq.
And so off he goes.
And one of the things he finds in there is this document, and it's a 15-page document.
And part of the document in there, there is a sketchy description or a set of procedures or something like that about how to cast uranium metal into hemispheres, OK?
And ElBaradei, in all his reports, he says, well, what the hell is this?
And they said, gee, I don't know.
Right.
You know, apparently it came with a whole bunch of stuff that we bought from, they didn't say Pakistan, but that was it, you know.
They had acquired all this stuff quite legally.
OK.
So what does the new IAEA report have to say about that?
Well, it says, the one that we're talking about right now, this is one of the things in the work plan that ElBaradei wanted to have cleared up.
What it says is, the Iranian says, well, it must have come in a package of stuff that we got from the Pakistani.
Right.
And we didn't even know it was there, about the forming of uranium into hemispheres.
And we've never done it.
We never tried to do it.
And ElBaradei reports in this report we're talking about, that there's no indication that they ever did, that there was any association with the nuclear material, uranium, with this document.
And furthermore, he says, and by the way, I've queried the Pakistanis and they haven't admitted that they gave it to the Iranians.
They have verified that they have an identical document in their file.
Right.
Right.
That's footnote 24 in there.
And, you know, this is the same thing that's happened before, right, where they found some residue of highly enriched uranium and they said, hey, where'd you get that?
And the Iranians said, I don't know, it must have come with the machine when we got it from Pakistan.
And they asked the Pakistanis and the Pakistanis said, yeah, that's right.
Well, again, I don't think they said they agreed that.
What they said is that the isotopic makeup of this material is identical to material that we have.
Right.
I don't think the Pakistanis have admitted that they've sold this stuff to Iran.
Okay, so they don't come right out and say it.
They shouldn't.
It was perfectly legal for them to sell it and it was perfectly legal for Iran to buy it.
But.
Right.
Well, it's one of those non-answer answers where we know that the question is satisfied anyway.
That's right.
Right.
And now, but a lot of these questions come from the so-called stolen laptop, which is.
That's the third category.
Okay.
Third category was the safeguards agreement.
That's fine.
Nothing.
That's great.
There's nothing to report there.
Second thing is the work plan is basically that's all resolved.
Now comes the stolen laptop stuff.
And here, the report is really funny.
Not funny, but I don't know what you do.
What happened is that this alleged stolen laptop alleged to be stolen and somehow another obtained by Israeli intelligence or somebody like that, and then maybe went to the Germans and then finally the United States.
I don't know.
Let me interrupt you for just one moment to point out that on March 1st, 2008 at antiwar.com, we published an article by Gareth Porter from IPS News who wrote Iran nuke laptop data came from terror group.
And that's his sources are the Germans.
They say that the laptop came from the NCRI, which is the political front of the communist terrorist cult, the Mujahedin Al-Khalq.
And the NCRI and the MEK have been identified by Scott Ritter and others in the past as fronts for Israeli intelligence.
That's right.
And he also specifically says in there in a footnote or something that that there are suspicions, although you can't prove it, that the that the Israelis are really behind this.
But at any rate, that's in that article.
Right.
Well, it's important to point out that nobody's ever proven that this thing actually came from this dead Iranian scientists.
They claim it came from, right?
As far as I know, Gareth knows more about that than I do.
But at any rate, what happened was, is that the United States, who has possession of this, apparently showed it stuff on it to the IAEA in an electronic form, and that the IAEA then proceeded to confront the Iranians with, at best, a secondhand version of this stuff in electronic form.
What that means to me is that the Iranians, as of yet, have not ever actually seen the so-called documents that are included on that stolen laptop.
And so they're being asked to say, OK, well, what about this?
And here is a critical statement in Brideye's latest report.
It should be emphasized, however, that the agency has not detected the actual use of nuclear material in connection with the alleged studies, any of them, OK?
What that means is that all of this stuff is none of the IAEA's business, none of it.
All right, well now, this is something that you say sometimes in your articles, is that if this or that is happening, this is really outside the mandate of the IAEA.
The UN doesn't really have any authority to tell the IAEA to do this or that.
Is that just a technical argument?
I mean, the War Party would say, let's just stick to the facts, and whether the IAEA is out of their jurisdiction, even going down these roads or not, aren't these indications of something nefarious is going on over there?
Yes and no.
In this particular case, the UN Security Council has told ElBaradei, actually it's told Iran that it would be a good thing all around if they were to satisfy him that there was nothing to any of this.
Now it's none of ElBaradei's business as a director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
However, the IAEA is a UN agency, and if the UN Security Council tells, directs ElBaradei to do this, then that's all the authority needs.
But in the letter, note verbal, sent by the Iranians back on March 28th of this year, they give chapter and verse about how the IAEA Board of Governors should never have forwarded this set of recommendations to the UN Security Council, because there was no basis in their charter and in their bylaws for doing it, because the director general had continued to report that there was no diversion of declared or undeclared material.
And hence, the IAEA was corrupt in doing that.
They violated their own bylaws and statute and everything else.
It was illegal, in other words, under international law.
Furthermore, the UN Security Council then proceeded, at the urging of John Bolton, to disregard their procedures for what they were to do in the event that they had gotten a report that there was a potential threat to the peace in the region because the material had been diverted to a military purpose, because no material had been diverted to a military purpose.
But what they should have done is, if Bolton had made this complaint, the UN Security Council should have met and they should have concluded under Article 39 that there was no threat to the peace in the region.
That should have been the end of it.
Instead, Bolton got them to go around their own procedures and to declare that its failure to suspend its safeguarded programs indefinitely, you know, in them, that Bolton demanded that they stop and they refused to do it, and therefore that constituted a threat to the peace in the region, which, of course, is ridiculous.
If safeguarded programs are a threat to peace, then boy howdy, we have got real problems right here in River City.
Yeah, well, it really does seem like a shame, going back, I guess, to the beginning and the media on all this.
Is it just the case, you think, Gordon, that nuclear technology is so complicated and international treaties are so complicated that these reporters just can't bother to get it right?
I mean, I don't know how many emails I've gotten from you criticizing the reporters at the New York Times and the Post and other places where I can't tell if these guys are liars or if they just cannot understand the topic that they're writing about.
Well, in the particular case I just mentioned of George John, J-A-H-N, of the Associated Press, who signed his article, in his first report on this most recent report by Al-Baradei, he said that the Associated Press had obtained a copy.
Now usually these guys say, well, according to diplomats with access to these reports, who told us all this stuff on condition that we not tell anybody who they were, because they're prohibited by their oath of office and all that sort of thing, to tell us these kind of things.
And then they proceed to then, sometimes with a byline, sometimes it just says Reuters or Associated Press or AFP or something like that.
But in this particular case, the very first one of these I saw, it was byline George John, Associated Press, and he said in his first paragraph, or right up near the beginning, that the Associated Press had obtained a copy of it.
So that's an example of where I say that he could not conceivably have written that article, that report that he wrote under his name, if he had even glanced through, skimmed through the actual report.
It's ridiculous.
And by the way, anybody can go to thestressblog.com or to antiwar.com slash blog, and if you find the entry for today's show, you'll see the word report, IAEA report is highlighted red.
Click there, and that's the PDF file.
It's available at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website.
And you're right.
I mean, I just, I got to admit, I only glanced at it, and I got the same impression that you got on intense study, and that was, it seems to me like ElBaradei is acquitting the Iranians pretty much across the board here.
Again, there are three reports.
First is the IAEA report.
That's his business.
They're not guilty there.
No evidence whatsoever, no indication that there's anything wrong with them as far as their safeguards agreement is concerned.
Second thing is, is that in this report and the one previous, he basically says, well, we've essentially resolved all the work plan issues, the issues I had.
And then there's this business that the Security Council asked him to look into, okay?
Which was, you know, the smoking laptop stuff and things like that.
And there he says, well, I don't know, you know, the Iranians say that we haven't actually shown them the real data, but as best they can tell, they say, you know, first of all, there's no indication that any of this stuff or any, most of this stuff has anything to do with Iran.
It doesn't say anything on here about Iran or anything in many cases, and a couple of cases it does.
There is a supposed flow chart that shows an association between the Revolutionary Guards and some missile stuff.
And somebody alleges that, well, they must, this missile stuff must have a nuclear application.
But once again, this is what El Boradei says.
It should be emphasized, however, that the agency has not detected the actual use of nuclear material in connection with the alleged studies.
That includes this warhead business for the missiles and all that sort of thing.
And by the way, didn't the arms control wonk, Jeffrey Lewis, write a thing complaining loudly to the New York Times that even according to these blueprints, the delivery vehicle that they're making couldn't fit a nuclear warhead in it anyway?
That could be.
But again, these are all Bush, Cheney, Bolton, and sometimes Condi Rice gets involved, accusations.
And the Iranians basically have not even been granted the right to face their accusers.
They don't know what documents, they haven't seen the document, you know.
Let me give you an example.
Well, when the IAEA finally got shown a copy of the actual document about the Niger uranium deal, they immediately said, oh, come on, you know, the letterhead's all right, but all the officials listed here and all this other stuff is wrong.
Right.
They said they debunked it in three minutes with Google.
They finally let them have copies, photocopies of the actual document just, I think, maybe hours before Bush made his speech.
Well, the Iranians have not been shown these documents as yet, these so-called documents.
And it's conceivable if they ever got shown them, you know, they might say, oh, yeah, we know what this is, and it has nothing to do with nuclear.
Or they might say, what?
This is ridiculous.
There isn't any such agency.
Well, I've got to tell you, Dr. Gordon Prather, if I've learned anything in this 45 minutes, it's that none of this amounts to a costless belly by the longest shot.
Well, it's worse than that.
What it really does, and again, it's great that McClellan is finally coming out and talking about this, is where we are today is the result of a deliberate attempt, a coordinated attempt by the Bush-Cheney administration to undermine the Nonproliferation Treaty, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Security Council itself.
That's the bottom line.
Yep.
And just so they can have wars, and those things stand in their way.
That's right.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gordon Prather.
He is formerly from Lawrence Livermore in Sandia National Laboratories, spent his career making bombs and testing them and taking them apart again.
He was the Chief Scientist of the Army and advisor to U.S. Senators in negotiating these international deals.
You can read everything he writes at antiwar.com slash Prather.
We run his article every Saturday and Sunday, and I want to thank you again for coming on the show and sharing your expertise with us, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
And in fact, Gordon, if you hang on the line there, you'll like this soundbite, and this is for the rest of you, too.
This is John Bolton explaining that he was trying, in fact, to force Iran to quit the NPT.
The Security Council resolution that gave them until August the 31st to cease their uranium enrichment activity.
And sorry, there's some narration here in writing on this YouTube, but there's more audio coming up in just a sec.
I have to say, because I'm a private citizen and therefore a free man again, these are my personal views.
Now, this resolution, the sanctions resolution, is very disappointing.
It is not as tough as I would have liked to have seen it.
In many respects, the Russians did an outstanding job from their point of view in protecting Iran and narrowing the scope of the sanctions, limiting the effectiveness, I think, of many of the things that we want to try and do to prevent the Iranians from continuing to make progress on their nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
I think the Iranian reaction to the sanctions resolution has been very telling in that respect, although they've passed the resolution in Parliament to re-evaluate their relationship with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
They have not rejected the sanctions resolution.
They have not done anything more dramatic, such as withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty or throwing out specters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which I actually hope they would do, that that kind of reaction would produce a counter-reaction that actually would be more beneficial to us.
