07/12/13 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Worden.
It's the Scott Worden Show.
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Next up, it's our good friend, Gareth Porter, back from his exile.
Did Obama take away your passport?
Where the hell have you been?
I've been here at home writing a book.
Oh, writing a book.
I already knew that.
What's the title of the new book?
It's going to be called Manufactured Crisis, the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
Yeah.
Man, I can't wait to read that, Gareth.
Well, I hope it'll meet your expectations.
I have every reason to think it will.
Yeah, I also have every reason to think that.
Hey, everybody.
So Gareth Porter, he's my favorite reporter.
And not just because those words rhyme and everything, but the thing of it is that whenever the war party says a lie, he proves it ain't true.
And specifically on all of the wars, but especially Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.
And he's done award-winning work on all of them.
And he's just really freaking good.
And so his article today, his new one, it's at antiwar.com.
It's at Interpress News, which is IPSnews.net.
It's about the JFK terror plot.
No evidence for charge that Iran linked to JFK terror plot.
So I want the full Monty debunking of this freaking thing here in a minute.
But first, it's very important to me anyway.
I don't know if anybody else cares, but I think it's extremely important that the new head of the FBI, Gareth, is a guy named James Comey.
And he was praised during his confirmation hearings the other day by Senator Sessions for being the lead DOJ lawyer who indicted Saudi, pardon me, Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah for the Khobar Towers attack, a truck bombing that killed, I think it was 17 or 19 American airmen back in 1996.
And then I went and Googled that up, and yeah, apparently that's true.
And then just now, we were speaking with Colleen Rowley on the show, and she said that Louis Freeh was in a big hurry.
And the way she remembered it, he announced the indictment on his last day in office, and that was going to be his big thing.
And then we talked about the anecdote about John O'Neill warning Louis Freeh that the Saudis were lying to him and that it was clearly al-Qaeda that did it and not Hezbollah.
But anyway, so I was hoping, since you wrote a plethora of articles about this, that you could clear up for us once and for all who was behind that attack and how you so sure.
Well, you know, it seems absolutely, almost 100% certain, a leadfinch certainty that al-Qaeda, that bin Laden was behind the Khobar Towers bombing for all kinds of reasons, which I have covered in a series that I did on this some years ago.
I think it was 2009, if I remember correctly.
First of all, of course, is the fact that he took credit for it.
He took responsibility for it publicly more than once.
In interviews with a Palestinian newspaper in London, he basically, in so many words, said, yes, we did it.
And it is well known that he did not claim responsibility for actions, terrorist actions, that he was not behind.
So that's point number one.
Point number two is that the CIA's bin Laden unit, led by Michael Scheuer, by Scheuer himself, put together a four-page memorandum after the Khobar Towers bombing, which was aimed at pulling together the intelligence that had been gathered by the CIA before the bombing, not afterwards, but before the bombing, that indicated that al-Qaeda was in fact intending to do a second bombing in Saudi Arabia after the Riyadh bombing of November 2005, which four Saudis were executed for by the Saudi regime in May, I believe it was, or May of 2006, 1996, excuse me.
I'm doing that decade thing again.
And so Scheuer pulled together all this intelligence that indicated that there was, in fact, an al-Qaeda plan for a second bombing and that Khobar Towers was one of the potential targets.
So I won't go on and on about that.
Wasn't it also on the anniversary of George H.W. Bush's foot soldiers first putting their feet on Saudi soil in 1990?
I honestly don't remember if that—you're talking about Khobar Towers itself being on an anniversary?
Yeah.
I actually don't remember where I learned that.
I'm sorry.
I shouldn't have said it without a footnote.
I don't recall it, actually.
I don't recall that specifically being an anniversary.
But, you know, another point is that he publicly declared war on the United States within a few weeks after Khobar Towers.
So, I mean, you know, we have on one side all this evidence that bin Laden was behind it and was taking responsibility for it.
And on the other hand, you have the FBI in certainly one of its many low points, and I would say clearly vying for the lowest of the low points, paying no attention whatsoever, essentially refusing to look into the bin Laden angle on this and insisting that the only thing they were interested in investigating was Iran's presumed involvement in it and, you know, that the Saudis aligned with Iran.
So, you know, they systematically closed the door to any investigation of bin Laden and insisted that they only would look at the evidence for Iran.
And so I interviewed John Brennan as part of my investigation of the Khobar Towers bombing and the investigation by the FBI, and he gave me, you know, a clearly cock and bull account.
He was then head of the CIA's Saudi task force, I believe it was called.
And so he was very much involved in this.
And his whole thing was, well, we had these two pots of information, and the pot that had to do with al-Qaeda was much smaller than the pot that had to do with Iran, and therefore that's why we decided that it was legitimate to target Iran.
But, of course, the problem with that is that the pot that had to do with Iran was all about surveillance of targets in Saudi Arabia that the Iranians had been carrying out from 1993, 1994, 1995.
And, I mean, that was the kind of information that they were citing as the basis for, you know, saying it had to be Iran.
Well, now, were they just grasping at straws like Dick Cheney trying to make a case, or were they really that stupid, you think?
Because, I mean, it was early on in al-Qaeda's war against America, you know.
It's the usual situation.
I mean, you know, the national security state organs, the bureaucrats, invariably, always conflate their interests with the interests of the country.
So, you know, it never occurs to them to question – well, okay, I can't say it never occurs to them, but they manage to avoid – let's put it this way – they manage to avoid the reality that what they're doing is, in fact, you know, serves the political and bureaucratic interests of the organs of the state and of the individuals who run them.
And beyond that, I mean, you know, it's difficult to – you can't tell what's going on inside their heads.
All you know is the structure of the situation, and that's what I use to explain it.
Yeah, well, I think they call that the public choice theory.
Well, that's another – Everybody's an individual, and they look out of their own eyes.
I'm a skateboarder, so to me, everything is something that maybe I could skate.
And to a cop, everything is something that maybe he could shoot.
And that's just how people are.
Right, right, exactly.
Yeah, okay, and so if you work for the State Department, everything is an excuse to beat a run over the head with something, even if it comes to the degree, to the point of ignoring and letting bombers go free, the people who actually killed American airmen.
You know, it's amazing.
Well, I mean, the entire record of the U.S. national security state from the Cold War on has been to pursue policies that are not in the interests of the American people, that harm the interests of the American people, over and over again, systematically.
Why do they do it?
Because it serves the interests of the bureaucracy.
I mean, it's as simple as that.
Yeah, there you go.
All right, now, so a couple of things here before we move on to the JFK thing is, first of all, some of these Clintonites have conceded the case now, correct?
And I don't know how meaningful that is because they were lying in the first place, so now they tell the truth.
I don't know, but isn't that correct, that the former Secretary of Defense has basically said, oh, yeah, it turns out that was bin Laden after all, huh?
The only person that I know of for sure who has, in fact, done that is, in fact, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who has gone public with this, saying I was wrong.
Unfortunately, or for some reason, I don't know why, he refuses to say I was misled by the FBI and the CIA.
And, you know, I certainly would like to know why they did this.
He simply says, you know, it's clear to him that al Qaeda was behind it after all.
And that's a very interesting question.
I interviewed him for my series on Kobar Towers, and, you know, he did make it clear that he believed that the administration had been completely wrong on that, but he did not explain why he, you know, he understood that they were so wrong about it.
All right.
Now, on the institutional interest there, to clarify, I mean, you tell me your way, but the best I understand would be that they had this policy of dual containment, which is another way of saying a policy of never make friends with Iran again no matter what and always find an excuse to make them the enemy, even if we have to pretend that they're in an axis with their avowed enemy, Saddam Hussein, who we used to back against them and them against him.
Absolutely.
It started with, I mean, with the Clinton administration.
As soon as they came into office, even before they came into office, Clinton had turned his Middle East policy over to Martin Indyk, who was a former advisor to Israeli Premier Yitzhak Shamir, among other things, and who made no bones about the fact that, I mean, he was out to promote the interests of Israel.
So, you know, it was a political action, a political act by Bill Clinton to essentially make Martin Indyk his Middle East policy guy.
And it was Indyk who articulated the dual containment policy in a very unusual move for any administration.
Normally this is, you know, a major new policy is announced by the State Department's main Middle East policymaker or the Secretary of State.
In this case, it was his National Security Specialist on the Middle East, Martin Indyk, who did it.
And I think it's indicative of the fact that Clinton basically made a political decision to turn his Middle East policy over to the pro-Israel crowd and, you know, simply let that be the policy.
Well, you know, I'm sorry for being, you know, all uptight about this and whatever, but I say it's treason.
I say that James Comey is guilty of aiding and abetting Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he ought to be strung up, not made the head of the FBI.
What the hell is going on here?
In a just world?
Absolutely.
They're making him the head of the FBI, Gareth!
Yeah, this is a profoundly skewed and screwed environment that we're living in.
I'm actually just pretending to be upset.
I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous.
The whole government is some kind of Monty Python put on at this point, I think.
Well, that's another view of it which is equally valid.
Yeah, like maybe this whole universe is an illusion that God created just to play a prank on me.
That kind of thing, you know?
Well, I don't know if I'd go that far, but anyway.
You couldn't disprove it.
One can see the comic aspect of it, even though it's tragic as well.
Yeah.
Well, of course, yeah, there's a lot of people dying.
Anyway, so there you go.
The Khobar Towers attack.
That's really something else, and the last point I want to make on that, which I don't know, you don't have to comment on this if you don't want, but at the time, and we've talked about this before too, I remember at my job we had to listen to the Rush Limbaugh show, and this got coverage then.
A lady yelled at Bill Clinton, you suck, at a political rally, because this happened on his watch, basically.
They were there sleeping in their bunks, but didn't have force protection watching their back, and so they got blindsided, and that was his responsibility, and Clinton had the SS goons detain her for more than 24 hours, as though she had threatened him or something, when all she did was tell the truth that he sucked, and then boy, did she have no idea that he was actually willing to just basically commit treason on behalf of America's enemies, and help cover up who really did it, so he could blame who he felt like.
I mean, that is absolutely incredible.
If you go back to the time and place when that really happened, and when the people who loved the men who died there still were crying about it, that was a big deal, and Bill Clinton just straight up lied, and his whole government straight up lied, and pretended it was Iran.
Ha!
Well, again, I mean, you know, they managed to convince themselves somehow that what they're doing is in the interest of the country, and that it's true.
So, you know, it is always part of that paradigm.
But, you know, I would just very quickly, before we pass on to JFK's plot, just make the point that the underlying reality there, of course, is that U.S. troops should never have been in Saudi Arabia.
That was a fundamental departure from common sense, which had prevailed throughout the Cold War.
It was Dick Cheney who, more than anybody else, made the decision to put those troops there, and keep them there, despite the fact that Ches Freeman, the ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said, you can't do that, are you crazy?
In so many words.
So, I mean, you know, let's just not forget that that's really the underlying phenomenon that kicked off this whole matter.
Yeah, of course, well, bin Laden's declarations of war in, I think the first one in 1996, is called the Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.
Exactly, exactly.
You're one of the few people who actually knows that fact.
Well, yeah, it's not a very subtle thing, and if you read it, it simply says, you're occupying my holy land, you're doing so that you can blockade and strangle the women and children of Iraq to death, and you support Israel in Palestine and in Lebanon and their horrible war crimes against civilians there, and so therefore I'm going to attack you until you either quit or go bankrupt and have to quit.
And it's right there in black and white from the year of the Khobar Towers attack, right there, as you said, just a couple months or a month after.
God, I mean, you know, just to make matters worse, I mean, you know, it's clear that people in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the government did understand that they were putting American interests at risk by having those troops there.
They knew that it was creating a target, they knew that it was antagonizing people, particularly the clerics in Saudi Arabia were extremely antagonized by this.
And, you know, I often cite a quote that is attributed to a senior staffer at the Pentagon's joint staff saying, well, you know, the possibility or the threat of a terror attack or two is the price you have to pay for being a superpower.
Yeah, the price somebody else has to pay is what he meant to say.
Exactly.
And, you know, I'm sorry to bring this up again.
I Googled the hell out of this and I could not find it.
If anybody knows my footnote, please help me out.
I'm scott, scotthorton.org is my email.
But I must have read this in a book because I know I didn't make it up, and that is that Lloyd Benson, who ran as the vice presidential candidate back in, what, 1984, right, but was a powerful Texas legislator for a long time and a senator and an oil man and who is very familiar with business in Saudi Arabia, that he was a conservative Texas Democrat, the old kind, and an ally of the conservative Republicans.
And he warned George Bush, Sr. personally in 1990, do not put troops there.
You're going to drive the crazies crazy.
And it's going to be a real problem.
Yeah, yeah, but that's a very important point.
And, yeah, so here ye, here ye.
I need that footnote.
If anybody knows what book I read that in, please tell me because I can't find it online anywhere.
But I know I read somewhere.
All right, now, so the JFK plot.
This whole thing, was there even a JFK plot, Gareth?
Well, not much of one.
There was something, but it hardly merited.
Barely, it barely merited the term a terror plot.
You know, there was a former JFK cargo handler from Trinidad named Russell De Freitas who got it into his head.
He was very antagonized by U.S. policies and, you know, got it into his head that it would be great to, you know, do this thing of blowing up the fuel tanks at JFK.
You know, it turns out, I mean, he had no idea.
He had no concept of how to do it.
He, you know, didn't know the first thing about it.
He didn't realize that, you know, yeah, you could, you know, set fire to millions of gallons of jet fuel, but you really couldn't do much else by, you know, exploding a bomb, you know, at the fuel tanks.
And, you know, nobody else really involved in this plot.
There were four people from Trinidad and from Guyana who were involved, and none of them really knew what they were doing.
And they would never have done this except for the fact that De Freitas had an acquaintance from his mosque in Brooklyn.
I guess it was Brooklyn, who turned out to have become an FBI informant later on after he knew him, I guess, because he'd been, you know, convicted of a drug trafficking charge.
And that's what happens many times to people who get convicted.
They turn into government informants.
Seven minutes.
Yeah, so basically what happened was that they started talking to this guy thinking that he was an old mosque acquaintance, telling him that he wanted to blow up the fuel tanks at JFK.
So the guy starts recording his conversations.
Well, this goes on for several months.
And, I mean, that's starting in mid-2006.
And by February 2007, De Freitas introduces this FBI guy to a guy named Qadir, Abdul Qadir, from Guyana.
He was actually a member of the parliament of Guyana.
And that's how he got involved in it.
And his two sons were both educated in Islamic schools in Iran, and so he had that tie-in.
And apparently he had been writing letters to a guy who was formerly the cultural attache in Buenos Aires, Mohsen Rabbani, and to the Iranian ambassador in Venezuela, talking about the social, economic, and political scene in Guyana.
So that's the background of all this.
It could not have, and of course never did, become a serious plot.
They had no explosives.
They had no plan.
They had no funding.
So in that sense, no, it was not a serious plot.
Well, now, when the story broke, were they accusing Iran of participating in this back in the beginning, or this is just all new accusations?
No.
That's why this is a story, Scott.
The U.S. government never claimed that.
They never charged that.
They never said that Iran was involved in it in any way, shape, or form.
This is all the work of Alberto Nisman, the guy who gave us the alleged Iranian top government plot to blow up the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.
Same guy.
He's now back at it again.
And now he's putting out this 31-page summary of a 530-page report, which is claiming that Iran was not only setting up intelligence networks in Latin America, but was behind, somehow involved in, the JFK terror plot.
And it's all complete outrage.
It's just completely made up.
And it reveals, I think, better than anything previously, just the way Nisman actually operates, the way he twists reality in order to promote a particular point of view, a political point of view.
I mean, he's got a political agenda.
And that political agenda is the political agenda of Israel.
Right.
And speaking of blaming people, the Iranians, who didn't do it, and letting actual murderers get away with it, the Argentina plot, and for the exact same reasons as Kobar, the Argentina plot is just another one, and another one that you've written a plethora of articles about, debunking from all sides.
I don't know.
Did anybody, as far as you know, has anybody else picked up on the fact that, hey, this is the same guy making these same bogus accusations again?
No, nobody else has written about that so far.
And the interesting thing is that even though he makes the flat statement that Iran was, quote, seriously involved in the JFK terror plot, nobody else has seen fit to say, what are you talking about, and really called him on it.
So I have a feeling that even the extreme right in this country is a little bit leery of getting into that, that it's so obviously untrue.
You mean they're not, it's not only that no one's challenging him on it, they're not picking it up and beating the drum with it either.
They're just kind of ignoring it, you're saying.
Well, I mean, I can't say that flatly because, in fact, Matthew Levitt, our friend from Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who is certainly a propagandist of the worst variety on behalf of Israeli interests, did, in fact, write something about this in which he stated at one point in the piece that Iran had, quote, helped the four plotters who were looking for money and logistical assistance.
Now, you know, not even, I mean, you know, that is a, that's a misstatement, which was first published by the Foreign Policy Initiative, which is another sort of Israeli propaganda.
That's Bill Kristol.
Bill Kristol, exactly.
And I think Elliot Abrams.
Yeah, yeah.
And they made, they did a piece that had that statement in it, and Levitt apparently didn't bother to read anything more than that, and just, you know, basically repeated their statement.
Now, what they did was to infer from a statement that was made by the U.S. Attorney's Office in a press release that was in turn an inference from something that was stated by one of the plotters.
So, I mean, it's just, it's like a game of telephone where the people involved in the game are, you know, have their own political agenda, if you can imagine how bad things can turn out under those circumstances.
Yep.
Well, that's pretty much what we cover every day on the show.
Speaking of which, did you see the one yesterday where the MEK is accusing the Iranians of having a new nuclear facility?
Do you know about that one?
I did not know about that.
I've not caught up with the latest MEK outrage, no.
Yeah.
Well, the only thing that was notable about this story to me was that Reuters didn't even bother asking even David Albright or anyone else whether they thought it was credible.
They just went ahead and printed it like it was an NCRI press release.
Yeah, that is certainly one of the more outrageous things that still happens, that the MEK gets quoted without any questioning of their bona fides, their agenda or anything.
I mean, it's unbelievable that that can still happen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're just complete lunatics.
I don't know what's the problem with that.
Anyway.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, listen, we're out of time.
Thank you so much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, my friend.
Thanks.
Glad to be back on the show again, Scott.
All right.
We'll do it again soon.
All right.
You send me that book as soon as you got one.
All right.
Bye bye.
All right.
See ya.
That's the heroic Gareth Porter from Inter Press Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
IPSnews.net.
And you'll find all of what he writes as well at Antiwar.com/Porter.
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