Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet every Monday through Friday from 11 to 1 Texas time at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And introducing our next guest, our regular guest, Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist, writes mostly for IPS News.
You can find all his IPS archives at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
And he has a new one at RawStory.com today.
It's called Documents Linking Iran to Nuclear Weapons Push May Have Been Fabricated.
Oh, Gareth, you don't say.
Hey, Scott, how are you?
I'm doing good.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks.
Okay, so come on.
Our government is accusing Iran of something and you're saying that the documents upon which these accusations are based might be, what, not, may have been fabricated, may have been forged, phony documents, Gareth?
The story is something I've been promising you and your listeners for some time and it's been several months in the making.
And it's really about the new evidence that has surfaced this year.
It's really something that has been around, I mean, the evidence has been around for some months now, but to actually pull it all together has taken quite a bit of time.
All right.
Now, let me stop you here for a second and try to give a little bit of background here.
Right now, the International Atomic Energy Agency has two separate investigations going on in Iran.
One of them is under their safeguards agreement, enforcing the Non-Proliferation Treaty and Iran's signature to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, by which they safeguard all of Iran's nuclear facilities.
And they say that they've been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of any of this nuclear material.
Everything there is hunky-dory.
Then they have a separate investigation, which is mandated not by Iran's signature to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but by an order of the UN Security Council, which is based on, as far as I know, based on this one group of documents that came from what they say is the stolen laptop, and that these are the unresolved questions that indicate that the Iranians were at least, if not continue, if they don't continue to, they at least were working on nuclear weapons.
Now, is that the case, that basically all that information, all those accusations coming out of the UN Security Council and the mandate for the IAEA to do that investigation is based on these documents?
That is correct.
There is not a single charge that has been made by the IAEA, or at least, perhaps the term charge is a bit too strong, but the questions that they have insisted Iran must respond to and explain are all based on these documents, which came from a source still unknown.
The circumstances of the document's appearance have never been explained.
There's still no official word from the U.S. government about these documents.
They have never acknowledged anything about them, except for the initial statement by the Secretary, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, that we have this new intelligence which indicated that Iran was indeed working on a nuclear weapons-related program.
He talked about a missile which would be tailored to carry nuclear weapons.
And that's been it.
Otherwise, it's been a matter of leaks, and of course, then feeding these documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and really getting the IAEA to carry the ball politically and to essentially keep Iran on the hot seat, conveniently, so that its dossier must remain at the Security Council, or can remain at the Security Council.
Well, and this is one thing, is that the Iranians are supposed to respond to these charges when they haven't been provided the evidence against them.
Well, that is one of the features of this whole process, which is remarkable and has received very little attention, unfortunately.
We've talked about it, I know, in the past on your show.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Secretary General of the IAEA, has publicly complained, he did from the very beginning, in 2005, when the United States government first approached the IAEA, briefed them on these documents, these so-called laptop documents, and wanted the IAEA to confront Iran over those documents.
But it did not want IAEA to share the documents with Iran.
It was willing to have them take a quick peek and say, here are the documents, now explain.
But not to actually take them back and be able to analyze them.
And ElBaradei said, well, this is obviously not in keeping with any sort of due process, and I can't go along with this.
Due process would mean that the documents would be shared with the people who are being asked to account for them, and he, unfortunately, was forced to bow to pressure from the United States and its allies in the IAEA, and he's gone ahead on the basis that he refused initially to go along with, by having reports which are based on the premise that Iran must account for these documents, even though they haven't been able to study them.
All right, now, I covered the Security Council and their mandate to the IAEA to do this investigation, and as you confirmed, that it is based solely on these laptop documents.
Now, what about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities put out by the National Intelligence Council a year ago, in November of 2007?
They said in there that whatever efforts the Iranians ever had at a nuclear weapons program were abandoned back in 2003.
But were those efforts, so-called, abandoned back in 2003, again, simply based on these documents, or was there anything else?
I have strong reason to believe that this was based, essentially, on these documents.
Bear in mind that we're talking about an intelligence estimate that represents a consensus of 16 intelligence agencies, which inevitably have big differences in the way they interpret things.
That inevitably involves pulling and hauling compromises on how to phrase, how to frame, how to present the finding.
And I believe that what happened there was that they didn't have solid evidence of any nuclear weapons program.
What they had was these documents, and they had words captured, either in print or electronically, or both, which suggested, well, we've been forced to quit.
Now, I think that what they were forced to quit was the Iranian enrichment, which, in fact, they did suspend in October 2003, as a result of their feeling that, politically, they were better off making an agreement with the EU, the EU-3, Britain, France, and Germany.
Wait a minute, no, no, no.
I think that's what happened.
And so I think that, in fact, it still remains true that these documents remain the only evidence of any nuclear weapons-related program.
So you're saying that when the Iranians signed their additional protocol to their safeguards agreement back in 2003, and they stopped enriching uranium as long as they were dealing, quote, in good faith with the Europeans, or I guess, as long as the Europeans were dealing, quote, in good faith with them, for, I guess, that lasted, what, two and a half years, something like that, that that was what they were discussing when they said that they called off something as far as their nuclear program, because there never was any of the rest of this stuff?
Yeah, and I think that, you know, there was indeed, there were, I should say, some serious differences within the Iranian regime between people who felt that this was a mistake to go along with the EU and suspend uranium enrichment, and to begin negotiating with the IAEA on new agreement which would tie the hands of Iran in the future, that it would bind Iran more closely to the course that involved basically having heavy inspection of its nuclear sites.
There was a strong contingent there in Tehran which believed that Iran should keep its distance, some distance from the IAEA and from the, even the Non-Proliferation Treaty, that it should keep its options open in terms of, you know, if it were under too much pressure, that it should not be so tied to the IAEA in the West.
Well, and this is what they've been doing, is keeping their options open.
I mean, that is, I think anybody could probably agree that that's sort of the point of trying to perfect their nuclear fuel cycle and their ability to enrich uranium is not necessarily to get it to weapons grade, but to have the capability to get it to weapons grade if they needed to.
So, I think this, I mean, the idea at least of a threat to do that, I'm not convinced that there were any significant officials in the Iranian regime who were, you know, contemplating doing that at any time in the foreseeable future, but I think they viewed having uranium enrichment and mastering the fuel cycle as a kind of proto-deterrent, a kind of sort of existential deterrent, if you will, just simply because if someone chose to attack Iran, they would know that at some point in the future, Iran could retaliate.
And, you know, this is exactly what some of the Israeli specialists on Iran reminded the Israeli government over the past year and a half or so, that Iran would not have to retaliate immediately, they could take their time.
And of course, that existential deterrent, I happen to think, is really part of the calculus that goes into the Iranian nuclear program.
Which again, you know, just to make sure we don't get too far ahead of people, because this is complicated stuff, that nuclear program that they do have, the uranium enrichment that they do have, is safeguarded by the IAEA.
In order for them to turn it into a nuclear weapons program, they would have to withdraw from the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, kick the IAEA inspectors out of the country, and basically announce to the world, we're going to try to make an atom bomb out of enriched uranium now.
Precisely.
Absolutely.
They are now in a situation where they cannot sort of secretly go about this, they have to announce it to the world by breaking with the IAEA and the NPT.
Okay, now, let's get in here and break apart all these bogus accusations here, Gareth.
First of all, there has always been a debate about the nature of, well, first of all, let me just say, in your article you break down the accusations as contained in this laptop, or the so-called intelligence, as referring to a warhead design, an underground chamber for nuclear testing, a detonation system, a complicated detonation system, and a bench scale facility for enriching yellowcake uranium ore to uranium tetrafluoride, green salt.
Okay, so now let's start with this warhead thing, because the way I remember it, Broad and Sanger in the New York Times, the neo-crazy media sycophants, as Gordon Prather calls them, they wrote that, oh yeah, they're working on this warhead.
And David Albright wrote a pretty angry letter, and they had this back and forth, where he said that you guys are trying to conflate the terms warhead and delivery vehicle.
They were not working on a warhead, they were working on a delivery vehicle that you might put a warhead in, but in this case, this delivery vehicle is way too small for a nuclear bomb unless they had, you know, the most sophisticated, miniaturized nuclear weapons like America has.
Well, just a couple of points on the document, insofar as we're able to learn what the content of these purported technical studies really were.
It is reported that in one of these documents, at least, there is a suggestion that the warhead would be exploded, I've forgotten the exact distance from the Earth, but at a distance from the Earth that is believed to be only consistent with a nuclear weapon, and that's the reason why this has been presented as technical studies that are presumed to be for redesigning the warhead, redesigning the nose cone of, excuse me, the nose cone of a Shihab-3 missile, so that it would accommodate a nuclear weapon.
Now, the problem here is that technical studies are, you know, there's nothing in there that verifies, there's no verifying information for the technical studies on the redesign of the warhead, there's nothing that links it to the Iranian military, and there's nothing that verifies the genuineness of these documents.
One of the key documents in the so-called laptop document collection, it's not an electronic document, it's a hard copy of a letter that was to an Iranian firm called Kimia Madan, and this is at the center of my story and the center of the real controversy that has arisen within the IAEA over the past year.
Right, this is where you say that the evidence, supposedly, that the Americans have is a copy of a letter, I believe, from an Iranian engineering firm to this company, and that the American version has a bunch of handwriting all over it in the margins, I guess, and yet the copy provided by the Iranians to the IAEA doing this investigation does not.
What's the significance?
That's right, you've captured the essence of that part of the story.
There are two different versions of this document, which is one of the key documents in the so-called laptop document, which does, as you say, have in the American version, the one the Americans turned over to Iran, or at least somebody turned it over, now, you know, there could have been another country associated with the United States, but that doesn't matter.
In that version, there's handwriting which allegedly, and this is according to a source that I quote in the story, who was briefed on the content of this paper, which refers to the warhead, or sorry, the nosecone design, redesign work in the technical document.
And this, therefore, has been cited, not publicly, but within the IAEA and among IAEA member states as a primary evidence that, in fact, the redesign work was genuine.
And that's because this letter could be verified.
This is from an actual engineering firm, a known firm, to a firm, an Iranian firm, which could be verified.
So this was a way of trying to prove the genuineness of these technical studies, which otherwise could not be proven.
And that's why it is so important that the Iranians, to the surprise, I think, of many people, came up with the original of that document, the original version of the letter from the Iranian engineering firm to this private Iranian firm, Kimia Madan, which shows no handwriting on it.
And that, of course, that raises very serious questions about the document that the United States or one of its allies turned over to the IAEA.
Well, was it that the incriminating information was in the handwriting and that without the handwriting it's really not that bad?
Oh, exactly.
Without the handwriting, there's nothing there that merits any attention.
I mean, it was a letter saying, we're responding to your query about a so-called system for widely used in automation in industrial processes.
And it was for the civilian Iranian atomic energy organization, which had been basically denied this kind of technology by U.S. pressures, political pressures, diplomatic political pressures.
And this private Iranian firm was helping the civilian atomic energy organization to acquire this for the conversion, the Iranian conversion facility.
So that is the story behind that letter.
Now, here's the explanation that the Americans and their allies are giving for the fact that we suddenly have these two versions of the letter, one of which has no handwriting on it.
They're saying, well, of course, what must have happened is that Kimia Madan made multiple copies of this, passed them out to the staff, and one of the staffers used one of the copies given to that person to use for the handwritten notes, which are so incriminating.
Now, that doesn't really make any sense for a couple of reasons.
One is that obviously, you know, this is a company doing a work for the Iranian government, which is politically sensitive.
And the effort to get this technology, despite the fact the United States is putting pressure on companies not to provide any technology to the Iranian atomic energy organization is a politically sensitive matter.
So they're not going to just willy-nilly make copies of this letter based on that fact.
They're going to obviously take elementary security precautions, or just elementary precautions that any company with good sense would do, to make sure that they can account for all the copies, which would mean that there would be a number or a letter indicating who got the copies and which one might be missing.
And that, of course, did not happen, because, as I point out in my story, the argument against allowing the Iranians to have this document is that they could use the handwriting to try to find the person who was responsible for having leaked the document.
Now, that means, of course, that there is no other basis for identifying who might have gotten away with that copy of the letter.
And that leads me to believe that there was no multiple copies, there were no multiple copies of this letter made.
The second point, an even more important point, is that there's no link between the work that Kimi Amidon was doing, supposedly, for this alleged, this purported nuclear weapons-related research program, which was to do the bench-scale uranium conversion facility drawing, they call them flowsheets, and the work on the redesign of a nosecone of a missile.
I mean, there's just simply no relationship.
They're two completely different types of work, and there's no reason why this outfit would have been writing about the work being done on the redesign of a Shahab-3 missile.
See, that's funny, because I had sort of forgotten that point from earlier in the article, and I was about to ask you, but Gareth, you're way off on a tangent here.
What does this have to do with the nosecone of a missile?
The answer is, that's part of the scribbles in the margin, but it makes no sense whatsoever, because...
It makes no sense whatsoever, and of course, we don't know what the scribbles were actually saying.
This has never been released, and this is part and parcel of the way this process has worked.
There's absolutely no transparency of any kind.
They never answer any questions.
I was only able to find this out because of the fact that the Iranians passed on this document, and in the February IAEA report, they describe the fact that the Iranians had passed on a number of documents which showed that Kim-Ian Madan had worked only for the civilian atomic energy organization of Iran, not for the Iranian military.
And that, of course, is another major blow against the laptop document.
That is an important point, right, that the IAEA itself concluded that, yes, all these documents check out.
There's really no anomaly in this paper trail.
It looks like this company was working only for the civilian authorities in Iran, and there are no indications otherwise.
That's right, and the interesting thing is that the IAEA, the section in the IAEA report on this fact that they were convinced that the Kim-Ian Madan company was, in fact, working only for the civilian atomic energy program of Iran, was very long, very detailed, more detailed than anything else that they have written about in conjunction with the Iranian nuclear program.
It was an astonishingly detailed, in-depth discussion of this question, in which they concluded that the documentation provided by Iran is consistent with what we have known in the past, and internally consistent.
And therefore, we regard the question of, you know, whether the military was running the Gashin uranium ore mine, or the civilians were running it, is now decided.
It's now settled, and we regard this as no longer an issue.
So there is very, very strong evidence to suggest that those people who worked on that issue for the IAEA are the ones who were raising serious issues, serious questions about the laptop document evidence.
Well, first of all, a couple of things.
When you talk about the distance between a bench-scale laboratory to enrich uranium ore to tetrafluoride green salt, uranium tetrafluoride green salt, that is so far removed from the actual delivery of a nuclear weapon, as a discussion of a warhead, that we're talking about a Ford plant.
The guys who make the axles for the truck are the ones who make every other part of it or something.
It just couldn't possibly be.
In fact, they already have an IAEA-declared and safeguarded and inspected facility in Iran that enriches uranium yellowcake ore far beyond, or one step at least, beyond tetrafluoride green salt.
They enrich it all the way to uranium hexafluoride gas.
Right.
I mean, it's technically conversion, not enrichment, but you're absolutely right.
Right.
Yeah.
Conversion.
Conversion.
Pardon me.
And then they inject that uranium hexafluoride gas into the centrifuges.
Then they enrich that to, as we discussed, much less than weapons-grade in the presence of the IAEA.
That's pointed to not just one, but two additional inconsistencies or anomalies, I think is the better term, in regard to these laptop documents.
I mean, the idea that they would need or would want to start all over again and do these kinds of basic design work or flow sheet for a bench-scale uranium conversion facility when they already had started building one, based on an entirely different design, makes no sense whatsoever.
And then, of course, as you point out, I mean, there's simply no connection between the work that would be done for a conversion facility and the rest of the work that is part of this purported, the alleged, but I think very clearly non-existent, Iranian nuclear weapons-related research program.
These are elements of a program that simply do not cohere.
There's no point, there's no reason why they would be part of the same program.
Right.
I mean, there are a thousand different steps removed from each other.
One of them is the very, very, very beginning, you know, first flick of the spinner on the board game move.
And the other is the final stages of weaponization and delivery, I mean, in the margins on the same document.
Okay.
But now help me out with this, though.
What is Ed Albright talking about in his exchange with the New York Times when he says, listen, this is a design for a delivery vehicle, not a warhead, and you couldn't fit the kind of warhead you're accusing them of trying to make in this delivery vehicle anyway?
Well, I think, you know, I'm not exactly sure what his thinking was at that point, but let's bear in mind that this was very, very early.
I mean, what information is he referring to?
What information is he referring to?
Notes in the margins on this document?
No, no.
He was referring at that point simply to the technical designs that make up this Shahab 3 redesign part of the document.
Okay.
So this is a separate document which describes the redesign of the missile here.
He's referring only to the redesign of the missile.
And he was suggesting that, well, they were overdoing it by insisting that within the nose cone, the room that was left there for the payload had to be a nuclear weapon, a nuclear warhead.
And, you know, I mean, that may or may not be the case.
I mean, I don't think that's the real issue.
I think he was really missing the basic issue here, which was the authenticity of the document.
He wasn't challenging that.
And I think that's the real issue.
Right.
Well, but it's just another case of, you know, a reason to challenge it.
Right.
Well, I mean, I hear you say this is all about a nuclear weapon, and yet the guys who did your forgeries, you know, should have looked closer in the Encyclopedia Britannica before they put this thing together.
Well, I mean, we haven't only begun to talk about the anomalies associated with these documents.
I mean, another part of this, which we haven't talked about, is that those very technical reports that we've just been discussing on the redesign of the nose cone of the Shahab three missile, supposedly to accommodate a nuclear warhead, were done so badly that those people who have actually looked at the document and who were quoted by Daphna Linzer in her February 2006 Washington Post article on the laptop document, which is called Strong Leads and Dead Ends in Nuclear Case Against Iran.
Only you would know that.
But yes, you're right.
Right.
Exactly.
That is the title of it.
In that article, she quotes unnamed sources, U.S. officials, as saying that the people who have actually read these papers found them to be badly done, very poorly done, that they were not they were clearly not the first team that I'm sorry.
I think it was actually she was quoting people from one of the labs who had reviewed them, and I've quoted by name, who said that they were they were clearly not the first team that Iran had to do this sort of work, because none of them would have worked.
None of them would have worked to accommodate a nuclear warhead, which is the point that you were making earlier.
Now, what is even more interesting and even more telling, I think, is that even the work on this alleged facility for the bench scale facility for green salt, excuse me, for green salt, was criticized by the Iranians as having technical flaws in it, technical mistakes in it.
This is a one page flow sheet and they found technical mistakes on it.
And even worse for those who were trying to defend these documents, Ali Heinonen, the head of the safeguards department of IAEA, conceded in his own oral presentation to the IAEA member state, February 25th, that indeed, there were what he called technical inconsistencies in that one page flow sheet, supposedly done by Kimi and Madan.
So clearly, these papers were done by people who were not the best people that you might have been hired to do work on on these issues.
And I mean, that's simply another layer of evidence, not the primary one, but a sort of secondary and supporting evidence that these are these are fakes.
Well, but it brings up the question of why are they faked so poorly?
Yeah, I think they're faked so poorly because it's impossible for, let's say, you know, an Israeli intelligence outfit to have the same information that the Iranians would have if they were going to be doing it.
For example, the Israelis would not have known enough about the thinking of the Iranian government in regard to a uranium conversion facility to be able to credibly come up with a one page paper that would be anywhere nearly as good as what the Iranians themselves would have done.
And they lacked the information.
They were making educated guesses and they were getting pretty close.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And now, why do you say Israel?
Because you don't say Israel in your article anywhere, which I was kind of bummed out that at the end, there's nothing about where this actually might have come from.
Do you have any real indications that came from Israel other than duh?
Oh, there are plenty of plenty of reasons why I think the trail leads back to Israel.
But A, there was no space in which to discuss this in the article.
I mean, I just had severe space limitations, so that was impossible.
And B, I think that if one were to deal with that issue, you'd want to have an article devoted only to that question of where these documents really were hatched.
And that's the task for the future.
I mean, I think there's still more work to be done before one could really write that article.
Well, we know that the Natanz facility was actually brought to light by the Mujahedin Al-Khalq, which is the communist terrorist cult of personality that used to work for the Ayatollahs and then worked for Saddam Hussein and now works for the United States and their political front, the National Council for Resistance in Iran.
And I don't know if there's proof of this or what, but I know that Scott Ritter in his book Target Iran, for example, indicates that they're a front for Israeli intelligence.
And I believe that, in fact, the Wall Street Journal mentioned that one time too, no?
No, it was not.
The Wall Street Journal did not report that link specifically.
They did report a comment by a German official suggesting that the laptop document came from an Iranian resistance organization, opposition organization.
So that was a link in the chain of evidence that showed that the MEK was involved in bringing these documents out.
So a clue, but not evidence of anything there?
Yeah, it didn't lead directly to Israel, but certainly it's a part of that chain that does lead back to Israel, definitely.
Well, now, what about this underground chamber?
Oh, crap, we're running up on the clock here.
What about this?
They were building a giant underground chamber to test their nuclear bomb in.
Is there any evidence that that was real?
Well, I mean, I did not really deal directly with the credibility of those documents.
I think that, you know, once you have the evidence that the key documents in this laptop document collection, which have been used to try to show that the rest of the documents were genuine, were themselves fake, then the entire collection looks like it has to be a fake.
I mean, that's simply the logic of the situation.
There's no possibility that this is a mixture of some fakes and some real documents.
I think that the entire collection, with the one partial exception, that these handwritten notes were written on a document which they had actually gotten a hold of.
And that's why it seems to me that that was the genesis of this idea for cooking up a batch of documents that would show that Iran was pursuing this nuclear weapons project.
They had a hold of a document that they could then write something on which would be incriminating and which would help them to authenticate or to suggest the authenticity of these other documents.
And once that falls, then the entire collection falls.
All right, well, now, I'll buy that, although I think you might as well go ahead and do a part two and dot every I and cross every T and just go ahead and completely debunk them from every angle possible on this kind of thing.
Well, I think, you know, from here, I am going to go directly to trying to document the role that Israel played in this.
I mean, at this point, I think what I have is some very interesting, quite convincing sort of circumstantial evidence.
And the question is whether that could be that could lead to something more than that.
Well, and you may have your chance as you finish your article here again.
It's Gareth Porter at raw story dot com.
Today, you can find a headline in the top headlines at antiwar dot com documents linking Iran to nuclear weapons push may have been fabricated.
And you end this article toward a showdown on the contradictions.
Apparently, the IAEA is about to put out a report.
And but since the last time we've heard from the IAEA on these so-called outstanding questions, the Iranians have given over one hundred and seventeen page response, which they have refused to do.
They've said all on.
We won't even respond to these accusations, which are such obvious lies.
Well, apparently they have gone ahead and responded.
And you cite ElBaradei calling out Bush on the Saddam tried to buy uranium from Africa lie prior to the Iraq invasion as at least an indication that he may very well be willing to contradict the entire American government and U.N.
Security Council on this point.
I don't want to raise hope.
And perhaps that citation of ElBaradei is very, very courageous.
Calling out of Bush, the Bush administration on the Niger Gate fabrication might might indeed raise hope falsely.
I'm not at all sure that ElBaradei is in a position today to be able to to do the same thing on these laptop documents.
I think that he is now politically in a very different situation.
I did not, again, have room in the article scope in the article to go into the intricacies of the internal politics of the IAEA, but they are indeed intricate.
And I think Ali Heinonen representing a very different view from ElBaradei on this issue does in fact have very close ties with the United States and its allies in this issue.
And that that is a key factor now in the politics of this issue.
So I certainly can't predict safely that that in the immediate future, the IAEA is going to come out with any kind of clear cut analysis or or conclusion on this question.
I think it's still in play.
I think that that there are people who would like the IAEA to come clean and say, look, we can't authenticate these documents.
And they're still waiting, by the way, for Iran to I'm told that this is something I've just learned.
The IAEA is still waiting for Iran to turn over the original copy of the clean version of that letter so that they can sort of conclude, yes, we've looked at this and it is indeed an authentic document and that that's that that's part of the analysis that that still needs to be done.
So all of this is still in play.
It's not clear how it's going to how it's going to come out in terms of a public report by the IAEA anytime soon.
Well, I'm going to go ahead and get my hopes up.
Why not?
I like that ElBaradei guy.
He gets to come out and say things like, no, really, there's no indication that they have diverted any of their nuclear material to a military or other special purpose.
And in fact, just scanning through this Daphna Lindsor article, this famous Washington Post article about the stolen laptop documents, she quotes ElBaradei as saying that he can still judge Iran's program.
Oh, no, it says cannot.
Never mind.
No, but I mean, you're pretty damn close, though.
Has been very forthright.
I mean, he says this.
He says this.
He says Iran is not an imminent threat to develop a nuclear weapon.
You need a significant quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
And no one has seen that in Iran.
But we have to bear in mind that ElBaradei is going to be leaving the IAEA next year.
He's a lame duck.
His power, certainly, which was never unlimited, is far more limited today than it was before.
And it's clear that because of the power of the United States and its allies in the IAEA, that the secretariat has had to tack very strongly in the direction of the U.S. position on this.
The people who I cite here within the IAEA who are calling for the agency to distance itself from the laptop document are by no means the ones who are in charge, who have the whip hand at this point.
And I think that's a point that perhaps I could have made stronger had I had more space.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's the way it always is.
There's the truth and there's the law and then there's politicians actually running things.
All right.
Listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, Gareth, as always.
It's my pleasure.
I'm glad to have a chance to get this story out to more people and hope that people are able to get the gist of it and to get the word out from there.
All right.
Well, we're going to work on it from here.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Thanks, Gareth.
All right, folks.
That's Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from IPS News.
You can find all his IPS archives at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
You can find what 35 or so interviews I've done of him since February of 2007 at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And you can find his new article in Raw Story.
It's RawStory.com documents linking Iran to nuclear weapons push may have been fabricated.
It's also in the headlines today at Antiwar.com.
I'm over time.
I got to go.
Thanks, everybody, for listening to the show.
We'll be back here at 11 to 1 Texas time tomorrow here on Chaos Radio.
