07/14/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is our good friend, Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, writes for Interpress Service mostly, IPSnews.net, also for truthout.org.
He won the Martha Gellhorn Award for his work on McChrystal and Petraeus murdering people based on their cell phone data in the days long before Ed Snowden.
Over there for truthout.org.
And he's the author of the book, Manufactured Crisis, a real history of the Iranian nuclear program.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back again.
Good.
Good.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
The opportunity, if I may, to just let your listeners know that the book is now available as an e-book.
Oh, great.
And this is for the first time, so I know a lot of people will be interested in that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's great.
And right there on amazon.com, right?
Yeah.
Or directly from justworldbooks.com.
OK, great.
And you know what I'm going to do is, I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I'm going to go ahead and put your book in the right margin on my site because I want everybody to read that damn thing.
Terrific.
Thanks.
So, yeah.
No, it's really good because you, well, and this is how you do in all your journalism.
You confront, you make sure everything is absolutely air and water tight.
You confront every last assertion that a dissonant opinion against your work might bring up that you could possibly think of.
You cover every single base, you make sure you're right, and you do damn good work.
And so on the Iranian nuclear issue, you're talking about 30 years worth of accusations and you just take them down, blam, by blam, by blam.
And so it's great work.
Very important work.
And especially right now, especially the fact that it came out this spring, this summer, as we're in the meantime between the interim deal and the final deal that maybe could, should be worked out by this semi-hard deadline of July 20th on whether the P5 plus one, the UN Security Council, mostly the US, can come to terms with Iran and their nuclear program.
And your new piece is called Khamenei Remarks Show Both Sides Maneuver on Enrichment.
Which remarks are those, Gareth?
Well, this is a speech that Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran, made a week ago today, a Monday of last week, in which he actually revealed remarkable details about the nuclear talks.
I think this was quite a surprise to a lot of people.
And you know, I thought it was, it gave us some very interesting insights into what was happening in the talks.
You know, I thought that when he said, essentially, I'm not quoting it word for word, but saying that the United States aim is to get us to accept 10,000 separative work units, SWUs, that was a bid, in effect, to initiate a new stage of negotiations with the United States, suggesting, I think, that Iran would be willing to go along with the 10,000 SWU.
And of course, he was saying that the United States, as I understood it, and I think this is correct, the United States wanted to establish that as effectively the final level and not agree to any higher level later on by Iran in terms of enrichment capabilities.
So, you know, he was saying, as I understood it, that, you know, we could make a deal if we freeze the level of enrichment capabilities, the SWUs, at 10,000, which would coincide with the operational centrifuges that Iran has had for the last few years, and not the ones that they haven't used, that they would be dismantled in whatever they're going to do with them.
It would freeze the level of 10,000 SWU.
And then, from the Iranian perspective, it looked to me like they were saying, he was suggesting, well, we don't need more centrifuges now, we don't need them for the next few years.
He said up to five years.
He didn't say anything beyond that.
So he seemed to be suggesting that there was a deal to be made here if they put off the decision on a higher level for a few more years.
And he wasn't clear.
You know, he said 190,000 was what they needed, but he said, our folks say that we need that much.
But that is twice as much as independent experts estimate would really be required to support Bushehr.
That looked to me like it was a bid to to make a more extreme demand in the hope that it could be dropped later on if the United States agreed to a more moderate demand.
Well, which is kind of a mirror image of the American negotiation, too, which is demanded as few as how many, you say?
Well, you know what he was saying?
I'm sorry I didn't I didn't add the other key detail which he revealed, which is that the United States was, in fact, demanding as little as five hundred to one thousand in its earlier draft.
Now, he didn't say that that was the current position, because I think by that time, the United States would say, OK, well, we'll drop that if you'll agree to, you know, our terms for the the final the final level.
That is the long term level.
So he was he was revealing something that hadn't been revealed previously, which was what was in the U.S. draft.
In effect, he was revealing this in the U.S. draft in in the June round of negotiations.
And the 500, of course, was the figure that this is this is reportedly what the French government was insisting on putting into the draft.
And that was included in brackets along with with another demand, apparently for one thousand.
And you're saying the experts are saying they'd need ninety five thousand.
Roughly one hundred ninety thousand eventually in the long term is what the Princeton group of scholars under Frank von Hippel have estimated would be the S.W.U. is required for providing fuel to the Boucher reactor.
Well, that sounds like that sounds like a hell of a lot cascade.
That's just for Boucher and not for future planned reactors or anything like that.
That's not for future planned reactors.
That's just for Boucher.
I mean, in other words, you know, Natanz is is really built for 50,000 IR1 centrifuges.
So it was not going to be able to to provide enough fuel, even, you know, if if everything was agreed to that that 50,000 could be used there, that would still not be enough.
But then if you, of course, begin to introduce, you know, the more efficient, more modern centrifuges, which is clearly what Iran intends to do, that could all be done at Natanz very easily.
All right, and now the am I right that the well, like you reported in your last piece, your interview with the foreign minister or I don't know if it was your last piece, one before that, maybe one interview with the foreign minister, it seems like kind of two different tracks of negotiation, the number of centrifuges, but also how long they hold on to the gas before they convert it.
And then so they got to tweak kind of both of those knobs at the same time as they're talking this out.
Is that right?
Well, absolutely.
I mean, you know, the the Iranian proposal which you're referring to, which was revealed to me by Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran, in early June, is is basically the same sort of proposal that was made in March of 2005.
We've talked about it on your show before.
And it's a key, really a key position that Iran is taking here to reassure the P5 plus one, because what it would do is is to promise that any batch of low enriched uranium would immediately be converted into oxide powder.
And then the oxide powder would go at this point to Russia to be converted into fuel All right.
I'm sorry.
I got to interrupt you, Gareth.
We got to take this break.
When we get back, more about that proposal and the ongoing negotiations over Iran's nuclear program with the great Gareth Porter.
IPS News dot net.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with the great Gareth Porter, author of the book Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare, which is all it is.
So as we talked about, the American negotiating position here is, well, we'd like for you to have as few as a thousand centrifuges, which is still pretty good.
They're outright saying, go ahead and keep some centrifuges, which is new for the American position over the years.
And the Iranians are saying, well, we'd like to have one hundred and ninety thousand centrifuges over time.
Eventually we would like to have that many.
And so here are our opposite negotiation negotiating positions on the both sides working on the so-called breakout capability, the extent of Iran's nuclear capability to make a bomb ever one day if they wanted kind of thing.
And but then another thing that the Iranians have brought in here for debate is what they would do with their uranium stock once it's enriched.
Maybe they would just go ahead and oxidize it, as the foreign minister explained to Gareth, as we talked about in our last interview.
And then that way it wouldn't really even be up for debate whether it's, you know, verified and under the eyeballs of the IAEA, because they still wouldn't be able to continue to enrich it to any higher grade.
Up to weapons grade as it is.
So that was where we left off was the debate over how willing Iran is to trade numbers of centrifuges for oxidized uranium.
Gareth, go ahead.
Right.
I just want to make the point that it's not just, you know, it's not just turning it into oxide powder, but the oxide powder then would be shipped to Russia under the current contract that Iran has with the Russian government to turn the oxide powder then into fuel plates for the Bushehr reactor.
And the, you know, the point that the Iranians are making here is that there would be no creation of a stockpile from the enrichment that would be continued under the Iranian proposal.
Now, the point I want to make about this that is completely absent from news media coverage of the negotiations is that the Obama administration has known from the very beginning of these serious negotiations from last October on that Iran was prepared to provide assurances that would allow the U.S. government to say that the so-called breakout timeline has been extended from the current, let's say, three months to six to 12 months, and in fact, well beyond that, to several years, because this should be understood in the context of the fact that if you draw down the existing stockpile of 3.5 to 5 percent enriched uranium, as the Iranians clearly are willing to do, then you're going to have, you know, no stockpile for years and years because there will be no buildup, because this is a constant process of conversion to oxide powder and then to fuel plates.
And so the Obama administration, as I say, has known that they didn't need to demand the reduction in centrifuges to a few thousand, let alone 1,000, in order to have that extension or increase of the breakout timeline that they've put forward as the rationale for the U.S. negotiating position in order to know that they will have years and years of a breakout timeline.
And that's a very stunning fact to me that is excluded from the public discourse in this country.
Well, and you know, I don't know, maybe don't tell them.
I wouldn't want the Congress and the neocons getting a hold of this.
They might figure out an argument around it.
I don't know.
It sounds like it could be the basis for the deal.
I don't know.
I don't think there's any danger of that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so now answer me about expanded searches and question answers.
And I guess all the questions are answered from all the former bogus investigations, or virtually all of them.
But are we talking about additional protocol or Iran's own personal additional protocol under another name or, you know.
I mean, it's part of this agreement.
Yeah.
Is that going to be part of this agreement?
Absolutely.
The Iranians have made it very clear that they are prepared to accept the additional protocol and indeed to go beyond it.
You know, I think that they're going to be some, they would want, I believe, some clarification of this so that it's not just whimsical that there should be, you know, that any additional surveillance operations that go beyond the additional protocol would be based on some reasonable evidence that there's a reason for the search.
But otherwise, you know, the Iranians have definitely accepted a very, very intrusive system of surveillance compared with the pre, you know, the situation without the additional protocol.
All right.
And now, look, all the details, you're the master of the details.
But the real point is here.
So we can't have a deal, right?
Since there's nothing left to fight about.
Can we have a damn deal?
You know, the problem I think you've laid out yourself in this very discussion, which is that the two sides are coming from very, very different sets of assumptions about the whole enrichment question.
I mean, you just pointed out that the United States has now for the first time actually said, yes, you can have some enrichment.
But what they have made clear, abundantly clear, over and over again in recent months is that they will not agree to any industrial-scale enrichment capability by Iran, regardless of anything else that Iran might agree to.
And that is a serious stumbling block to any agreement.
What I have suggested in the last couple of pieces that I've done is that the United States could very easily simply agree to what the Princeton group under Professor Von Hippel have proposed, which is that there be a provision in the agreement that would freeze.
Well, this is in addition to freezing the level roughly at its present level of enrichment capability of 10,000 SWUs, and put in a provision that would put off the decision on how much Iran could have in the long run for a number of years, for six to eight years, for example.
And during that period, Iran would show that it has no intention of trying to build up a stockpile that could be used for breakout, and show good faith in that regard.
And indeed, during that period, there's no question that the United States and Iran would be talking about a number of issues where they have clearly congruent interests, particularly on the issue of jihadist forces in the Middle East region.
So it would make perfect sense to put off that decision for several years, and then come back to it and say, okay, Iran, tell us why you think you need to have an industrial-scale, you know, capability for enrichment, and then we'll evaluate that.
And by that time, I think the political context would look very different.
And so I think that the resistance on the American side would certainly be reduced to having industrial-scale capability to enrich uranium, to support Bushehr.
And it's very possible that on the Iranian side, their resistance to an alternative to having 100,000 or more SWU of enrichment capability would also begin to be reduced, that they would be willing to look at other alternatives to provide the fuel necessary for Bushehr.
So, I mean, this is such a logical conclusion that I think that the United States ought to grab that immediately.
That's why I think they could come to an agreement even before the 20th.
But my sense is- In other words, Gareth, what you're saying is come to basically another stage of an interim agreement, put off all the most difficult choices until we really get to those bridges and have to cross them.
But in the meantime, the ice is broken.
The sanctions are beginning to be lifted, and we can be more like frenemies than enemies.
Absolutely, yes.
A gradual reduction in the sanctions.
It would be a phased reduction over the period of years.
And at the same time, the Iranians would be demonstrating that there is no intent to prepare themselves for breakout.
Got you.
All right.
You heard everybody.
That's a great Gareth Porter.
Thanks so much for your time, Gareth.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Gareth Porter, he's at IPSnews.net.
Can many remarks show both sides maneuver on enrichment?
Thanks for listening, y'all.
See you tomorrow.
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