01/22/13 – Muhammad Sahimi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Mohamed Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC in LA and he writes for antiwar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com/Sahimi.
And used to write for PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau.
You can find a lot of great work there and he's written for the Guardian and all over the place as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Mohamed?
Scott, it's great talking to you.
I'm not too bad.
Thank you.
Okay.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And I'm sorry, I tried to Google it real quick during the song there, but I couldn't find it.
What's the name of your new news website?
Iran News and Middle East Reports.
Iran News and Middle East Report.
And then what's the site exactly?
It's IME, like Iran and Middle East, news.com.
News.com.
IMEnews.com.
Yeah.
It's up and running and hopefully it will be a good site over the next several months and years.
All right.
Well, I'm going there right now.
There we go.
IMEnews.com.
Perfect.
All right.
Great.
So let's talk about David Albright.
I think it's okay to talk about him with him not here because I basically quit trying to invite him on the show because he quit answering me anymore.
So I'm pretty much over that.
He's had his say and people can go back and listen to my interview with him from back in, what, 2009 or whatever, if they want to.
But well, he's very important and he says a lot of things about a lot of people.
So I think it'd be perfectly fine to give you half an hour to tell the people who's David Albright and why they ought to trust him as much as you say they should.
Well, David Albright is the president of Institute for Science and International Security, which is supposedly a nonpartisan nonprofit organization in Washington whose expertise is weapons of mass destruction and in particular, nuclear weapons.
When we go to their site, they supposedly have different pages for various countries like Iran, like North Korea, and so on.
But the main focus of the institute has been on Iran's nuclear program.
And that's fine as long as the work is done objectively and in a nonpolitical way.
But the problem that people like me have had with David Albright is that although I believe Albright originally started his work as some kind of objective analysis, he has gradually moved towards the neoconservative Israel and American conservative viewpoints that Iran's nuclear program is in fact a nuclear weapon program and it must be stopped at all costs.
Again, this will not be a problem if a nuclear weapon program did exist in Iran and if this nuclear weapon program was actually producing a nuclear arsenal of some size or sort.
But the fact of the matter is there is no evidence that Iran is making nuclear weapons.
There is no evidence that they have actually made the decision to make nuclear weapons.
And this is confirmed by all the statements that in 2012 were made by values Obama administration officials from Leon Panetta to Martin Dempsey to James Clapper, David Pateros, and so on, that they emphasize that Iran is not making nuclear weapons and has made a decision to make a nuclear weapon.
Now, because that is out of the picture, now the emphasis of Albright and people who work with him is that Iran should not have the capability to make a nuclear weapon, which means that Iran should not have enough stockpile of low-enriched uranium or high-enriched uranium so that it can convert it to a nuclear weapon.
Again, most of what Iran has is low-enriched uranium at 3 to 5 percent.
Iranians do have some enriched uranium at 19.75 percent.
But that is for fuel for Tehran Research Reactor, which generates medical isotopes for hundreds of thousands of Iranian patients every year.
And Iran was, in fact, not interested to enrich uranium to that level.
Iran asked the International Atomic Energy Agency back in 2009 to supply the medical reactor with fuel.
Then Iran and the IAEA and the U.S. and its partners reached some sort of preliminary agreement according to which Iran was supposed to swap some of its low-enriched uranium for fuel for Tehran Research Reactor.
But the agreement didn't go through.
It collapsed because Iran put some modest, reasonable conditions, but they were rejected by the Obama administration.
Several months later, in May of 2010, Iran reached another agreement with Turkey and Brazil, which is very much similar to the agreement that they had signed with the IAEA and the United States, whereby Iran would actually address those aspects that had been rejected by the U.S. because Iran wanted the swap to take place in Tehran, and the Obama administration had rejected it.
Iran also wanted to have the swap done in installments rather than all in one time.
And then the agreement that Iran reached with Turkey and Brazil addressed those.
Iran agreed to transfer its low-enriched uranium to Turkey and be stored and safeguarded there by the IAEA.
And then the swap takes place.
But that also was rejected by the Obama administration on the excuse that Iran has increased its stock of low-enriched uranium, and therefore the amount that had been agreed on in October of 2009 was no longer acceptable.
So Iran said that they would go ahead and try to produce their own fuel for Tehran Research Reactor.
At that time, Western powers were skeptical that Iran could do it.
Albright and his institute also said that they don't believe Iran can do it.
But Iran did do it.
And by the way, the scientists, Iranian scientists, that have actually made it designed to enrich uranium to that level, 19.75 percent, was assassinated later on.
His name was Dr. Mahdi Chahriari, who was a professor of physics in one of the universities in Tehran.
And Iran started to produce 19.75 percent enriched uranium.
And of course, that alarmed, you know, all those people and those powers that didn't think that Iran could actually do it.
But at the same time, what Iran started doing it was doing what it always said it would do, namely converting that 19.75 percent enriched uranium to fuel plates for Tehran Research Reactor.
And therefore, they have never reached to the level that if they continue beyond 19.75 percent, they will actually be in a position to produce nuclear weapons.
But all of these facts have been ignored by Albright and his institute.
And instead, he and his institute have been totally sensationalizing what is supposedly happening or happened in a military site in southeast of Tehran named Parchin, which is where Iran has produced conventional ammunition and weapons for its military since decades ago.
In 2004, Albright alleged that Iran had experimented with high explosives in Parchin and aired a visit to Parchin by International Atomic Energy Agency.
At that time, Iran was carrying out the provision of additional protocol on a volunteer basis, according to the agreements that Iran had signed with France, England, and Germany in October of 2003.
And therefore, it allowed the IAEA to go into the military site at Parchin and visit it.
And in fact, IAEA made two visits, I believe one was in February of 2005, one was in November of 2005.
Both times, the delegation of IAEA was led by Ali Hainanen, who was the period director general at that time for safeguards.
And both times, they wanted to visit five different buildings and sites within the Parchin complex, where they had suspected that something might have happened.
And in fact, in the second visit that they made in November of 2005, they also asked Iran for a surprise visit to another building that they hadn't asked for a visit previously, and Iran actually allowed them to do it.
And after that second visit, Iranian press reported that Ali Hainanen had told Iranian official that the case for Parchin had grown in history, meaning that there is nothing to be found there and there is nothing to look for.
But when Yukio Amano became director general at the end of 2009, in his report of November 2011, he revived those allegations.
He again made allegations that Iran had experimented with high explosives, and this time they mentioned a Ukrainian scientist that had allegedly helped Iran to carry out those experiments.
And since then, Albright and his institute have been issuing one alarming statement after another about Parchin and saying what's going on in Parchin and so on.
And by the way, after the visit of Hainanen in 2005, Albright never said anything.
He never retracted, he never said that we were wrong, he never said, you know, we made a mistake and so on.
And I remember when he came to your program, after I criticized him, he said that, well, somebody, a source had told him that something might have happened in Parchin, and that's why he was making all that noise.
And of course, that person was Ali Hainanen, because Albright and Ali Hainanen have had a very close relationship over the years, and in fact, in the original article that I published about him, about Albright in 2009, March of 2009, and criticized him, I pointed out the fact that Ali Hainanen had made a lot of allegations about Iran's nuclear program in the past, and all those allegations were based on an allegedly stolen laptop taken out of Iran, and in fact, he had made a presentation in February of 2008 to the board of directors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, entirely based on that laptop and its content, and Albright had told people privately that he doesn't believe in that laptop story, and he thinks that, you know, it is the work of some intelligence agency, but he had never taken any position publicly regarding the laptop, and he was completely silent.
And in the article that I published about him on Anti-World Outcome in March of 2009, I pointed that out, I said, the reason that he doesn't want to do it is that he and Hainanen have been very close over the years, and Hainanen is his source at the IAEA, and if he comes out publicly and says that he doesn't believe in the laptop story, that means that he's basically discrediting Hainanen, and he will lose his source at the IAEA, and therefore he doesn't want to do it.
And I thought that that was a totally dishonest thing to do, because if you don't believe in it, and if you are non-partisan, and if you are a scientific institution, you're supposed to be talking about these issues in an objective, you know, neutral way, and he wasn't doing it.
And in fact, when I published that article, he sent me an email, he first basically threatened me, saying that what I had said was libel, meaning that he could sue me, which I told him, oh, I'll be more than happy to go to court with you regarding this, if you want to sue me, and then he suggested that he and I have a debate on your radio program, AntiWallet.com Radio at that time, and then, if you remember, I'm sure you remember, at the last minute, he backed out, saying that I had already been on your radio program, and therefore he wants to have all the 30 minutes of program to himself.
He did that, and then after that, he was basically compelled to issue, you know, sort of a report defending the work of his institute regarding the Enon Sucre program, which by itself was a sort of a minor victory, because Albright never actually explains anything to anybody, he's always right, he has all the facts all the time, and therefore that's the way he operates.
And this is not just what he has done to me, I mean, he has been having a big argument with Professor Daniel Joyner, who is an expert, a scholar, on international laws and agreements, and Joyner has actually taken a position that regarding the political aspects of the problem, Iran's interpretation of safeguard agreements and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and related agreements are more objective and are closer to the truth than the interpretation that IAEA and Albright and people like him present, and that has, you know, created some sort of feud between the two.
Albright also attacked Sam Hosseini, you know, a very nice progressive journalist that I like him very much.
When Sam asked him pointed questions about some of the work that the institute had done, Albright got very angry and threatened that he might sue Sam Hosseini's organization, which is Washington Stakeout.
So this has been a pattern in the behavior that this guy has had, and regarding parking, for example, in the article that I just published by antiwar.com, I quoted a paragraph from one of his reports in which he basically speculates without any foundation, and then he draws most definitive conclusion about it.
He uses words like could be, may be, possible, perhaps, this and that, and then at the end he says, well, all of this substantiates what the IAEA says.
All of it is sheer speculation, and yet they substantiate what the IAEA says about Iran's nuclear program.
And that's, in my view, that's totally unacceptable, particularly from a person who presents himself as a scientist and his institution as a scientific organization and a nonpartisan organization.
Of course, if you look at the source of his funding, some of his funding comes from, for example, Japanese foreign ministry and United States Department of Energy and International Atomic Energy Agency itself.
So I wonder whether an institute that receives funding from, you know, political organization and the IAEA itself can actually look at the IAEA reports objectively and analyze it objectively.
So that has been a problem.
Now, he has collaborated with four other people, Mark Dovowitz and three other guys, and they have released a new report about nuclear nonproliferation in the Middle East, the title of which is U.S. Nonproliferation, a Strategy for Changing the Middle East.
And a big part of it is dedicated to Iran's nuclear program, in which they basically call for intensifying the war that has begun on Iranian people by imposing some of the toughest sanctions in memory against Iran that have ruined and have basically totally ruined Iranian economy and have created, you know, very difficult hardship and all sorts of miserable conditions for tens of millions of Iranians.
But Albright and his company, in their report, they want even tougher sanctions.
Not only that, they go even well beyond it.
They say that you have to have a credible threat of use of military to stop Iran.
And they even tell the president how to threaten Iran.
They, you know, they suggest the words that they should use in order to appear and sound totally credible to the Iranian people.
And that's the problem that people like me have had with him and the work that he has been doing.
Yeah.
Well, I guess, like all hawks, he claims that this is all because of how anti-war he is, you know, and he just wants this, you know, if we give them the harshest of ultimatums, then we can avoid war by forcing them to capitulate before war breaks out.
Well, what he doesn't understand is that economic sanctions of the type that have been imposed on Iran, which is of the same type that were imposed on Iraq from 1991 to 2003, are war.
They are war.
I mean, a war does not have to use a jet fighter or, you know, aircraft carriers or anything like that.
Any type of action that results in the death of civilian people is war.
And the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq during the 1990s, we all know that it killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including babies and children and so on, which led to that infamous interview of Madeleine Albright in the Clinton administration with Leslie Estal of CBS, where Madeleine Albright stared into the camera and said that the U.S. thinks that overthrowing Saddam Hussein is worth killing all those infants and children.
The same type of sanctions have been imposed on Iran, and therefore a war has been waging on Iranian people.
I don't care whether they go inside or bomb or not, as long as these economic sanctions are creating hardship for Iranians and are endangering the lives of tens of thousands of Iranians that are at the minimum suffering from a shortage of critical medicine in Iran, and many of them may die over the next year or two if this situation continues, then the economic sanctions that they supposedly call for in order to prevent a war is nothing short of a war.
It is a war, and any time that you create conditions like that, it's a war.
As I said, a war doesn't have to involve soldiers.
As long as you kill people one way or another, you are waging a war on these people.
If you ruin their economy, if you take away their livelihood, if you take their jobs, if you try to collapse their economy so that their currency loses its value, and people wake up the next morning and realize that their lives are in ruins, that is a war.
And of course, when you remind them of this, they say, well, the Iranian government is totally responsible for creating this situation.
No, the Iranian government is not responsible, at least not to this extent, in creating the conditions that these people have created for Iranian people.
It is the United States, the Obama administration, and its allies backed by supposedly scientific, objective people like David Albright that have created these conditions for Iran.
And this is the type of thing that people like me are opposed to.
Okay, so for people like David Albright, this breakout capability is what they call the giant loophole in the global nonproliferation regime.
Any country can stay within their safeguards agreement and their signature to the nonproliferation treaty while achieving the ability to make a nuke quick, basically.
That's what they call it, the breakout capability.
And that's the tone, if you take all of Albright's shrieking over the years, that's what it all comes down to is they're about to have enough where they could do this or that with it if they chose to.
But then, as you're pointing out, and I think this is kind of worth going back over again here, they're taking their most highly enriched uranium, which is just 20%, still far short of the 90 plus percent needed for a nuclear weapon, for even just one of them, but they're taking this and they're manufacturing fuel plates out of it and then they're shipping those off to the American-built medical isotope reactor in Tehran to use to make radioactive dye for doctors and cancer treatment, radiation tools, that kind of stuff.
And they really are sacrificing the breakout capability that they really had.
I mean, come on, let's be cynical here for a minute.
They never, I agree with you, they never wanted to make nukes, but they did want to have that breakout capability.
But they've kind of proven just in the last few months, right, that they're willing to give up their breakout capability even before negotiations here.
It seems like a pretty good faith effort to me.
Yes, I totally agree.
Let me point out a few things.
In a report that Albright and one of his collaborators, after this new report with Mark Davobis and others posted on their website, they say that Iran basically decided that it's not going to make a nuclear weapon back in 2003 because of the threats that it was feeling coming from the United States.
That was when the Bush administration had invaded and occupied Iraq, and Albright claims that that induced Iran to stop its program for making nuclear weapons.
That is total nonsense because I don't know whether Iran actually wanted to make nuclear weapons.
But let's assume that before 2003, they wanted to make nuclear weapons.
The question is, if they had a nuclear weapon program before 2003, and they stopped it in 2003, what happened in 2003 that induced them to stop the program?
If it was fear of the United States, then I would guess that any rational leader in Iran that was after nuclear weapons before 2003 and was also fearing attack by the United States would have accelerated the program in order to have a credible deterrent against the attack.
But if the program stopped, then that means that that could not be a factor.
The real reason, in my view and in the view of a lot of other people, is that if Iran actually wanted to make a nuclear weapon arsenal before 2003, it was because of the threat that the Iranian leadership was feeling, not from the United States and Israel, but by the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Because it was Saddam Hussein that during the war with Iran used weapons of mass destruction, and used chemical weapons, and killed thousands of Iranian soldiers in addition to Iraqi citizens.
And it was Iraq that was always suspicious of having a nuclear weapon program.
And in fact, Iraq was very, very close to making a nuclear weapon in 1991 according to IAEA.
So if Iran did have a nuclear weapon program before 2003, and I don't know whether they did actually or not, but assuming that they did, and if they stopped in 2003, it was because the regime of Saddam Hussein was overthrown by the US forces and British forces, and therefore the Iranian leaders decided that they no longer need to go after nuclear weapons.
Now regarding nuclear capability, yes, I believe that's what Iranian leaders wanted all along.
In other words, they were always after what we call the Japan model, namely having the infrastructure for a nuclear industry in Iran, which supplies fuel for Iran's reactors, the one that it under construction and the ones that they will build in the future, but at the same time put themselves in a position that they can actually have a credible deterrent, just like Japan with regard to China and North Korea and so on, so that no country would think that they can attack Iran with immunity.
But as you said, the behavior of Iran and Iranian leadership over the past several months has indicated that they are even willing to give that up in return for a reasonable negotiated settlement between Iran and the West.
Yet Albright and his institute and his collaborators continue to insist that Iran is after that, continue to make allegations, unfounded allegations about Parchin and other places, and continue to urge the Obama administration to make even tougher sanctions against Iran to create even more misery for Iranian people.
And at the same time they present themselves as humanitarians saying that, oh yeah, all the humanitarian help and aid to Iran should continue.
This is while in the face of the fact that many, many, many people, reporters, journalists, analysts, and so on, have been reporting from inside Iran.
Even, for example, the New York Times reported who lives in Iran, and he has an Iranian wife and lives in Iran.
He has reported on great shortage of medicine caused by, at least partly, by these sanctions.
And yet these people claim that all of these economic sanctions, the shortages, the misery that they have caused, are in place in order to prevent a war.
This is a war.
This is a war that has been imposed on Iranian people, that is going to kill Iranian people, that is going to kill Iranian infants and children, that has already ruined the Iranian economy, that has already devalued Iranian currency, that has already created misery for tens of millions of Iranian people.
If this is not war, then I don't know what war is.
All right.
Thank you, Mohamed.
I appreciate it.
It's great to talk to you again.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Mohamed Sahini.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC, and he writes for antiwar.com.
And check out his new website, imenews.com, Iran News and Middle East Reports at imenews.com.
And also go ahead and refer you to his work and, of course, the great Gareth Porter and others on virtually all those issues he brought up from Parchin, the alleged studies documents from the so-called smoking laptop, and all of these things.
There's plenty there for you.
And really, antiwar.com has got most of what you need.
The Emergency Committee for Israel, Brookings, Heritage, AIPAC, WINEP, JINSA, PNAC, CNAS, the AEI, FPI, CFR, and CSP.
It sure does seem sometimes like the war party's got the foreign policy debate in D.C. all locked up, but not quite.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They put America first, opposing our government's world empire and especially their Middle Eastern madness.
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