Radio KPFK, 90.7 FM Los Angeles, 98.7 FM Santa Barbara, and streaming globally at kpfk.org.
For Pacifica Radio, May 6th, 2018.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Aren't you guys welcome to the show, it is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
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And I'm very happy to be here live, hosting Anti-War Radio in person here in the KPFK studio.
I live in Austin and usually just send in a show, so I'm very happy to be here in LA.
I gave a talk for a group last night, and happy to be here, and happy, very happy, thrilled in fact, to again bring you the heroic Gareth Porter, my very favorite reporter.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing, sir?
Thank you very much, Scott.
Glad to be back again.
Very happy to have you on the show.
And people might ask...
Hello?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me well?
Check, check.
I don't know if you can hear me, Ricky.
So people might ask in the audience, hey, Scott Horton, how come you always interview Gareth Porter?
And the answer is, of course, because Gareth is the great debunker of all things that are not true.
And whether it's Iraq War II, Afghanistan, the war in Syria, and especially when it comes to Iran and their civilian nuclear program, Gareth Porter just absolutely is the best.
And of course, as everybody in the audience I'm sure is familiar, last week Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, leveled some, quote, new accusations against Iran about their nuclear program in his effort to convince President Donald Trump to go ahead and withdraw from the JCPOA, that is, the nuclear deal that Obama struck with Iran in 2015.
So Gareth has a new piece at ConsortiumNews.com, and of course it's reprinted at AntiWar.com as well, all about this.
And it's, you know what, you guys might have seen some pretty good debunkings of Netanyahu's claims over the past week, saying that, well, what Netanyahu says is a lot of old news.
But Gareth Porter goes much further.
He says it's old news, it's old lies.
It never was true in the first place, these accusations about Iran and their alleged studies into the development of nuclear weapons.
So can you hear me now, Gareth?
You all set?
Are you good?
Is he there?
All right.
Well, all right.
Well, okay.
Well, I'll just tell you then.
I'll tell you myself, I don't need Gareth Porter.
So what Netanyahu described up there in his big presentation was really the alleged studies documents that we all already know about, that have all already been out for years.
And the bulk of them come from what was alleged to be, or what was called the smoking laptop or the laptop of death that supposedly was smuggled out of Iran by an Iranian nuclear scientist and then given over to the CIA.
But of course that's not true.
And we've already all known for years and including even in the Washington Post that brought us the smoking laptop story in the first place.
They eventually admitted that, oh, the laptop, well, yeah, that belonged to the CIA.
The documents.
Well, yeah.
Okay.
They got the documents somewhere.
We're going to get Gareth on the line.
He's going to talk about that.
But at the, at the very minimum, they had admitted that the laptop was theirs and they had basically arranged the story about the smuggling of this laptop out of Iran and with all of the documentation on it about their alleged studies.
And so I can't see Ricky in there.
Oh, you got him.
All right.
Gareth, are you there?
Can you hear me?
All right.
All right.
Well, this is not working out.
He dropped again.
Huh?
All right.
Well, that's live radio.
That's the rules.
It has to not work.
Right.
I think that's okay.
Cause I'll just keep talking and I'll tell you what's wrong with it.
Part of the alleged studies said that the Iranians were working on testing a laser conversion of uranium enriched or not enriched, refined uranium ore and using laser enrichment to enrich it to uranium tetrafluoride, which is sometimes known as green salt because that's what it looks like is green salt.
And this made no sense whatsoever because in fact, the Iranians already were developing.
And by the time the alleged studies came out or the smoking laptop documents came out, they already had a facility at the Istrafan site where they refined that uranium ore and in fact converted all the way to uranium hexafluoride gas, which is what you need in order to introduce it into a centrifuge in order to enrich the uranium.
So converting it to green salt was, you know, basically one step in a process that they weren't following.
They were using an entirely different process and had no need to pursue that.
So you got them now?
Gareth, can you hear me?
Are you there?
Gareth Porter, the great reporter.
All right.
Well, I don't know.
That's okay.
I'll just host the show myself.
If you think I can't talk for half an hour, you're totally mistaken.
I'll just interview me.
So another thing about these documents, and this is something that even David Albright, the war propagandist from ISIS, that is the good ISIS, he calls it, the Institute for Making Up Lies About Iran and Their Nuclear Program, run by David Albright there in Washington.
And even David Albright, one time back years ago, took on David Sanger and William J. Broad in the New York Times after they had run with these stories of this, as Netanyahu, you know, Gareth showed these drawings and plans to develop a nuclear warhead to fit in the nose cone of Shahab 2 missile, or was it Shahab 3?
Anyway, so Gareth showed how these were forgeries.
And in fact, how the Iranians had secretly had begun developing a new nose cone for their missile that was not shaped like a dunce cap and, you know, a true cone, but instead was shaped more like a baby bottle nose or a dolphin nose, as they called it.
And this is an entirely different nose cone for the rocket, which would, of course, require an entirely different warhead, quite separate, quite different than the drawing.
So it was obvious that what had happened was the Israelis had forged these weapons blueprints, these missile blueprints, on an educated assumption that this was the missile that the Iranians would continue to field and would, you know, could look like they were being, you know, could frame them up to look like that this is what they're, you know, where they're going to eventually place nuclear bombs in their warheads.
But then it came out that, no, it had been years since the Iranians had abandoned that original cone-shaped nose and were working on the new documents, working on a new design.
And, you know, when a New York Times story about Iran's missile program and nuclear program is so shoddy that even David Albright is writing letters to the editor complaining about it, you know you have a real problem.
And so these are the lies that, again, even David Albright was debunking when David Sanger was retelling them in the New York Times back more than 10 years ago now, or approximately 10 years ago.
Here we are in the future, in 2018, and here's Netanyahu, puts up the same drawing, and you're supposed to go, wow, I mean, that really does look like the drawing of a warhead or something.
Another thing that Netanyahu showed in his presentation was a picture of spherical-shaped metals.
And he's saying, look, see here, they're testing uranium pits and cores for nuclear bombs and this and that.
Whatever those were in those pictures, they absolutely could not possibly be, it could not possibly be weapons-grade uranium, which the Iranians have never manufactured and never produced.
And so, you know, assuming that that was even true at all, that they were testing whether they could manufacture a hemisphere in this size or something like that, it certainly had nothing to do with actual nuclear material or nuclear weapons material.
So all right, well, so we do have Gareth on now, we want to try again?
Yeah, let's do it.
The great Gareth Porter, everybody.
Gareth, can you hear me?
Hi.
Yes, I can hear you.
Okay, great.
Well, we've had some live radio problems this morning, but I was just telling them everything that you would have told them.
I've been hearing part of what you said, yes.
All right.
So the big deal here is the Prime Minister of Israel has made some real claims here, or I don't know.
He claimed that they lied about what they were doing back before.
He didn't try to claim that they're breaking the deal now, but he's saying that they're obsessed with nuclear weapons and they claimed that they never had a nuclear weapons program and that then this information that he was displaying showed that they did in fact have a nuclear weapons program, Gareth.
So I guess the first thing, I guess, is just easy, which is at most, if we take at face value the truth of all the information he was displaying there, it showed a nuclear weapons research program, not an actual attempt to make a bomb, but perhaps an effort to look into what it might take to make a bomb, something like that.
As I was explaining earlier, bench level experiments with green salt and this kind of thing.
So take it at face value for the sake of argument for a minute, Gareth.
I mean, is that right, that this still is short of what you'd call a nuclear weapons program in any real sense?
Of course.
You know, there was no pretense that this was anything close to a nuclear weapons program per se.
It was sort of preliminary studies that expressed the supposed interest of the Iranian regime in having a nuclear weapon and exploring what sort of things they would need and so forth.
So you're absolutely right, and that's for the sake of argument.
You can accept the idea that they had some kind of program, but it certainly was not a nuclear weapons program.
They called it a covert nuclear weapons research program, a program of preliminary research.
And now this is what the CIA says, and Mossad has said that they agree with the CIA, that this was abandoned in 2003 after America got rid of Saddam Hussein for them.
They said that they don't need this anymore.
That was what Seymour Hersh said was the Americans' conclusion, that once we got rid of Saddam, they decided they didn't even need even to look into this anymore, and they completely abandoned it in 2003.
That's right.the specific point about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which looms so large in the politics of this issue.
Even people who would be inclined to be skeptical about what Netanyahu might say or what might come from the Israelis or from the Bush administration have been inclined to believe that in fact the Iranians must have had a nuclear weapons research program as the CIA assessed in 2007 when they said, yes, they had one up to 2003, and then they stopped it.
But what I've shown in my book and in subsequent discoveries as well is that the entire collection of documents on which the NIE of 2007 actually relied in making that judgment about the cutoff in 2003 were in fact fabrications.
You have to say that what the CIA judged in 2007, their assessment being that the Iranians did in fact have this research program up to 2003 and then they stopped it, that has to be viewed as absolutely wrong because it was primarily the result of the CIA having accepted these documents on face value without having authenticated them, without having subjected them to any real forensic research and passing them then on to the IAEA as evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons research program.
I think that is a fundamental problem that we're still now seeing the political fallout of.
We are seeing an incipient crisis over the Iranian nuclear program as a result of this whole train of falsification and acceptance of falsification by the CIA, by the news media and by the political elite in the United States.
All right, well, so I've read the book.
It's Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
And you certainly do thoroughly deconstruct all this.
But let me ask you, before we get into the details there, about why you think the Israelis, they truly did forge these documents and funnel them into the intelligence stream.
Why did they stop at a measly nuclear weapons research program?
Why not go ahead and forge some documents that make it look like the Ayatollah had ordered the go ahead at some point, even if later back down or something like that?
Well, I think there are two answers to that, Scott.
You know, they did in fact come up with later documents subsequent to the original so-called laptop documents.
I think that's what you and I have called them in the past.
The ones that were turned over to the German intelligence by the Mujahedini calc on behalf of the Israelis.
And then, you know, the CIA got them and gave them their sort of seal of approval in some sense and they were turned over then to the IAEA.
But later, the Israelis came up with more documents and in particular, there was a document that showed, you know, again, it's experiments, but closer to experiments for explosion of a nuclear weapon.
They were experiments with what they called multipoint initiation device.
And this is the one that Netanyahu actually flashed something up on the screen about and talked about at some length.
And this was a document that I've shown in my book, you know, was clearly fabricated because what they were showing here was clearly something that was related to their discovery of the fact that our friend Danilenko, the Ukrainian, who they called a Russian nuclear scientist who was neither Ukrainian nor a nuclear scientist, had served for some months, for a year to two years in Iran, lecturing.
And they made it out that he was, the Israelis pointed this out to the IAEA, that he was connected somehow with this MPI, multipoint initiation experimentation.
Now that was totally based on the fact that he'd published an article about fiber optic technologies and that they suggested that I was involved in this experiment.
That was the only thing they had, but it was good enough for the IAEA.
This was the scientist, as you said, you slightly misspoke there.
This was, as you said, the Ukrainian scientist who they accused of being Russian.
And they accused him of being a nuclear physicist, a nuclear weapons expert, when really his expertise was creating nanodiamonds with these sophisticated implosions.
And you know, I think it was also the great nuclear physicist Gordon Prather who said that all these tests, the multipoint initiation tests, the way that you would do that would be outside, not in these small chambers, the way that the Israelis had set it up in their accusations.
Right, and that's a point that Robert Kelly has made as well, you know, that...
A former IAEA weapons specialist, Kelly.
Right, right.
Just want to make sure we know who Robert Kelly is.
Okay, so now the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, so you have confirmation then from International Atomic Energy Agency officials that they got the documents from the MEK and they don't really know, better than that, where they came from?
No, it was not the IAEA officials who told me this.
It was the former North American coordinator for the German Foreign Office, Carsten Voigt, who had...
An American then?
Pardon?
I'm sorry, German or an American?
No, German.
Oh, German, okay.
Who was in charge of the German Foreign Office's North American Affairs Coordination Office.
Nice.
Who was close to people in the German Foreign Intelligence Agency, the BND, and they brought him in in November 2004 and told him, look, we're very concerned here about Colin Powell's public statement saying that the U.S. now has information, has evidence that Iran is trying to mate a nuclear weapon with their Shahab-3 missile, and of course that's a reference to the document that I heard you were already discussing that I debunk in my book, but they were saying that we know all about these documents, the BND people were saying, we know about these documents because we got them from one of our sometime sources and we didn't trust this source and therefore we don't trust the documents because we knew that he was a member of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the M.E.K., and of course the M.E.K. was a terrorist organization listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization because they killed Americans in Iran, then they began to kill Iranian government officials when the Islamic regime took over, and then finally they began to work for Saddam Hussein against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, and then when that was over they hooked up with the Israelis, the Mossad intelligence agency used them to launder intelligence as is basically documented in multiple places, including by the IAEA itself.
Well, and as my wife reported back during Iraq War II, Cheney and Rumsfeld were using them to collect intelligence inside Iran, and they were accused by the Obama White House in fact in 2012 in NBC News as part of the wrangling there with the Israelis of doing the hits and murdering the Iranian scientists for the Israelis there.
But even more relevant to this particular point, it was established in multiple places that the Mossad people were using the M.E.K. to launder intelligence or information, let's put it that way, that Mossad did not want to have attributed to Israel, but which they wanted to get to the IAEA in particular, and of course this was the perfect mechanism for them to do that.
They had an Iranian cutout that could be the alleged source, the supposed source of this information, and that's what they did in the case of the laptop documents, the alleged studies.
It's funny too, isn't it?
It's just like the aluminum tubes, where they say aluminum tubes so many times that you're just supposed to accept the premise that an aluminum tube is a really scary thing, or an aluminum tube somehow automatically equates to a full-scale Manhattan project to make a nuclear bomb.
In this case, it's alleged studies, which in any other context you'd be saying, alleged studies?
What's the threat there?
Studies that may not have even happened at all, and even if they did, they're just studies, and yet this amounts to a Causus Belli almost.
Let me point out that the term alleged studies was used by the IAEA when Mohammed ElBaradei was the Director General, and of course ElBaradei made it very clear publicly that he did not trust these documents.
They were never authenticated, as he pointed out repeatedly, and he would not use them as evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons research program or a nuclear weapons program, and of course they had to wait until ElBaradei finally stepped down to put their man, they being the Bush administration and the Israelis, put their man Amano into the IAEA to replace ElBaradei, and then of course they had free reign to use these documents.
Amano was already known to be willing to play ball with the Bush administration, so that's how they did it.
Well, and we know thanks to Chelsea Manning, we have primary source material on that.
The American State Department cables saying, yeah, this guy's completely in our pocket and swears he's going to do whatever we want.
Now the right-wingers try to spin that, including go along with Obama on doing this terrible deal or whatever, but what that really meant was he was willing to play along with leveling these false accusations and taking them at face value.
You're absolutely right, yes.
Let me just go back to a point that I omitted, the second point that I was going to make, which is that the Israelis then did try later on to come up with further information suggesting actual nuclear weapons program.
I don't think we want to go into more details about that at this point, but for one thing, they had a document that they leaked to the London Times that was suggesting a nuclear trigger, and they had more stuff like that.
Well, they also, remember the one where they leaked it, we found a secret weapons laboratory in Tehran, and here's a picture of the vault door, but then it just had come from Google images of a vault door or something.
That's right, exactly.
And the whole thing was...
And they do that over and over again.
I think that was the London Times as well.
I'm having to scratch my brain and go back in history here.
All right, so here's the deal, Gareth.
The bottom line is, well, there's a few different bottom lines.
Well, wait, not before the bottom line.
I'm going to have to hurry here.
There's the smoking laptop.
We've more or less covered that, but as you describe in your book, the alleged studies actually includes another set of intelligence too.
These are intercepts about dual use technologies, and I think the way you put it in the book is, you know what?
It's kind of fair.
If you were a DIA intelligence analyst looking at this stuff, you might think that there was something nefarious going on here, except that then you go and you track down all these dual use technologies they'd imported and discovered that, no, really, they all went toward the benign use and not the nuclear weapons one that even you could have suspected based on the intercepts of their financial information there at face value.
Can you talk about that?
Right.
Let me just clarify that the dual use issue that you're talking about here goes back to the late 1980s, early 1990s, when then, I guess, that would have been the first Bush administration, the George H. W. Bush administration.
Intelligence people had this, what they thought was a spectacular find.
They had found out that this organization, this contracting outfit, was writing letters to basically high-tech manufacturers to get a nuclear-relevant material of various kinds.
Long story short, the fact is that the guy who was associated with this contracting outfit that did studies for the Iranian Defense Ministry was also the dean of the school at Sharif University.
He was doing some work on behalf of the university in sending these cables out.
The bright young people who were doing the analysis for U.S. intelligence said, okay, now we've got them.
We know that they're feeding these, they're trying to get information and technology that they will give to their secret nuclear weapons program.
That's how this all started, way back in the early 1990s.
Yeah.
All right.
Again, the book is Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare, where all of this is deconstructed in the smallest detail.
Okay, so now to the bottom line, which is what you've basically shown here, is there never was a nuclear weapons threat from Iran.
It always was a giant hoax that they were building nuclear weapons or that they have ever been a nuclear weapons threat to Israel, the United States, or any of our allies or any of this stuff.
They've been under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and they've had a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency all this time.
Mohammed ElBaradei and the IAEA back then, and even under Yuki Amano, have continued to verify the non-diversion.
That is, they've continued to prove the negative.
They've guaranteed and verified the non-diversion of nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose a million times over.
So then Obama made this deal, not to really protect Saudi, Israel, America, or anyone else from Iran's nuclear program, but basically to protect the American people from the threat of war over this fake excuse for a war by saying that, look, now their program isn't just safeguarded, now it's double extra safeguarded, locked down beyond all reason, extremely verified to be civilian in nature, and to such a degree that the war hawks can only be frustrated.
They can't just lie about it anymore.
And so that's why the hawks want rid of the deal.
And so my question for you is, are they going to be able to get rid of the deal now?
And is it going to lead to war?
I think they are going to get rid of the deal.
I think that it's really, it's time has come and gone in the sense that there's just not going to be enough interest, you know, on the part of the Iranians to continue to just hold their hand and, you know, not go back to where they were when the agreement was signed.
Which still just means a robust civilian program, though, right?
Yes, right.
But of course, this is what is unacceptable up to now, has been and will continue to be unacceptable to the world's Western elites.
And I just want to make the point that the problem with the JCPOA has been from the beginning that the Obama administration accepted lock, stock and barrel the entire false narrative that surrounded the Iranian nuclear program.
And therefore, they were giving this ammunition to the neoconservatives, the Trumpists, and all the people who wanted to set up the United States for a crisis with Iran.
And now we're seeing the consequences of the acceptance of these lies.
And so I think that one of the underlying truths here that has not been really discussed and I would like to see discussed is the danger of the failure of elites in this country, the media elite, the political elite and the national security elite of refusing to subject the claims of
