05/04/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

In America today, teachers, cops, judges, and other so-called public servants make far more than the average taxpayer.
And their pensions?
Well, if the people knew, they'd join us.
That's where you come in.
Taxpayers United of America is embarking on a great new project to train activists how to take on the parasites in your communities.
The entire process, from prying loose the facts to disseminating the truth to the people.
The next of these great workshops is Saturday, April 25th in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
It's just $15.
For more information, go to taxpayersunited.org slash govpensions.
All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
I got Gareth Porter on the line.
He wrote two very important things that we got to talk about.
The first one is at Truthout.
As Israel lobby pushes full access inspections, U.S. makes false claim on Iran nuclear deal.
That's very important.
And then also why Iran must remain a U.S. enemy.
Gareth Porter, he wrote the book on Iran's nuclear program.
Of course, it's called Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
And he wrote about 10 million great articles for IPSnews.net.
You can find virtually all of them at antiwar.com slash Porter.
And he also won awards for his great work at Truthout on the Afghan surge and maybe on the Iraq surge too.
And now here he is.
Oh, he often writes for Middle East Eye now.
And here he is at Al Jazeera and again here at Truthout.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
Hi, Scott.
Good to be back again.
How are you?
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Very important stuff going on here.
So first of all, just if I can try to sum up very quickly, we have an interim deal ever since November 2013.
And the P5-plus-1, which is America and the entire United Nations Security Council plus permanent members plus Germany, have been negotiating with Iran on their nuclear deal to scale it back, expand inspections in exchange for sanctions relief.
And now we're at the point here in the spring of 2015 where we have a framework for a final deal and we have a deadline for the end of June to hammer out the last details to finally put this thing to bed here.
And it encompasses a lot of important moving parts and this kind of thing.
And one of them is the level of inspections under the additional protocol which Iran has agreed to sign and just what the IAEA will be able to do in Iran and how that compares to what the Americans' demands are.
So I guess please take it from there if I got that much right.
Well, you do have that much right.
And indeed, the negotiations now are, you know, in a sense, in the final lap around the track.
You know, there are relatively few issues left, but they are the ones that were the most difficult to resolve.
And of course, among them is the – I mean, first of all, there's the question of the research and development, which still has some loose ends, very important loose ends to be resolved.
And there's the question of exactly what is the timeline, what is the schedule for lifting sanctions of various kinds against Iran.
That's definitely unresolved.
And then the third one, which is the one that I talked about in this piece that you just referred to, is what in fact will Iran be required to agree to, to allow the IAEA to do.
Under what circumstances will the IAEA be able to go to visit various kinds of sites?
And that is another very sensitive issue for all kinds of reasons.
Politically sensitive in Iran because, of course, they're very concerned about spying by foreigners, by people who are associated with the IAEA, leaking militarily sensitive information to the Israelis and the Americans.
And politically sensitive in Washington because the Israelis and their lobby are pushing – have been pushing very, very hard to get through language which would essentially set the Israelis up to be able to continue the kind of disinformation campaign that they've been so good at over the past several years and continue to raise flags about alleged nuclear weapons work on military bases specifically.
And that's where this issue has come down to a very difficult political situation for the Obama administration, to say the least.
In other words, the Iranians will never concede that you can just walk around wherever you want at any time, including all their most highly classified facilities, but the Americans won't back off those kind of demands.
And so if we have anything less than that, which is what we're going to end up having to settle for, then the Israelis get to continue saying, yeah, but there could be something here and there could be something there, and just pretending forever it'll be just like they never even had the deal in the first place.
Well, the issue won't have been put to bed even with the new expanded inspection regime, et cetera.
That is precisely right.
In other words, you're correct.
The Iranians will never agree to a language which allows that kind of situation to continue indefinitely.
And that is exactly what the Congress has been insisting on.
And in fact, it's written into the legislation that they have passed that they expect to have a regime for inspection that essentially allows the IAEA to go wherever it wants, wherever it suspects anything is taking place, so that essentially Iran would be treated as an occupied country, a defeated country, the way Iraq was after the first Gulf War.
And of course, that's not going to happen.
Nothing like that is going to happen.
And in fact, I will tell you that as my piece, I hope, makes clear, the Obama administration understands this perfectly well, and they have already agreed to move back at least a step from the formula that the Israeli lobby is demanding.
And that is something much more ambiguous in terms of – what I say in the piece is that I don't think it has been negotiated yet at all.
But there's kind of agreement in principle, in a very vague way, that there will be some kind of system that allows – I think they call it enhanced access.
The term, I believe, is enhanced access.
So in principle, yes, some enhanced access to be agreed upon, to be negotiated, and that hasn't been done yet.
But that means access to the mines and maybe the centrifuge factory, right, where there's not necessarily nuclear material being introduced, but it's still not marching into Parchin and looking around wherever they want.
Yeah, I think that that is roughly correct.
But I think there's some nuances here that are being dealt with through this ambiguous language, which is that the United States wants to go beyond simply having visits to centrifuge factories and mines, and they want to try to negotiate something that allows something – a system whereby if there's enough evidence that they could justify visiting a military base, I think that's what the Americans are after.
And there's where the rub's going to come.
I mean, the Iranians are going to be very tough in their negotiating stance on that, and I think it's going to be very tough to reach an accommodation on this issue that will – certainly it's going to be impossible to satisfy the Israeli lobby, that's for sure.
But whether they can arrive at a formula that is general enough to be acceptable to both sides and still meaningful is a big question mark.
But what my story does here is to show that the Obama administration was clearly overselling what they got in the negotiations in Lausanne, completely overselling.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with more Gareth Porter right after this.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Or maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still.
If you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, talking with Gareth Porter from Middle East Eye.
Truth out, Al Jazeera.
And he, of course, wrote the book Manufactured Crisis about the Iran nuclear program.
Now, so did you see this Bloomberg thing, Gareth, where Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, said, clarifying the possible military dimensions is essential.
It's important to restore confidence, even if it has never been a precondition for reaching an agreement.
Sounds like maybe he's backpedaling a little bit there, and they're going to let this work itself out and take a more easygoing attitude toward the, because after all, the possible military dimensions is a quite a mess of accusations.
It's going to take them a while to go through.
So they can't, you know, they're obviously going to have to take their time trying to resolve them to whatever degree they can.
Right.
Well, that's an issue that, as you know, I've been very interested in and follow very closely, as closely as I can.
And I can tell you that there is a continuing linkage between the possible military dimensions, the resolution of that issue with the IAEA on one hand, and not the reaching of an agreement, but, of course, the implementation of the agreement, including the lifting of sanctions.
In other words, there's a specific set of UN sanctions that there apparently is an agreement in principle that there will be some kind of linkage between the PMD resolution and the lifting of those sanctions.
You know, again, everything that's agreed to depends on agreement on everything else.
And so that's tentative.
But my understanding is that that is what is supposed to be finalized in the final round of negotiations or final rounds of negotiation.
And so I'm not ready to say that Amano is going to relax now and say, ah, don't worry about it.
We got you.
We got your back covered here.
No, no, I think he's he's still part of the U.S.-European alliance against Iran.
He is taking his orders from the White House.
He is going to utilize the negotiations with or the talks with Iran as a Let me put it the other way around.
He's going to use the necessity for the Iranians to satisfy him in order to get the lifting of that set of sanctions that are referred to in order to force the Iranians to basically do whatever he wants them to.
And the question that remains is, you know, is is he going to admit that he doesn't really have any evidence to support the idea that there was covert nuclear weapons work by Iran?
Or is he going to is he too committed to that position?
I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, in other words, too committed to the idea that he is.
Maybe they'd be able to go ahead and back away from it by just kind of going through and giving them a clean bill of health on each issue, kind of one at a time.
And that's sort of what happened with the telegrams, right?
All the receipts for the dual use stuff is they never really said, well, we were totally wrong about that.
But they did admit that each and every issue had been resolved.
So let's move on.
Well, that, of course, was ElBaradei.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Had it been had it been up to Ali Heinonen, that wouldn't have happened because Heinonen was already, you know, working hand in glove with the Bush administration in 2008.
So it really was that ElBaradei's much greater even handedness on this issue.
And Amano is exactly the opposite.
I mean, you know, I'm now finishing a piece that quotes Amano at a meeting of the so-called like minded group of states, meaning basically the English language countries plus Japan.
And in this meeting in early 2008, he was saying, oh, yeah, ElBaradei.
He'll probably he'll probably say that the Iranians have confessed to being not guilty.
Talking with Gareth Porter about his piece here at Truthout as Israel lobby pushes full access inspections.
U.S. makes false claims on the Iran nuclear deal.
And so is what we're talking about.
And I forget if we talked about the part where they they kind of got out ahead of what they claim the Iranians had agreed to in the talking points that they had released on the framework there.
So, right.
That's that's basically the punch line of my story here, although, you know, in a sense, it's the beginning point.
The punch line is what President Obama revealed in his interview with Tom Friedman.
But right immediately after the negotiations in Lausanne were completed, Kerry's publicly saying the Iranians have agreed.
We have an agreement to basically be able to go wherever we suspect some site.
That was the way it was sold by Kerry, by Ben Rhodes and ultimately by Obama himself.
In that interview with Friedman, he crowed that, yeah, we're setting up a system whereby we can go wherever we we suspect something.
And then further on in the interview, he basically acknowledged that, well, it's a lot more complicated than that.
They're setting up a system whereby, you know, we can request it.
The and then the Iranians can say no.
And then there will be some something will happen whereby the request will be vetted, reviewed for, you know, what the evidence is.
And then we don't know exactly how something's going to be decided because he wouldn't say.
And I presume I think it's fair to assume that that's because it hasn't been negotiated yet.
And so that's really where the situation has has finally ended up in the negotiations.
These damn Democrats, they better not screw this thing up.
I mean, they already are.
They're getting it done, but they're screwing it up at the same time.
They're building in all their own obstacles that they don't need for their own policy.
It's ridiculous.
Well, you know, I, of course, agree with you.
But I think we have to recognize that this is merely a symptom of the underlying disease, which is that this whole political system has been taken over by, you know, not just the Israeli lobby on one hand, but, you know, powerful business interests and bureaucratic interests who basically control the votes on, you know, the most important issues that we that they have to vote on.
Yeah.
Now that's this other article here at Al Jazeera dot com today.
Why Iran must remain a U.S. enemy.
And, you know, I'm pretty sure you probably saw it.
America dot Al Jazeera dot com, Mark Perry's piece about how the military was concerned about flying as Al Qaeda's air force in Yemen.
Yes, yes, yes.
And but one of the things that came up in my interview with him last week or two weeks ago.
Yeah, last week.
No, two weeks ago was that.
The crowd was going to say, oh, yeah, about how, you know, when it comes to Iran, that the military definitely does not want to have a war with Iran and that.
And then I asked him, you know, what about all the permanent interests in the national security state, the Pentagon, the CIA?
Are they willing to go along with the president's push to to move toward more normal relations here?
And he said, well, at least as far as the military is concerned, they definitely don't want war.
And he said there are a lot of arms contractors who are licking their chops at the opening up of a new market and selling the possibility of selling Iran a bunch of weapons now.
And so we're joking that that's what you got to do is you got to get the arms dealers in the military industrial complex behind the peace deal so that they will.
They have their own interests at stake, not in not in sell weapons to us in the name of that enemy, but going ahead and sell weapons to that enemy so that we can have peace.
That's a brilliant analysis.
I subscribe to it entirely.
The problem, of course, is is getting there is extremely difficult.
And, you know, until you get there, then exactly the opposite principle applies.
And that's what I talk about in my article, which is that it's precisely the need of the Pentagon to have a justification for both missile defense programs, which are the single, you know, most lucrative research and development program that the Pentagon has had for the last decade and more.
And at the same time, the selling of massive amounts of defensive and offensive weaponry to the Saudis and other Gulf shakedowns and particularly the Saudis, of course, are the dominant source of profit here for anti Iran missiles or not missiles, but anti missile technology and and offensive weaponry.
So, you know, the Pentagon at this point is totally committed to the idea that Iran is a threat.
They simply cannot back away from that officially.
Maybe they can't go around and say, you know, we think that Iran now is a is a is a responsible state that we can do business with.
At the same time, justify those programs.
So, you know, that means that that's not going to happen.
I mean, they're simply not going to embrace a normal relationship, let alone a quasi partnership alliance with Iran for many years.
That's right, Virginia.
This is how American foreign policy is made.
How much money does Lockheed stand to profit this way or that?
That's what it all comes down to.
I think I made the point in the article that at this moment of these major arms manufacturers, the Lockheeds and Boeing's of the United States are depending on these sales to the Saudis and their Gulf allies for roughly 25 percent or even more of their profits.
That that is the reality that we are up against in terms of trying to bring about or hoping for, let's put it that way, a change in U.S. policy in the Middle East.
All right.
One last thing here real quick.
Our friend Mohammed Sahimi has a piece at The Huffington Post and honestly hadn't even read it yet.
But the headline is along the lines anyway, that the whole or at least a major part of the Saudi war in Yemen in the name of Iranian support for the Houthis is really just to try to undermine the nuclear deal.
And all these negotiations and their projected fear that America and Iran are cozying up back to the 70s and that they're going to lose their importance and all that kind of thing.
And so by creating this crisis and blaming it all on Iran and making it a Sunni-Shia split where we're stuck on the Sunni side, that'll help undermine the nuclear deal.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, I think that makes sense.
I would simply add that, you know, in addition to and perhaps even more importantly than the hope that this might have some effect on on the U.S. negotiating posture.
I think even more important than that is that the Saudi extremely exaggerated view of the threat that comes from Iran, that there's an Iranian threat to the Saudis, that they must do something to disrupt.
And this, of course, is the result of this very narrow Wahhabi or Wahhabism that the Saudis embrace and that they have been pushing extremely aggressively for decades around the world.
And that leads to, shall we say, a slight distortion of perception in the reality about what's been happening in the Middle East.
And so I would simply, I would put the emphasis, you know, substantially differently.
I would say that it's much more a response to an exaggerated perception of threat with perhaps a slight hope that this might help derail the talks.
But I don't think they really have that much hope in that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks.
I kept you over time.
I'll let you go now.
I appreciate it, Gareth.
Thanks.
Sorry for the audio difficulties.
Next time, maybe we go back to the old fashioned phone.
Yeah.
You know, we're going to maybe have to go through your settings someday or something.
Something's wrong there, but we can work it out.
But anyway, it was a great interview anyway.
So thank you.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, so that's a great Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book Manufactured Crisis.
You should buy it and read it.
And buy two and give one to your library.
And also he writes at aljazeera.com why Iran must remain a U.S. enemy.
And then also as Israel lobby pushes full access inspections, U.S. makes false claims on Iran nuclear deal.
That one is at Truthout.
You can also find him at Middle East Eye.
And we'll be right back with Phil Giraldi in a sec.
Hey, all Scott here.
You're like me.
You need coffee.
Lots of it.
You probably prefer taste good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at Darren's Coffee dot com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world.
All specialty premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee dot com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
Darren's Coffee dot com.
Don't you get sick of the Israel lobby trying to get us into more war in the Middle East or always abusing Palestinians with your tax dollars?
It once seemed like the lobby would always have full spectrum dominance on the foreign policy discussion in D.C.
But those days are over.
The Council for the National Interest is the America lobby standing up and pushing back against the Israel lobby's undue influence on Capitol Hill.
Go show some support at Council for the National Interest dot org.
That's Council for the National Interest dot org.
Hey, I'll run out and get a copy of Embedded Alive First Person Journalism in the United States of America 2013 through 14 by Chris Braswell.
The book takes a gonzo look at daily life in America columns, informational letters and other marketplace vigilance.
A look at drug abuse culture and its marketing and a series of contemplative and metaphysical essays.
Get Embedded Alive First Person Journalism in the United States of America 2013 through 14 in paperback, hardcover and digital formats at Fuse Powder dot com.