Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Aren't you guys on the line?
I've got the great Gareth Porter.
This one was written for Salon.com, believe it or not, but of course we reprinted it at Antiwar.com.
Hey, they used to run quality stuff there like a decade and a half ago, sometimes.
All right.
Hey, welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Gareth?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Hey, happy to have you here.
Hey, you know what?
You wrote the book on Iran's nuclear program.
So if anyone in the audience was curious about Iran's nuclear program, they could read your book, Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare, and then they would know all about it.
Well, not everything, but a lot of stuff anyway.
Yes.
Yeah.
What they really need to know.
I agree.
All right.
Actually, you need like an addendum chapter about the nuclear deal and its end and what have you or something.
Yeah, yeah.
There's lots more to be written.
There's so much more.
Pouring concrete in the Iraq reactor.
That's a whole little subsection right there.
Indeed.
Scandal.
Hey, man.
I know.
You know what they're going to do with that concrete?
Is they're going to make it radioactive and then make a dirty bomb out of it.
I read that at the FDD website.
No, I'm just making that up.
I will read that at the FDD website at some point.
How about that?
Very possible.
Well, here's some things that aren't true.
Claims, well, evidently, I guess, I can't say with absolute certainty.
Here's some claims that have no sourcing.
Iran was behind the attacks on those tankers in the Persian Gulf back a few weeks ago.
And you've got another great piece following up on that most important story before it fades away.
The Pentagon's phony Iran evidence.
New rationale for U.S. intervention.
And this is about a briefing that was given by Vice Admiral Michael Gilday, director of the Joint Staff, blaming Iran for the tanker attacks.
Why don't you tell us all about that?
Well, actually, I mean, this is really a fascinating little episode for a variety of reasons, because it's an event that begged for media interpretation, a little bit of background, a little bit of understanding, digging in a bit and trying to figure out what this all meant and to report that to the public.
But, you know, you'll look in vain for any such report except for mine.
I'm sorry to say, although it does give me something to do, admittedly.
The first point, of course, is that Admiral Gilday is an interesting pick for making this, giving this briefing to the press, which was largely, if not exclusively, for the purpose of making the case, as you indicated, that Iran was behind the sabotage of these four oil tankers outside the Strait of Hormuz, just offshore from the UAE's major port, Fujairah.
And that's because he is the director of the Joint Staff, which is the staff that serves the chairman and the rest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And normally he would not be the person to talk about intelligence matters that relate to a current crisis.
I mean, that's just not his function.
And my surmise, which I make in my piece, is that he is a sort of symbol of the uniformed military.
And the people behind this interpretation, if you will, were not interested in having their own faces be the ones to make this case.
They wanted somebody with a uniform on and they fingered him as the guy who was going to do the job.
Clearly, he was not prepared for this task, except for kind of a few rhetorical words that he was, I think, advised to use.
And that's because he was given no evidence to present to the media to back up the accusation that Iran was indeed culpable in the sabotage operation that hit those four ships.
And it was an embarrassment.
It really was an embarrassment to the Pentagon in general, but to Admiral Gilday more specifically, because in a way he was humiliated.
He was really kind of pursued by a series of reporters after he made his initial accusation.
And they were saying, well, what do you have to back up this accusation?
And he didn't have anything.
All he could say was, well, the Iranians told us in advance that they were going to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.
And they're doing all these things which would be in line with that idea, and therefore it must be true.
I mean, he didn't say that, but that was the implication.
And of course, the premise that he started with, that Iran had warned that it was going to shut down or threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz or the Persian Gulf generally, is simply not true.
I mean, what the official to whom they were referring indirectly, the IRGC, Israeli Revolutionary Guard Corps Naval Commander, actually said in April was that if we are not allowed to use the Strait, if we're forbidden from using the Strait, then we will do something to shut it down.
In other words, it was a defensive rather than offensive threat, a retaliatory threat.
And so really, he had nothing to offer the media.
And there was this repeated pattern where a reporter would say, well, you don't have anything to do it.
And he would go back and repeat one formula after another of the same kind of what I call a syllogism.
You know, A is true.
Therefore, B, which is somehow related to A, must be true too.
And so the overall effect was that it absolutely had no credibility to make that charge against the Iranians.
And what's so interesting about the media coverage of this event is that nobody, there was no story that headlined that the Pentagon charges Iran with responsibility for the sabotage event.
Instead, there were, the headlines were about what happened the same day, which was that the Pentagon announced that they were sending more troops to the Middle East.
And so it was an indication that nobody believed Admiral Gilday.
Or if they did believe it, they were too sheepish to actually publish this because they didn't believe that it would be believed by the public.
And so that's really quite an interesting development.
And it does shed light, obviously, on the more fundamental question here of what basically John Bolton and his allies in the administration, including, of course, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, outgoing Chairman of the Chiefs, Joseph Dunford, General Joseph Dunford, and McKenzie.
Those would be the CENTCOM commander, Kenneth McKenzie, are the ones who really had made the decision to push this idea.
And so what it reveals really is that they don't have any evidence whatsoever.
There was a threat by Bolton or an announcement by Bolton that UAE would bring evidence to the UN Security Council.
But in fact, the UAE did not accuse Iran of doing it.
They simply said that some probably state actor carried it out.
And that's basically what we're left with.
Hang on just one second for me.
Hey guys, don't you think it'd be cool if you could go to college but Tom Woods was the dean of the thing?
Yeah, well, something like that.
Check out LibertyClassroom.com, where Tom Woods went and had his pick of all the best professors to teach their courses in the real history and economics that you didn't learn when you went to college the first time around.
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All right, well, so one thing I got to contradict you on there, since there's one thing I can contradict you on, is I saw the blaring headline on Fox News that military announces that Iran did it.
Although you may well be right that they didn't bother writing it up.
I mean, that could have just come out right when they were starting the press conference or something, you know.
I don't know.
Yeah.
And I'm actually reflecting essentially major networks, except for Fox, of course, and print media.
And it's possible that there was a story that I didn't see.
And I see what you mean, that they played it down.
Which is funny, right?
Because you actually have, was it Matt Lee from the AP?
He's the only one of these guys who ever seems to cross-examine.
But you have a few reporters actually do their job this time, but it doesn't make it into print.
That's exactly right.
That's what's so interesting.
Because normally you don't have that.
You have reporters kind of standing in line to, you know, throw up softball questions to whatever high-ranking official is giving the briefing.
But in this case, you know, there was a series of questions suggesting that they were not convinced.
And in fact, the New York Times and Washington Post did the same thing on this story.
Neither of them had their reporter who covers the Pentagon write up a story on this.
They simply used like a four-paragraph or five-paragraph Associated Press story.
So they really sort of low-balled it.
They minimized the story as much as possible, essentially.
And then also you talk about how one of the reporters was trying to be helpful and say, Well, you could just say that, you know, if it's their M.O. or something, give us anything.
And he just went back to, no, they threatened to close Hormuz, which, as you pointed out, no, they didn't.
That's right.
You know, he did have this apparently helpful reporter who was prompting him to say, well, was it possibly, you know, the forensics that you did or something about, you know, the explosion at the water below the waterline?
And no, he didn't have anything whatsoever to offer.
That was very amusing.
And then so he was also at the same time as these tankers, he was also lumping in a rocket attack on the green zone and a Houthi drone attack on the Saudi oil pipeline, just as feared, right?
You're absolutely right.
He did.
He did lump all those things in.
And again, you know, nobody nobody really sort of isolated the specific cases.
And and except for that one that one journalist that you mentioned.
But but yes, they have lumped all these things together.
And of course, what's interesting is that the Houthi attack on the on the Saudi oil pipeline, that's something that they've claimed responsibility for.
There's no mystery about it.
And what they're doing is trying to conflate an event that, of course, is directly related to the war in Yemen and the Saudi refusal to end that war and continuing to carry out bombing, which hits civilian targets in Yemen with the issue of what Iran may or may not be planning to do or what they have done with regard to U.S. and allied targets in an offensive manner.
And that's another just telling point about how completely lacking in any credibility this whole line of argument is.
By that logic, I mean, they could just say that, hey, the next time Hamas fails to stop Islamic Jihad from firing a couple of rockets over the prison wall in the Gaza concentration camp, that upseat an Iranian proxy did.
Well, that's right.
That's exactly right.
I mean, they open up all kinds of possibilities for citing Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis.
Who else can we throw into the pot?
You know, the all the pro-Iranian Iranian supported militias in the in the Iraqi war against ISIS or the conflict with ISIS.
Hey, sometimes they blame Iran for backing the Taliban these days.
Well, that's true.
That's been that's been happening for a while.
So, so, hey, those guys commit atrocities constantly.
So if you really want to start pinning that stuff on Iran, there's a couple of headlines, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, this is this is a almost an endless, boundless sort of universe of possibilities that they're opening up.
And and it really it really needs to be called by people in the in the corporate media.
And thus far, I think it just hasn't happened.
I don't know if anybody's going to step up.
I tend to doubt it.
Well, like you say, the fact that you got who from the joint staff is talking about this at this press conference now instead of bloody Gina Haspel and her people, isn't she in charge of saying what's true around here?
As terrifying as that is.
Well, that that is precisely the point that I think I make.
I recall making something.
Maybe I didn't do it enough in enough detail, but I wanted to make the point that the intelligence people were absent.
Not only that, but there was no reference to any intelligence assessment or any intelligence estimate or any intelligence report that went beyond the specific idea that there was an incident in in in the near the Persian Gulf.
So so that's a very telling point, because I think what's behind that is that we have a strategy that's being pursued systematically by John Bolton and his allies to misrepresent what is simply their highly contorted version of the significance of raw intelligence reports.
As actually intelligence analysis or intelligence, even intelligence assessment.
And that is something I'm actually writing about right now as we speak.
I'm writing a follow up piece to make a more in-depth analysis of a case that that the heart of this entire Iran crisis, which now has subsided, actually.
I mean, no, no one now is making the case that we're on the cusp of an imminent Iranian attack or that that we're in a in a war crisis.
Well, in fact, the secretary of defense announced that all of their hype worked and the Iranians have backed down.
So that's that's the way they're explaining it.
But in fact, the reality is that that the whole crisis has subsided.
And, you know, we're going to wait for another occasion before the same outfit or a variant thereof tries another effort to to build up build up a phony crisis.
But my point is that that these people are misrepresenting what is simply their torque, their their contorted version of the meaning of raw reporting as though it were finished intelligence assessment.
And in fact, I have no reason to believe that there has been any intelligence community assessment of this.
That has really been dispensed with as far as I can see.
I think that actually happened earlier in the Trump administration when you had a series of well, you had two incidents involving alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria, in which, you know, one would expect that there would be an intelligence assessment by the intelligence community.
And in fact, there was no evidence that anything like that happened.
I mean, the the people in the NSC or the Pentagon or some combination thereof simply got together and put together their own statement of what it meant.
And that actually goes back to the Obama administration.
They did the same thing on Syria.
So, you know, we're talking here about a long term pattern in which the intelligence community has ceased to play any role whatsoever in trying to put forward an intelligence analysis, much less a national intelligence estimate that would serve as the basis for policy that's been dispensed with.
Well, I mean, they're willing to lie to Trump about the Skipperell thing in England there, except that, I don't know, the New York Times has now retracted that and said they didn't lie to him after all.
I'm not sure which version I believe.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that there are no intelligence estimates or intelligence assessments.
But I don't think that that has been the basis for any significant policy decision or even associated with any significant policy position taken by the administration.
I hear it.
All right.
So who do you think blew up the ships then?
Well, I don't know if I should announce it on your show, but I'll go ahead and do it anyway.
Look, I mean, the obvious suspect here has to be Israel.
And I'm going to write about that.
I will write a piece that makes that case in detail.
And the essence of it is that if you follow the precise timeline of what unfolded, you know, it clearly reflects, I mean, whoever did this did so in a way that would make it look like the Iranians, so that it would maximize the possibility for the Trump administration to take some very harsh action in retaliation.
Yeah.
So, you know, I mean, what other nation state has the obvious capabilities to carry out that kind of attack?
There isn't anybody else.
Well, the Saudis and the Qataris could have just done it themselves.
You know, they're just trying to frame up the Iranians too, right?
I suppose that's true.
But I don't know that either the Saudis or the Qataris really have the naval capabilities for special operations.
I haven't looked into it, I have to admit.
Well, you nail that down.
I mean, it seems like also Ayman al-Zawahiri and his guys have a profound interest in seeing America attack Iran, if they could ever figure out a way to provoke us to do it.
Sure.
But again, you know, the idea of having commandos that are trained and outfitted to do that sort of thing, it makes it a little bit more, you know, makes a little bit more select group, shall we say, that you can look to as the suspects on this.
Yeah.
And the other thing is that, you know, we know that the Israelis do do false flag attacks.
I mean, maybe they haven't done it recently.
The Leban affair?
The Leban affair, that was a long, long time ago.
Think about the 1994, I believe I got the date right.
The Israeli embassy in London had an explosion.
And there's a lot of evidence to support, not just supporting, but indicating that the Israelis did it for their own political diplomatic reasons.
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me.
Have you written about that one?
No, I haven't.
All right.
Well, that's on your list, too, then.
That's right.
Exactly.
Hey, thanks, Gareth.
I sure appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks so much again.
All right, you guys, that's Gareth Porter.
He wrote Pentagon's Phony Iran Evidence, New Rationale for U.S. Intervention.
That's at Antiwar.com and at Salon.com.
Read his book, Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, Antiwar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
