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Sorry I'm late I had to stop by the White's 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, we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name and 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.
All right you guys on the phone I've got the great, well actually not on the phone, on Skype.
I've got the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare and he has two very important articles about North Korea right now.
One of them is at Truthout.
Media hardliners play up North Korean nuclear quote deception claim and then in the American Conservative Magazine the media's brazen dishonesty about North Korean nuclear violations.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing Gareth?
I'm doing fine thanks Scott.
By the way I'm so grateful for the work that you do.
I'm serious.
You know a lot of people have been objecting to the ridiculous attempts to undermine the North Korean peace talks here but nobody does it like you do here.
So we've got two different articles along the same lines here.
What's the difference?
Yeah the first one Scott just to be clear the title had a comma after either I guess it was media comma hardliners.
Yeah I tried to say it that way I'm not sure if it came across right.
Yeah just to make it clear that there are two sort of entities here that are involved in this in this drama not just one although they're obviously very closely related.
So the first story really is the hook for it is the beginning of the actual negotiations between the Trump administration and the Kim Jong-un government, North Korean government, about a denuclearization agreement were to begin last week or I guess the previous previous weekend but just days before Pompeo, Secretary of State Pompeo, was to go to Pyongyang again.
We have a little drama involving a set of stories that came out on June 29th, June 30th in the NBC News and the Washington Post that were telling about a new intelligence report that was claiming that the North Koreans were known to be planning to deceive the United States in these talks and in an actual agreement by concealing secret facilities and not owning up to them.
And that then you know that was leading to a supposed revelation about a secret site called Kangsong which the Washington Post had already reported in May in fact that supposedly you know represented a secret enrichment facility that North Korea of course had never acknowledged.
North Korea has one acknowledged enrichment facility for uranium enrichment in Yongbyon, the nuclear center where they do all their nuclear work but has never acknowledged any other site for doing enrichment work.
So this was the hook for both of these stories basically although only one actually mentioned Kangsong.
The Post article mentioned Kangsong.
So my article eventually then gets to the real revelation here that in fact this alleged site at Kangsong is nothing more, has never been anything more than a suspicion.
And the primary evidence for it was a defector who in 2010 if I remember correctly said that he knew about the site or he suspected the site because he worked nearby.
Now that meant of course that he had never been inside the site.
He was acknowledging that.
It just seemed to him that that's what it was most likely.
And in fact you know this whole business of the site was written about by our friend David Albright.
We've talked about him on a number of occasions and he was leaked information from the administration in late May or sometime in May and wrote a piece that basically laid out the case for the Kangsong secret facility and actually, and this is the most interesting part of the story I think, Albright expressed some open skepticism about the case starting with the fact that the guy who originally told about it was clearly not somebody who'd actually been inside.
It was simply his suspicion.
And secondly it turns out that there's aspects of the building that emerge from obviously a satellite photography that are inconsistent with the thesis that it's a uranium enrichment facility.
So this is a very very weak case and always has been.
And that's really the essence of that first story.
All right now so it's important to note here for those who aren't familiar David Albright runs the Institute for Science and International Security something like that.
The good ISIS he likes to call it and we've run up against him numerous times.
He used to claim he was a nuclear weapons physicist but he's not.
But anyway the real point is that he's a very hawkish guy on Iran, Korea and all kinds of things and he loves having these scoops about oh look at the intelligence I've figured out.
A lot of times it just comes from Mossad or the MEK kooks or whatever.
But anyway the other point is sometimes he's honest and sometimes he at least has an incentive to not be caught being very wrong.
And so as we've talked about he called out the New York Times over Iranian missile designs in the forged Israeli laptop and other things like that.
So it's as you say here he is making the case for it and yet throwing cold water all over his own case really and saying yeah well we still don't really know.
That's exactly right.
I think you've nailed it precisely that David Albright has been very dishonest and in fact you know I've written about this.
He clearly shifted radically on Iran in 2008-2009, late 2008-early 2009 and began to take the Israeli line consistently.
Everything that he wrote after that until the final negotiation of the nuclear deal with Iran was a reflection of the Netanyahu government's line.
So he's very suspect in that regard.
But you're correct that at the same time when he's not shall we say already on the take you know he has an incentive not to be caught embracing something that can be clearly later on shown to be untrue.
So I think again we should say because he's been caught numerous times he didn't support the lies about Iraq's nuclear program but he did support the lies about their chemical weapons stockpiles before Iraq war two.
So he should never be able to live that down.
Anyway this is just a parenthesis anyway but the point is well first of all about this site you're saying that you know there's no real way to know.
All you see is a roof.
You don't know if there's spinning centrifuges in there or not.
Yeah and you know the anonymous sources who always surround this kind of issue have told the Post that there are other independent strands of evidence that support the suspicion that this is in fact an enrichment site but they don't specify what the pieces of evidence are.
And even the Post ended up in its report on May 25th the same date as the report by David Albright saying you know this is a suspicion.
It's suspect.
There's nothing more than that.
They've got no more case than that and and that's really the bottom line.
Hey I got another bottom line how about so what if they do have a uranium enrichment program one if that building does have centrifuges spinning in it we don't know if they're spinning up to weapons grade purity or not and even if they are well North Korea because of George Bush and as you detail in your previous journalism is no longer a member of the non-proliferation treaty so they're not breaking the law they even said we announced that six months from now we will withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty back in 2002 and then that's exactly what they did six months later just like is stipulated in the treaty is the only way to leave it legally that's the way they did it and so maybe you and I and Donald Trump and John Bolton wish they weren't spinning centrifuges but they're not in violation of international law in doing so or I guess I don't know maybe they're UN Security Council resolutions I'm not referring to here you could clarify about that I guess but then more importantly and you really point this out in your other article that we have this huge contradictory set of narratives going on in the media here on one hand Donald Trump is such a chump that he went and bestowed legitimacy on the dictator of North Korea by giving him a handshake and got absolutely nothing for it while at the same time anything that the North Koreans are accused of doing in terms of work on their nuclear or missile infrastructure since then is deemed to be a failure and a violation of the deal that they say was never made yeah well you know let me just go back to your original point that uh yeah we don't know for sure if this is a uh an enrichment site it's possible it's conceivable that it could be uh you know I you know you can't deny that there's some distant possibility that that's the case but I have to say that after all this time uh the the evidence that has been put forward is just pathetically weak and I think that's really the bottom line as far as we know at this at this stage so you know again we come back to the idea that this intelligence report which uh turns out to have been written by the defense intelligence agency which is notorious for writing reports that as I point out in the piece are uh worst case uh based analyses uh anytime that the is the issue uh relates to a military interest uh you can count on the DIA to take a hard line and I think that's uh certainly germane to understanding the nature of the case that's been made here yeah well you know I'm going to ask you again about the law in a second but I want to go ahead and throw this in at that point because you have this great quote here in the article from Donald Trump's current national security advisor John Bolton who then worked for George Bush Jr. in the state department and said that these rumors of the North Koreans attempting to get aluminum tubes and centrifuge infrastructure from the AQ Khan network or whoever else that that was quote the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the agreed framework the excuse he needed uh to break the deal that the Clinton administration had made with the North Koreans to keep them within the non-proliferation treaty and then of course and importantly even if they had been spinning centrifuges then one that wasn't in the agreed framework and two they have the right to nuclear technology it's guaranteed in the NPT and that wouldn't have been a violation if it had really bothered them it could have been the subject of future negotiation but instead this was the excuse the hammer I'd been looking for to shatter the agreed framework Bolton said then and then interestingly the reason I'm harping on this is because when they started setting off nukes in 2006 and ever since then best indications by all the experts who claim to know as best they can are that these have all been plutonium implosion bombs none of them have been uranium gun type nukes and they already had fuel for their Pyongyang reactor which which is where they're getting their plutonium from from the waste from the reactor there before so apparently if they're spinning centrifuges and enriching uranium nobody knows what they're doing with it yet anyway well let me let me just address the the Bolton factor here I that was going to be my next point because I've now run through the case that has to do with the Kang song alleged nuclear site and what I wanted to go back then to is that the the actual origins of this leak of the DIA report which then was translated into NBC and Washington Post stories is somebody in the Trump administration wanted to influence the press at that crucial moment just before Pompeo was to go back to Pyongyang now who might that be except for John Bolton John Bolton we know as as you've just cited in the past has been the guy who was maneuvering within the bureaucracy using intelligence reports leaking them to the media or using them within the bureaucracy to devastate efforts to negotiate with North Korea and that's apparently what happened in this case because we know Bolton was the one who was proposing that Pompeo take to Pyongyang the proposal that the that the North Koreans would have to denuclearize essentially within a year and that the process would have to begin with a declaration of all their nuclear sites and their their sites for their long-range missiles or for their missiles and so he was an essential player in trying to shape the policy that the U.S. would embrace in Pyongyang the proposal that the U.S. would embrace in Pyongyang and so there's every reason to believe that it was Bolton and his people it didn't have to be Bolton personally but somebody working for Bolton leaked the story of the DIA analysis to the two media outlets and and so this is really a story about how Bolton was behind it as much as it is about the questionable nature of the Kang song the Kang song site.
Well it sounds like maybe Bolton's winning the fight inside the bureaucracy too there if it's really him versus Pompeo because well and I don't know if this is true at all really but there was this Bloomberg story about Pompeo's recent bad trip to North Korea and how you know the North Koreans characterized his demands as gangsterism and this kind of thing and and it was because he put complete denuclearization first and without offering any kind of reciprocal anything in other words he was kind of Pompeo himself was acting like Bolton with a bunch of poison pills rather than trying to be agreeable.
Yeah but but it looks to me like Bolton won that round now I'm just wondering to what extent having two stories in major news media that reported this idea that that there was evidence from the DIA analysis that the North Koreans were intending to deceive the United States was useful to Bolton to tip the balance within the meetings in the White House that were deciding what Pompeo was going to take to Pyongyang and I you know I suspect very strongly that's exactly what happened.
All right hang on just one second.
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you can tell and if you want a good 2018 model website for your business or for whatever you're doing your opinions check out expanddesigns.com the great harley abbott over there and if you go to expanddesigns.com slash scott you'll save 500 bucks all right so now let's get back to the point though about whether it matters one way or the other whether they've expanded this or that facility or whether they're enriching uranium even up to weapons grade one in terms of international law and two in terms of the current agreement well I think that it it would be a matter of trust you know the degree to which north korea could be trusted not to have secret nuclear weapons production facilities they've they've got an acknowledged one and that's the way they've played in the past and you know to have a secret nuclear weapons uh you know a facility for producing the enriched uranium for nuclear weapons without acknowledging it would be obviously a problem for trusting them I think that's the issue it's not a legal issue it's a trust issue in other words if they were part of the npt they would be bound by the law to declare any facility where they're going to introduce nuclear materials six months before they do so but they're not a member of the npt and so that's that and if you want to blame anybody hey look whose fault it is it's john bolton's fault in the first place well yeah obviously the north koreans have a problem of trust of the u.s government I understand that completely so well I'm now looking at it from the opposite angle and well I mean I'm talking about the kind of the media spin here and the all the hawks spin on twitter and all of that kind of thing is that this all proves what a chump donald trump is for even trying to negotiate with north korea we'd be way better off with the status quo we'd be way better off if singapore had never happened yeah and I think the the correct answer to that line of of argument uh is the entire history of north korea's negotiating with the united states on the nuclear issue has been one of very punctilious observation of agreements that have been reached now that doesn't mean that they don't take advantage of any loophole absolutely they do they have just like the united states does but they have not violated agreements reached or understandings reached with the united states uh they have uh very scrupulously observed them and I mean this is this is a practice that they have I think quite consciously adopted because they want to make the point to the united states that we are a trustworthy negotiating partner we will uh carry out our agreements but if you violate them we will do something about it we will respond in kind that's the record that they've amassed over the years hey tell me who's joel witt joel witt is uh the guy who was an advisor to ambassador galucci in negotiating the agreed framework 1993-1994 and then uh he became the state department's coordinator for uh the implementation of the agreed framework from 94th to 2000 so and then he started the 38 north uh website which is you know the most uh sort of comprehensive and reliable website for information on north korea that one can find I think at this point and then so um importantly you talk about him in your article in the american conservative magazine and his take on this recent controversy yeah joel uh has has been very uh forthright about uh not not agreeing with the media uh trumping up um so to speak of a case that the north koreans are trying to deceive us here uh he he thinks that that is uh really irresponsible and and that's not his word but but that's my uh that's my reading of of his statement there that that he uh he thinks that that's that's not an accurate reading of what north korea is doing now yeah i mean people are taking his article and his pictures and saying oh my god look at this expansion this is just shows what you know a hoax these talks are and how foolish trump is for trying etc etc no mention of the south koreans i'll ask you about that in a second maybe but um yeah now this this you've gotten out to the second article but in the same yeah i'm on the second article in the same article he says now look everybody don't go freaking out because there's no agreement for them to not do this and this is stuff they were already doing anyway and there was no need for them to call a halt to it yet basically yeah so so this second story is really about uh another spate a separate spate of articles in late june uh and early july uh from the usual suspects uh you know nbc news was involved in it uh wall street journal was was into it uh and and the storyline was oh look the north koreans are continuing their expansion of their missile and nuclear uh facilities uh even as they are negotiating with the united states even after the summit meeting they're continuing to do this and this shows that they're not serious about reaching an agreement they're simply uh taking you know the trump administration as you put it as a chump uh and and so that's the storyline that that informs these uh this this set of articles and and uh you know the the point that i make in the piece and that joel uh also underlines in his comment and and which he made by the way in a briefing for reporters last i guess it was last monday um the point is that look there there is no legal agreement that would uh uh would would under which you would expect the north koreans to end any work on missiles or on uh nuclear nuclear in nuclear facilities that have to do with enrichment uh there's merely a an understanding that we are going to negotiate on a denuclearization agreement which also of course will involve u.s concessions on political and military uh aspects of the u.s north korean uh relationship and uh so so there's no legal requirement and there shouldn't be any political expectation that north korea is going to suddenly stop everything that it's doing in regard to its defense uh programs and it's in its nuclear in its nuclear program uh and and joel by the way makes the point which is extremely i think useful to just keep in mind that when the united states has negotiated arms control or or arms reduction uh agreements with the soviet union or russia that that there was never any expectation that uh you know during the negotiations that they were going to stop anything they continued uh as business as usual until the final agreement was reached all right now let me ask you this um this nbc story uh came out was by a guy named ken danilian i'm probably saying it wrong he used to write for the la times and back when he did he was outed by wiki leaks and the emails of being a completely obsequious agent of the cia and i don't mean officer of the cia i mean you know asset um and doing their bidding and uh you know writing propaganda for the los angeles times he lost his job there because of it now he's at nbc and so you know this is sort of a speculative type of a question i guess for you but i wonder if you think that this really represents um you know not just uh an analyst with a hawkish interpretation but a real attempt by the intelligence agencies to thwart and stop the president like true insubordination to stop the president from achieving this deal i mean it sounds like the national security advisor is too but i mean and that's worth addressing too i mean bolton does work for trump in a sense right or or not well i think bolton in this case is working for bolton uh he technically works for trump but uh he he clearly uh is undermining trump's effort to reach an agreement with north korea assuming as i do that that's what trump wants we have every reason to believe that and i have to tell you just this is not really an aside because this is a central question that that we're talking about i i have a hard time believing that bolton's going to survive this process i mean he's just too crazy uh he he takes too many chances and i think ultimately it's going to come back just come home to roost and that bolton will be fired uh that's just a hunch i don't have any inside dope man i hope that's right i mean i actually have a little bit inside dope that said that this is just to please adelson for a little while and he'll be gone by the end of the summer or something but i say go ahead and get on with it then that would be the logic i think you're absolutely right that that's why he's in there it's because of adelson and uh you know i i think that that's going to wear thin to the point where he's going to have to let him go uh you know because he's got to make a choice so um anyway about back to ken delaney sure i think the storyline about delaney and and the cia is is um it is a clear-cut case of a of a journalist on the make who understands uh or who believes let's put it that way who believes that cultivating higher level cia people uh by telling them i'm doing this story i want you to okay it i want to make sure you're happy with it uh that's the way to get his inside dope from the cia in the future and that that's the way the press um uh has always operated i mean this this was not that remarkable a case it was captured by wiki leaks and that's what was different about it but but this is the way the the national security reporters in the post and the times and well so that being said does that mean that that's where his narrative is coming from is a political agenda by langley to undermine washington dc on this no i don't think the cia was behind that story at all i think that that was that again i think that it was um simply uh the the times and i'm sorry the uh in this case uh nbc news uh you know picking up uh the vibes in the administration from people who are opposed uh not necessarily the cia because you know the cia now is on board unless you're catching a working stiff who is you know out of sympathy you know pompeo um and uh and his people were were already you know working on this from a point of view of support trump i think it came from from the people who are more aligned with bolton and and uh generally you know it's the media even more important in this case i think it's the media who are all in favor of trying to dump the agreement with north korea that's their bent um it's it's not just that they're getting stories from opposition people within the trump administration they're manufacturing them themselves so i mean hang on that's that's equally if not more important in this case yeah all right now but so uh when it comes to the all important question of denuclearization i have my arguments i think that it's certainly at least within the realm of possibility that they'll denuclearize but so my question for you is you really think they will after bolton pushed them to nukes in the first place and threaten them with the libya option and all this as he tried to put it at libya scenario where qaddafi was lynched on the side of the road um or does it matter what if we had a peace deal and then but they didn't denuclearize all the way but who cares because either they're they join the npt as a nuclear weapons state or they stay outside of it but still we have a peace treaty to end the 50s war a final because that was as people may or may not know is still just ended with a ceasefire and no real peace treaty there so if we just ended the war and normalize relations and drop sanctions and open trade and diplomacy and all that and they still had at least some of their nukes would that be okay or no well look i think there are two sides to this story the first side is um that the united states has no idea where uh north korea's stashing its nuclear weapons it probably knows where some of them are but uh assuming that north korea has somewhere between 10 and 25 or something like that they've got nuclear weapons that the united states has no idea where they are and i mean that's a fundamental problem uh you know the united states is going to try to say to north korea you have to tell us where all your nuclear weapons are and if you don't tell us where 26 of them or 30 of them or 40 or whatever they decide on that's going to be a critical political decision for the united states to say how many nuclear weapons they're going to say north korea has to has to declare um then then that's a basis for basically saying that the north koreans are in bad faith and not negotiating the the agreement uh but but that also means that that in effect there's no possible way that the that a potentially secret stash of nuclear weapons uh can be uh in the end prevented i mean you know they just they can't do it that that's a given that that's part of it that's part of the territory the other side of it is that you know the the most likely uh almost certainly the the way in which this agreement will collapse is that the united states political system will be unwilling and unable or unable to uh provide the kind of concessions that the north koreans will inevitably must uh inevitably demand in order to avoid the libya uh scenario uh to to avoid that being a danger to them is what i mean uh so i mean the real problem here is that that the u.s government is so unable to deliver what has to be delivered for this kind of agreement ultimately to be reached and to be carried out i mean that's the whole record of the past uh 25 years that uh that there's so much political opposition from the military from the from the media from various other elements within the national security apparatus of the united states um that it translates and in congress of course and it translates into the inability or unwillingness to deliver this kind of an agreement that's really the danger and i think we should be focused man you know what so back to pompeo though so you made the interesting point that he was he went from congress to cia director where he started breaking this ice with the north koreans there with not a secretary of state but with all cia guys as his staff they made the initial progress here and you know it seems pretty obvious that a conspiracy of two between donald trump and mike pompeo could start a war anywhere in the world maybe kill everyone on earth so if they could do that then maybe they could just do a peace deal and the rest of the establishment and the media and everybody can go to hell i mean apparently right i'm just making this up but it's it must be the case right that at some point pompeo said to trump yeah no bullshit we really could do this and so go ahead and give me the okay to go ahead and try because i'm telling you i think we could do it so that's pretty damn right no i think that's correct so far you're you're absolutely right on but that doesn't solve the problem the more fundamental problem that i'm posing which is that look this agreement would have to take the form of a treaty you can't have a an executive agreement with the north koreans on this that's not going to wash it has to be a treaty which is binding on i don't know man obama did it on iran and of course then trump did turn it right over again but still yeah but that's not going to be acceptable to north korea and it shouldn't be acceptable to north korea they'd be crazy to agree to anything except a treaty uh so so the question is can the u.s political system deliver that kind of a treaty i'm afraid the answer is no man and that's something yeah you would need for ran paul to be at his most heroic place your bets everybody i don't know yeah you need like 60 ran pauls in order to get that passed i don't know i mean the thing of it is though you know what i saw something and it was about i don't know i think it was feinstein and them in the senate the leaders of the democrats in the senate wrote a letter quietly supporting a new nuclear deal with russia because this is something that they've been working on the government's been working on for years and at the end of the day you know they know all this russia stuff is a bunch of crap and at the end of the day do or do we or do we not want more and better nuclear deals with russia all the time if we can get them yes we do and and you know what i mean so if you really if if the president of the united states said i'm delivering up a peace treaty and usobs are going to ratify it they'd have to wouldn't they look if if the president uh is so committed to it that he goes to the american public and and he does it effectively trump is the president that's exactly the point yeah that's the problem that's problematic you know i mean that's where we that's where the whole scenario suddenly falls down yeah yeah it certainly does john bolton up there man i'll tell you what it's uh it's a funny thing this 2018 i mean it's the same permanent crisis we've been in but now it has this wrinkle of absurdity that just makes it i know a different kind of entertaining i guess i don't know but it's the wrong kind of absurdity to enjoy i must say yeah you know what though i mean look at where we are where they did singapore they shook hands and that means a lot right i mean the ice is broken i guess trump could get really mad if he felt betrayed on this bike him but so far looks like some pretty thick ice broken pretty severely he can negotiate it there's no question about that it's negotiable the problem is what comes after that and and that's that's really at a deeper level we're in serious trouble on that wouldn't it be funny though to see the whole right wing sean hannity and all these guys going to full jihad for a peace treaty to support their man that would be that would be worth it just to see that even if it failed yeah yeah but i'm not sure that we would get that in the end i don't know i'm not sure yeah all right man well thank you very much for your time on the show gareth great journalism as always my pleasure as always thanks scott all right you guys that's the great gareth porter he is the author of manufactured crisis the truth behind the iran nuclear scare and check out this article at truthout.org media hardliners play up north korean nuclear deception claim and at the american conservative the media's brazen dishonesty about north korea nuclear violations all right you guys and that's the show you know me scott horton.org youtube.com scott horton show libertarian institute.org and buy my book and it's now available in audiobook as well fool's errand time to end the war in afghanistan hey it's endorsed by ron paul and daniel elsberg and stephen walt and peter van buren and matthew ho and daniel davis and anand gopal and patrick coburn and eric margulies you'll like it fool's errand time to end the war in afghanistan and uh follow me on twitter at scott horton show thanks guys
