09/11/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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It's Friday.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm doing my radio show.
Lucky for you, I got Gareth Porter on the line.
He wrote the book on the Iranian nuclear program.
It's called Manufactured Crisis, the Truth Behind the Iranian Nuclear Scare.
And he also writes for truthout.org and Middle East Eye.
You can also find in the archives about 100,000 articles he wrote for Interpress Service.
Virtually all of these things from all these places are rerun in his archive at antiwar.com as well.
Not the nation pieces, I guess, but the IPS and the rest, I think, all end up at antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
Hi, Scott.
I'm doing fine, thanks.
Good, good.
I'm doing good.
Very happy to have you here.
And so, well, you can rain on my parade all you want if you want to.
I'll give you all the chance in the world to.
But yesterday the Senate failed, in all capital letters, in bold, in italics, to pass their anti-Iran resolution.
58 to 42 was the vote, and they didn't get their cloture.
And so Obama doesn't even need to veto it, and they're not even going to get a chance to override his veto of it.
In the House of Representatives, apparently, they're voting right now, but no point in that, because it's already failed in the Senate, so it's not going to the president.
So I'm sure they have other plans, and we talk all about the other plans that they have, but at least it looks like they can try to sabotage it in other ways, but the deal itself will be implemented come New Year's Day.
Am I right, or am I wrong?
No, I think you're right.
And thank God for these undemocratic institutions that we have, like the Senate and its arcane rules of procedure.
Of course, I'm being somewhat facetious, but nevertheless, you know, that has saved the bacon for the Obama administration and the Iran deal for sure, because clearly the opponents of the agreement had a majority in the Senate and the House, both, but they certainly didn't get the two-thirds.
And, I mean, there will be an effort led by Ben Cardin, as I understand it, to put forward a so-called Iran oversight bill or act that will try to snatch a victory from the jaws of the defeat on the floor by introducing a series of poison pills that would essentially make it impossible for the administration to implement the agreement.
But I'm quite sure that will fail because it's going to be too obvious.
Right.
Well, now, and so that's the question, right?
Is Obama going to have to actually be able to maintain this same supermajority on all of these things?
Or is it actually, I mean, it seems like kind of it makes sense for AIPAC to go this route that, well, you know, if we just pass new sanctions in the name of, I don't know, Syria or Hezbollah or, you know, some other thing, then maybe we'll be able to cajole more Democrats to sign on to something like that than to something like this, even though, like you say, it's pretty obvious it's sabotage.
At least it kind of gives them an out that, hey, this is just about terrorism.
And so I had to, that kind of thing, you know?
Yeah, you're asking a good question.
And I have to admit that I have not looked precisely at what the politics of or the legalities, I should say, of trying to pass a piece of legislation apart from the vote on the agreement itself will be.
You know, it may be that they can get a majority, but the president can veto it.
And then, you know, they would have to override it.
So that much is clear.
I'm not sure exactly what the calculation of the opponents is in introducing this, but I assume that it's their last gasp.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I kind of like seeing them whining and complaining and thrashing around as long as they lose.
I just don't want to figure out a way to make their evil plans stick.
You know, that's all.
Well, that is, that is, of course, the thing that we have to fear for sure.
All right.
Now, so I hate to do this to you, but you know what?
There are good people, well-meaning people who've been exposed to such scaremongering over this thing.
And I guess I wouldn't have you confront the most cartoonish, ridiculous stuff like, you know, the former vice president saying that Obama is handing the Iranians the means to attack us with nuclear weapons, which is, I mean, I don't think anybody is dumb enough to believe that.
But there are people who, you know, even all the Democrats in the Senate signing on, Gareth, as the Republicans could tell you, even these Democrats say it's not a very good deal.
But, oh, my president says so.
And it's the best deal that we have now.
And this kind of thing.
Is this really a bad deal?
Or what would you say to well-meaning people who are taken in by the scaremongering and are afraid that Obama is really being fooled by the Iranians and is giving them the means to hurt us later on?
Scott, the only sense in which this is a bad deal is that it should never have been necessary in the first place.
And, you know, I mean, there are people who are complaining that Iran is being deprived of its legitimate right to have more advanced nuclear technologies.
And that, of course, is true, that they have to sacrifice, they have to put off for a period of years the ability to enrich uranium at higher, not at higher levels, but more efficiently, to have more efficient centrifuges to enrich their uranium.
And, I mean, you know, there is injustice built into this because of that.
And as you know well, and I think most of your listeners know well, what I show in my book is that Iran has not tried to get nuclear weapons, that the evidence to the contrary is extremely flawed or simply fabricated.
So, you know, this is a situation where the Obama administration has gone off on this tangent of, you know, forcing Iran, quote-unquote, to agree not to have nuclear weapons when in fact that was never an issue in reality.
And the cost of this, I'm sorry to say, is extremely high in the sense that, you know, the Obama administration has helped to make the argument that Iran is not only a terrorist, a state supporter of terrorism, but also, you know, trying to pursue nuclear weapons, not just a sort of right-wing rant, but the Democratic Party's rant as well.
And that means that the Obama administration is extremely limited.
I mean it helps to limit further, it's probably the right way to formulate it, the flexibility of the Obama administration with regard to regional diplomacy.
And that's a very serious problem for all of us in the coming years.
Hey, tell me this.
Why do you think Obama wanted to do this so bad anyway?
He had to spend a lot of political capital to get this done, and he could have just kept the status quo and passed it off to his successor.
It's a very good question, Scott, and a lot of people have been asking that same question in interviews with me.
And the answer is, I think I'm quite confident in saying this, that this administration, like all previous administrations, suffers from a complex of superiority in power over the rest of the world, and that includes Iran.
And so this whole question of getting the Iranians to agree to give up their nuclear program was taken on by the Obama administration under circumstances which led the president, under the influence of some very hawkish advisors such as Dennis Ross and Gary Seymour, who was his advisor on weapons of mass destruction for at least the first four years of his administration.
Under their influence, Obama believed that if he put enough coercive pressure on Iran, he could succeed in getting the Iranians to give in on that issue.
So, I mean, what happened was he failed, and then was under pressure to reach an agreement and had to make compromises with Iran.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis and this new piece at The Nation, how the U.S. and Iran reached their landmark deal.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're talking with Gareth Porter about the end of the manufactured crisis.
It was Stephen Walt who observed in me who plagiarized him and repeated it 100 times about how it's the people who understand the reality.
You know, us agenda list people who understand the reality of Iran's nuclear program, who want the nuclear deal so bad just so we can put this giant fake controversy to bed for crying out loud.
And while the people who pretend to be afraid of Iranian nuclear weapons, the last thing they want is a real negotiation that would preclude the possibility of the Iranians being able to make a nuke anytime soon, because then they lose their giant fake controversy, which is their priority.
And so I don't know how how much things are going to change here.
JDA in the chat room says it's not like Winep is going away and it's not like they have any other priority than an American war with Iran.
That's the same as it's been this entire century long, right?
Well, I think you're right that, you know, the people who have been pushing for war with Iran for years now are not going to just turn around and shut their doors.
They have to come up with new variants on the theme to keep raising the issue that they have in the past.
They will continue to do so.
But let's face it.
I mean, or let's maybe the right way to put it is let's enjoy this for what it is.
This is a huge defeat for AIPAC, for the Israeli lobby.
I mean, this is excuse me, this is going to be reported that way and it should be reported that way.
They have anteed up an unparalleled, unprecedented amount of cash to try to defeat this.
They have pulled out all the stops and they failed.
Although, you know, they turned out an impressive number of members of Congress to support them.
No question about it.
But the bottom line is that this is a major failure.
And, you know, I think that that's going to have some impact on the politics surrounding this without any question.
And I think we're going to see a shift from the nuclear issue toward terrorism without any question.
I think we can anticipate that the WINAP and a lot of other organizations like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies are going to be focusing more and more on terrorism.
Not that they haven't done in the past, but, you know, I think that's going to be increasingly the propaganda theme.
Well, everybody get your DVRs warmed up for the day that they finally inspect parts and can't find a trace of a damn thing because the whole deal was a hoax all along.
That is going to happen.
That is going to happen without any question.
And they won't find anything.
And the answer that we're going to get, I'm safe in predicting, is, well, of course, they cleaned it all up.
And, of course, that's a complete total lie, because, you know, if there was, in fact, any nuclear material used to carry out tests, then it would not be anything that could be hidden.
It could not be washed away or anything of the sort.
That's a extremely well-documented fact.
Sure.
And unfortunately, it won't be reported by the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but it's a fact, nevertheless.
Yeah.
Yosef Butt, the nuclear physicist, wrote an article about it and talked about it on the show.
If it was 24 days or 24 years, you're not going to be able to erase evidence of uranium.
I mean, David Albright, of course, is just a punchline at this point.
But his whole crisis when he saw some Corning insulation, he said, oh, no, look, a pink tarp that's apparently covering up these guys, washing away uranium particles with a garden hose, because I guess garden hoses are the most effective way to clean up radioactive particles.
Just to put a fine point on it.
Who's buying that?
The best thing for people to remember as a line to close arguments on this is that the IAEA's labs are able to find traces of uranium as small as one trillionth of a gram.
And I just leave it at that.
Yeah, there was the other guy, Tariq Ralph, came on the show and explained all that to the process of how they examine it and all that.
Now, Phil in the chat room is asking about.
So what is next for the lobby?
I mean, assuming they can get Congress to do what they want.
The goal is what to just add new layers of sanctions on them in the name of Hezbollah or anything else in order to just piss the Iranians off enough that they break their end of the deal.
Is that the plan?
Certainly that will be part of it.
Yes, I mean, the the poison pills that Ben Cardin has in mind in his legislation includes not only depriving the president of waiver authority, as that's the first priority.
And of course, that's not going to go anywhere.
Reauthorizing the those sanctions that would otherwise or otherwise will expire in the coming months and years.
And thirdly, adding new terrorism related or other sanctions that would be would be regarded certainly as a violation of the agreement by the Iranians and is clearly aimed precisely at provoking a rupture in the implementation of the agreement.
All right, now back to hoaxes for a minute here.
Well, that's kind of still a continuing theme here when we're talking about Congress.
But I want to get back to the Khobar Towers hoax.
I read a piece by Paul Pilar, who is, you know, he seems to be working on trying to redeem himself for signing off on the Iraq and IEA vote to ease.
He's one of the best writers at the national interest, although, of course, I'm still dug band out first kind of guy.
But the thing of it is, so I kind of like this guy for a former CIA guy.
He's no Phil Geraldi or Ray McGovern.
But I kind of like him.
I run him on antiwar.com all the time.
And then but he ran this thing about how, yeah, Iran did Khobar Towers, but so what?
And I thought, man, you can't really believe that Iran did the Khobar Towers or maybe he really does.
And what the hell do I know?
He's a CIA guy.
So what do you say?
Yeah, I think he really believes that.
He also believed that Iran carried out or I assume he still believes that Iran carried out the Buenos Aires bombing.
And I've had a bad bit of back and forth with him on this.
And I'm not going to convince him.
So there's no.
You know, I could be getting this wrong, but I don't think so.
I think in that same article, he concedes maybe Buenos Aires.
Oh, really?
OK.
And he says Khobar, though, I missed that.
Well, anyway, I put that in in pencil, everybody.
It was only a half-baked assertion for me, but I'm pretty sure that's the way I remember it.
I will check it out.
I hope you're right.
I hope you're right that that's the case, in which case I will, you know, give him even more credit for for his flexibility.
But, you know, I mean, he he was, in fact, in the counterterrorism center of the CIA at the time when the Buenos Aires bombing was being investigated.
And I mean, at that point, that that outfit was very strongly oriented towards the suspicion of Iran as the as the one that they should look for first for any terrorism activity around the world.
And, you know, I mean, they as I point out in my piece in The Nation some years ago, 2008, I guess it was, you know, the CIA, as well as the FBI, basically based their analysis, their findings on suspicion on inference.
And it was inference from a set of of assumptions that were false.
And so, you know, that that's kind of the way that operated.
And he was he was part of it.
And so it's not terribly surprising that that he fell victim to a set of assumptions or conclusions about the things that they were investigating.
Well, let me point out that in your work, you quote at least a handful of former FBI and CIA officials, including Michael Shoyer, saying, no, that was wrong.
It was Osama that did it.
Well, Shoyer didn't say Osama did it, but he certainly he certainly shared with me an extremely important piece.
I'm pretty sure he said that on this show that he may have said he may have said it somewhere else.
But but he that was not that was not what he said to me.
What he said was that he had had his his unit, the bin Laden unit at CIA, come up with a four page memo that summarized all of the intelligence that they had collected after the Khobar Towers bombing.
I'm sorry, before, excuse me, before I meant to say before the Khobar Towers bombing to show that there that there was a plan.
There was an intention by al-Qaeda to carry out another terror bombing after the November 2000.
Sorry, the November 1995 bombing in Riyadh, the National Guard office.
So so this was a very important set of of a collection of intelligence indicators that that al-Qaeda was planning such a such a bombing.
And and that was totally ignored by the FBI and CIA.
They refused to do anything to follow up on that on that very important set of leads.
And that's indicative of the way in which they approached the whole problem.
Well, now, ma'am, music's playing.
Well, let's just keep recording for a minute here for later on audience.
You know, the thing of it is, too, is Wayne Barrett has that piece, Rudy's Ties to a Terror Sheik, where he he has.
I forget now exactly what it is, but I think he does a pretty good job of showing that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was there and and maybe with less certainty, but look like Osama bin Laden had been there, too.
And that they were guests of this Qatari sheik who was basically right there adjacent to Khobar, basically on the other side of the border there.
And that that was the way that the attack had taken place.
And in fact, he even.
No, I'm conflating Wayne Barrett with with Peter Lance now, but I think Peter Lance says that the FBI sent the hostage rescue team.
You know, their special forces, the Waco killers sent them to go and arrest Khalid Sheikh Mohammed there.
But they were made by the Qatari princes to spend the night and wait till morning.
And by morning, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was gone.
And that was in 1996.
Bob, Bob Bear made the same point.
OK, he's the source.
I'm not sure, but I remember he has that in his book for sure, that Al-Qaeda was being protected by the sheik in Qatar at that point.
Yeah.
And that was Al-Thani who ended up that was the article.
Wayne Barrett's article was Rudy's ties to a terror chief, because this is the guy who hired Giuliani's firm to be his security consultant and pay him all this money.
You know, Mr. the mayor of 9-11 and all the much more serious connection between the FBI and, you know, the real problem in this whole business of Kobar Towers is that Louis Freeh, while he was still FBI director, was clearly, you know, in bed with the past head of Saudi intelligence.
And at that point, the Saudi ambassador in Washington and and he was very seriously allowing himself to be influenced by what he was telling Freeh.
And in the end, he became the the lawyer for for the former head of Saudi intelligence, who was then I'm sorry, I'm forgetting his name.
Are you talking about Prince Bandar?
Bandar.
Yeah, he's out of power now, but but he was in and out of power many times over the last three years.
And, you know, he became Bandar's lawyer for a suit, a lawsuit where Bandar was accused of being involved in a scheme to rake off billions of dollars in a defense deal with the UK.
Makes you wonder how the hostage rescue team ever got sent after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the first place at that point.
Well, there's a lot of a lot of questions surrounding the way the FBI and the CIA approached these issues during this period from the late 90s into well into the last decade, for sure.
It's a record of spectacular failure and and really malfeasance to the point.
And I'm sure you must have encountered this already in one of your interviews or maybe more than one, that the CIA's counterterrorism center actually there's evidence.
There's strong evidence that the CIA's counterterrorism center before 9-11 was actively recruiting these two Al-Qaeda, the two the San Diego guys, the San Diego guys who were in the hijacking and the 9-11 bombing because they up to that point had no agents within Al-Qaeda.
And they were determined to get these guys as their agents.
They would recruit them while they were in the States, send them back, and they would continue to be the CIA's agents.
And they tried to keep that as long as they could, you know, from the FBI.
But the FBI did learn about it just before 9-11, two weeks before 9-11.
And then the shit really hit the fan, so to speak.
Yeah.
Now, so, I mean, at this point, that almost sounds like a charitable explanation of why the CIA, for example, is not telling Richard Clark at the White House everything they knew about real-ass Al-Qaeda guys in this country.
A direct threat to American citizens.
So I wonder why you're so sure that that was what it was that they were trying to recruit him.
Because the best I know is Richard Clark kind of rubbing his chin in the Rich Bleed podcast part two with Ray Nowaleski saying, well, that must be it.
Yeah, Clark is the source of that.
I mean, that is the most plausible explanation for all of this.
Yeah, I mean, it is Occam's razor, I guess, but horrible.
Horrible, horrible.
And then, you know, you get to the Bandar thing where, you know, his wife cut a check to the San Diego cell.
These are the pilots of Flight 77.
And these are the guys who are calling back and forth to, it was Hani Hondur, I think it's his father-in-law, ran the Al-Qaeda switchboard house in Yemen, that they were calling back all the time, that there was so much fighting about who was getting to hear those phone calls and what was taking place.
Well, I mean, of course, Clark makes a very strong case that what was going on here was that Saudi intelligence was acting as the agent for the CIA in making the contact and getting these guys enlisted.
And I think that makes perfect sense.
And now, would that have been the bin Laden unit?
I guess Sawyer was in exile in the library at the time, but is that who would have been running that?
That would have been a different group, huh?
That was counterintelligence, yeah.
It was an entirely different group, which had, you know, of course, a different set of incentives going to push them in that direction, in that very, to say the least, morally questionable direction.
All right.
Well, hey, man, I'm already almost back on again.
So thanks for staying over time with me and doing the show again, Gareth.
No problem.
Thanks.
See you later.
All right.
That's the great Gareth Porter, everybody.
He wrote Manufactured Crisis and also how the U.S. and Iran reached their landmark deal behind the scenes, how the U.S. and Iran reached their landmark deal.
That's at TheNation.com.
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