09/23/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's libertarian foreign policy mostly.
Live here on the Liberty Radio Network from noon to two eastern time, libertyradionetwork.com.
Find the full archive, about 3,900 and something interviews going back to 2003.
About half of them are with our next guest, the great Gareth Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth, how are you?
Hi, Scott, I'm fine.
You do exaggerate a bit, but thank you anyway.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's at least 200.
The last I counted, it was 150, but that was a couple of years ago, I think, a few years ago, maybe.
So we're definitely up over 200 interviews now.
And it's only because everything that you write is so valuable.
I want people to read it.
And so I figure if I bring you on the show to talk about the things you write, then maybe that'll increase the odds of them reading it.
And then we'll live in a better world, man.
That's it.
Thanks as always, Scott.
Yeah.
All right.
So I know that this is kind of a little bit of a victory lap for you, too.
So I'm extra happy to have you on for this.
Iran's Parchin nuclear myth begins to unravel.
It's at Middle East Eye.
And it'll be probably the spotlight on antiwar.com tomorrow.
So go ahead and tell them ha ha, Gareth.
Well, as usual, in my pieces, it's not just one development or one piece of evidence that is reported and discussed in my piece.
It's several points that bear on this whole myth pertaining to the Parchin bomb, the explosive container or bomb cylinder or whatever you want to call it, that has been in the news for three and a half years now.
But clearly the lead here is the news that Amano, the director general of the IAEA, has gone to Parchin personally, set foot inside the building and found, guess what?
There's nothing there.
There's no equipment of any kind, according to Amano.
And I mean, there's no surprise there, of course.
Yeah, but I mean, that just proves how sneaky they are.
What are you talking about?
Well, of course, the the response will inevitably be that, yes, of course, we know they got rid of it a long time ago when no one was looking.
And so so, you know, that raises the question, well, you know, has the have the U.S. and Israeli and other intelligence agencies been following this site in terms of satellite imagery for a long time?
Guess what?
The answer is yes, of course.
Not only that, there's commercial satellite imagery or photography available, which the IAEA availed itself of.
In fact, immediately upon the the publication of their November 2011 report, which first talked about the the bomb cylinder in Parchin, the purported bomb cylinder in Parchin, what they did is quite interesting.
They acquired all of the satellite photography for that site from February 2005 until February 2012.
Now, the reason is that it was beginning in February 2012 that the first reports began to filter out that Iran was making changes on the site.
And so, you know, the IAEA was obviously interested in finding out, well, you know, have have the Iranians been doing something that would suggest that they were trying to hide evidence about that site in the past?
So they looked at all of the the satellite photography, all the all the imagery for that seven year period, and they found that there was at no point any evidence of activity suggesting that the site was even being used is the way I interpret it, at least, you know, basically no unusual activity, they said, in any of the photography over the seven year period.
So that that's a pretty strong piece of of evidence suggesting that not suggesting, indicating that that Iran had not done anything during the period from February 2005 to February 2012 to to indicate that it had anything to hide.
Yeah, but Gareth, I don't know, man, David Albright at the ISIS, the good ISIS, he says that he saw satellite pictures of a pink tarp and a garden hose.
And so that sounds pretty incriminating to me.
Yeah, well, that, of course, is David Albright at his most fanciful when he was, you know, pointing to anything, anything new on the site as an indication that Iran was up to no good.
I mean, of course, Robert Kelly had analyzed that and said, you know, look, this is simply a pink material for new new.
It's Pink Panther insulation is all corny insulation.
It's insulation, which was being used to, to put in a new roof on the on the building.
And so it the problem with David Albright is that he refuses to acknowledge the reality that nothing that Iran has done changes the the capability of the IAEA to take environmental samples that would show one way or another whether there was any nuclear material used on the site.
And of course, they have now taken those environmental samples.
That's the second piece of major news, which has been reported.
The fact that Amano found no equipment in the in the room or in the building, the shed really is what it is, was was covered only very badly by burying it in the in the many, many paragraphs of coverage of this of this Amano trip.
But the fact that the Iranians have, in fact, taken the samples.
And of course, now they are being beginning the process of analyzing this has started.
That has been covered very well by the by the news media.
And, you know, of course, they're focusing on the the fact that it's Iranians who took the samples, not IAEA personnel.
But I can tell you that the IAEA watched every bit of the collection of samples by remote cameras, which were focused on the entire process and that there's there's absolutely no question about the integrity of that of that whole process.
So we will soon know whether there was any use of nuclear material on that site.
And the the results will will, I think, be able to to effectively close this issue.
Although, you know, once once the results come out and it shows that there's not evidence of uranium or nuclear material, we know what the retort is going to be.
Well, you know, they could carry out nuclear testing without using nuclear material.
They could carry out weapons related testing without using nuclear material.
I can I can guarantee you that David Albright will make that argument, as well as others in the the pro-Israel cacophony, the machine that that inevitably comes out with with the line that supports the Israeli point of view.
But, you know, that that means that the whole exercise is totally meaningless because there was no possibility of ever finding anything whatsoever.
And and there's no evidence one way or another.
So that that means that the whole issue was a fraud from the beginning.
Yeah, well, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, Gareth Porter.
As one famous wag put it.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Now, so listen here.
There's a bunch to go over here about all of this.
But the first thing I wanted to ask you, well, I wanted to point out that the whole argument about, oh, 24 days inspection and all this, that was worst case scenario if Iran dragged out inspection of this site, not any of the nuclear sites which are under expanded 24 hour inspection.
Of course, the war party like to conflate that issue in their headlines and in the way they regurgitate it.
But so there's that entire argument shot to hell.
The Iranians said, yeah, come on out.
They went right out there and did it.
And then now the music's playing.
So I'll ask you the question now.
You can answer it on the other side.
I'll ask it again to how do you know about the IAEA overseeing the taking of samples?
I'm interested in that.
But hold it right there.
We'll be right back with the great Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis right after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Talking with Gareth Porter about his new piece at Middle East, the Parchin nuclear myth begins to unravel.
And again, this is the Iranian military base where, according to some documents, they had an explosives testing chamber that they were using to practice imploding plutonium nuclear warhead fission bomb.
And it's a bunch of nonsense, always has been.
And now the IAEA has been invited right out by the Iranians.
The head of the IAEA says, yeah, there was nothing there.
And so now we're talking about whether that means that they secretly got away with moving it all, which Gareth has already debunked, citing the IAEA, obviously looking at American provided satellite photos and American.
You cite in the article, Gareth, American government employees even telling George John him, him quoting them, saying that they haven't seen what's alleged in the accusations in terms of movement from the satellite photos, cleanup, sanitization, as they call it, of from the satellite photos.
But then.
So one very important point that came out, another article by George John in Associated Press said that the Iranians are going to get to inspect themselves at Parchin.
They're just going to bring their samples and give them to the IAEA.
And that's going to be good enough for the IAEA.
And then there was quite a bit of controversy about whether that was true or not.
And then when Yuki Amano, the head of the IAEA, gave a statement, he was actually kind of opaque about it.
He sort of said, look, trust me, we used the all appropriate measures and procedures in order to procedure the policy and the thing.
And then what?
But he didn't say whether his guys were standing there or not, were they holding the video camera or who was holding the video camera or how did it happen in order to settle the controversy?
But you said that you can tell me, which I think means that you have one or two sources who are who have described to you exactly how this took place.
Am I right about that?
The source that I'm talking about did not describe exactly how this particular operation took place.
But the source described to me a way, a methodology for doing precisely this, which he is quite sure is very similar to what was done in the case of Parchin.
And that is that there are remote cameras that can follow through satellites what is going on in a distant location.
And that this source actually worked on the approach, worked on the methodology for this kind of operation in which headquarters based specialists could follow the taking of a sample through special digital hand carried cameras that would that would basically send satellite images directly to the to the headquarters.
So anyway, I do have this from somebody who I've been working with on another story who I know is very well versed in this in this whole set of issues.
I talked with Tariq Ralph on the show.
And he was the one who said a former IAEA inspector who said that he doubted the authenticity of the document that George Yan had used, although there was a flaw in his logic.
He says, George Yan is too good of a reporter to have gotten the document that wrong.
And so I'm not sure if I disagreed.
I disagreed with that that analysis for the following reason.
One of the things that was reported by George Yan, at least in one of the stories, was that they had to hand copy this document.
And in hand copying a document, a fairly, you know, fairly long document, I mean, more than one page, obviously mistakes can easily be made.
And I'm I'm ready to believe that whoever copied that document down, could make the kind of mistakes that were found, such as saying Islamic state of Iran, rather than Islamic Republic of Iran.
So I mean, that that's, to me, that's not really evidence that that it was a fake.
I think the problem was that it was a first draft of a proposal that later on was, was completed with more details.
Well, that was what he said, too, was that, you know, I mean, basically, he described what you just described that what they're going to do here is the same thing that they always do.
It's a pretty standard protocol for this.
And, you know, they'll take the swipe, but they'll be monitoring it, the IAEA will be monitoring it in such a way where they have plenty of confidence that nobody did a slight of hand on them or anything.
Yossef Butt came on the show and explained about how they screwed up Syria, because this guy got a this inspector got a rogue sample.
And it was his rogue sample that had uranium on it.
But then, of course, it turned out that was much more likely the uranium came from his clothes, being a weapons inspector, he brought it with him.
And so when he didn't follow the protocol, it ended up incriminating the Syrians for a nuclear program that they didn't even have at the time, and are incriminating them for building a secret nuclear facility, which they were actually not building at the time.
So that was why they do the protocol the way they do it now and this and that.
So in other words, it just sounds like you're basically confirming what he told us on the show, which was that they're going to do it the same way they always do it.
The guy takes the swipe, he puts it in the IAEA baggie and off they go.
Right.
And this this approach of a remote camera that sends images directly to the headquarters that they can watch in real time has been used elsewhere, I understand.
So there's no doubt that this is valid.
Now, before we forget, sure.
I mean, and that is a minor point, but it's been made into a major point by a bunch of liars.
So it's worth refuting.
Yeah, since we've just alluded to George John, I want to go back to that piece of important evidence that I discuss in my piece, which is hardly I mean, it's just not known at all.
I talk about it in my book, allude to it in my book, but it deserves to be more widely known.
It needs to be more widely known.
And that is that John was approached by an unidentified official, a state of an unidentified state in November of 2000, 2011, immediately, like two weeks after the IAEA report came out, and was told by this official that intelligence from his country showed that Iran was in fact trying to remove, remove actual evidence, not just evidence, but the but but important equipment from that building.
In other words, they were trying to convey the idea that Iran was getting rid of the of the bomb, the alleged or the purported bomb cylinder immediately after the report came out.
But the problem was that this unnamed state official was contradicted by two other officials of IAEA countries who were following the same imagery, the satellite imagery, and they said, No, that wasn't happening.
That's just not true.
In fact, one of the countries was clearly the United States because Admiral Kirby, who was then DoD spokesman was asked by john about it.
And Kirby said, No, I haven't seen anything that even remotely resembles what's being described to you.
So and we know that's the Israelis, because when they say IAEA member state, that means Israel, because the the funny loophole there is, of course, that they're not members of the non proliferation treaty.
And then I have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
But there's still a IAEA member state in terms of its original purpose, which was Adams for peace and that kind of thing.
So they participate in it.
But it gives them a nice little diplomatic cover for funneling these kind of lies into the intelligence stream.
We know is Israel.
I mean, it was the Israelis trying to set the set the stage for what they thought would be an IAEA mission to parchment, which would find nothing.
And so they had to set up the storyline in advance that the Iranians had already done this.
This is the smoking gun evidence that, in fact, it was the Israelis who, you know, passed on the false story about the parchment.
You know that the alleged parchment bomb cylinder in the first place and realized that they had to figure out a way to get the story out to to offset what they knew ultimately would be the discovery that there's nothing there.
And as you say, debunked even by the DoD at the time now.
Talk about 2005.
The Iranians, when this first came out, John Bolton put this stuff out for the first time in 2005.
Is that right?
Or it was earlier than that, that it came out in 2004 when Bolton came out publicly saying, oh, we have all this satellite photography that indicates that Iran is working on nuclear weapons.
And of course, it didn't indicate that at all.
It was photos of essentially conventional explosives facilities or sites in the parchment military facility that were used for for explosives research, high explosives research, which doesn't mean squat as far as nuclear weapons is concerned.
But that was what the Bolton was pushing.
And he he bullied the IAEA into demanding to visit parchment so that they could check it out.
And the Iranians finally said yes, let them come in in February.
And they were allowed to go to five sites on any one in any one of the four quadrants that they would choose and take environmental samples.
And so they took the samples, found nothing.
Then Albert, I said, well, we're to be really credible.
We're going to have to go back again.
And so several months later, November 2005, they let him come back and do it again.
And again, they had the choice of five sites, took the environmental samples, found nothing.
David Sanger, to this day, will not admit that this is what happened.
He makes it sound like they were not allowed really to do much of anything at parchment.
But that's the truth.
And that is, again, just very powerful evidence that there was absolutely nothing that ever nothing there because the Iranians would never have allowed them to take their choice of five sites twice if they had any, you know, any idea that there was something to hide there that the IAEA could possibly find.
Well, of course, Gordon Prather says that's not how you and not only him, but I think Jeffrey Lewis, the arms control wonk and others have said that's not how you test an implosion bomb for a nuclear fission warhead.
Anyway, you do it outside, like in the fake accusations about Maravon, not inside in a chamber, like in the fake accusations about parchment.
So the whole thing is nonsensical.
There's so much more about this idea of the bomb cylinder parchment that never made any sense.
And it's very easily connected with the whole, you know, set of Israeli intelligence claims about nuclear weapons work.
We don't have time to go into now, but I do talk about that in my book.
And, you know, people really interested.
They can find a lot more that makes it very clear that that this was part of a much broader effort by the Israelis to try to suggest that Iran had done nuclear weapons work that was much more far, much more advanced than anyone ever guessed.
And that might have even gone on as late as 2007.
Right?
Well, and people can just search Gareth Porter and parchment and find where you wrote the story about how the former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist turned out to be a Ukrainian, which isn't as scary as Russian.
So had to go all the way back in time to former Soviet.
The bomb cylinder story is all tied up with this Ukrainian who they tried to make into the nuclear test guru, including David Albright, was part of the story and which absolutely no evidence supports at all.
And also, I want to say one more thing here to add for people who really want to do some research about this, that this guy, Robert Kelly, the former IAEA chief inspector, he seems like a pretty sober minded guy.
And yet when he writes about this thing, he can't help but basically clown on these idiots who've put this out where he's talking about how in the artist's rendering, you know, like Colin Powell put this together.
It's a biological weapons trailer or something.
So here's the computerized cartoon drawing of what this test chamber might look like if it existed.
And here, obviously, is the picture of the nanodiamond test chamber that they copied it from.
And you notice how in the real test chamber, not that it ever existed inside Iran at all, but this is some other test chamber somewhere else, I guess, in Ukraine or something, that you notice how it's sitting on these big kind of railroad ties, these huge, like, what, six inch by six inch, you know, railroad tie type logs.
And he said that obviously the artist who is copying this didn't know what he was looking at and thought that they were some kind of fins that went on the outside of the chamber.
So he went ahead and added more fins on top just for symmetry or whatever to make it look right and ended up basically drawing railroad ties or what would be railroad ties along the top of this chamber for no reason whatsoever.
Actually, Scott, I've discussed this with Bob Kelly, and he points out that what they were depicting in this artist's rendering was a very heavy concrete shell around the purported chamber that would help to prevent any bursting of the chamber with a high explosive.
You know, it was all very fanciful and that part of it had nothing, you know, that's got nothing in common at all with the nanodiamond chamber that we actually have a drawing of from the book that the Ukrainian scientists did.
So basically, I mean, the whole thing is just the Israelis trying to come up with another way of bolstering their phony story.
And John fell for it, you know, as he's fallen for every single thing that they've ever given him.
Yep.
All right.
And yeah, with that, I just realized how over time we are.
Thanks so much for coming back on the show, Gareth.
You're the best, man.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
All right.
So that's the great Gareth Porter.
The book is Manufactured Crisis.
And here he is.
The parchment nuclear myth begins to unravel at Middle East Eye.
And we'll be right back.
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