09/03/12 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
We still got one more guest to go here.
I'm going to wrap it up with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, www.ipsnews.net.
Also www.truthout.org.
He won the Martha Gellhorn Award for his work on civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
Writing for Truthout, that's www.truthout.org.
And they keep all the archives at www.antiwar.com.
The latest is IAEA report shows Iran reduced its breakout capacity.
But Gareth, that can't be true because I read ScareHeadline A and ScareHeadline B and ScareHeadline C that said something about increased uranium production, which means I'm very, very afraid.
A hell of a note, isn't it, Scott?
Anyway, thanks again.
Nice to be back on the show.
Thank you for joining us.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, this is another one of those endless train of stories whose headlines and leads are misleading, if not completely false.
In this case, usually what happened was that the headline and the lead talked about Iran doubles the number of centrifuges at their enrichment facility at Fordow.
That's true.
Technically speaking, there are twice as many now as there were at the time of the previous IAEA report.
The problem with that headline and lead is that it doesn't accurately represent what actually has happened in regard to Iranian policy over the last three months.
In fact, just to take care of the doubling of centrifuges, yeah, there are twice as many centrifuges, but they're not operating, and they're not operating clearly for a reason.
They haven't even hooked them up to a pipe.
And what they're doing is essentially saying, look, we could do this if we wanted to, but we're not doing it because we want to have negotiations on this.
One of the things we can negotiate about is whether these will be used for 20% enriched uranium, or that is the grade of enrichment for the Tehran research reactor, or 3.5% enriched uranium, which is much lower, of course, and is not regarded as nearly the concern by the United States and other countries.
So, I mean, the real storyline regarding the number of centrifuges was that they have doubled the number, but they are waiting to see what they can do with regard to negotiations with the United States.
But as you indicated in your lead-in, the title of this story indicates that what Iran has actually done is to reduce the total stockpile of uranium that has been enriched to 20% that is actually available if they were to choose to do so by kicking out the IAEA and doing all the rest, which would be obviously something they're not going to do.
If they chose to do so, they could increase the level of enrichment to weapons grade.
And instead, what they've done is to actually reduce that stockpile of uranium that could be enriched to weapons grade by actually taking basically all of the stockpile that they've accumulated in the previous round of enrichment, that is from May to August, and they've basically turned it into a form of uranium that cannot easily be reversed, cannot be turned into weapons grade uranium.
So, they've actually sent a signal by doing that that they are headed in a different direction from the one that, of course, the United States and the P5-plus-1 in Israel are all saying that they're headed towards, which is rushing to have the capacity for a nuclear weapon.
That's absolutely ridiculous.
So, in other words, yes, they've increased the absolute quantity of uranium enriched up to 20%, but they've made more of it unavailable to themselves for use in, for further enrichment to make weapons grade uranium if they wanted to.
But only the first half, or the second, gets the headline.
The scary part gets the headline.
They've increased their uranium production.
And that is clearly not the real story, and the IAEA is to be faulted, although I did not go into that point in my story.
Clearly, the IAEA is to be faulted for having failed to make that point clearly.
One had to carefully research, comparing the data which is hidden, essentially, in a table at the end of the report, of this August 30th report, with the data which is in a previous report on May 25th, if I remember correctly the date, in order to see what the actual storyline is.
And I think there's a reason for that.
And as I've said, I think, many times on your show, the problem is that the IAEA's political agenda is essentially to serve as a kind of court in which the Iranians are constantly in the dock, so that, essentially, their file can be kept at the United Nations Security Council, and all these resolutions passed that are then cited as the rationale for sanctions against Iran, and basically the rationale for accusing Iran of defying the international community, quote-unquote.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, with all the war party slogans, it's always vague.
It's the one thing you can always count on.
Oh, you're defying the international community.
Really?
How so?
Well, let's see.
They're not in violation of their safeguards agreement.
They're not in violation of the nonproliferation treaty.
Oh, they're in violation of UN Security Council resolutions that are either in direct violation of the treaty, that all the members of the Security Council are members of and supposedly are bound by, or are based on Israeli forgeries that they're not done answering all these ridiculous questions on, or some nonsense, as long as, I guess I could say they're in defiance of me, because I say, set all the Iranians free, Mr. Ayatollah.
So they're in violation of all of Scott's Security Council resolutions.
The problem, Scott, that we face in this issue, of course, is that the principle of might makes right is what is being applied here by the United States and its allies.
And they have the power to basically get their message across through the mass media that what really counts here is the UN Security Council and that other treaties are somehow inferior to that.
And there is this legal idea, this legal concept that supports them on that.
But, of course, that represents nothing more than an opinion which is tied to a set of interests.
And so the real problem here is that their interest lies in essentially making Security Council, which is responsive to U.S. wishes, the alliance that is under U.S. leadership, can use that for whatever it wishes to, with obvious exceptions when the Russians and Chinese are ready to veto.
When they can get the Russians and Chinese to stand in line, then they can do whatever they want at the Security Council.
And that, again, is the fundamental problem that really makes it much more difficult to get the truth out on this issue.
Well, and you know, even though for a long time, well, many years now, the Israelis in their fifth column in America have been beating the war drum and crying wolf about this, and the war hasn't broken out yet, there already are severe consequences, not just the risk of war that could break out due to all these stupid policies that are meant to fall short of war anyway, and the risk that, you know, sometimes wars happen accidentally, but the layers upon layers of crippling sanctions are just that, and they are really destroying the economy over there for the little people.
They're not hurting the regime any more than the sanctions against Saddam brought down Saddam Hussein, but they sure did bring down the people of Iraq, and we're already seeing that too.
I don't know if you saw, we may have even talked about, Mohammad Sahimi's piece where he talked to family members who are pharmacists there, who say, you know, we can't get the drugs that, you know, hemophiliacs need so their blood can clot, chemotherapy for people dying of cancer.
These are the kinds of things that already regular Iranians are being made to suffer based on this same pile of lies, none of which have been diverted from their purpose either.
It's the same thing that happened, of course, with Iraq.
As you, I'm sure, have said many times on your show, the parallel is quite apt, and the whole thing about U.S. foreign policy is that, you know, they loudly proclaim that, oh, we're not intending to harm the people of Iran, it's only the regime that we want to set straight and get them to behave themselves and adjust their behavior, which is always the language of coercive diplomacy.
But inevitably, they end up not caring about the welfare of the people at all, because it gets in the way of their interests and their tactics in trying to put pressure on the regime.
And so, inevitably, this is what happens.
The people are the ones who suffer.
Or they'll even cite the suffering of the people as their cause.
I mean, that's what Madeleine Albright said, is we're trying to force the people of Iraq, we're trying to make their lives so miserable that they would rather die trying to overthrow Saddam than live that way one day longer.
Well, you're right.
I mean, she embraced the whole idea that it was a trade-off that was acceptable to her and to the Clinton administration and to her everlasting shame that that's going to be associated with her name, at least it should be.
Yeah, in fact, here it is right here.
That's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And, you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.
And that's what she's saying.
If she can destroy the lives of Iraqi civilians enough, then they'll overthrow Saddam for us.
Which didn't work, of course, but it sure did kill a lot of people.
It's pretty amazing you could bring up that recording so fast.
Hey, you know me, man.
I'm terribly impressed.
I got it together.
I got Norman Podhoretz here, too, saying, in fact, well, here, let's go ahead and listen.
This is my favorite Podhoretz quote ever.
Well, if we were to bomb the Iranians, as I hope and pray we will, it will unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we've experienced so far look like a love fest.
That's a worst-case scenario.
That's great.
I hope and pray that we'll do it.
Yes, the consequences for America will be horrible, but screw America.
Of course, that's a worst-case scenario, so don't worry about it.
That's right.
That's a perfect illustration of the kind of madman thinking that we're up against, for sure.
But one thing that I've been thinking about, Scott, since I did my piece, is that this new development, the relatively new development by the Iranians of the capability to manufacture the fuel plates for their Tehran research reactor, which, by the way, the U.S. government, I can tell you for sure, simply did not believe Iran would be capable of doing that.
And Olli Heinen himself denied that they could do it earlier this year, in January this year.
They both turned out to be wrong, and the Iranians indeed did have the capability to do that.
And I think the significance of that is that it transforms the whole negotiating context with regard to the nuclear program of Iran.
Because, as you know, the centerpiece, the central issue of the negotiations in 2012 has been the enrichment facility at Fordow, at Qom, and the 20 percent enriched uranium that is being produced there.
And the demand by the U.S. in P5-plus-1 has been what they called stop, shut, and ship, the three S's.
Stop the 20 percent enrichment, shut down the Fordow enrichment facility, and essentially ship out the entire stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium to another country to be turned into the fuel plates.
Now, that no longer makes any sense, as the Iranians have actually been saying now for a matter of months.
And the U.S. negotiating position going into those talks has simply become irrelevant by the time they met in June.
I think it must have been clear by that time that the Iranians did in fact have the capability to do this, because the IAEA was already reporting about it in their May 25th report.
So, basically, what I would say is that the U.S. negotiating position has been running on fumes ever since then.
And I think they have to go back to the drawing board now and say, well, we're going to have to come up with a different proposal.
Well, we'll just go back to being afraid of 3.6 percent again, since they're taking another 20 percent and making medical isotope reactor fuel out of it.
They may well do that.
That's probably the direction they'll be moving.
Either that or they'll blame them for all our problems in Iraq.
Well, that goes without saying that they're going to do that.
But I think what the implication of this development is that Iran could in fact also manufacture the fuel rods, or whatever the correct technical term is, for their future reactor that they're beginning to build at Darkovin.
Forget about Boucher, because that's a Russian-made reactor that the Russians are...they already have this deal with the Russians to provide the fuel for it.
But they also have on the drawing board, in fact, have already begun working on Darkovin.
And they could be manufacturing the fuel rods for their own nuclear reactor of the future.
And that seems to me to be the obvious direction that the talks ought to be moving.
That is, to make a deal, an understanding whereby Iran would in fact be committed to, and there would be a carefully monitored process, that all of the 20 percent enrichment, or 3.5 percent enrichment, would be immediately transformed into fuel rods, that would go into that process, that would be under IAEA inspection, and there would be the same kind of assurances that you would have for the 20 percent enriched uranium going into fuel plates.
So I think that that is the kind of fix that really needs to be discussed widely now, and that would make it unnecessary for the United States to be demanding the kinds of things that they've demanded in the past.
It's a perfect solution.
Just use your uranium for fuel, like you said, and then we'll have nothing to complain about.
Hey, it's almost like we didn't have to mess with them in the first place.
Well, of course, if you had an actual rational diplomatic policy toward Iran, you would not have had to have these demands, because the United States would have made a deal back in 2005, 2006, which would have involved precisely this kind of arrangement.
In fact, the Iranians, as I think you know, did make that proposal in 2005 to the EU3.
Hey, we could have had it off the entire enrichment program back in 2003, I know, because I read it in the prospect by you.
Burnt offering.
Well, you know, that was only vaguely prefigured in that, but in 2005, 2006, the Iranians were quite explicit about a deal that would, in fact, result in precisely that.
Well, I'm of the opinion that, and I think that the leverets agree, that it really could have been worked out back in 2003, but you're right, though, that there was a much more concrete deal in 2005.
That's right, yeah.
I mean, they had reached the point where they actually had enrichment going on, which they didn't have in 2003.
They were in a stronger bargaining position, and I think they were much more ready to make a deal in 2005, 2006.
All right, everybody, check out Gareth Porter's latest at antiwar.com/porter at ipsnews.net.
It's called IAEA Report Shows Iran Reduced Its Breakout Capacity.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
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