Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Hey, guess who's on the line?
It's Gareth Porter.
Hi Gareth.
Hi Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
That's good.
Everybody, you know Gareth.
He's an independent historian and journalist who writes for Interpress Service.
That's ipsnews.net.
And of course you can find virtually everything he writes at antiwar.com/porter.
So, you had some adventures.
Where'd you go?
What happened?
Tell me all about it.
Well, I was in Beirut, Lebanon for a symposium on WikiLeaks, which was sponsored by a new think tank in Doha and met dozens of intellectuals and think tank people from across the Arab world.
Made a number of very interesting contacts.
And then I stayed for another three days to pursue the subject of the special tribunal for Lebanon, which is a story that is not very well covered, not covered at all, basically, in the American press.
This is the tribunal looking into the assassination of Rafik Hariri?
Exactly.
And, you know, the only real news that has come out about that tribunal, I would say, over the last few months has been, you know, leaks, a leak, I should say, from CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Company, which basically said that the tribunal has this hot information, hot documentation, showing that it was really Hezbollah that killed Hariri.
And, you know, when I first saw that leak, and indeed a previous one in 2009 from Der Spiegel, it was clear to me that something was going on here, that we're looking at another case of manipulation of an investigation.
Wow.
Well, so here's the thing now.
Let's go back for a second.
Rafik Hariri was the former prime minister of Lebanon.
He was assassinated in an explosion, which I put it that way because I think that's part of the dispute.
He was assassinated in an explosion in 2005, there, driving down the road, I think in Beirut, but certainly not in Lebanon.
And then the Bush administration basically just, you know, through innuendo, said that obviously the Syrians did this, and then they used that to force the Syrian army out of southern Lebanon, which they'd been there since the first Gulf War in 1991, because that was part of the deal to get them to help in the first war in Operation Yellow Ribbon against Saddam back then.
And then in forcing the Syrians out, of course, that just empowered Hezbollah in the first place there, by making them the only organized armed force in southern Lebanon, another great move by the Bush administration in their pro-democracy agenda, or whatever the hell you call it there, killing people, whatever.
But then the whole thing is, it was all based on the assassination of this former prime minister, and I guess there were basically two theories.
One was what the international community said, and that was that obviously Syria did it, and then the other was that maybe it was an al-Qaeda attack or something else.
That's correct.
Yeah, there was indeed a theory, in fact it's more than a theory, I'll explain why I say that.
That it was al-Qaeda.
And the reason I say that is that, in fact, there is testimony directly from the group of, not al-Qaeda per se, but, well, I mean, they were working under al-Qaeda.
I'll take that back.
It was al-Qaeda per se.
A group of about 13 jihadists, stationed and based in Syria, actually were caught and confessed to having carried out the assassination of Hariri.
This was covered in the Lebanese Arabic language media in January of 2006.
And I have now, since I've been back, I have read a very, very long, basically the text of the interrogation of one of the people in that 13-man cell, who gave the great details about how they organized the monitoring and the assassination.
Now, the problem is that this guy was very clever, and he kept going back and forth, he kept saying, now I'm telling the truth, and he'd give all these details, and then he would deny that that was true, that he told them he was lying, and then he'd go back and say, now this is the truth, and he would give more details, and then he would say he was lying.
So, and of course, at the trial, the 13 claimed that they were tortured into making the statement, so they recanted their testimony.
And so that's where that stands.
But the fact is that there was not just a case against them, but there were confessions with detailed accounts by the people in the cell about their hit against Hariri.
Well, now, wasn't the guy a Saudi or something?
There was a Saudi-Arabian connection to the story.
I'm trying to remember, because Raimondo said it was Al-Qaeda all along, and I remember reading his take on it.
There was one prominent member of the cell who was a Saudi, that's correct, yeah.
All right, now, so on the other side of this, though, you know, what the cops were saying, you know, the international cops, the UN people, whatever, at least at first, was that there was a hidden tunnel under the road, and that the bomb was in the tunnel.
And then that turned out to not be correct, I think?
Well, you know, on the forensics of this case, I do not have a firm grasp of it.
I have not really gotten into that level of study of the details.
Well, you should go back and read Raimondo, because he was fighting with Michael Young over at Reason Magazine and making it very personal and saying no, and so it was a very point-by-point sort of contradictory kind of thing.
Well, you know, the answer is I don't know at this point what the best evidence they have is.
I do know that the prosecutors on the UN Investigating Commission and then later the Special Tribunal, which basically took over in March of 2009 from the UN Investigating Commission, that they've gone back and forth several times on the question of exactly what sort of bomb it was, how it was planted, and so forth.
And there was at one point even a theory offered by a member of the Investigating Commission staff, a French specialist on explosives or in forensics, crime forensics, he said that his theory was that in fact the bomb was dropped from an airplane.
And of course that raised the question of whether the Israelis might have done it.
But that was eventually abandoned, at least officially, by the Investigating Commission.
So again, I don't know what the current state of affairs is as far as the forensic evidence.
Well, what's the plot as confessed to by these guys?
It was a suicide bombing, right?
That is indeed what they testified, that the leader of the group, a fellow named Abu Adas, actually perished in the bombing as a suicide bomber.
But there's been no confirmation of that.
They've got no DNA evidence of this guy's presence there.
So that's been part of the problem.
They couldn't provide the physical evidence to support that.
Well, it just goes to show, I guess, that no matter what happens, whether it's Hurricane Katrina or the assassination of a former prime minister on the other side of the world, the American empire is going to find a way to take advantage of it and use it to get something done.
Although, would you agree with my sort of encapsulation of this story that all they ever do is just shoot themselves in the foot?
Like in this case, all they did was empower Hezbollah, which is now their coalition runs the government, right?
Or is coming to power there?
You're absolutely correct that everything the United States and Israel have done, in Lebanon specifically, over the last few years...
And the entire Middle East in general, since World War II.
...specifically on Lebanon.
I mean, what they've done is to give Hezbollah far more legitimacy and far more power than they ever had before.
And one of the things that struck me, I would say the single thing that I came back from Lebanon with is the degree to which Hezbollah now has really complete, I'm not going to say control, but their political dominance is so great that it is really unchallenged.
All right, well, we're going to pick that up on the other side of this break.
It's the great Gareth Porter, antiwar.com/Porter.
All right, everybody, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the line is Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, author of a bunch of books and a...
Man, so many articles, you wouldn't believe it, and about all of the most important things in the whole wide world.
He just got back from a trip to Lebanon where he's been learning all kinds of things.
We were talking about the Hariri assassination.
I think now we're sort of talking contemporary Lebanese politics.
There's this new coalition, I guess it's been a coalition between Michael Aoun, is that how you say his name, Gareth?
I guess so, yeah.
Now, I forget, that's the Maronite Christian group?
No, the Catholic, sorry, the Christians in Lebanon are highly fragmented, and there are different categories of Christians that I haven't even figured out yet.
So, you know, I have not been focusing on the Christians quite frankly.
Well, anyway, but they have this coalition with Hezbollah, and then I think they've expanded it recently, right, and gained much more power in the parliament there?
Well, that's right.
I mean, the Christians did, in fact, lean much more toward Hezbollah over the last couple of years.
There's some indication that there may be some backtracking on some of the Christian elements who were more pro-Hezbollah now.
But the fact is that as a political advisor to Saad Hariri, the son of the assassinated former prime minister, told me Hezbollah is really the only game in town.
They are the only political organization in Lebanon that has any real discipline, that has mass membership, that is capable of playing a dominant role politically in the country.
And what I didn't realize before I made this trip is the degree to which the Hezbollah viewpoint on the Hariri assassination and the special tribunal on Lebanon is now so dominant because the news media actually do reflect, for the most part, that viewpoint, which is, first of all, that the special tribunal is indeed an effort to pin the blame on Syria and or Hezbollah by the Western countries, the United States specifically, and that it has not been honest, it has not been forthright, it has twisted things and was responsible, basically, for putting four honest people in jail for three years, three to four years, and doesn't have any credibility, basically, as far as most people in Lebanon today are concerned.
I mean, it is the Hezbollah view that dominates, it is the Hezbollah view that is credible.
And that has completely shifted the political balance in the country over the last couple of years to a degree that I certainly had not realized before.
Well, yeah, I mean, the opinion polls have showed for a long time that across the Middle East, where the vast majority of people are Sunni, they still, when asked who do they admire most in terms of political leaders, they say Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, not Osama Bin Laden, and not the king of Saudi Arabia either.
That's true.
In Lebanon, however, it is also true that sectarianism is much sharper focused than elsewhere in the Middle East.
As somebody associated with Hezbollah told me, in Lebanon, everything is sectarian, everything.
Well, and the thing is, they wouldn't even exist if it hadn't been for the Israelis chasing the PLO around there for two decades in a row.
That's correct.
They would not have even arisen at all.
That really is where they came from, right?
The Israelis were chasing Yasser Arafat, and then the Shiites in southern Lebanon were like, well, I guess if the army isn't going to do it, we've got to make our own militia to fight these guys.
That's right.
So everything, just to go back to that theme that we started with, really everything that has happened there in terms of the rise of Hezbollah and its continued ability to dominate the politics of the country and even to convince the majority of the Lebanese of its viewpoint, its political viewpoint on current issues, it's all traceable back to the effort by the United States and Israel to take a very aggressive stance in Lebanon.
And the fact that it's backfired, it's had exactly the opposite effect of the one that they anticipated or the one that they wanted.
All right.
Well, what else did you learn while you were there?
Well, I think the most important thing is that there is a lot of evidence that the commission, not just the commission, the UN Investigating Commission, but the tribunal that succeeded it, has been taken for a ride by the Israelis.
And this is another case of the Israelis basically using underhanded means to taint evidence.
And I found this in the case of the Buenos Aires bombing.
You will recall in 1994, when I did an investigation of that, I found that in fact the Israelis had inserted this idea, this phone call evidence, this phone link analysis, which was completely phony.
Well, and they did the same thing in the case of the Kobar Towers attack, and you wrote about that too, right?
Well, it wasn't the Israelis in that case.
Oh, right.
That was just the Americans.
But in any case, there's a direct link here between the Buenos Aires bombing investigation and the investigation of the Hariri assassination in that what you find is that the Israelis had managed to taint evidence, or not to taint evidence, but to basically put in a falsified evidence, which is crucial in the indictment that apparently has been handed down, which includes, in its targets, the Hezbollah.
And I learned details about this that I hadn't been aware of before, that the Israeli spies had penetrated the telecommunications system of Lebanon very effectively over a period of years, and that they were in a position actually, they had access to the cell phone towers, and they could actually falsify a specific phone call, which would then be registered on the phone records as coming from somebody, from a phone number, which was registered to a Hezbollah owner.
And that's exactly what they did, and that's why we have this leak from the Canadian Broadcasting Company talking about the phone records, which leads, a trail that leads to Hezbollah.
This was all the result of Israeli spies, which were ultimately uncovered in 2008-2009 by the Lebanese military intelligence.
And so that story has started to get into the Lebanese media, it has not made it into Western media at all, and that's part of what I'm going to be writing about.
Well, I can't wait to see that.
Now, am I right that you have some more adventures planned in the near future?
Can you talk about that?
I originally planned to go to Pakistan on this trip, but did not get my visa in time.
And yes, I do intend to try again, sometime perhaps later this spring, to go to Pakistan.
And I think, you know, really try to get a grip on just how serious the situation is there and how the United States is, as always, contributing to make it worse.
Yeah, well, I mean, that goes without saying, but it really is getting bad there in Pakistan.
I think the Americans, you know, at least the foreign policy types, have just kind of taken for granted that, well, we can just, you know, like Egypt, we can bribe that government and prop it up and, you know, do whatever we want there forever and it'll just be fine, but we may be nearing the end of the ability to do that with Pakistan.
I think that's right.
I mean, the United States government has so long depended on the combination of, as you put it, bribery, in other words, the Pakistani economic dependence on the United States, which is quite extreme on one hand, and its threat to do even more military operations inside Pakistan, which may or may not be serious or credible, but which enrages the Pakistanis all the more every time the issue comes up.
And as we've seen in the current case of the guy who works for the CIA who got into a stupid situation of shooting two Pakistanis on motorbikes and is now in a Pakistani jail, I mean, this political situation in Pakistan is so sensitive to anything that the United States does to make a gesture toward political, military involvement in that country that, you know, just about anything can tip the balance and really force the resignation of the current government.
And there's a real possibility, as many people have pointed out, that the military might take over either quite explicitly or with very little veil over it.
And that would be yet another step toward the destabilization of the country, clearly.
Thanks very much for your time.
It's been a very interesting discussion.
And we'll all keep our eyes on www.antiwar.com/Porter for the next piece.
Thanks very much, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Gareth Porter.
We'll be right back.
