Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and we're going to start with our first guest right now.
It's the great Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist, author of Perils of Dominance, and a reporter for Interpress Service, IPSNews.net.
We run all of it at AntiWar.com/Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How's it going?
Fine.
Thanks for having me.
I'm Scott.
Well, you're welcome.
I appreciate you joining us.
So, David Sanger wrote something in the New York Times, so I figured it probably wasn't true, and then I thought maybe I'd have you on to explain how that is.
Well, I think there are few statements that are more certain than that.
That when David Sanger writes something about the Iranian nuclear program, it is going to be blatantly distorted, unfair, and inaccurate.
So, this new article yesterday certainly delivers on all those.
Well, you know, on that point, just about what you can bet to come out of a David Sanger article, I wonder, man, maybe I just need to take a train to New York someday and try to get an interview with William J. Broad, because it seems to me like when William J.
Broad writes an article about Iran and their nuclear program with Mark Mazzetti, it comes out more or less pretty reasonable.
But when he's teamed up with David Sanger, out comes a bunch of half-baked propaganda and assertions without references to any evidence whatsoever, and that kind of thing.
No question about it, but Sanger is the ringleader of this.
He's the one who's driving the New York Times coverage into the territory that is, let's face it, I mean, it is supporting the Israeli line just straight out.
I mean, there's nothing that Sanger has written, I would venture to say, over the last three years, almost four years now, that is not in line with the position of the Netanyahu government today and then his predecessors.
Right, yeah, and also, in other words, it's based on a bunch of mythology rather than actual facts of the matter, just like Israeli policy.
What we see Sanger doing in this story published yesterday is what he has done repeatedly in the past in covering IAEA reports.
He has made it sound like the report has new information which is damaging or damning in terms of Iran's nuclear program, whereas in fact the reports have very, very little new over the last few years.
Once in a while there's a new item which is referred to, but in this case, as in most cases, he's referring to an IAEA report that has absolutely nothing new in it.
I mean, the language of the items that are enumerated in the report, in the IAEA report itself, which is available at the ISIS site, that is David Albright's think tank website, has the full text of the report.
And when you look at it, you find that these are simply summaries repeating what has been stated in previous reports.
There's absolutely nothing new in it.
And of course, it's referring to documents which are either the famous or infamous laptop documents, which I have debunked repeatedly, or they refer to a document which the Israelis clearly turned over to the IAEA in 2008, which is arguably a fraud on a number of counts.
Certainly it is very, very, shall we say, convenient that it filled a gap that the Israelis needed to fill in 2007, 2008, or 2008 after the NIE, which was very damaging to Israeli interests.
Sorry, I made a very long, complicated answer there to your simple question.
Well, no, that's all right.
I mean, I think it's important that this discussion start with the dishonesty of David Sanger and the agenda of the Israelis that, for whatever reason, he has apparently identified with so strongly that what you read in the New York Times about Iran's nuclear program is not a reflection of what's true.
It's a reflection of what David Sanger wants you to think.
And that's basically all.
And so I don't know if he wrote the headline or not, but might as well have.
It certainly fits with the rest of the article.
Watchdog finds evidence that Iran worked on nuclear triggers.
And then it says in the article, we don't know what the evidence is, but they say they have some.
As soon as I saw this article and printed it out, I circled two words in the title, finds and evidence.
Neither, of course, are accurate in terms of describing what is in the IAEA report.
First of all, it's not evidence that they're reviewing here.
It's questions that IAEA has insisted that Iran must answer.
They've now insisted on that for, what, five years, six years?
And so he's not really talking about evidence.
And it's not something they've found.
This is simply repeating, as I said, questions that they have published in previous reports.
So again, it's a technique that Sanger has perfected over the years of sort of repackaging old stuff and presenting it as news and, of course, also presenting it as having something more than the stale repeating of the propaganda position, essentially, of the IAEA, rather than actual evidence.
Right.
Well, and as ever.
Now, I haven't had a chance to look at the page over at the Weekly Standard and Commentary Magazine.
Maybe I'll get a chance to do a little bit of Google searching during the break, because I'm still paging down here in the report.
I'm just really at the very beginning.
I'm looking, and for some reason it's not letting me search the PDF, but I'm looking for the part where I'm certain it's in here where they say that they have continued to verify the non-diversion of any declared nuclear material in Iran, which is, as Gordon Prather said, ought to be the entire report.
The rest of this is none of the IAEA's beeswax.
Well, I mean, I agree with that, of course.
It's an old argument that you're not going to convince people who are desiring to find Iran guilty of trying to get nuclear weapons, but it is indeed the case that the IAEA was never intended to carry out the kind of campaign that the IAEA has, in fact, carried out over the past few years, where they are making inferences on questions of, for example, Iran's ballistic missile program and demanding information about the ballistic missile program, which under the normal agreements, the agreements that Iran has had with the IAEA, the organization, the IAEA, is not entitled to get classified information on the ballistic missile program.
In fact, they have demanded that the Iranians turn over documents that relate to its Shahab 3 missile program, and that's simply out of order, just plain and simple.
The Iranians told the IAEA, when they got the request for classified information about the Shahab 3, that they would end their cooperation with the IAEA's so-called investigation, and that has been the case, of course, ever since September, I believe it is, 2008.
And that is why you get the IAEA and the United States and its allies continuing to say, oh, the Iranians are refusing to cooperate with the investigation.
Well, it's because the IAEA has, in fact, made demands which are outside the framework of the agreement that the IAEA has with Iran and with any other member state.
They cannot ask for classified military information.
Right now, that is information that is not specifically about nuclear material.
Right now, so, you know, this is a complicated subject because it's not just nuclear materials, but it's also all these complicated international treaties and all of that.
And, you know, hopefully after the break, we can, you know, hopefully, you know, go through and clarify some of this a little bit better.
But I did find the single sentence in question in this latest International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran.
The agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities and LOFs, which is locations outside facilities declared by Iran under its safeguards agreement.
Now, that's out of context because it's laced with accusations.
So we'll get back to that.
Continue to clarify that right after this with Gareth Porter.
All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Gareth Porter.
He's got X-ray eyes, man.
War Party comes out with some lies which favor the policy of the right-wing government of Israel, nine times out of 10.
And Gareth Porter goes, uh-uh, no, right.
See, here's what's right.
For example, from January the 6th, 2010, new revelations tear holes in nuclear trigger story.
And this is you guys might remember back in 2009, there were two really big, bogus propaganda stories about Iran's nuclear weapons program that doesn't really exist in the Sunday Times of London.
The second one was about this document that proves a nuclear trigger.
And Gareth Porter, of course, saw right through it and talked to some CIA guys, including Phil Giraldi, who said that the actual, you know, current CIA guys have debunked this document as a forgery and don't believe in it and are telling the government not to base any policy on it, et cetera.
And but the lies roll on.
Apparently, Gareth, would it be your best estimation that, you know, as far as we can tell, this same bogus old document from then that you debunked in this story, new revelations tear holes in nuclear trigger story, is the very same so-called evidence that's being cited in this IAEA report and then, of course, echoed by David Sanger?
Well, actually, I think there are multiple fraudulent documents involved here.
It's not not just the laptop documents that were turned over to or brought to the U.S. government in 2004.
Apparently.
And it's not just this document that I was covering in that story, which was surfaced in late 2009, in the autumn of 2009.
But it's also another document which was turned over to the IAEA in 2008.
And David Albright, our friend who who has been in the thick of all this for so many years and is in very close contact with the IAEA's Department of Surveillance Monitoring.
And he told me in a an interview in 2009 that the the document in question, the one that was turned over to the IAEA in 2008, was undoubtedly from or he said, I'm sorry, not undoubtedly, he said probably came from Israel.
I mean, it was clear that that, you know, it's the Israelis who have been coming up with these documents.
They're the source of of the the overwhelming bulk of material that that has been used by the IAEA.
And he was, in fact, honest enough at that moment, although he's backtracked since then and backed up the IAEA's hard line position on this, he was honest enough at that point to say that, yes, this is an Israeli document.
And it was essentially the same with the same line that the Israelis have been peddling for years, which was, hey, the Iranians are trying to secretly carry out experiments with nuclear weapons that will not leave a trace.
And they're using the nuclear trigger.
And they started out with this line in 2005.
They got the M.E.K. to put that line out in a press conference, 2005, after the laptop document documents had been turned over.
But before they had been made public, that was February 2005.
In 2006, Cy Hirsch talked about an Israeli effort to peddle that line to the CIA, including documentation which was not identified, but mainly essentially an agent's report, an allegation based on an agent's report in Iran.
The CIA didn't buy it.
That was not obviously convincing to them.
The Israelis didn't provide any details.
They didn't provide the place, the time, what was exactly done by the Iranians, supposedly.
And so all I'm saying is that this particular document, which is now included in the universe of evidence, that so-called evidence that the IAEA continues to refer to, is very suspect, has been suspect all along.
And the CIA never bought it.
Yeah.
Well, and it just goes to show that, you know, whatever the scientists with their little handheld do-wackies are saying, that the IAEA is really a political organization.
And that's what it's all about.
It is absolutely political.
And I wish that point were taken seriously by the news media.
I mean, they act as though this is a completely neutral scientific organization that has no axe to grind, as opposed to an organization which has been thoroughly politicized ever since the issue of the Iranian nuclear program became front and center.
And the United States, Israel and the Europeans became a bloc insisting on pushing essentially a double standard in the issue of Iran's nuclear program, because they subjected Iran's program to a standard that was completely different from that that the South Korean government was held to.
I've written about that, as you know, that the South Koreans were given a tap on the wrist for actually having, despite the fact that the South Koreans actually had carried out an experiment in which they enriched uranium to the level of, I believe, 78 and or 79 percent, very close to the level which would make it clearly relevant only to nuclear weapons.
All right.
Well, now, hold on.
Here's the thing.
We're running out of time.
And I think your point is taken on South Korea.
People can look that up.
But I wanted to make sure and clarify.
What it actually says in this IAEA report and the complicated issue.
I mean, you basically laid it out in the first segment there.
But I just wanted to make sure that I have this straight.
You give me kind of an up or down.
Elaborate as much as you can before the bumper music kicks in here.
And that is that this all important sentence, the agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities and locations outside facilities declared by Iran under its safeguard agreement.
But that's really the essence of this entire new IAEA report.
They're saying for the millionth time here that all the uraniums right here, none of it has been diverted to any special purpose other than in the agreement.
And then all of the rest of this is just complaints saying, but they won't answer every question under the sun based on the fake laptop the Israelis forged.
And they won't open up all of their non-nuclear facilities like their missile facilities and so forth.
And they won't just cease enriching uranium and accept the additional protocol to their safeguards agreement that they don't have to accept.
Basically, these are all U.N. mandates far above and beyond what Iran has agreed to in there by signing the NPT or the safeguards agreement.
And really all this stuff belongs in a separate report or something, right?
Well, I don't know if it's a separate report, but look, just just to reiterate that the key point here that is constantly being ignored by news media coverage is that the Iranians were going well beyond their basic agreement with the IAEA by their cooperation on this question of the laptop documents.
They were answering all kinds of questions.
They were providing all kinds of information.
And then, as I say, in September 2008, they get this request to turn over blueprints effectively of their Shahab-3 missile, but they're not going to do that.
And they, of course, that the the IAEA knew perfectly well that that was the case.
So they suspended their cooperation.
That's what this is all about.
And that context, that crucial context has been missing from the media coverage.
Of course, because the truth isn't scary.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time, as always, Gareth.
You're the best, man.
Thanks again, Scott.
That's the great Gareth Porter, everybody.
Antiwar.com/Porter, IPSNews.net.
And we'll be right back with Bob Perry right after this.
