For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is anti-war radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
Appreciate you joining us tonight.
This is anti-war radio here on KPFK.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Keep all the archives of this show and all the foreign policy interviews from my other radio show at antiwar.com/radio.
And all week long on my other show, I've been featuring interviews with guests on the subject of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, Iranian communist terrorist cult, and efforts by extremely powerful members of the American war party to get them removed from the state department's list of foreign terrorist organizations.
So they might better be able to use them to lie us into war with Iran, the way that they used the Iraqi National Congress back in 2002 and 2003 to lie us into war with Iraq, spoken with Trita Parsi, Mohammed Sahimi, Scott Peterson from the Christian Science Monitor, who had an incredible report this week, and also a former CIA counterterrorism officer, Philip Giraldi.
Here in a second, I'm going to play for you an interview I recorded with Gareth Porter Thursday night about the Mujahideen-e-Khalq's role in funneling the Israeli-forged so-called alleged studies documents, the Iranian smoking laptop, which supposedly shows the Iranian government's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons prior to 2003.
I know there is a large Iranian diaspora here in Los Angeles, and I know only the very smallest proportion of you favor the Mujahideen-e-Khalq.
Well, this is your time to stand up and make sure your congressmen know, write a note, stick it to the fridge for Monday morning.
You must contact Capitol Hill and let them know what you think of the war party's attempt to remove the Mujahideen-e-Khalq from the terrorist list.
It's been made clear in these interviews all week long that the Mujahideen-e-Khalq might as well still work for the Ayatollahs as they serve as the number one best excuse for the Iranian government to clamp down on all opposition and castigate all of them as agents of the American CIA.
And now Dr.
Gareth Porter on the Israeli stooges, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq and their lies about Iran's nuclear program.
Introducing Gareth Porter, reporter from Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net and we reprint every bit of it at antiwar.com/Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth, from the other side of the planet.
Hey, thanks very much, Scott.
Glad to be on the on the line with you.
All right.
Now, it may seem strange to some that I got you on the phone from Pakistan and I'm not going to ask you all about what you've learned since your trip to Pakistan, although maybe I'll try to at the end.
But actually, I brought you on the show to talk about something we've talked about before, which is something extremely important that sounds boring and obscure on the face of it.
But actually, the fate of quite many important things hangs on it.
And it's the alleged studies documents, the Iranian laptop.
And you've done reporting in the past about holes in the story from all different angles, Gareth, and as well as the origins of these alleged studies documents.
And so I wonder, first of all, if you could just describe to us, you know, the Washington Post version of what this is and what it means.
And then we can start getting into the background of this extremely important subject.
And then hopefully also we can talk about what it has to do with.
And by Washington Post version, you obviously mean what is the official line on the on the laptop, the laptop of death, as some have liked to call it, the collection of intelligence documents.
And the answer is that these are the supposedly purloined Iranian nuclear studies documents, which showed up at a US embassy in or consulate in Turkey in 2004, in the summer of 2004, and which then were later announced by then Secretary of State Colin Powell, as a prima facie evidence that the Iranians were indeed going for nuclear weapons.
And so, you know, the next six, seven years now, the following seven years have been the years of the laptop of death, because these documents have been really the, you know, 95% of the evidence being claimed as the basis for keeping Iran in the dock, as it were, at the International Atomic Energy Agency is or are these documents because they are the basis for arguing that Iran is refusing to cooperate with the IAEA, and therefore must be continually the subject of sanctions and diplomatic and quasi military pressures to supposedly force Iran to fess up to cooperate fully with the IAEA.
Well, it turns out, as I have reported, as far as I know, uniquely, no one else has reported this story.
The only reason that the IAEA has given for charging that Iran has refused to cooperate has been that Iran would not turn over documents which the IAEA demanded in September of 2008, that the IAEA demanded that Iran turn over documents relating to its Shahab-3 missile.
They wanted to see engineering studies, meaning essentially blueprints of the Shahab-3 missile.
Now, that's clearly national security documentation, information which the IAEA has no right to demand.
And in this case, the Iranians terminated their cooperation on the basis that the IAEA had overstepped its bounds very clearly and said that as long as you're trying to do that, we will not cooperate further in your inquiry.
So that is the essence, I think, of the political story of pressure through the IAEA on Iran over the last five, six years.
So when Barack Obama says that the Iranians are in violation of their international obligations, he's not referring to the nonproliferation treaty, which they're a member of, or their safeguards agreement, which they're a member of as mandated by that nonproliferation treaty.
He's referring to their defiance of IAEA, and I guess before them, UN Security Council demands that they answer to these bogus documents.
Exactly.
I mean, what the what the U.S. has done is to tie the sanctions to the UN to the supposed refusal to cooperate with the IAEA, which, as I say, is all about demands which clearly have nothing to do with actual evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons experimentation or research, but which have to do with these with the demand to see the blueprints of the Shahab 3.
Now, that brings us, of course, to what are these documents all about?
What do the documents themselves show?
And, you know, very quickly, the documents, the major collection of documents in this overall collection, show a series of designs of the Shahab 3, which purport to show an effort to fit what looks to be a nuclear device into the nosecone of a redesigned Shahab 3.
Now, and here's where my reporting, I think, has been most important.
What I was able to demonstrate, I think, without any question, is that the blueprints that they were showing, the designs that they were showing, were of the wrong missile, the wrong missile design, because at that point, we now know from all kinds of evidence that the Iranians had already discarded the Shahab 3 as the missile of the future and had now gone on to, by that time, had gone on to another more advanced missile, which could actually reach Israel, whereas the Shahab 3, we know, could not have reached Israel.
And so there is prima facie evidence that the designs that were found in these laptop documents were fakes, that this was not something that Iranian military planners could possibly have had any interest in having ordered done.
So that is why, you know, I think that's the biggest single case of evidence that these documents, the whole laptop of death documents, were fraudulent.
They were manufactured by a foreign intelligence agency.
And I think the circumstances are very strong.
Wait, wait, hold it there.
I want to talk more about what's in the documents for a second before we get to their origin, because we can kind of break it in half that way.
Now, so what you're saying then, I think, about these missiles is that it makes sense that a foreign agency would have made these documents because nobody knew yet about the new missile, basically.
There's no way that whoever wrote these documents, manufactured these documents, could have known that Iran was already working on a more advanced model of a long-range, excuse me, intermediate-range missile, because it was not, that information did not become available until August of 2004, whereas these documents would have to have been completed.
The actual laptop of death documents would have had to have been completed by sometime late 2003 or early 2004 at the latest.
I see.
Okay.
And now another part of this was a green salt experiment, although it was just a bench-level experiment as described in the documents.
But what is green salt and what do you make of those accusations?
Well, what I was able to establish simply by, you know, going through the IAEA reports carefully is that the IAEA was told through Iranian documents that were passed to them in 2005, excuse me, 2007, if I remember correctly, that the program that supposedly the green salt bench-level experiment was associated with could not have been part of a nuclear program, a covert nuclear program of Iran that began in 2001, as was claimed in the laptop of death documents, because in fact the name of that program had been assigned, the code name of the program had been actually assigned by the Civilian Atomic Energy Agency of Iran as early as 1999 or, yeah, 1999, if I remember correctly, two and a half years before the program that is described in the documents could have gotten started.
So there's a fundamental problem of timing here, of the sequence of events, which again shows clearly that these documents could not have been authentic.
Well, Dr.
Gordon Pray, they're now retired writer for antiwar.com and nuclear physicist, former chief scientist of the army and all that, pointed out that green salt is just uranium tetrafluoride and yet to introduce your nuclear material into a centrifuge to enrich it, to separate out the 238 from the 235 and so forth.
You need uranium hexafluoride gas and they already have a gigantic operational uranium hexafluoride gas facility right down the street there.
Well, that is really a crucial point, absolutely.
I mean, there's simply no plausible reason why Iran would have started all over again and instructed this supposed secret Manhattan Project style outfit of engineers and scientists to create a whole new technology for the purpose of creating this uranium hexafluoride, excuse me.
The fact is that not only had they created this system, they had tested it carefully for years.
They were committed fundamentally to that technology, which they'd gotten from China.
It would have made no sense whatsoever.
It did make no sense whatsoever.
It's simply not a plausible case that that they would have tried to start all over again.
And I think that that's another major piece of evidence in favor of my conclusion that this is a fraudulent set of documents.
There was another accusation in there, too, as well about testing implosion systems, something like that.
Yeah, the testing the implosion systems document is is one that obviously, I believe, is is fraudulent along with all the rest of them.
But we know very little about what is actually in the document.
We don't know that it is, in fact, an implosion.
We don't know what sort of system exactly is shown in that document.
All we know is what is described by the IAEA.
And I mean, all I can say about that is that the Iranians were were very clear in denying that they had ever experimented with the kind of system that is attributed to them.
What they said is that that we have carried out, you know, explosion experiments for civilian purposes and for other, you know, conventional weapon systems, which, of course, you know, plenty of non-nuclear systems where this kind of technology could be could be relevant, including anti-ship missile devices, anti-ship missile systems, which, of course, Iran has very great interest in.
And I must add that the IAEA was never honest in acknowledging that there were not just civilian applications, but non-nuclear conventional military applications for the generic kind of explosion systems that the Iranians admitted that they that they have used.
So, again, I mean, I just think that the whole stream of information the IAEA put out about this question, as well as other questions, was extremely dishonest and I think gives away their intention of simply keeping Iran in the dark as part of a political agenda.
Well, and typically if they were to make implosion bombs, that would be out of plutonium.
The whole threat, supposedly, from Iran has been their uranium enrichment, which means a simple gun type nuke, probably, if they're going to have one or two of them.
And Gordon Prather also explained to me that if Iran was testing an implosion system, that the way to do that typically would be to test the system with inert metal like depleted uranium 238, what's left over from the enrichment process, and that what you have to do is do it over and over again, thousands of times, and take the super high speed X-ray film of the systems that to implode a nuclear bomb takes, I don't know the number exactly, but thousands, I think, of tiny little detonations that must be timed within perfect microseconds in order to get an actual effective nuclear weapon.
Something that cannot take place without notice of the IAEA and the National Reconnaissance Office and everybody in the world, you just can't do that kind of thing in secret, not them.
I think that's absolutely right.
And of course, I bow to Gordon, and even to you on this level of technological expertise.
I think what I've done is to try to point to the more obvious chronological and other inconsistencies in the case that's been made.
But I think that that's undoubtedly another dimension which deserves to be added to the picture.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so now let's talk about whodunit.
What do you know?
Well, I mean, clearly, there's one state and one state only which had the motivation and the institutional mechanism in place to carry out a covert operation, misinformation operation along these lines, and that was Israel.
We know from published sources, which are sympathetic to Israel, that is a book by former investigative journalist who later went to work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his wife on the AQ Khan network, who interviewed security and intelligence officials and foreign ministry officials in Israel for the book, and we're told that Israel had created a special office in Mossad to funnel information, including supposed captured documents from Iran, on the Iranian nuclear program to the world's major governments and to the news media.
And so we know that Mossad had an outfit that was doing precisely the kind of thing that that the laptop of death fits to a T, that is creating a set of documents, which would be game changers in terms of global public opinion.
And they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, despite the fact that, as I've pointed out, they made fundamental errors, which finally, if you look carefully enough at the documents that the IAEA has published and compare them with what everything else that we know about the issues surrounding the documents, they show fundamental inconsistencies, which give away the fraud.
And I counted, as I believe I've said on your show before, at least nine cases of such anomalies, such fundamental inconsistencies, which could not possibly be explained except for fabrications.
Well, now you talked to IAEA officials that confirmed to you, correct, that this came from a certain Iranian dissident group.
The Israelis passed it to the American intelligence stream by way of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, is that right?
Well, it wasn't that IAEA officials admitted that, it's that there are a number of reports showing that the MEK was in fact used by Israeli intelligence, by Mossad, to launder, excuse me, Israeli intelligence, quote unquote, on the Iranian nuclear program.
And this goes back to the 2002 news conference by the MEK, in which, this is in Washington, DC, in which they supposedly revealed the existence of the Natanz enrichment facility, which of course began the entire process then of the attack on Iran's good faith, and which the MEK then received enormous credit for and became a favorite source for news media after that on the Iranian nuclear program.
Well, we now know, in fact, that the MEK was fed that information by the Israeli intelligence agency.
And we know this from a multiplicity of reports from IAEA sources, through Cy Hirsch.
We know from Israeli journalists who published that fact in their book on the Iranian nuclear program in 2006 or 2007, and perhaps another source which I may have forgotten now.
But in any case, it's well established that the MEK was getting this information leaked from the Israeli intelligence.
So we know that there is this close MEK relationship with the Israelis.
They've used the MEK for a number of purposes.
And so you can combine that fact, the history of the Israeli relationship with the MEK, with the fact that the Mossad had this office whose purpose was to do precisely what was done with the laptop of death documents.
And I think the case is very, very strong, if not irrefutable, that that this had to be the Israelis behind the creation of the documents.
Now, in what other areas do you know of where the MEK was cooperating with Mossad?
Well, I mean, I don't know specific areas, if you mean with regard to Iran beyond the nuclear area.
Yeah, I think I forgot your exact phrase, but you said something a second ago there about how, you know, they have this relationship.
Okay, well, we know that the MEK was supported by Iran in beaming broadcasts into, excuse me, supported by Israel in beaming broadcasts into Iran.
During the 1990s, this was revealed in a New Yorker article quoting an Iranian dissident group on this relationship between Israel and the MEK and also quoting an Israeli diplomat in Washington who admitted that they did have a relationship with the MEK, but not going into detail about that.
All right, everybody, that's the great Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net.
We reprint all of it at antiwar.com/Porter, including Iran nuke laptop came from terror group.
Iran laptop papers show the wrong missile warhead and report ties dubious Iran nuclear docks to Israel.
All of those are available at antiwar.com/Porter.
Thanks very much for your time and come home soon and tell me all about your trip to Pakistan.
Appreciate it.
All right, and that is antiwar radio for this evening.
I sincerely appreciate everybody listening.
And again, for Americans concerned about the delisting of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, it's extremely important that this week you contact your Congress people, contact even the White House and the State Department and let them know how you feel about them delisting this Mujahideen-e-Khalq communist terrorist cult from the State Department's list.
And please go to antiwar.com/radio and check out the interviews from this week with Trita Parsi, Mohammed Sahimi, Scott Peterson, Philip Giraldi, and including Gareth Porter about the Mujahideen-e-Khalq's history, the politics of the war party attempting to use them now, and the lies and bogus intelligence that they continue to feed the US government and media about Iran's nuclear program.
That's at antiwar.com/radio.
Thanks very much for listening, everybody.
We'll be back next Friday at 630 here on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
