Alright, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm so happy to welcome Gareth Porter back to the show and back to America.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm fine, thanks very much, Scott.
Glad to be back on the show.
Hey man, how was your trip to Pakistan?
Well, my Pakistan trip was not exactly what I had expected.
I had hoped to take a trip to the Taliban zone.
That didn't work out.
I had hoped to go to Bagram and get a briefing.
I was basically ignored by the, my request was ignored by the U.S. military.
And I was basically stonewalled by the United Nations in Afghanistan when I tried to do an interview with the American woman who was in charge of the study of civilian casualties for them.
So I basically was frustrated on a whole series of fronts there.
Yeah, well I can't figure out what in the world the U.S. military would have against you.
I can't figure that out either, Scott.
It's not like you ever wrote anything about David Petraeus saying things that aren't true or anything like that.
That's true.
I have been very, very kind to all these people so I don't understand why they're not being kind to me.
Hey, and you know what?
I think we could probably, even if we kept lying like that, convince people it's true as long as they don't look at your archives at antiwar.com/porter where we find that in fact everything David Petraeus has ever said has been completely and thoroughly debunked by you because it's all just a pack of lies.
Well, yes, I think that's very kind of you to take notice of my debunking of Petraeus.
That has been one of my major preoccupations over the last few years.
Yeah, which, you know, and he's just a nice stand-in for the war party in general these days.
They all pretty much say the same lies, so it's good to have your debunking.
I don't know what we'd do without it.
As a coda on my trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan, I do still have a couple of major pieces that I've not written yet which will be out in the coming weeks.
One on the drone strikes in Pakistan, and I'm working on getting data to show what the actual incidents of civilian casualties have been in those drone strikes.
And then with regard to the special operations forces raids, targeted raids in Afghanistan, I have a piece which I have finished but which I'm now trying to place somewhere that really addresses the degree to which the United States military has become completely dependent on electronic intelligence specifically and especially data from cell phones in its targeting of Afghans for its kill-and-capture list.
And so I think that's going to be a real eye-opener when it finally gets published.
It's an ear-opener already, I know that much.
And you know, these night raids, we know how it is, we know how it was in Iraq, we know how it is in Afghanistan.
Their intelligence amounts to, you know, some guy thinks so, and then some other guy in Nevada somewhere plays video games, and then people on the ground over there die.
Right, and my story, my article is going to give a much more fuller account of just why these intelligence analysts quote, think so, unquote.
It's really based on abstract quantitative analysis rather than on any traditional sort of vetting of who these people are that they're targeting.
Well, you know, I'm reminded of this thing I read by Ray McGovern over the weekend that's all about Dave Petraeus' new smithers at the CIA and the processes of the CIA analysts and things like that.
And, you know, for all the hype about what intelligent supermen these guys are and whatever, in fact, just the spin on the word intelligence, like everything that they think is because of how smart they are, and they must be right about everything.
They actually remind me of my Facebook feed.
Like, hey, look, here's an article and here's what I think about it.
What's so sophisticated about CIA analysis at all?
Well, I mean, of course, it really depends on who you're talking about.
There's no doubt in my mind that some CIA analysts are sophisticated, but I think the history of that place over the last few decades, particularly since Robert Gates rose in the hierarchy there in the 1980s and early 1990s, you know, the CIA has been very much a place where the truth has been subject to political coercion of a subtle but nevertheless very effective nature in the CIA.
And there are just too many examples of how that's worked to deny the reality.
All right.
Well, now you mentioned the cell phones being used to come up with the targets for night raids and airstrikes in Afghanistan.
And that brings up this brings us to the point of your most recent article and your brand newest one that will be coming out later this afternoon about the assassination of Rafik Hariri back in 2005.
The former Lebanese prime minister died in explosion.
I won't be more specific than that.
I'll leave it to you to fill us in on the details here.
But the important part, you know, the effect of it in any way is that the Bush administration used this as the reason why Syria had to withdraw all of their forces from southern Lebanon, which they'd been invited there by the Bush senior administration, as I understand it, in order to get them to help participate in Operation Yellow Ribbon in 1991.
And then by forcing them out, that, of course, empowered Hezbollah and led to the war a year later and all that.
But so you've got an article here called Hariri Bombing Indictment Based on Flawed Premise, which I would assume means that the narrative that they used against Syria back then and all the way through today is based on a false or flawed premise.
And I guess I'll turn it over to you from there.
Yeah, the false premise, really, you could view as having different levels.
You're right, of course, that there's an overarching narrative here that everything bad that happened in Lebanon was because of Syria and its Hezbollah allies, and that the Hariri assassination was another chapter in that narrative.
But what I meant to specifically refer to by talking about the flawed premise of the indictment is that the investigation initially launched by the UN Commission, the independent commission which was created by the UN Security Council to look into the assassination of Hariri in 2005, what they ended up doing was to rely on something called communications link analysis to come up with a set of networks of phones that they sort of created through the software that they used.
They took a number of telephone calls that were made during the period of January, February 2005, and they teased out of the total telephone calls a set of telephone networks, what they called telephone networks, and they assigned them different colors.
They assigned the color red to a small set of telephones that they claim were undoubtedly used by the actual perpetrators of the assassination, those people who surveilled and then prepared the bomb and actually exploded the bomb that killed Hariri.
Then they talk about other networks of phones that they say were related to the red network, not by having actually communicated directly with phones in this so-called red network, but by having been co-located, having at least one phone, if not more than one phone, co-located with at least one or more phones of the red network.
This idea of co-location is the way in which they have linked these four Hezbollah figures who have been indicted for the murder of Hariri to the crime.
This is really the only evidence that one can find in the indictment, or any suggestion of evidence against the four Hezbollah guys, is this idea of co-location of personal cell phones with cell phones that were supposed to have been used in the assassination.
Alright, well that sounds pretty thin to me, but we'll break it down a little further when we get back from this break.
It's Gareth Porter, Hariri bombing indictment based on flawed premise at Antiwar.com.
Alright y'all, we're going back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and we're talking with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, IPSnews.net.
We keep all the archives at Antiwar.com/Porter, and for that matter, slash radio, because I've interviewed Gareth about 130 times or something since 2007, because he's the great debunker of everything that the War Party says, which none of it's true, so he just happens to pay attention to the right stories is all.
It's still, you know, real journalism.
It's not his bias, it's theirs, is what I'm trying to say.
Alright, so here we go.
Hariri bombing indictment based on flawed premise.
We had a few minutes to talk about it before the break, Gareth.
The investigators here from the special tribunal or whatever it is, investigating the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafah Hariri in 2005, basically say, well, we got on the GPS that all these guys were using cell phones in the same, maybe not even on GPS, they were all contacting the same cell phone towers, so therefore they were near each other at the time this happened, and then what, assuming that's concrete, then it all supposedly traces back to one guy, and that's how they know the rest of them did it too, kind of thing?
Well, it's a bit more complicated.
It's extremely complicated, and in fact, you have another piece here, which is coming out today, which is called Tribunal Concealed Evidence Al-Qaeda Cell Killed Hariri, which is also very convoluted, too.
I mean, it's clear you know what you're talking about, but it's very long and difficult to explain, so I'll turn the rest of this 10 minutes over to you.
In a way, that's kind of the punchline of this story, which is a story about a very misleading indictment handed down by the prosecutor of the special tribunal for Lebanon, which is the successor to this United Nations investigating commission, again, created by the United Nations Security Council, which of course means the United States and its allies were behind it.
And so, again, just to go back to the methodology that was used to support this indictment against four Hezbollah figures, there's really only one of these four who they claim was in touch with the people who actually carried out the hit against Hariri, those people who held what they called the Red Network of cell phones, which the basis for that judgment, by the way, about the group of cell phones that were supposedly used in the assassination plot against Hariri is that they ended the last transmission by any of those group of cell phones was two minutes before the explosion took place.
Now, you know, that's a reasonable sort of supposition, but it's not absolute knowledge that those were the cell phones that were used by the group that carried out the assassination.
But what they're saying here, again, is that from phone records, they can trace the presence of the personal cell phone of this one fellow named Ayyash, the Hezbollah person who was linked directly in the indictment to the plot against Hariri.
It's because his cell phone supposedly shows up on a number of occasions, on many occasions, in the same cell phone tower zone as the red phones of the conspirators.
Now, and, you know, there are some other angles here which I won't go into now, but let me go to the point that is crucial in understanding why this is a flawed premise for the indictment.
It is the fact that, you know, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of cell phones that could also have been found to be co-located, as they put it, that is in the same cell phone zone and in the same time frame as one of these red phones, because, as I found out from a specialist on the Lebanese telecommunications system, Riyad Bassoon, a Lebanese living in Beirut, there are between 20,000 and 50,000 cell phones operating at any one time, on average, in one of the 11 cell phone towers range, within the area that was being used by the conspirators to carry out surveillance against Hariri, between the National Parliament building and the palace that was used as an office.
So it's a very densely populated, rather small area, and tens of thousands of cell phones are being used.
That makes it statistically impossible that there aren't many more phones that would also be found to be co-located with one or more of the red phones.
And so this is a completely farcical conclusion to reach, if you just stop and think about the fact that it excludes all the cell phones that were in operation during the same time and the same place on a number of occasions.
And therefore, this comes back to the abuse of a particular investigative tool called the Communications Link Analysis, which the United Nations Investigating Unit, on more than one occasion, talked about in its reports actually using as a key tool to try to locate or to identify who the people were involved in the killing of Hariri.
Now, that was very interesting to me, and this is why I ended up writing about this subject, because when I did the investigation of the Buenos Aires bombing of 1994, which, as you know well, was blamed on Iran, a key element in the case made against Iran early on was Telephone Link Analysis, Communications Link Analysis.
What they did was to claim that there was a set of cell phones used by conspirators and that a call was made to a telephone down in the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, and that the same phone was contacted at some point by a phone that they associated with the cultural attache of Iran.
It was all crap.
And the FBI official sent down to Argentina to help the Argentine intelligence outfit to do their investigation, who I interviewed years later, told me that this use of Telephone Link Analysis to arrive at that conclusion was very dangerous because you could use the same tool, the same thing, to link his phone with bin Laden's phone.
It's that dangerous.
It's that easy to misuse it.
So that's the coda of my article about the flawed premise of the indictment.
And so that now brings us...
Well, hold on one second.
I wanted to say...
Yeah.
Okay, so now, yeah, on the network thing, I just want to say real quick, I saw a thing on the Science Channel or one of those about how it was really the Kevin Bacon game that got it started, the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, and that then these brilliant mathematicians at these universities started emailing each other, and they came up with this whole new science, network science, wherein everyone on Earth is connected to everyone else on Earth by six degrees of separation.
It's not just Kevin Bacon.
It's all of us.
And they took packages and sent them to the four corners of the Earth and said, see how many steps it takes you to get this mailed or handed to a professor in New York City.
And they got it all done from all over the world within six steps.
Yeah, and this is why...
You were just in Pakistan.
Obviously, you were connected with him by six degrees.
No problem.
This is precisely why this tool is so easy to abuse, to use it to make whatever case you want to make.
And I quote Serge Bramert, who was the second chief of the UN investigative unit, in a report that he did in 2006, using the term speculative to describe the way in which they were using this tool, the telephone communications link analysis tool.
And by that, he meant that they were using it to try to prove that a particular group were involved in the assassination.
In other words, they were trying to prove a hypothesis.
And that is why this is so dangerous.
Because if you're using it to prove a hypothesis, you can do it.
No question about it.
You can prove that anybody on Earth was involved by simply linking their phones together in this network analysis.
Yeah, absolutely.
Wow.
This is really incredible.
I mean, so much in the world hinges on this.
And to have a case so thin, I guess, you shouldn't expect any better from them.
But hey, the truth.
No, it's still a shock.
It's very shocking that they would abuse it in this way, as far as I'm concerned.
All right, y'all.
Hang tight.
We'll be right back with Gareth Porter.
More about the bombing of Rafaq Hariri after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And on the line is my buddy Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
And we run every bit of it at Antiwar.com/Porter.
We're talking about Hariri bombing indictment based on flawed premise.
Extremely flawed.
And the brand new one that'll be out this afternoon is called Tribunal Concealed Evidence.
Al-Qaeda cell killed Hariri.
Let's talk about that concealed evidence.
Actually, first, let me give you a chance.
If you wanted to wrap up anything about the case against these four guys and the phones and whatever else.
I know you had to hurry through that there.
Well, just to say that it's very clear that this U.N. investigating commission, as well as the special tribunal for Lebanon that then followed on in 2009, have had a political agenda from the beginning.
And the agenda was to pursue the adversaries of the United States, Israel, and their allies.
I mean, this is so clear from reading the reports and seeing that they were, from the beginning, just locked in on a determination to convict the Syrians to the point that, and I didn't report this, but it's worth mentioning, that the first head of the U.N. investigation, Detlev Melas, who was a German prosecutor, was relying on sources claiming to have been Syrian intelligence people who even U.S. intelligence and French intelligence regarded immediately as fabricators not to be relied on.
So, you know, these are people who are just so ready to act on their political agenda that they have no capacity or no willingness, I guess is perhaps closer to the truth, to really pursue the evidence as it presents itself.
And that's why the second story that I did is a logical follow-on to what happened with regard to the U.N. investigation and the special tribunal.
They ended up, of course, indicting Hezbollah people and in the process completely ignored and, I would argue, concealed evidence that they have had for years now that a cell of 13 Al-Qaeda cadres, 11 of whom were arrested and detained in 2006-2007, had actually confessed to the plot to kill Hariri in 2006.
I can't tell you exactly how many of the detainees did in fact confess, but it was a multiple number of the Al-Qaeda cell members who confessed individually, separately, to the plot to kill Hariri.
And what they revealed was a number of details that tied them together and a number of information that could be ascertained independently.
And in one case, there was the full transcript of the interrogation of one of the key members of the Al-Qaeda cell about his role in the plot, what he knew about the plot, in which he talked about the fact that the head of the cell had told him in Syria on the day that they watched the television news when the videotape of the guy who publicly said that he and his group were responsible for the assassination of Hariri and which had been made clearly well ahead of time before the explosion took place, they were watching this on television and the head of the cell said to him that this was done because Hariri had signed the order for the execution of several, or I should say a few, Al-Qaeda cadres who had been involved in terrorism and had been executed.
This happened in 2004.
That is, the execution took place in 2004.
So there was clearly a motive.
The Al-Qaeda cell was, according to the testimony given in this transcript, had pledged allegiance to bin Laden through the head of the cell in 1999 and then to al-Zarqawi in Iraq in the period after the United States invaded Iraq.
So they were very, very tightly connected with the top-level figures of Al-Qaeda and they were very close to the figure of the guy who did the videotape.
I mean, there was a great deal of detail about how they collaborated with and helped the guy who did the videotape to make that tape.
Now, the problem arises because the people who made those confessions, the Al-Qaeda cadres, then withdrew their confessions or retracted their confessions when they went to trial in 2008 and said that they had been coerced, that they had been tortured.
But in 2007, as I say, the full transcript of this interrogation of one of the key members of the cell was published by a Beirut newspaper, Al-Akbar, and that transcript shows very clearly that he was volunteering this information.
And furthermore, that the interrogators very cleverly gave him a tricky question to ascertain whether, in fact, he did have knowledge of the plot against Hariri, which no one could have had simply from reading the news media.
And they gave him a list of 11 phone numbers, saying, these are the phone numbers that we have been able to come up with.
Can you identify which ones were actually used?
Can you recall which ones were actually used in the plot to kill Hariri?
And the guy doing the confession immediately corrected him, saying there were only seven phones being used by the team in Beirut.
And of course, this was what the investigators themselves had found out independently.
It was a big clue.
Well, now, wasn't it an entirely separate set of phone numbers from the ones we were talking about before the break there, that they tied in the Zezbulon characters?
No, these are supposedly the red phones, what they decided to call the red phones when they were doing the indictment.
These are the phones that ended the last call was made two minutes before the blast that killed Hariri.
Okay, well then, so how do they square, or how do you square, Al-Qaeda did it with, they arrested these guys based on, these Hezbollah guys, based on they had these phones?
Well, of course you can't.
There's no way you can reconcile it.
So you're saying they're not Hezbollah guys, or they weren't Al-Qaeda guys?
Or those phones aren't really the red phones at all?
I'm saying that I think that it's very likely that indeed the Al-Qaeda cell did do the hit against Hariri, yes.
Precisely.
Okay, but I'm saying, so how do these numbers trace to Hezbollah guys?
You're saying these are different numbers?
Remember, all they did was to claim that the personal cell phone of this guy, Ayyash, was found to be co-located with the phones of this so-called red phone network.
Not that he actually was, you know, that his phone was one of the red phones, but that his personal phone was co-located with the red phone.
So in other words, you know, it's again this tricky use of telephone link analysis, in this case locating where phones were physically within the range of a particular cell phone tower.
Right.
We're already at the break.
It's just unfair the way the earth spins so fast, but we've got to go, Garrett.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Everybody, please go look at antiwar.com/porter and at the website for Interpret Service, IPSnews.net.
Keep it all there.
Garrett Porter on the Hariri bombing.
