All right, Joe, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest is Gareth Porter.
He's the author of this new article we're running at antiwar.com/Porter, entitled U.S. officials peddle false intel to support terror plot claims.
It's a follow up to his piece.
FBI account of terror plot suggests sting operation.
This is a article about how what you believe isn't true.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks.
Glad you're back, Scott.
It seems like every time I interview you, it's about how what they say isn't correct.
And you know what?
I'm sure I'm sure both you and your listeners will will all be extremely shocked, shocked to hear that that the Obama administration would peddle false intel to support its weak claim with regard to Iran.
Well, I'm not sure why they would even need to bother.
They invaded Uganda over the weekend without so much as a wink and a nod to a lie.
They don't even care.
Why don't they just nuke Tehran tomorrow and say they did it because they felt like it?
Because this is all about building public support, of course, for a policy of isolating Iran further.
And I'm you know, I don't subscribe to the idea that they have a plan to go to war.
Of course, I think that this is about further, more serious sanctions against Iran.
But nevertheless, it is never it is the same thing that we've encountered many times in your program, which is the articulation of false information and arguments to the American public through the news media.
Well, and even if they're just focused on sanctions now, Flint Leverett was pointing out on the show last week that Ron Paul points out often that we tend to go to war against the countries we put sanctions on first and and especially with the nuclear deal that the Iranians were trying again to push for the nuclear swap on the 20 percent enriched uranium with that falling now to the wayside and with all these accusations of not just terrorism, but an attempted plot inside the United States.
That means that we're further down the path to war now, even though that's not the immediate goal here.
It makes it much, much harder for anyone who's even trying to work out some kind of deal inside the government to be able to do so.
Don't don't get me wrong.
I think this is an extremely serious development.
The whole notion that they are using this, you know, the alleged plot to push for more extreme sanctions against Iran does have very far reaching and extremely dangerous implications.
No question about it.
All right.
Well, this story is about as complicated as can be.
So I'm going to turn my mic off and you explain what the heck is going on with these people.
Well, I mean, just to recapitulate, you know, the initial story that I did focuses primarily on a central fact that the news media has completely ignored up to now.
I'm the only one who has reported on this so far as I know, and I'm pretty sure that I haven't missed anything.
That is that in the FBI account of the conversations, the contacts between this Iranian-American named Arbabciar, Mansour Arbabciar, and the DEA, the NARC, who was posing as a Mexican drug cartel official, they have, I think I may have said two weeks, it's actually three weeks of meetings.
We don't know how many meetings were held between them, which are not documented at all.
There's not a single quote from these three weeks of meetings from late June to the middle of July.
And it's during that period that, of course, Arbabciar makes his pitch and makes it clear why he wants to meet with this guy that he thinks is a member of a drug cartel.
And that, of course, is, from my point of view, the giveaway that what really happened is quite different from what we're being told.
Because if, in fact, there was a pitch for a terrorist action, whether it was a kidnapping or something even more serious than an assassination attempt, then the FBI would have immediately been called in, and all of those meetings would have been recorded, and they would be able to cite the statements by Arbabciar saying, we want a hit job on the ambassador.
They'd have nothing like that.
So it's simply not plausible that, in fact, they did not record those meetings if there was any kind of statement suggesting, even hinting, at terrorism.
And that is the heart of the problem that I think we have with the FBI's statement about this.
It's a count of this series of meetings.
Okay, now, so we're in the mainstream news, though, well, I don't know about the mainstream news, but many commentators have pointed out that, well, it looks like this didn't really turn into a terrorism plot until the DEA informant made it that way.
But at least, supposedly, it started out at least as a kidnapping plot.
But you're saying there's no proof of that.
They don't even claim that they recorded that.
They just say that, oh, yeah, they're just saying that.
I mean, this is the testimony, alleged testimony, of the DEA informant, who, of course, as we've talked about previously, is somebody who was accused of a narcotics offense in a U.S. state and who was let off in return for cooperating to help investigate and basically pin charges on other people.
So, I mean, he's simply an instrument of the FBI and the administration, in this case, and is unreliable as a source of information that's not independent verification at all.
Then we also have the fact that Arbabciar, at some point, and I'm convinced it was before his arrest, was also turned and became part of the Sting operation, as well, with the purpose, of course, of implicating higher-ups in the Quds Force.
And I think what they were really aiming at, the person they were aiming at, was this Mr.
Shalai, or General Shalai, who the Americans, apparently, believed that was involved in the Iranian relationship with Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army.
So that was the guy they really wanted to pin this on.
And clearly, they saw Arbabciar as an instrument for doing that.
So all of Arbabciar's claims now, in his confession, which was done after his arrest, and by the way, we learned from the FBI statement on this, that Arbabciar both gave a series of oral confessions and interviews and signed a typewritten statement, which somebody else wrote.
So some parts of his confession were not even by Arbabciar himself.
They were written by somebody else.
Well, now, what indications do you have about when he was flipped?
Well, I mean, the clearest indication of this is that Arbabciar, at the behest of this DEA informant, of course, acting for the FBI, was told that they wanted him to go to Mexico City to be a personal insurance policy for getting the full amount promised for the hit job.
Now, according to the account, believe it or not, Arbabciar talks to his, he claims that he talks to his contact, Shakoury, in Tehran and says, they want me to go to Mexico.
What should I do?
And Shakoury says, you're on your own, Bob.
And so, even so, Arbabciar then goes, agrees to go to Mexico City and does fly there.
Now, anybody who is not completely crazy would know that he's risking his life by flying to Mexico City and putting himself in the hands of the most lethal drug cartel in the world.
But he does so without even blinking an eye, immediately.
And so that's the giveaway that this was all part, he was then part of the Sting operation.
For sure.
Now, I think it's very possible, it's very plausible that he became part of the Sting operation much earlier, but we can talk about that more in detail.
All right, well, yep, we got to hold it right there, music's playing, we got to go out and take this break.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter.
The article is, U.S. officials peddle false intel to support terror plot claims.
It's at the top of the page right now at antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to this thing, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with my buddy Gareth Porter.
He's the best reporter around.
Occasionally he writes an opinion piece or something, but 99 times out of 100, the government claims something and then he goes and does journalism explaining why it ain't true.
The last one, FBI account of terror plot suggests Sting operation and the newest, U.S. officials peddle false intel to support terror plot claims are no exception at all.
So we were talking about how it was that you decided that you think that the accused in this case, Gareth, was actually flipped earlier on in the script than they say.
I think it's quite possible.
I mean, this is less, I'm less certain about this, but it's quite possible that sometime between the beginning of these contacts between Arbabciar and the DEA, the NARC, in late June and July, the middle of July, he was brought into or guessed that he was dealing with the NARC.
He was either informed or guessed it.
And at that point, in fact, it may have been the United States that decided to let him know and to invite him to become part of the Sting.
The reason I suggest that is that there is such a dramatic shift from the absence of any quote suggesting an intention to carry out a terrorist action before July 14th or before July 17th, in fact.
The absence of any quote, even the July 14th meeting where we have lots of quotes from the DEA informant talking about how he was going to start working on doing, as they like to put it, in a kind of effort to mimic the kind of language you'd imagine a hitman to use, that we're going to do the Saudi Arabia, as he says.
But nothing that they can quote from Arbabciar along those lines up until the 17th of July.
And then suddenly, they're able to describe in detail this plan for exploding a bomb at a restaurant that would kill 100 to 150 Americans, probably including senators, you know.
And Arbabciar's response is, fuck them.
Can we say that on the air?
On chaos you can on LRN, no, but you just did, so all right.
I just did.
But that's exactly what they quote Arbabciar as saying, as though he doesn't care at all about the consequences of this plot.
So, I mean, this tells me, this suggests to me that something happened in between that is quite dramatic.
And I think it's quite possible, quite plausible that what happened was that he was actually brought into, he became part of the sting in order to get it at Shalai.
All right, now.
That's not the only reason.
There are others, but we don't have time to go into them.
Well, yeah, let's skip ahead to Ray McGovern's piece last week where he pointed out David Ignatius, the CIA ombudsman at the Washington Post, said that FBI and the DEA didn't even believe their own lie until they went to David Petraeus at the Central Intelligence Agency.
And he came back and said, oh, yeah, this is definitely true.
Well, Petraeus may have had some role in this in terms of providing, you know, some tidbits that would support them.
I have no doubt.
Well, he says he has evidence from the other side of the equation in Iran that this was true.
Well, you know, I'm sure that there's something that they claim that they've got, you know, from intercepts.
They always have intercepts that they can say supported this.
But so far, nothing of that sort has surfaced.
And, of course, it would be quite surprising if they, you know, if they did do so, that it was not a misreading, a misinterpretation of something.
That's 99 percent of the time that's the case.
So, I mean, I don't see the CIA as being central to the lie that's been told so far.
I mean, I think that it's an add-on to sell this to the American public.
And, for example, I mean, in my latest piece, we have a couple of instances here just in the past few days where the administration has leaked stories, first of all, to NBC News, to the guy who's called the, quote, National Investigative Correspondent, unquote, of NBC, and to the Washington Post suggesting that Shalai, they know Shalai, in fact, was a terrorist and somebody who was linked with the killing of American troops in Iraq.
Of course, those are two separate things.
But, of course, they're conflated in the telling of this by the news media on behalf of the administration.
You know, they're confusing the two things.
And then the second story by Peter Finn of the Washington Post goes even further on the Shalai angle, saying that it is known that he was in charge of the attack at Karbala in Karbala in January of 2007.
He was the one who planned it.
Now, that attack, people, I think, probably remember, if I'm remembering the same one correctly here, this is the one where Iraqis, I guess, dressed up in Iraqi army uniforms, drove into a base in a suburban, got out and killed and kidnapped a bunch of people?
They kidnapped five Americans.
They took five Americans with them, took off.
All five, as far as we know, were killed eventually.
And so this was definitely a major issue for the U.S. military.
But the truth is, I'm sure I must have talked about this on your show back in 2008 or 2009, that, yeah, 2008, that the 22-page memorandum that is cited by Peter Finn as the evidence, the smoking gun, that Shalai, this mid-level deputy commander of the Quds Force, was the planner of this attack that killed five Americans, the 22-page memorandum that they're claiming is the smoking gun for this was discussed by General, none other than General David Petraeus at a press conference on April 26, 2007, in which he said, we don't link this to Iran.
He said, there's no evidence that this operation was linked to Iran.
There's nothing in the 22-page memorandum and nothing anywhere else that we've found to link this to Iran.
And he was answering explicitly, an explicit question from a journalist, is there anything that links this to Iran?
He said, no, no, no.
And then continued, and then explicitly denied that there was any link to Iran.
I'm still confused about this, though.
They say that money originated in Iran and then came here, so the DEA couldn't have arranged that.
Okay, yeah, let me talk about the money, because that is one of the other indications that there's something really quite wrong with the account by the FBI.
In the July 14th meeting, it is alleged in the FBI statement that the DEA, sorry, that Arbab Siar, is telling the DEA guy that the money has already arrived.
The money is already there in Iran.
It has been prepared to be wired or to be sent.
He didn't say what was going to happen to it.
He just said, this is already for you to pay you.
Now, this was before there was any explicit discussion about exactly what was going to happen, before they talked about an assassination plan involving a bombing.
So, we're expected to believe that this $100,000, which was what was being discussed, was already being set aside to be sent.
He was already ready to send it before there was any even detailed discussion about what was going to happen, about an assassination plan.
So, this is, of course, not plausible.
What was really going on here, clearly, is that $100,000 was for something else.
We have no idea what it was for, but something else was going on there.
And the way in which this is presented by the FBI, deceptively, tries to present this as the payoff for the assassination plan.
It just doesn't work.
All right, well, it's a bunch of crap, just like we knew as soon as they said it on CNN, but now we can back up our arguments with real arguments.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
That's a great Gareth Porter, everybody.
Antiwar.com/Porter.
U.S. officials peddle false intel to support terror plot claims.
