Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I won't sell any of your short.
You must have thought, just like me, what a bunch of crap when you saw the headline that some federal judge says that it's been a proven fact in his courtroom that Iran did 9-11.
Gee, you wonder why Dick Cheney didn't nuke them back ten years ago, huh?
I guess they're only just figuring it out.
What do you say, Gareth Porter?
Well, once again, we're looking in the face of the propaganda mechanism that involves both the official Washington and right-wing coterie that's behind this one.
I mean, it's a story that we're all familiar with, I know, but the details are pretty sort of interesting because it's a bizarre cast of characters, as I put it in my story, of a bunch of hate Islam activists and Iranian defectors who basically have been discredited many years ago by U.S. intelligence as serial fabricators.
And the testimony in this court case is based on these people who you say have been exposed for how many years?
How many different people are we talking about in these supposed exposures?
Well, there are three Iranian defectors.
Two of them have been identified.
The third one has not been.
And so I just looked at the two who were identified.
They're both familiar names, particularly a guy named Abu Ghassan Masbadi, who was featured in the... he's the star witness in the Buenos Aires terror bombing case, which of course I've investigated and I've written about him, because the FBI agent who was sent down to Buenos Aires by Bill Clinton in early 1997, late 1996, to help the Argentine investigation of the Buenos Aires bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center, told me in an interview in late 2006 that this guy Masbadi, who had claimed that he knew from his sources in Iran, from his old Ministry of Information and Security, meaning intelligence days in Iran, that there was a meeting in August of 1993, at which supposedly the decision was made to carry out this terror bombing of the Jewish Community Center.
But I was told in this interview in 2006 that the U.S. intelligence community had long ago decided that Masbadi had no credibility, had not kept in touch with his sources, his friends or his associates in Iranian intelligence.
He had left the service in 1988, and he was still claiming to have these contacts as late as 1996-1997, but they said no, he didn't have those sorts of contacts, and he was making it up basically.
And then this guy's a serial fabricator.
You say he tried to implicate Iran every time anything ever blew up.
He went and warned the government right after it happened that Iran did it.
Yeah, there was both Buenos Aires where he came forward in 1998, as I recall, and then he also suddenly claimed to know after the explosion in Pan Am 103 in 1998 that in fact Iran was behind that one too.
Unfortunately for his credibility, he didn't come forward until it was too late, until it was over, despite the fact that in theory he was supposed to have known this before the bomb plot was carried out.
He was claiming that Iran had asked Abu Nidal and the Libyans to carry out the bombing for them.
It was a tall tale, obviously.
It didn't really hang together very well.
FBI didn't believe it.
Some people in the CIA did believe it, but in the end it was the FBI position that they had the evidence implicating the Libyans.
And so basically he's been regarded as a serial fabricator.
Now the other Iranian defector is a guy named Hamid Reza Zakari, who has an even more interesting story in a way.
He claims that he was actually present physically at a meeting in 2001, of course.
He's talking about May of 2001, where he says the top officials of the Iranian government, including the Supreme Leader himself, meet in an airbase not too far away from Tehran with one of bin Laden's sons, Saad bin Laden.
And he of course did not participate in the meeting itself.
He claimed that he was responsible for the security for the meeting, but he was sure that they had in fact made decisions about planning on 9-11 at that.
And one reason he gives is that shortly after that he claims he saw in the main hall of the Ministry of Intelligence, the Iranian Ministry of Information Security, a miniature replica of all the targets of the 9-11 attacks, plus a missile suspended from the ceiling as if it were going to hit the target.
And hilariously he lists Camp David as one of the targets, because they called the fourth plane the Camp David plane, even though no one in the world would really, I don't think, conclude that the target was Camp David just because the plane crashed in Pennsylvania on its way to D.C.
Obviously the choice would have either been the White House or the Capitol, whichever probably would be easiest to hit, the Capitol building, maybe the White House if they could.
But they're going to find Camp David in the woods of Pennsylvania, and Bush wasn't even there and whatever.
But someone on TV said Camp David was the fourth target, and someone said that the cops refer to the fourth plane as the Camp David plane, so this makes it into this guy's ridiculous lie.
Yeah, so what we have here, the interesting thing about both cases of Mesbahi and Zachary is that they tell stories that are on their face clearly lacking in any credibility.
In the case of Mesbahi, the most interesting detail for me is that he tells two entirely different stories about the so-called coded messages, as he calls them, that he says that he received from his contact in Iran in 2001.
The first story that he told, which was really shortly after the 9-11 attacks, was to this right-wing journalist Kenneth Timmerman.
Timmerman talks about it in his book, Countdown to Crisis, published in 2005, and in this story he says that he got two coded messages.
One was on September 1st, and the second one was on September 4th.
Furthermore, he certainly implied very strongly, if he didn't state outright, that these messages came by phone, in a phone call.
Now, in the story that he gives in his affidavit to this court case, he now says that no, he had three coded messages, July 23rd, August 13th, and August 27th, and that they took the form of articles in Iranian newspapers, and that they had this code system that had been worked out, that if you applied it to these stories, you get very brief three- or four-word coded messages.
Now, of course, it's obvious that what happened is that when he had to testify to give some verisimilitude to his story, he had to find some newspaper articles that he could come up with some scheme which would give him a few words that he could claim were code words for the terror plot that Iran had supposedly cooked up earlier, and which now they were applying to the 9-11 attacks.
And, you know, obviously he was under pressure to come up with some scheme here, and this is what he came up with.
Well, and it obviously is pretty transparent, even at the time, what he was doing, that this was all post-hoc, and you quote Timmerman quoting CIA officers saying they don't buy this crap at all.
Current ones, right?
Right, exactly.
And I've got another interesting story about the second guy.
It's Gareth Porter, the best reporter in the whole damn world.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm online with the great Gareth Porter.
I don't know what the hell we'd do without him.
Never mind this radio show, but I just mean in general.
Original.antiwar.com/Porter.
That's where you find the debunking of everything the War Party says because it ain't ever true, really.
Not even in kernels.
In this case, they're trying to pretend the Ayatollah, I guess probably would go ahead and throw in axis of evil partner Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden all did the 9-11 attack on us together.
And Gareth Porter is explaining how the federal judge who found that this is a fact because somebody said so in his courtroom is a fool because the people who said so are liars and the CIA doesn't believe them, and these are the kinds of lies that the CIA would like to use as we saw them try to do against Saddam Hussein.
Why wouldn't they try to use it against Iran other than they don't think they can get away with it?
So, yeah, the second case that I wanted to mention, Zachary, the sort of punchline of that story is that he claimed he actually defected in July of 2001.
And so he, of course, had to have a story to explain why he didn't give the information to the U.S. government immediately after he defected that he was, in fact, aware that there was this alleged plan to carry out attacks.
He actually said that he knew that it was going to be something having to do with an attack on the United States and that it would involve the actual buildings that were depicted in these replicas.
So, in fact, he claimed that he did tell the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, on July 26, 2001, about this alleged meeting and the replica.
And the problem is that U.S. intelligence officials, when Kenneth Timmerman asked him about this, they said categorically, absolutely not, this was a complete lie.
And they called him a serial fabricator in one quote that Timmerman has, according to a CIA official, and another quote that Timmerman actually has in his book, the official called Zachary, quote, a fabricator of monumental proportions.
So, I mean, I thought that was a pretty good summation of the situation regarding these Iranian defectors.
And then the question that obviously is posed by the obvious information that we have from U.S. government officials about these characters is why would a set of lawyers for the victims of 9-11 families think that they could get away with giving the testimony, the affidavits of these defectors as legitimate testimony?
And the answer is that these lawyers are not the brightest bulbs, apparently, on the Christmas tree, and they went ahead and brought into the case these two former CIA case officers, Claire M. Lopez and Bruce Teft, to be the sort of big cheeses to vet the testimony of the Iranian defectors and to give them legitimacy after having supposedly sat through hours of their testimony.
And so the question is, who are Claire M. Lopez and Bruce Teft?
Well, it turns out that they're both crackpot adherents to this war against Islam movement.
And they've both given publicized talks, videoed talks and or interviews in which they've made the most damning sorts of statements indicating that they believe that the United States is in fact at war or should be at war with all Islam, with everybody who is Islamic, with maybe a few exceptions, and that Sharia law, which every Islamic person is said to believe in and to be guided by and to be under the authority of, basically gives non-Islamic three choices.
You either convert to Islam, you agree to be a second-class citizen, or what they call dhimmis, or you are to be killed.
And so this is the point of view that these two crackpot ex-CIA agents have been pushing before they were taken on with this very sensitive position of giving the thumbs up or the thumbs down on these Iranian defectors.
So obviously they were brought in simply to give the thumbs up, and there's no doubt about that.
I actually finally, after three or four days, got one of the lawyers, the two lead lawyers in this case, on the phone, and I asked him, were you aware of the hate Islam activities of the two ex-CIA agents who you gave the authority basically to vet the testimony of the former Iranian defectors?
And he kind of didn't answer it directly.
And then he said, well, to the extent that you're accurate, we'd say, fine, go ahead and take them out of the case.
But we've got other expert witnesses anyway, and we don't rely entirely on these people.
That was his answer.
So I thought that was pretty revealing.
Well, I think the lesson here is that people should not be allowed to be judges.
We should not allow some jerk to sit up there in a robe and pretend that that means that somehow if he decides something, that's what makes it true, which is the whole point of the headline, Federal Judge Rules, Iran Did It.
Well, I'm not ready to say that we shouldn't have any judges, but I certainly would say that this whole notion— I mean, we ought to get rid of the executive and the legislative branches first, and then the judges.
I guess I'd go with you that far.
Well, I'm not ready to go that far, Scott.
I mean, I would say, though, that the idea that judges should be given the authority to determine that there is a case to be made against a foreign government, that it did or did not—that it was or was not involved in a terrorism instance, a terrorism plot, should be definitely eliminated.
I mean, that's ridiculous to have a case where you can—these cases—this is one of dozens of cases that have been put into the U.S. courts where judges have given default judgments against Iran and, in some cases, against other governments.
In cases where there was no cross-examination of witnesses, it was simply like a turkey shoot, and it was simply an opportunity for propaganda to be displayed and for people to grind their axes in the courtroom and to have it legitimized by a judge.
So that's clearly absurd, and that should stop.
Well, and they are seriously jerking around family members of those murdered on September 11th.
There's all kinds of quotes in this AP story about how, well, finally we're getting the truth for Jimmy or whatever, when no, they're getting lies.
I think you're right.
I think they're being manipulated, and I think—my guess is that the lawyers are in on this, that for their own reasons—of course, they're getting paid for it, so that's a perverse incentive.
But they realized right away that their best bet was to buy into this bizarre coalition of people, of former Iranian serial defectors and hate Islam activists, and then people who worked—we haven't talked about the people who worked for the 9-11 Commission who have their own ax to grind for reasons which probably have to do with the fact that they're part of the conservative element of the U.S. government that thinks it's fine to just bash Iran any chance you get.
And they basically have no incentive to tell the truth, to seek the truth.
But anyway, Bobby, I think the lawyers are in on this, and that they took their clients for a ride, thinking that there's no incentive not to do so, that the clients won't catch on, and they'll be happy that they've gotten this opportunity to bash the Iranians over the 9-11 case.
Now, why it wasn't enough to bash bin Laden, why they were led to believe or they were ready to believe that you had to have another culprit, I'm not so clear on.
Obviously, there's probably some hope that somehow or other they're going to get some cash out of Iran, even though there's no real reason to believe that that's going to happen.
Obviously, you want to sue a government rather than bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, which are much more difficult to get a hold of.
Well, you know, the thing is, it's worth bending over backwards for the war party to just do everything they can.
I mean, what does it cost them when Lockheed's footing the bill or whatever for them to just have another talking point?
You know, 1,001 talking points of accusations against Iran.
None of them have to hold up to scrutiny.
It's just, we know Iran did this, this, and that.
And now, Gareth, can I keep you one more segment here?
Because I want to ask about the passports and all that.
Okay.
All right.
One more.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and my guest again is the great Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, writes for Interpress Service.
That's IPSNews.net.
This latest one debunking the ridiculous Iran did 9-11 myth being pushed by the war party these last couple of weeks.
We'll be running at truth out by the time most of y'all hear this anyway.
So far, we've covered how the exiles who make their wild claims have no evidence for them, and all their claims are after the fact, never real warnings.
And that they've been dismissed by even war party so-called experts and by current intelligence officials as not credible.
Then there's a couple of former CIA guys who have the name former CIA near them.
And yet they are already busted and called out for being part of what Max Blumenthal and Eli Cohen and so many great reporters have covered and called the hate Muslims industry.
These people who basically are a bunch of Nazis passing around, neo-Nazis, passing around the protocols of the elders of Islam.
And I mean that seriously.
I mean the protocols of Zion in effect, because nobody ever read the damn thing anyway, right?
It's all just second-hand supposedly and whatever.
But the conspiracy theory about the Jews in Germany in the 30s was that they were all in on it together.
They can all hear each other thinking, and they're all sworn by their religion or whatever it is to be the end of us.
They're the terrible fifth column from within, etc., etc., etc.
And that's the exact lie that they are pushing about all Muslims in the world and including Muslims in America.
If you want to make a community center with a little prayer room in it in New York City now, you're part of the Islamo-fascist caliphate trying to destroy North America forever, enslave us all, whatever.
And these experts are part of that same group of liars, the great fear factory there.
And then we were getting to the 9-11 Commission and all these reports that the 9-11 hijackers actually were allowed safe haven in Iran.
Right, and this in some ways is the most interesting of the three interrelated stories connected with this court case.
The fact that there were three former staff members of the 9-11 Commission, two of whom were lawyers.
I don't think it's too much of a coincidence that they were lawyers, because the kind of argument that these people make in their testimony to the court case is a clever sort of lawyer's trick.
But clearly it's based on an absurd argument.
What they're saying is, first of all, they're using this idea of material support, quote-unquote, which is a legal term in the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act, which essentially forbids anyone from giving not just real material support, material assistance or money to a group which is listed as a terrorist organization, but any service, quote-unquote.
And they have interpreted the failure of the Iranian immigration authorities at their border posts or in their airports to stamp visas of people coming in, in this case the al-Qaeda future hijackers coming into Iran, as a service which provides the, quote, material support, unquote, to al-Qaeda's 9-11 attacks.
And so that is the very clever but ultimately absurd argument.
And the reason it's absurd is, first of all, of course, failure to stamp a visa is only a service if it is done with the intention of supporting the terrorists in carrying out their actions.
And in this case, nobody involved in the 9-11 Commission report claims that Iran had any foreknowledge of the attacks.
And they explicitly stated in the report itself that there is no evidence that Iran knew that there was going to be an attack on the United States carried out by al-Qaeda in September of 2011.
Furthermore, what I found in a careful reading of the 9-11 Commission report is that it states very, very clearly in another section, which this team of people, these three people, were not involved in writing, that Iran did not stamp visas as a matter of practice.
It had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or even Saudis.
It was a general practice that they did not stamp visas in the passport.
They stamped visas outside the passport.
That was their practice, for whatever reason.
We don't know what the reason was.
And al-Qaeda found out about it and took advantage of it, but there's absolutely no reason to believe that it had anything to do with any connection between, understanding between, or anything else between Iran and al-Qaeda.
And so, the argument being made here is simply fundamentally dishonest.
And these people who make this argument, the reasons they're doing so, generally speaking, I'm sure that they are anti-Iran.
And they're pushing their own agenda through this 9-11 Commission report.
Beyond that, we don't really know much.
Is it a proven fact that these people even were in Iran at all?
Yeah, I mean, there's no question that they traveled through Iran to get back to Afghanistan, so that they could go through some training.
But, you know, the significance of it, of course, is not what is being claimed at all.
Now, the other side of the argument that's being made is that there was an associate of a top Hezbollah official who was on the same flight as three of the future hijackers from Beirut to Tehran in November 2000.
So, this is something that these three people all claim could not be a coincidence, and therefore supports the idea that Iran was giving material support to al-Qaeda.
In a sense, used in the law, which means that you have to be intentionally doing this in order to support the terrorists, knowing that they are carrying out terrorism.
You quote Paul Pillar, who helped write the bad NIE on Iraq in 2002 that lied us into war, who has turned into a critic now, and he told you that he wasn't buying it.
Is that right?
Yeah, the Intelligence Committee clearly never bought that argument.
Pillar was then the top intelligence analyst on Middle East and South Asia, the agency's primary analyst on that part of the world.
And he was the one who was in charge of doing national intelligence estimates for them.
And he was quite categorical in saying that these pieces of information that they used in the 9-11 Commission to suggest, to hint, that maybe Iran might have had something to do with this.
It's phony, and they do not show any Iranian complicity in the 9-11 attack.
Now, the other point that I was just about to make, and you cut off before I made it...
Sorry.
No, no, you didn't cut me off, I cut off myself.
The final point that needs to be made is that the 9-11 Commission report also states very clearly that they had intelligence saying that the Iranians were expecting a group to travel from Saudi Arabia to Beirut in November 2000, and that the group involved a top Hezbollah commander and Saudi Hezbollah activist, not Al-Qaeda.
It's plainly stated, it couldn't be any plainer than that, and yet these people pushing their own agenda have made this completely phony argument, suggesting that the presence of, not the presence, but the fact that there was an expectation on the part of the Iranians that there was going to be a group traveling from Saudi Arabia, was evidence that maybe there was some connection with Al-Qaeda.
That's how low people stoop, that's all I can say.
Alright, well, you've done it again.
Thank you very much.
Gareth Porter, this one will be at Truthout, y'all.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
