All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos, 95.9 in Austin, Texas, and welcoming back to the show our regular guest, Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and investigative journalist.
You can find him at the American Prospect, the Huffington Post, and IPS News.
We run all his IPS stuff at antiwar.com/porter.
You may recognize his name, and I interview him almost every week because almost every single article he writes is worthy of discussion, I think.
And I really appreciate you making time for us again today, Gareth.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Glad to be here.
Let's see, White House fought NIE over an old charge, and basically what you do here is you go through the history of Bush-Cheney administration accusations against Iran and the changing shape back and forth and around again in terms of what exactly the United States government has been accusing them of doing in terms of nuclear weapons.
So I guess could you just get the ball rolling and tell us where they started and how they started to shift it?
Well, the pattern that we see when you look at the outline of the evolution of the Bush administration's policy toward Iran's nuclear program is that when the first evidence came out that Iran was moving toward a uranium enrichment facility, the Bush administration immediately said, well, that's prima facie evidence that they want a nuclear weapon, that they have, in fact, a nuclear weapon program already in being.
In other words, simply having uranium enrichment itself was considered the evidence that they were actually working on nuclear weapons.
Well, that sounds familiar.
That's about where we are this week again, aren't we?
Well, that's exactly right.
Okay, now we've got to go the long way around to how we got here.
Yes, what we're talking about is going a full circle.
But in the meantime, what happens is then Iran moved to an agreement in late 2003 with the European three, Britain, France, and Germany, under which they agreed voluntarily to suspend any uranium enrichment-related activity.
When that happened, the Bush administration was sort of caught out, and they had to come up with a new basis for accusing Iran of seeking nuclear weapons.
What happened was that was the origin of the notion of a secret nuclear weapons program, which was going on behind the scenes, of course, covertly, which, of course, was an effort to fill the vacuum left by this inconvenient Iranian policy of suspending enrichment activities.
So that's when John Bolton begins to come forward, and he appears to be a key factor in this, coming up with the idea of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.
It was he who first articulated the idea, and it's interesting, I mean, I didn't cover this in my story, but Bolton developed this notion of the Persian bomb, which is an interesting concept, because at that point, you still had the reformist Iranian government of Mohammed Qadmi in power, and the neo-cons hated the reformist government, because they believed they stood in the way of regime change.
So he accused Qadmi of having the Persian bomb, which he admitted had nothing to do with sort of fanatical Islamic regime.
He referred to it as a nationalist phenomenon, a nationalist Iranian phenomenon.
That's just part of the background of that Bolton concept of a secret Iranian bomb program.
Now, what year was that?
That was before?
That was 2004.
Oh, okay.
2004, before the election of Ahmadinejad as president.
So then, you know, that continues to be the Bush administration line through 2004, and it's reiterated by Bolton and then by the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, Gregory Schulte, in November 2004, after the Iranians then reached a new agreement with the European Three, Britain, France, and Germany, in mid-November 2004, under which the Iranians extended the regime enrichment suspension, and the Europeans, in turn, agreed that they would negotiate with Iran a new agreement, a formal agreement, which would meet Iran's concerns about its own security and about the political issues surrounding the Middle East.
So there was clearly a quid pro quo involved in that agreement.
In any case, that was the situation that the Bush administration faced in 2004, 2005.
Now, that's when, in early 2005, the Bush administration called for a commission, a new NIE, on Iran's nuclear program, among other issues, but particularly the nuclear program.
So clearly, what Cheney, Bush, et al. wanted was an intelligence finding that would back up this Bolton line of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.
But instead, the 2005 NIE, which came out in May 2005, failed to back that idea.
They came up with no evidence to support it, or concluded that there was not clear evidence of a secret nuclear weapons program.
And so that left the neocons again out in the cold.
This situation was clearly still rankling them in 2006, when a new situation arose, when Iran began to enrich uranium once more, because the negotiations with Europe did not pan out.
The Europeans backed off, under pressure from the United States, backed off the negotiation of a substantive agreement in which they would offer a real security concession to the Iranians.
So the Iranians then began uranium enrichment.
And then you had a situation where the Bush administration hardliners wanted to have it both ways.
They wanted to cite the uranium enrichment, but also a secret uranium enrichment program, that they alleged the Iranians had, paralleling the publicly acknowledged one.
And the purpose of that, then, was to be able to argue that the Iranians could not be allowed to have even very, very limited uranium enrichment, very carefully limited to, you know, far below weapons-grade uranium fuel, nuclear fuel, because that would then allow them to feed the expertise they got from the above-ground, publicly acknowledged uranium enrichment program.
They could feed that into the secret uranium enrichment program, which supposedly would be much farther along, and would be using P-2 centrifuges, which are more efficient than the P-1, very primitive P-1 centrifuges that they were using in the Natanz facilities.
So again, all of these arguments had a very clear-cut political purpose for the Bush administration to push the political line that they were then involved in carrying out against Iran.
The issue that they, again, had in mind, they wanted to push forward their argument in the NIE that began in 2006, and we now tend to forget that it was, in fact, not in 2007, but in 2006, that work on that NIE began.
So that's really the historical background to the huge fight that took place in 2006 and 2007 over the question of a secret nuclear weapons program.
And again, we now know that the CIA, very early in the process, came to the conclusion that there was not evidence of a secret nuclear weapons program, and in fact, they came to the conclusion that the evidence did not support that, and that was then opposed by Cheney.
He did not want that CIA conclusion to go into the NIE, and he deliberately delayed it, demanding that there be full consensus on the judgment about the secret nuclear weapons program.
And that then brings us into 2007 and the discovery of this new evidence that turned things around and allowed the intelligence community to come together and agree, all 16 agencies agreeing on the new conclusion that Iran no longer had a nuclear weapons related program.
And now, Seymour Hersh wrote The Next Act in November of 2006.
He quoted, well, that was, I guess, the second story to talk about the fact that there was a new NIE.
Philip Giraldi, I believe, first wrote about it in the American Conservative magazine, and then Seymour Hersh followed up with The Next Act, and there he said that not only could the CIA find no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in November of 2006, but that also he talked to sources inside the Israeli Mossad, and that they actually had no evidence either.
Tezipi Livni, I forget how to pronounce her name exactly, but the foreign minister of Israel in one breath, apparently behind closed doors, as revealed in Heretz, says, you know, Iran's really not a threat to us, even if they had nuclear weapons, which they don't, they're not really a threat to us.
We don't have any evidence they're making nuclear weapons, and then she's the same one apparently, you know, telling the world that the CIA now is wrong, and that they do in fact have a secret nuclear weapons program, etc.
Well, that's right.
I mean, Israel, of course, is arguing very vociferously against the conclusion of the NIE, and Hersh did cite an interview that he had with a high Israeli intelligence official, unnamed of course, which very strongly defended the view that Iran did in fact have a secret nuclear weapons program which paralleled the public one, and which had both weaponization components or component and a secret uranium enrichment program.
So that was definitely the Israeli intelligence position, and there's no doubt that the hardliners in the Bush administration were working very closely with the Israeli intelligence people to promote that idea right through 2006 and into 2007.
Larissa Alexandrovna from RawStory, at her blog, atlargely.com today, is saying that the terrorist group, the Mujahideen al-Khalq, and their group, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, that they're due to have a press conference today where they're supposedly going to reveal some new evidence of a secret program.
What do you think?
Should we listen to the MEK, Gareth?
Well, you know, they have a record of overwhelmingly wrong claims about the Iranian nuclear program.
Really the only one in which they were even close to being right was the first one in August 2002 when they identified the Natanz facility.
There are two problems with that, of course.
One is that the facility was really not intended to be secret.
The Iranians were under no obligation to report, I should say, to IAEA the existence of that facility until they introduced the actual nuclear material into the facility, and that was not until later.
But the second thing is that it's clear now that it was not the MEK that actually made the discovery.
They got the information from another intelligence service, not the United States.
A recent book about the Iranian nuclear program called The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran revealed that it was, in fact, the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, which actually had made the discovery and which used the MEK to release the information to the public.
Yeah, that's what Scott Ritter says in his book, Target Iran, as well, that basically the NCRI is a front for Mossad, or at least in that case.
They definitely have been used by Mossad to put out information that they wanted to release to the public.
Yeah.
And I'm sorry for harboring this, because it's sort of beside the point, but I think it's interesting that the Mujahideen al-Khalq is the conduit for this information when this group is a cross between the Heaven's Gate cult and the Fourth International or something, Saddam Hussein's old terrorists now working for us.
I mean, what are we doing here?
Well, this is a very interesting point, which I think deserves more coverage, and undoubtedly there will be more coverage in the future of this question.
The MEK obviously has been used by the Bush administration as a source for its information on both the nuclear program and other matters relating to Iran and Iraq.
On the other hand, I doubt very much if people in the intelligence community take the MEK seriously.
In fact, we know that the intelligence analysts regard the MEK as complete fabricators and as completely unreliable.
So it's the same thing that you had in Iraq, the split between the neoconservatives who like to use the information from their clients and then stovepipe that information apart from the intelligence community on one hand and the intelligence community rejecting that kind of information in their own analyses on the other.
All right, I think the bottom line here, Gareth, what people want to know is just how much of a blow to Cheney's policy has this NIE been.
I think we're agreed that the Iranian nuclear program, weapons related or otherwise, has always simply been a pretext for some wild dream of regime change, and I'm not certain that the policy has changed.
George Bush certainly has indicated that everything's just as it was before and it's time to seek more sanctions and continue on this path to war.
What do you think?
Well, I think it's not just Bush, but I think even Gates and Rice are on board in trying to carry on as though nothing has happened.
This is a terrible embarrassment for them, not just Bush, but for everybody in the administration because they are in an exposed position, pushing a line which makes no sense, and they know it.
But they're not going to back off publicly now and admit that.
That's too embarrassing.
So I think that all of the top officials of the administration will soldier on, at least for the time being, but the question is whether down the road in 2008, Rice and Gates will prevail in the White House to say, look, we're dead in the water here.
We're going to have to make a final adjustment in our policy and change our position on negotiations with Iran so that we can try to get something started.
I think there's no doubt that they will try to do that.
Whether Bush will agree is another question.
I have my doubts about that.
But it's possible that you could see a final adjustment towards real negotiations with Iran.
I have to believe that the Iranians would be not interested in that, but I, again, could be wrong about that.
What do you mean, they've been seeking peace agreements with us all this time?
Well, they have, but I think they now believe that they would do better with a Democratic administration, waiting for a Democratic administration, which appears to be in the offing.
And of course, they could still change their mind at the last minute if the signals change about American politics.
But one has to believe the Iranians are going to look very carefully at what their best chance would be, whether it's to negotiate with a dead, dying administration, which they don't trust, have no reason to trust, or a new administration coming in, which is more likely to deal seriously with them.
Very interesting stuff, everybody.
Read what Gareth writes, it's antiwar.com/porter.
Thanks very much for your time, sir.
Thanks for having me, Scott, as always.
