All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Welcoming back our regular guest, Gareth Porter.
He writes for the American Prospect, IPS News, and the Huffington Post, and always debunking our government's lies about Iran.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Hi, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
So basically, let me get this right.
Your thing is this.
You sit around and you wait for the government to say something about Iran, and then you say to yourself, hmm, that sounds like it's probably a lie, and then you write an article proving that it's a lie.
That's basically the process here, right?
Well, it's not quite so easy as that, actually.
On this story, I began more than a year ago on an investigation which actually was assisted by the Nation Institute, which gave me money to travel to Buenos Aires to do a little investigative trip there.
So actually, I worked on it for about five, six, seven months.
Wow.
And the article is in The Nation, that's thenation.com.
It's Bush's Iran-Argentina Terror Frame-Up.
And this goes right to the heart of the War Party's claims about Iran, Gareth, is they are the world's leading sponsor of terror, and don't just say they support Hamas and Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Oh, no.
They're supporters of worldwide terrorism.
Why just look at all those people that Hezbollah killed in Argentina?
Well, you know, this is obviously an issue that they love to exploit, because it's been on the record for so long.
The Clinton administration, before it began, immediately after the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in July 1994, to blame it on Iran and Hezbollah.
The Secretary of State was very quick to step forward at that point and blame the Iranians and the Israelis and the Argentines, chimed right in.
And that became the official line ever since then.
I mean, there's never been a slight deviation from that line on the part of either the Clinton nor Bush administration.
So you know, this is obviously a terrible terrorist crime.
You know, it's certainly one of the worst.
The Jews who were in Argentina, obviously not everybody who was killed was a Jewish person, but that would appear to have been the target.
You know, they were innocent of any involvement in the Middle Eastern conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, or the Israelis and then Hezbollah in Lebanon.
You know, one of the questions that immediately occurred to me was, why should Hezbollah or Iran have any interest in attacking Jews in Argentina when you have a war going on in Lebanon between Hezbollah, the Shiite pro-Iranian group in Lebanon, and Israeli occupation forces?
They're killing one another every week.
There's military skirmishes going on there.
Furthermore, as I point out in the article, Hezbollah had rockets, Katyusha rockets, which could reach across the border from Lebanon into Israel.
And in fact, after the infamous Qanaa massacre in southern Lebanon in 1996, that's exactly what the Hezbollah forces did.
They launched a rocket attack in retaliation against what they regarded as the worst Israeli crime in Lebanon up to that time, 100 innocent Lebanese who were killed in that town of Qanaa.
So, you know, this was among the clues that I had that there was something wrong with this case.
The way you just characterized it, you said, you know, right away, but in the article you say it was literally the day of the bombing that Secretary of State Warren Christopher announced that he implied at least, this is the Iranians, this is an act of those who wish to disrupt the peace process, he called it.
Absolutely.
I mean, there was no doubt that he was referring to Iran.
And there was no real ambiguity about who he was charging with the crime.
And the Israelis were even more explicit, of course, they said, you know, all the evidence, all the pointers, all the indications go to Iran here.
Even though, you know, we find out from the Israeli press a few weeks later that Israeli intelligence had found no real evidence that the Iranians or Hezbollah were involved in it.
Well, now, the narrative basically is it was a suicide bombing, therefore it was Hezbollah, it wasn't Al-Qaeda.
Well, this is, you know, this is the one thing that, you know, officials in the embassy and back in Washington were so absolutely certain of, including U.S. intelligence people, and I have done interviewing, which is not reflected in the article, with some of the intelligence analysts at the time who still maintain up to now, oh, you know, it had to be the Iranians and Hezbollah because it was a suicide bombing.
Well, you know, when you look more deeply into what the actual evidence shows, you know, the suicide bombing thesis is very, very shaky indeed.
And in fact, the evidence points to an alternative explanation for the bombing, which is that there was more than one bomb.
There was a bomb inside the building as well as a very, possibly one outside.
But there's no, I mean, the mysterious so-called suicide bomb car, this white Renault so-called traffic, which was the trade name of the van which was allegedly used, is one that, the trail of which leads one to believe that the Argentine police, not the Buenos Aires police, but the national police, planted evidence in order to lead investigators directly to the conclusion that A, it was a suicide bomb car, suicide bombing, and B, that the suicide bomb car had been sold to the terrorists by a certain Raul Tel-Odin.
And he was the Shiite, you know, from a family with a Shiite last name, who was the patsy for the investigation.
He was arrested within days.
Very conveniently, if you ask yourself how it could be that an extremely, otherwise extremely professional bombing would have left the number of the engine, the engine serial number, very visible on the engine block, which was found near the scene of the crime, it leads one to believe that either somebody was extremely stupid, in which case they would not have been likely to have pulled off such a job so well, or that this was a deliberately planted clue to lead precisely to Tel-Odin, who was then used to try to finger some poor guys who had been arrested in the tri-border area of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, who the CIA thought might be Hezbollah people.
And this Tel-Odin was offered a big bribe, supposedly a million dollars, to finger these alleged Hezbollah officials to say that they had gotten the alleged suicide bomb car, and he wouldn't do it, and they were released.
Now, toward the end of your article, you talk about this Iranian cultural outreach guy or something named Rabbani.
They had him on video shopping for a van like this from, I think you said, 15 or 18 months before.
That's right, and let me just take a couple of steps backward from that piece of alleged evidence and say that the heart of my story, what is really new about it, maybe not new to American readers because they're unfamiliar with the story, but new in the literature on this case, is that three American officials, or former officials, two who were in the embassy in Buenos Aires at the time, and one FBI official who is now head of the New Orleans office, but who was then the head of the Hezbollah office of FBI, and who was sent down in 1997 to assist the investigation, have told me in interviews that essentially there was no evidence gathered during the Clinton administration after the bombing, which pointed to Iran or Hezbollah.
There simply was nothing.
They had found absolutely no evidence, although there were false clues that turned out to be not legitimate or not real, which pointed in that direction, such as a couple of Iranian defectors who were later discredited, but no real evidence.
The fact that two top diplomats in the embassy and the head of the FBI team who went down there have said that there was no evidence is news, and I think it really should cause the discrediting of the official line that, oh, the Argentines have proven that the Iranians are behind this.
Just to go back, then, to this alleged clue or alleged evidence having to do with photographic surveillance videotape.
They obviously had the Iranian embassy officials under surveillance, and they were videotaping them day by day.
They had videotape of this cultural attache, Mohsen Rabbani, shopping for a white van or shopping for a van.
To shop for a van, by the way, in 1994 in Buenos Aires meant that you were shopping essentially for a white traffic van, because basically there was no van that you could use for small hauling that was not a Ronald van, and virtually all the more white.
That was not a clue at all, and the FBI agent, James Bernazani, was very frank to tell me that that was essentially a meaningless piece of evidence.
Well, and it sounds like, you know, am I assuming too much that they said, oh, I know, well, we want to pin this on Hezbollah.
We have old stock footage of this guy shopping for a van.
Let's pretend that it was a white van like that that blew up outside.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, you know, there's no doubt that this was a setup.
It was a frame-up from the very beginning, and, you know, this leads to a number of other questions which I could only just begin to adumbrate in my article.
This goes well beyond the scope of my article, which is who really was behind this, and, you know, one has to have very, very deep suspicion that the culprits in the terror bombing in 1994 in Buenos Aires were anti-Semitic right-wing military people who had connections with those war criminals who were set free, essentially, who were not set free, who were never prosecuted or never imprisoned for their crimes during the dirty war in Argentina in the 1970s.
Now, you have to understand that, despite the fact that when a democratic regime came into power in Argentina in the 1980s, that the military was adamant about not being prosecuted for those crimes.
And when the democratic regime went ahead and passed a law that said they were liable, then there were military uprisings.
There were three military uprisings in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which very seriously intimidated the democratic politicians in Buenos Aires and resulted, essentially, in no one actually being held accountable for those crimes during the dirty war.
The other point I want to make very quickly, and I know that I'm overwhelming people with details here, but these are very important.
During the dirty war, the Jews who were very active in liberal left politics in Argentina, they were the elite, educated intelligentsia, you know, they were a large part of that intelligentsia, and they were targeted in disproportional terms by the right-wing military.
And they were treated more harshly than other prisoners, according to those who followed this very closely, who I interviewed in Buenos Aires.
There is no doubt in my mind that there is a connection between those people and both the bombing of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the bombing of the Jewish Community Center in 1994.
And, you know, people that I talked with talked about a culture of impunity in Argentina, which has never really lifted, which clearly means that people in the military who were involved in those crimes know that they're not going to be punished.
And so they had the motive, which is anti-Semitism.
They had the opportunity, which is the knowledge that they would, well, they had the opportunity because they had the ability to carry out bombing.
They had the explosive experts and the access to explosives.
And they had the reason to believe that they would not suffer any consequences from it.
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess if you know that any murders you commit are going to be blamed on Iran, I mean, hell, does that mean I can go rob a bank, a federally insured bank, and then just, you know, be happy to know that the government is going to blame it on Iran so I can get away with it?
I think that was a powerful incentive at that point, that basically these people knew that it could be bobbed off on someone else.
Yeah, well, that's always interesting, you know, in a cover-up like this or, you know, the wrong people blamed for political reasons, the guilty go free.
So whoever it was that killed those people is still free today rather than rotting in a cage like they belong.
Absolutely.
Those people are walking the streets and laughing up their sleeves that this investigation and the headlines that have accompanied, you know, the Interpol vote last November that voted to put five ex-Iranian officials on their red list because the Argentine prosecutors who based their case on a lot of empty rhetoric and no real evidence had accused Iran and Hezbollah of that crime.
And so now, has anybody been successfully prosecuted for this?
No, there's been no successful prosecution.
The person that I call the patsy, Tel-El-Din, or Tel-Jedin, I guess is how you pronounce it in Spanish or in Arabic, is free because his case was thrown out because, you know, it was proven that the prosecutor, the prosecuting judge, had tried to pay him a bribe, had actually bribed him to name some high-ranking Buenos Aires police officials as having been implicated in the crime.
This was back in 1996.
And the funny thing is, the amusing thing is, that that bribery was actually videotaped by the Argentine secret police, the Argentine intelligence agency.
And it was actually shown, it was leaked to an investigative journalist, it was shown on Argentine TV in April 1997.
But still, the guy, you know, remained in prison, and the Argentine officials who were then arrested were in prison for several years before the case was finally thrown out.
And the prosecuting judge had to resign in, you know, basically having been accused of irregularities, serious irregularities in the case.
All right, now, another detail of this I want to explore is the bomber.
Supposedly, there was a suicide bomber named Barrow, and he's the guy who did it, right?
This identification of the so-called suicide bomber as a Hezbollah militant named Hussein Barrow shows up, supposedly, according to the official line, it initially shows up in late 2001, because the Argentine secret police, the Argentine intelligence, along with the CIA, had hired an informant to go to Lebanon and to try to penetrate Hezbollah to find out who the bomber was.
And the story that is told is that this informant then tells them this completely incredible story, that he just happened to live nearby a young guy who had been in Hezbollah but was now out, but who had sat in on all these important meetings where they talked about all their most secret operations, and he was now, you know, just chatting with his friend and telling him that one of the things that he learned was that the bomber in Argentina was this fellow Barrow.
The whole thing, you know, just frankly, it stinks from the very beginning.
It's simply not credible.
And the interesting thing is that the Argentine intelligence official who was in charge of the case testified before a court in 2003 that he had entertained the Barrow theory for a while, but had quickly essentially dismissed it because he found out that when he asked some questions, the informant was not responsive, and he intimated that he felt he was being lied to.
So something funny was going on there.
We don't know what.
We may never know what was actually happening, but the bottom line is that there's every reason to believe that the name came from Israeli intelligence, from the Israeli government.
In fact, in 2003, the Israelis claimed credit for the fact that they had identified Barrow.
And here's another cockamamie story.
They claimed in two different news articles that were published in 2003, they claimed that they had an audio tape of the last phone call made by Barrow to his family, saying that he was soon going to join his brother, who had a suicide bombing himself in Lebanon against the Israelis, that he was going to join his brother soon.
Well, it turned out that that was simply falsehood.
There was no such tape.
There was no such evidence of a final call.
It was all made up.
Well, what's the proof that it was all made up?
That the Argentine prosecutors never mentioned it in their 801-page indictment.
There was no mention whatsoever of any such call or any evidence of such call.
All right, so bottom line here is all indications are that it was right-wing crazies within the Argentine government who did this, rather than the Iranians, and that the ambassador to Argentina, the American ambassador to Argentina, did not believe the story.
His deputy did not believe the story.
And the FBI, the head of the FBI's Hezbollah unit, did not believe the story.
Well, I would put the wording slightly differently.
I cannot account for what they believed or didn't believe.
All I can tell you is that they told me we had no evidence.
We kept looking for it, and we thought that the Iranians must be guilty, but we couldn't find any evidence.
And, you know, the FBI, the head of the FBI team, Bernazani, went further, and he said that basically what he found when he got there was that not only did they not have any forensic, real forensic evidence, but they were indulging in a kind of exercise called link analysis, which used phone records to try to make a circumstantial case for Iranian guilt.
And he said, he was appalled by this use of link analysis.
He said, you know, that's very dangerous.
You could use that to prove, to link my telephone with Bin Laden.
So, you know, essentially he was saying that the investigation had ventured into, to try to prove their case, they'd gone to such lengths that were really outrageous.
All right, it's Bush's Iran-Argentina terror frame-up, Argentina terror frame-up, in The Nation magazine.
And now, I'm sorry, did I say the prospect earlier?
It is The Nation, if I got that right.
That's right, yes.
Nation Online.
Right.
Well, let me ask you this now.
I'm just going to put you on the spot.
I assume you know something about it.
Lockerbie, Scotland.
There's a whole scandal, Gareth, that the Libyans were framed up, and that they really didn't do it, that Gaddafi offered them the sacrifices so that he could cozy back up to the West, and that, at least this is, you know, the latest story I've read, that really it was the Syrians who did it, but Bush Sr. was trying to bribe the Syrians into helping be part of the UN coalition that invaded Iraq, or bombed Iraq in 1991, and so therefore they wanted to cover it up and blame it on the Libyans.
Do you know anything about that?
Well, I can't say I don't know anything, but, I mean, I haven't investigated it deeply myself.
What I have seen is that they did have, you know, some forensic evidence, and eyewitness evidence that pointed to the Libyans.
There may be something wrong with it if you go more deeply into the evidence.
I don't know.
What I can tell you is that one of the Iranian defectors, who later turned out to be, you know, as it seems that they all are in one way or another, unreliable and not really credible, had in fact charged that the Iranians were behind it.
And the CIA actually, you know, there were a number of analysts in the CIA who have, you know, had at that time, and I think still have a very strong anti-Iranian bent, a very strong animus against Iran, who believed that Iran in fact was behind the Lockerbie bombing.
And I think some of those people still hold to that theory, even though they were never able to find any evidence to support it, except for, you know, this defector who later turned out to be, again, a dud, essentially a fabricator.
So, you know, just all I know is that it was blamed on Iran at one point.
The CIA did in fact believe that, and there were those who were saying that, you know, and this may be connected with what you're suggesting, there were those who were suggesting that it really was Iran, and that for political reasons, the Clinton administration decided to blame it on Libya, because it was more politically convenient.
But of course, this linked up with the whole phony political line, which, you know, Louis Freeh, the Clinton's FBI director, who was pushing this line that, well, Iran is really the terrorist behind, you know, the Kobar Towers, behind everything else, and the Clinton administration is protecting Iran by refusing to really pursue this case.
Well, you know, I think that the real problem was that Louis Freeh was being manipulated by the Saudis, and he refused to face the truth.
So, I mean, there is this fiction that goes back to the Clinton administration, that Louis Freeh and the right-wingers have been saying for many, many years that Clinton was cozying up to the Iranians, and really didn't want to face the truth about Iranian responsibility for terrorism.
Yeah, that's interesting, because the Kobar Towers thing has been coming back up lately.
That guy Barrett, I think his name is, at the Village Voice, did that article about Giuliani's business partner over there at the Interior Ministry in Qatar, and how it was at his farm where Osama Bin Laden stayed, and the explosives went through for the Kobar Towers, that that was al-Qaeda's first attack.
Yeah, guess what?
Against combat forces occupying the Saudi desert.
Then they tried to blame it on Saudi Hezbollah, somehow, an offshoot of something or other, make-believe.
I actually have not seen that article, believe it or not.
I'll have to check that out.
Oh, yeah, it's great.
I interviewed the guy, too.
Okay.
It's on anti-war radio.
I forget the guy's name here.
I'll try to see if I can find a chance to Google it while you're answering my next question, which is, and I'd really love to see you look into these bombings, and like you've done with this Argentina story, look into the Kobar Towers and Lockerbie, and set me straight, because you're good at this.
That is on my agenda, absolutely.
I'm going to do that.
Okay, great.
Okay, now, we still have time.
I can keep it to the top of the hour?
Sure.
Okay, great.
Again, it's Gareth Porter from IPS News, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Huffington Post.
You can find all his IPS stuff, antiwar.com slash Porter, including this one, which is just, I don't know what we'd do without you, Gareth.
It's how the Pentagon planted a false story, and this is where you went through the entire pseudo-Golfotankan incident that happened in the Persian Gulf a few weeks back, and you went back, all the different statements by all the different factions and all the different offices and all the different spokesmen to figure out who knew what when and who made up which lies about what happened there at what time, and you did such a great job.
I was wondering if you could just kind of give us the basic outline of that for the audience today.
Well, sure.
I mean, you know, the key point here is that, you know, the original story when it came out was a bit mysterious.
We didn't know what the provenance of this sort of exaggerated, you know, story about a near battle at sea that involved a, you know, mysterious threat to blow up U.S. warships that had been made supposedly by Iranian boats, where this really came from.
And I think, you know, what I was able to do by sort of going back and saying, well, when exactly did this happen, and then what was the sequence of events that followed in the next 48 hours, you know, you begin to see more clearly that, first of all, you know, it happened very early in the morning on the 6th of January, which is a Sunday morning, Washington, D.C. time.
And for the next, what, the next 24 hours and more, 27 hours, nothing happened.
That is to say, there was no public information given out.
There was no press release.
There was no claims of any sort of event that occurred from the Pentagon, from the Fifth Fleet headquarters, or anywhere else.
Then, at 4 a.m.
Bahrain time, 11 a.m., I'm sorry, 11 a.m.
Bahrain time, 4 a.m.
Washington time, the next day, you get a press release from the Fifth Fleet headquarters, which basically, you know, described the incident in very moderate terms.
I mean, it did accuse the Iranians of aggressively maneuvering, whatever that means.
You know, I mean, that's a very vague term, which could mean anything.
I mean, they were hot-dogging in their boats, and we didn't like it.
But it did not say anything about the U.S. Navy almost fired on one or more boats, that there was a threat to blow up a U.S. warship, that they dropped something in the water that turned out that might have been explosive.
None of that was in this press release.
You know, it was the closest thing to a routine.
The reason that it was published, of course, is that the decision had already been made in Washington to play this up.
In other words, by then, it was later in the day, on Monday, and the Pentagon had already decided that it was going to put out a story that made this into a major international incident.
So the Fifth Fleet put out a press release, which was quite different, having already been informed, obviously, that Washington had made a decision that they were going to do more with it.
And so I find that very interesting.
And then the next point, perhaps the key point, is that we can now trace all these exaggerated, sensational stories about what happened in the Strait of Hormuz to a briefing given by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Brian Whitman.
He gave a briefing on the record that morning, very early that morning, to Pentagon correspondents.
What we now know is that he then went off the record and gave them all these juicy details, which were not supposed to be quoted.
One journalist, however, made a mistake and cited him as the source for one of these juicy details in one of the articles.
So that gave away the story that it was, in fact, a relatively high-ranking official of the Pentagon who gave out the story.
And we know that Brian Whitman does not create a story out of whole cloth without having been authorized to do so by the top brass of the Pentagon.
So there is very, very strong circumstantial evidence that Bob Gates, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, was in on the decision to release that story, to puff up, to blow up the story into something that scarcely resembled the reality.
Right.
So just bottom line, the Navy, when it happened, said, eh.
And then the Pentagon grabbed their bullhorn and said, oh my God, look what happened, everybody.
That's right, exactly.
I mean, there's every reason to believe that the Navy itself would not have run off and turned this into a major crisis, that this was something that was entirely cooked up in Washington by the White House and Gates.
And clearly, you know, there was White House influence on this because it was useful for Bush's trip to the Middle East to push his idea that Iran is a regional military threat.
Right.
OK.
And now this is the key point here.
Is it right that it's your view that they seized on this in order to make it easier for Bush to try to rally reluctant Arab states, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, et cetera, our Sunni Arab allies against Iran just, you know, in the long term and in terms of economics and sanctions and weapons deals and that kind of thing versus the idea that, you know, hey, this is Dick Cheney getting Robert Gates under control and that he's perhaps back in the driver's seat and we're back where we were a year ago headed toward war?
Absolutely.
I think we are not where we were a year ago.
Things constantly change and shift.
Our power relations change.
And I think that there is now very, very powerful evidence, as I said before in your show, that the hawks, the people who really want to attack Iran militarily, are very much on the defensive on that issue.
On the other hand, as part of the deal, if you will, under which the hawks have been, you know, brought under control or as Fallon put it last year, you know, put the crazies put back in the box.
I think that both Rice and Gates have essentially sold their soul to a political line that is violently anti-Iranian, that is full of lies and deception in order to pursue a diplomatic political line in the Middle East that the White House insists on.
So, you know, it's a kind of, and this, of course, is an interpretation.
I won't be able to prove this.
But I think, you know, the circumstantial evidence supports it, that there is a kind of fix here, a kind of deal under which Bush and Cheney have agreed, OK, we're not going to launch an attack against Iran and we won't help Israel do it either because the consequences would be too dire.
And the politics of it now don't look good.
But in return, Gates and Rice and their minions have agreed to go along with a completely fraudulent political line about Iran as a threat in order to do a number of things that the Bush administration wants to do in the Middle East.
And I have to say that here's where, you know, a kind of traditional sort of realist analysis comes in here to suggest that the bureaucratic interest in the national security state, particularly the Pentagon and its industrial allies, its military industrial allies, plays a big role in this because, you know, they just announced a $20 billion arms sale deal to Saudi Arabia for over 10 years or so.
This is the kind of a deal that makes absolutely no sense in terms of the national interest whatsoever.
But the Pentagon is always in favor of it.
They've never found an arms sale deal they didn't like.
I wonder why.
But they'd rather keep the wars cold than hot for financial reasons.
That's right.
Exactly.
Not just for financial reasons, but because the military knows full well that, you know, an actual war would be disastrous for them.
I mean, the Navy would suffer, would not be unscathed.
You know, I'm not saying that there are no naval officers or other military officers who are not, you know, hungering for a fight.
But the people who run the military, the top brass, who are managers and who are, you know, in a sense like, you know, executives of very, very large multinational firms, they have to consider what the consequences are for their assets.
Right.
And I think, you know, on balance, they say, no, we don't want a war.
We want to, we're happy to have enough tension to justify what we're doing.
And, you know, the goodies, the toys that we have, but we don't want a war.
Well, this still remains very dangerous game for Rice and Gates and the brass to be playing because, I mean, it's compromise as you describe it.
And admittedly, as you said, you're speculating about it as best you can tell.
But this compromise is basically, well, it's sort of like the Senate did with the Kyle Lieberman Act.
They basically go ahead and affirm every false claim about Iran, but then say, oh, but we don't want you to go to war against them.
But, yes, everything that you say about them is right, including they're killing our guys in Iraq, which is, you know, that's a lie that's making a comeback again.
I still have yet to see any evidence of it.
You're absolutely right.
I think that's a very good analogy, actually.
I mean, that's a costus belli.
Look, if it's true that the Iranians are at war against the American army in Iraq, then, well, they started it and we've got to kick their ass.
I mean, that's the way it goes.
So even if that's a lie, if everybody opposed to it, Rice and Gates and Hillary Clinton and the brass in the Pentagon and everybody else are saying, okay, Dick Cheney, we'll accept and repeat your lies, but we still don't want a war, they're basically handing them a war on a silver platter.
Well, I mean, I think that you're right, that there's high risk associated with this kind of game.
And it is extremely dangerous, particularly in the longer run.
I mean, you know, we may well escape without a war this year or next year, but in the long run this sort of system leads to war.
That's the problem.
Eventually it's going to lead to war.
There's going to be somebody and some set of circumstances which will be conducive to taking that kind of a risk.
And this is the kind of behavior that builds the cases that too many, too large a segment of the U.S. political elite buys into and therefore makes it possible, enables that kind of behavior.
All right.
Tell us, what are you working on next?
Well, you know, I want to actually go back to the incident in the Strait of Hormuz and try to reconstruct what actually happened there.
Oh, by the way, you only have one minute.
Okay.
This leads me to a very quick summation of the key point that the New York Times and the media generally are misleading the American public by continuing to suggest that these boats were armed and that they were somehow a potential threat.
And that simply was not the case at all.
They were essentially unarmed or completely unarmed.
They could not have harmed the U.S. ships.
They did not have the kind of weapons, contrary to the article in the New York Times yesterday, which, again, suggested that quite explicitly.
All right.
Well, you stay after them.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
All right.
Appreciate it a lot.
Hey, everybody, that's Gareth Porter from The Nation, The American Prospect, IPS News, The Huffington Post.
His latest for The Nation is Bush's Iran-Argentina terror frame-up.
Latest for IPS, How the Pentagon Planted a False Story.
That's at antiwar.com slash porter right now.
Thanks again very much for your time today, sir.
Glad to be here.
