06/03/08 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
And the guest that we interview most frequently on this show, well, that I interview most frequently on this show, is the great independent historian and journalist, Dr. Gareth Porter.
He writes for IPS News, and all of his IPS articles can be found at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
His most recent article is actually the spotlight on Antiwar.com today, and it is called, How Cheney Outfoxed His Foes on Iran and EFPs.
It is the Cossus Belli Hunter Killer, Gareth Porter.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
Hi, how are you, Scott?
Well, yours is my favorite kind of violence.
It's the written word kind, and what you do is you take lies told primarily by Dick Cheney and his minions in this government with the aim toward starting the next war, and you take those lies and you smash them into tiny little pieces.
And I sure appreciate that.
That's why I bring you on the show all the time.
You got these guys numbered, Gareth.
I don't know where you found it.
Well, this is all, of course, stuff in the public realm already.
It's pieces of evidence that are right there in front of our eyes.
And, you know, I blame myself for not having put this together earlier.
It was all there, and I knew it was all there, but I just never really took the time which is necessary to put the pieces together, and that's what I did in this piece.
But what I showed was that when Cheney tried to get the military to put out a draft briefing on the EFP issue back in January of 2007, and it was circulated to the State and Defense Departments and to the NSP staff, they condemned it as simply untrue, because what they were saying, the military was saying that Iran was manufacturing these EFPs and shipping them to the Shiite militiamen of the Mahdi Army.
And basically they said there was no evidence to support this.
Well, now, if I remember right, Gareth, when I first talked to you on this show a year and a half ago, January 2007, that was exactly the story, was that Bush had lost the election in 2006, the midterms, the Democrats had taken over, Rumsfeld was gone, they brought in Gates, the Baker Commission report was coming out, which was the blue ribbon panel of so-called wise men saying it's time to begin plans for withdrawal, and instead Bush seized on the Fred Kagan plan at AEI to go ahead and escalate the war instead, and in his speech in January, he debuted all these lies and new accusations against Iran, and one of the news stories, there were quite a few news stories debunking the role of Iran in providing these explosively foreign penetrators to Shiite militias in Iraq, but there was one particular news story that said that Rice and Gates and others on the National Security Council staff were unhappy with the intelligence, and they didn't want to debut the intelligence and start making the accusations until it could be sent back to the cook so that it would be a little more credible before they laid it all out for us.
That is correct, that was an LA Times story, and it was quite explicit about the unhappiness of Rice and Gates with what was being proposed.
What I didn't say at that time, and what I think helped to further solidify this storyline, or to basically nail down the storyline, is that the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormick, and he's the Assistant Secretary of State, actually, for Public Affairs, said on the record, in a briefing on January 24th, he was asked whether they had evidence that Iran was manufacturing these, and he said, well, you know, you don't have to find that these are made in Iran, there are other ways that Iran could be involved in this, and he specifically then pointed to the know-how, technical know-how, and of course, you know, we know that that was being supplied by Hezbollah originally, I mean, Hezbollah had the relationship with the Mahdi Army, not the Iranian.
We know that the Mahdi Army was not particularly the favorite of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it was the body of the Badr Corps, as we've said many times.
Right.
So what was really going on here was that the State Department and the Defense Department and NSD were pointing out, hey, you know, you don't have evidence that the Iranians are the ones supplying these EFPs.
The best we can do is to say that, you know, that Iran is involved in these networks, somehow applying the know-how, and that, of course, was a very indirect route.
Cheney's people in the military command there in Baghdad, at that point it was Odierno, Raymond Odierno, in fact, in January 2007, who was already out there, they did not want such an unexciting, complex web to be presented.
They wanted the dramatic but untrue version of the relationship between Iran and the EFPs.
So that was what was being proposed, and then the State Department was actually going on record as saying, well, you know, what we can say is that they're somehow involved in the networks by supplying know-how.
Even that was untrue.
But they were totally unwilling to go along with the version that was being cooked up by the military.
Now, what we didn't know at that point, of course, was that they were about to send the general who was to become lionized by the American media and Congress out to Baghdad to become the new commander, and that was really the key to the story.
Right, that is the key.
That was the part I left out in summing up, trying to take us back to January 2007.
There was a regime change going on right then.
George Bush, who calls himself a commander guy.
Any bad decision I make, it's not my fault, I only do what the generals tell me to do.
I'm a commander guy, he says, but then when they tell him what he doesn't want to hear, he fires them and replaces them, and that had just happened.
It was Casey and Abizaid had just been replaced by Petraeus and Admiral Fallon, right?
Exactly.
We knew that that was the key to the surge policy, which he was then about to make public and did make public on January 7th, wasn't it?
I've forgotten the exact date.
I don't know.
January 10th, was it?
Are we talking about when they laid out all the weapons in Iraq?
No, no, the Bush speech, which laid out the surge policy.
I don't know, but I'll find it right now.
It was a couple of days before that, and now I've flipped the exact date, but I think it was January 10th, if I'm not mistaken, or January 7th, one of the two.
Google's fetching it for me right here.
It's January 10th.
January 10th, okay.
So, of course, it was the day right after that, the day after that, that the military presented its briefing to the assembled reporters.
And it was supposed to be the briefing they had said, yeah, we'll have a briefing for you in a couple of days.
We'll send it back to the Cook.
We'll have it for you in a couple of days.
And then all of a sudden, they had it, but not in Washington, D.C., in Iraq.
They laid out all the evidence in Iraq, and it was Michael Gordon who wrote the big piece for the New York Times, right?
Right, and so the key here that I point out in my story to understanding the dynamics that were going on there is that on February 9th, Sean McCormick again went before his regular briefing corps there, the press corps, and said, well, you know, we're sure, we're confident that when the mid-level people get the next round, the next draft of the briefing, and they're happy with it, it will go then to the principals, and they will have a chance to review it to make sure it's in line with the facts.
Well, of course, that's not what happened at all.
There was never another round of consultations with the mid-level people, let alone the principals like Rice and Gates and Hadley.
In fact, what Cheney did was to do an end run around them and to basically instruct Petraeus before he went out to Baghdad to get the transfer of power from George Casey.
And that was done on the 8th of February.
Sorry, on the 10th of February there was the changeover ceremony.
And he was told that he would basically give the Cheney line in that briefing, which was what they had proposed in the first place, which was that Iran is manufacturing these things and shipping them to the Shiite militiamen through the IRGC Quds Force network.
And that's exactly what they said on February 11th.
He did an end run around the bureaucracy, because they did not accept the line that he was intent on putting forward, because they knew that what both Cheney and at this point then Petraeus were doing was setting up the Qassas Valley with Iran.
They were establishing a reason for going to war with Iran, which they knew Cheney was intent upon doing, and they were opposed to.
Now the celebrated, well, by you and I, and forgotten apparently by the rest of our society, NIE of last November 2007, which says that Iran abandoned whatever designs they were ever even looking at, nuclear program, back in 2003.
That NIE, as I believe you reported and Philip Giraldi reported, in the fall of 2006, the CIA was already working on that.
They were already ready.
I remember I wrote a blog entry on antiwar.com, release the Iran NIE.
That was in the fall of 2006.
So Cheney already knew that the CIA was working on, and the rest of the intelligence communities, were working on undercutting his case for a nuclear weapons program.
He needed another excuse to go to war with Iran.
That's right.
That's a very good point, Scott.
You've done an excellent job of connecting the dots.
He was a man in a hurry at that point in late 2006, early 2007, knowing that the ground was being, that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were in the process of cutting the ground out from under his case.
And so indeed he was much more eager to find a casus belli in the alleged Iranian role in Iraq, which he could then use to push the line of, you know, let's provoke war with Iran.
And of course, you know, we know that he did then ultimately make a specific proposal within the bureaucracy, within the Bush administration in June of, it was roughly June of 2007, which was to attack these bases, these IRGC bases, being connected with Iraq.
Right.
And not only that, to do an end run around the president of the United States, get the Israelis to start the war, right?
Is that what you're talking about?
That was one possibility, but, you know, I think that he really hoped to convince the president to do that and that this was a very elaborate process that Cheney was using.
And the key that I wanted to bring out here, you know, was his alliance with Petraeus.
Right.
That was the key to everything he was planning to do after, once Petraeus was chosen and he was, you know, running into opposition from basically everyone in the Washington national security bureaucracy, viewed his, this first draft of a military briefing in Baghdad as a means of advancing the Cheney case.
And they, they pounced on it right away and said, you know, we have to send this back and get it aligned with the other NIE, which was the NIE on Iraq, which was close to being finished in January of 2007.
And that NIE was not going to support the case that Cheney was making.
It was not going to support the idea that Iran was sending EFPs into, into the Shiite militiamen in Iraq.
It was saying, well, you know, we have evidence that they're training Shiite militiamen, but not that they are doing the EFPs themselves and sending them to Iraq.
So basically Petraeus' role was to go into Baghdad with the Cheney message, put out the briefing, and basically smash the strategy of the bureaucrats in Washington, which was to block Cheney's strategy of war against Iran.
Now, what about, was it, I'm sorry, I just said it and got it right.
Casey and Pace, were they just not on board for this?
Well, I mean, definitely.
We don't know what Casey's position was explicitly, but we know that basically it was the people who had been sent out in late 2006, specifically Odierno, who were carrying Cheney's water, and that Casey at least was not overriding the bureaucrats in Washington.
He was not overriding the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Definitely Pace was not on board.
We know that.
We know the Joint Chiefs were unhappy with the proposal that they were hearing from President Bush when they met in mid-December with Bush and the tank, and President Bush said, what do you think of bombing the nuclear sites of Iran, using the Air Force to carry out basically a strategic bombing operation, and not just the nuclear sites, but the entire list of military targets in Iran.
And the Joint Chiefs said, no, that's not a good idea.
The Air Force may have gone along with it.
We're not totally sure about that, but definitely the rest of the Joint Chiefs were opposed to it.
So Pace, we know, was not on board.
And we have reason to think that Casey was certainly not overriding the opposition of the Joint Chiefs in going ahead with the Cheney strategy.
Well, and we were all really worried, right, in January.
I guess you weren't quite as worried because you watched Rice talking to the, I guess, the Washington Post State Department reporter and saying, no, we're not going to bomb.
It's going to be a while.
The rest of us were freaking out, though, because they had not only put this yes-man, Petraeus, who is obviously what they call a perfumed prince there inside the Pentagon, but they also had put this guy, Admiral Fallon, in charge.
We didn't know too much about him, but that his career was based around naval aviation, and wouldn't he be the guy to put in place for airstrikes against Iran?
Well, yeah, that is the thought that most analysts watching the Fallon nomination thought, that that was the logic behind it.
And, indeed, that's because the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, had actually mentioned that in his explanation for why he nominated him.
And he may have suggested that to Bush and gotten Bush on board by mentioning his naval aviation background.
Later on, of course, Gates would mention that the reason he nominated him was because of his diplomatic prowess, his reputation for sort of carrying out military-to-military diplomacy in the Pacific, where he'd been a think tank.
Right, yeah, it turned out he knew a little bit more about how to be a military overlord of nation-states in different regions besides just dropping bombs on them.
Right, so we now understand much more clearly that Petraeus was really the key person who was being pushed by Cheney and his minions as the person who would do their bidding in Baghdad, and that Fallon was, on the other hand, the one who was being pushed by the Joint Chiefs and by Gates to block Petraeus' alliance with Cheney.
Right, and now, I think we bring this up probably in almost every interview, but I think it's worth repeating, just maybe even as a minor aside, that Kevin Berdner, who's the main spokesman for the U.S. military out of Iraq now, General Berdner, he came straight from the White House where his job was working with Dick Cheney?
Exactly, and he was then playing a key role.
He was lined up to play a key role in bringing out the evidence that Cheney wanted made public in order to support his proposal to bomb the IRGC base, which was on July 2nd, when Berdner gave that briefing, about the Hezbollah operative named Dokduk, as well as the Iraqi, who had been arrested, both had been arrested in March, in Karbala.
And they had, you know, they were under interrogation for weeks and weeks, and finally, on July 2nd, Berdner announces that Dokduk has given detailed information about the training that the Iranians were providing in Iran to the militiamen of the Mahdi army, or at least of the Shiites.
And that, of course, came days after, basically, the proposal by Cheney within the administration to bomb those IRGC bases.
And then, of course, the same day, you have Lieberman coming out publicly, supporting the bombing of the bases in Iran, based on that Berdner press conference.
So, everything was all being set up by the Cheney staff, Cheney himself, to forward his proposal to bomb Iran.
And now, I'm sorry, can you repeat the name of that guy, the Lebanese deaf mute guy?
Dokduk.
D-A-Q-D-U-Q, I believe is the way it was spelled.
Okay.
Because I just had an image in my mind of a history textbook from the year 2035, where his picture is right next to the picture of al-Libi, who they tortured into saying that Saddam Hussein was training them how to hijack planes and make chemical weapons.
Right, right.
Well, we don't, yes, we don't know, of course, anything about, in fact, what Dokduk actually said, but it is certain that he was regarded as the prize, in terms of the Cheney strategy.
That they thought, okay, this is what we'll put out, and this will disarm the opponents within the administration, and advance the case for war against Iran.
Is it fair to say that you know a lie is a really bad lie when Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor, refuses to sign on to it?
Yeah, that's a pretty good clue.
Well, when you have Gates, Rice, and Hadley all publicly, either directly or through their spokesmen, coming out and saying that this is untrue and that we can't support it, that's a very good clue that you have something big going on here, something really dangerous.
And in this case, I think, you know, they were all very much alarmed about what they saw Cheney trying to do.
Okay, now, details, details.
You know, I'm immersed in this stuff.
You're completely immersed in this stuff.
I read your articles all the time, and we talk about, you know, which general moved from where, and what Cheney did, and which reporter brought it up a year and a half ago, and all these little things.
But let's just get this straight in the big picture here.
Gareth, help explain to me.
TV keeps telling me that Iran is supplying the bombs that are killing our guys in Iraq.
True or false?
The bombs that are being used are at least, I would estimate, 99.5%, or 99.9% coming from Iraq itself.
I'm not going to suggest that there's not a single Iranian-made weapon in Iraq.
That would be ridiculous.
I know that there are some weapons that find their way into Iraq that were made in Iran.
But this, of course, is not the same as saying that there's a pipeline of weapons that are coming from the IRGC or from the Iranian government to the Iraqi Shiites.
But I've given some specific examples here where we know that the overwhelming majority, not just 55% or 65% or 75% or 85%, but virtually 100% of particular types of weapons that have been suggested, that the pro-war people have suggested are indicative of the Iranian role in Iraq, specifically rockets and mortars, are not Iranian-made rockets and mortars.
They are from old Iraqi government stocks, primarily with the possibility of a few that were manufactured in China that have found their way into the country.
And then looking at RPGs, the rocket-propelled grenade launchers, I've been working on a story on that, and I can tell you that the percentage of Iranian-made RPGs in the hands of the Shiite militiamen is close to zero.
It's close to zero.
So, I mean, that's the case that I'm making.
There are undoubtedly some weapons that have made their way into Iraq, but those are perfectly explainable in terms of the leakage of weapons from storehouses, from individuals and from weapons storehouses in Iran into the black market.
And I can tell you that the arms black market in Iraq is huge, and it involves virtually every major city, and you can buy virtually anything, any weapons system on that black market.
And there'll be more about that, I can guarantee you, in the future.
Right, yeah, I'm sure there will be, whether America's still there or not.
But so, we've been under a relentless assault in the media for a year and a half.
Actually, it's funny, because I think they kind of paused there for a little while last fall or last summer or something.
But basically, for intensive purposes, for a year and a half straight since Bush's speech in January 2007, they have been pushing hard on this line to make us believe that Iran is waging a proxy war against us, as Joe Lieberman says.
But what are we waiting for, in the words of the guys on Fox News?
How can we sit back and let the Iranians wage war against us in Iraq while we sit and do nothing?
They're damn liars, and they know they're damn liars, don't they?
I mean the administration, not the Fox News guy.
Can I interrupt to just highlight something you just said, which was that there was a pause last fall.
Indeed, there was a pause last fall, and the reason that there was a pause is that the U.S. military and State Department and Defense Department were all sort of examining very carefully whether it wasn't true that Iran was helping to restrain the Mahdi Army in its military operations.
And that's because the al-Maliki government, of course, was telling them repeatedly, and with great emphasis, that Iran is not playing a role of trying to destabilize us.
Iran is trying to help us by restraining the Mahdi Army, trying to restrain Sadr.
And they said it was because of Iran that Sadr agreed to the ceasefire of August 27, 2007, which was immediately very effective.
The rockets and mortars that had been hitting the Green Zone immediately stopped as soon as Sadr said we're imposing a ceasefire, a unilateral ceasefire.
And that was taken very seriously by American officials.
They understood that Sadr did, in fact, have control over his forces, and that when he said to stop, they did stop.
And therefore, it was being taken very seriously that Iranians were indeed playing a positive role in helping the United States to keep the level of violence at a minimum.
Right, which even, I mean, that detail as far as keeping Sadr in check is one thing, but ever since America championed the results of the January 2005 election, and really even the creation of the Constitution before that, but when George Bush held up those purple fingers and said, see, now this is legitimacy, and America decided the policy is, I guess they had no choice, the United Iraqi Alliance, those are our guys.
The Skiri and the Dawa Party and the Badr Corps, these are our guys.
And that being the case, the Iranians have been helping the American government install the Vichy puppet government of Jafari and then Maliki after him this whole time since January 2005.
It's in their interest to create the exact same government that America is creating here.
Well, let me just add one or two details to that point, which I think is a key point that I wish we could somehow drill into the heads of Democratic leaders in Congress.
There is one list of weapons which apparently was discovered, a list of weapons that were being provided by Iran to Shiite militias.
And this was reported in the press, although it somehow slipped into the black hole of memory.
That list was a list that was involved in the Badr Corps' relationship to Iran.
And it was more or less admitted, it was never denied by the Badr Corps, that yes, they had a list of weapons that were being provided to the Badr Corps by Iran and it involved sniper rifles and mortars.
And yet somehow or other, that piece of information has never become part of the political discourse about U.S. policy toward Iran and Iraq.
When Bergner was asked specifically last July in that briefing, what about the Badr Corps, aren't they getting assistance from Iran?
Aren't they getting weapons from Iran?
And you know what Bergner's answer was?
I have nothing to give you on that.
So, you know, the fix, as you, I think, quite well put it, the fix was on in terms of the Badr Corps, which they knew perfectly well, was much closer to Iran than the Mahdi army ever was.
Well, you know, I've been getting the truth out of you on this show pretty much every week for a year and a half here, but since 2005, if I could draw cartoons, the cartoon would be me standing talking to a brick wall.
I mean, what's the point of any of this when nobody apparently is able to learn, Gareth?
I mean, Iran is friends with the Badr Corps.
How hard is that?
Yeah, yeah, hello.
Is anybody home, I guess, is the question.
Yeah, and I want to go ahead and rather than just, you know, complaining without purpose, I want to, you know, give a call out here to ABC and CBS and NBC and CNN and, you know, Fox, NPR, all the different financial networks.
You people are looking for good reporting.
Hell, Wall Street Journal, not the editorial page, but the reporting side of the paper, you know, Chicago Tribune, L.A.
Times.
Do you need a reporter who can explain to you who's on whose side in Iraq?
Do you need a reporter who can explain where these EFPs are actually coming from?
His name is Gareth Porter.
He's published 10 million articles on all this stuff.
Every single fact in everyone I've read over the last year and a half stands the test of time.
All of them.
And it's just unforgivable that right in the middle of this big McClellan scandal, they bring it up again that we were lied into war, and the media guys are looking at each other saying, who, us?
And we're all saying, yeah, you.
We know it was you.
It's time to get the real reporters on there to tell the real story.
And instead, you have to go, you have to know to go to look at IPS News or know to go to look at antiwar.com to read Gareth Porter.
And it ain't fair.
It's time to get this shit straight.
Well, Scott, you know, I'm not going to disagree with anything you've said.
My thought in general over the last month in surveying the huge gap between what's being reported by news media in the United States, the mainstream media, and what we know is true is that we are up against a system, of course, that has a great deal of momentum to it, and it's very difficult to beat back the system when it has that momentum going when you're in a war.
And my sort of strategic concept about this whole problem is that the only way we're going to get traction, really, is to get ahead of the curve and to begin to prepare, not to prepare, to begin to analyze the nature of the system itself, go to the root of it, why this happens, how the whole military behemoth operates, and how it operates in the interest of the institutions, the military bureaucracies, and their civilian political allies themselves, not in the interest of the American people, and to really develop an analysis that will have some political attractiveness to mainstream America.
And with the general slogan, the general theme, don't be a sucker, they're taking you for a ride.
So in other words, not so much to focus on the specifics of what's happening in Iraq in relation to the Iranian role, although that's necessary to be done, I'm not saying that doesn't have to be done, but to begin to bore in to the center of that whole system.
And that's really what I want to do in the coming years.
And hopefully that would have a bit more political traction than trying to push this particular stone up the hill.
I have to tell you, I don't know of anybody else in the major media who even has the focus that you have on this question, and narrows in on the different questions within this question, the EFPs in Iraq, so to speak, to sum it up, that you're doing.
Nobody else is doing this work, so I'm just going to need you to double your workload, I guess, because I need both out of you.
There's nobody who has been so enthusiastic about discussing and bringing up over and over again the stories that I've done, and that's great to have your work in that regard.
Hey, it's a free market of ideas, man, and you're winning the competition.
That's all it is.
Now, listen, this weekend I'm so lucky that I'm going to be able to go to the Future Freedom Foundation conference, and I understand that you're actually going to be attending as well.
I will be there, yes.
Okay, well, I'm going to try to bring as little equipment as possible and see if I can record some interviews.
So maybe you and I can sit down, meet face-to-face, and talk a little bit about this behemoth and the structure of the warfare state that has us in this situation where these things keep happening.
They keep lying us into these wars.
That sounds like a great idea.
Thanks.
All right, Gareth Porter, you're the best damn reporter in America.
Thanks very much for your time today on the show.
Thanks for having me.