09/16/08 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

This is Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 in Austin, and we've got much more important things to discuss.
First of all, we've got to talk about the smoking laptop that says that Iran is guilty as hell.
Gareth Porter, Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian, journalist for IPS News, antiwar.com slash Porter.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
Hello, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Actually, I'm really pissed off.
So I'm reading in the New York Times that, oh, the IAEA says that they're at loggerheads at an impasse with those damned intractable Iranians who will no longer answer any more questions about their nuclear weapons program.
The poor IAEA inspectors are so frustrated at the Iranians' intractability.
But meanwhile, my friend Dr. Gordon Prather, the nuclear physicist, forwarded me the new IAEA report, and I have it here, and it says here right at the beginning that there are – geez, I wish I had highlighted the exact quote for you, but oh, yeah, here we go.
All nuclear material, as well as all installed cascades, remain under agency containment and surveillance.
And then later down here, they say it's low-enriched uranium-235, none of it greater than 5 percent U-235, none of which can possibly be used for a nuclear weapon.
And then the rest of it goes on to complain that the Iranians will not answer the questions, which I understand all spring from the so-called smoking laptop.
Set me straight, Dr. Porter, please.
As far as I know, you are correct.
The basis for the accusation is with very marginal possible exception.
In other words, the exception of possible documents that the United States and or Israel may have palmed off on the side to IAEA.
All the rest, certainly 99 and 99 hundred percent of the documentation is, as you put it, the smoking laptop.
Okay, now Dr. Prather also points out to me that the Iranians have never even gotten to see this darn thing, and that all they've seen is, I guess, e-mail attachments of what's supposedly on it or something.
Scott Ritter has complained that in any other case, they ought to bring in an entire forensic team of CIA computer experts and everything to go through and do what they call computer forensics and prove just when this computer was accessed and when these files were made and does that fit consistently with the rest of the story and so forth, and yet that's never happened.
Well, apparently, you know, the CIA was unable or unwilling to say unequivocally that they could rule out fraud.
Going back to the Dauphin and Linzer story of 2005, that was the upshot of what she had to report.
And as you just said, Scott Ritter has rightly complained that we do not have the assurance that such an operation was done, and therefore we have to conclude that it wasn't done because the administration had some reason to fear what the result would be from such a forensic analysis.
Oh, you're such a cynical guy.
Really?
All right, now, so you've reported on this story before about how, and I'm not certain, maybe you can refresh my memory as to how it was you learned and proved to your satisfaction to write in this report that this smoking laptop comes from what's called the National Council for Resistance in Iran, which is basically the political front for the Mujahideen Al-Khalq, the communist terrorist cult that used to work for the Ayatollahs and then worked for Saddam Hussein and now works for the Department of Defense.
Yes, the report was based on two German sources, one of whom had made a public statement and was quoted by the Wall Street Journal at the time that the laptop documents were revealed by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in November 2004.
The head of the North American Relations Office of the German Foreign Ministry, Carsten Voigt, told the Wall Street Journal that these documents came from an Iranian opposition source and therefore should not be made the basis for policy decisions on Iran.
That was strangely ignored by the media.
It seems to me that was a fairly important revelation.
But last fall, another German source who was familiar with the issue of the provenance of these documents confirmed to me that it was indeed the resistance organization in Iran which was the source of the documents.
So that's why I went ahead and reported that.
Okay, now, is it the case in your view that anything whose origin from the NCRI should simply be discounted?
After all, they did reveal the secret Natanz facility before the CIA, right?
You are so objective, Scott.
Yes, you are correct that one should not automatically rule out the possibility that they are authentic.
On the other hand, it's a reasonable doubt, should certainly be entertained, that they are authentic, given the fact that the MEK is known to have very close relations with Israel and that Israel has both the capability and the motive to manufacture a set of documents, such as the ones that were apparently passed on from a laptop computer.
Well, in fact, isn't there every reason to believe that it was really the Mossad who found out about the Natanz facility and then leaked it through the NCRI?
I think there is strong reason to believe that the MEK itself did not get the information about Natanz, that it was passed on to them by a foreign intelligence agency, which really was either the United States or Israel.
And again, the suspicion must fall primarily on Israel for a variety of reasons, which we need not go into detail about.
Let's face it, the MEK is simply hopeless in terms of getting information correct.
They have submitted a whole series of claims to the IAEA over the last few years, all of which turned out to be just dead wrong.
I mean, they knew the location of things, but they simply did not know what the purpose of it was.
So the MEK does not appear to have the kind of capability for actually acquiring the intelligence that would be required to assume that they were capable of doing this on their own.
Well, I know you're working on a story along these lines, and I don't want you to give away the big score in the article, but you can, I guess, assert to me, and I trust you, you've got nothing but things right on this show this whole time.
You're telling me you have various pieces of evidence that would indicate that the Mossad was really behind this laptop?
I do indeed believe that that is the case.
Now, I cannot prove that.
There's no smoking gun that would show that, and therefore we're talking about circumstantial evidence at this point.
But I am indeed working on a story, and I'm happy to have your listeners be the first to know, the elite group of listeners to anti-war radio, that what I'm working on is a story that shows contradictions between the account given by Ali Heinonen, the IAEA Director of Safeguard, in his February 2008 briefing about the so-called alleged studies of the alleged atomic weapons-related research program under the Iranian military auspices.
The contradiction between that account and information which the IAEA received from Iran, and ascertained to its satisfaction was authentic and accurate, about the key Iranian company called Kimia Madan, which is at the center of the so-called alleged studies program.
This had to do with the Gashin uranium mine, which Kimia Madan was contracted to manage a procedure, which they call the Uranium Processing Facility, for the Gashin mine.
And this was always said by the United States and other countries making the accusation against Iran about a nuclear weapons program, that the Gashin mine was being actually managed by the military using Kimia Madan.
And Ali Heinonen shows in his oral briefing to the IAEA member countries, notes of which were carried on the website of David Albright's NGO, the ISIS, in Washington, D.C., it shows that Kimia Madan was part of the alleged studies program, managing two different projects, one of which was the Gashin mine project.
What I show in my story, which has not been published yet, I'm still trying to get it published, is that the IAEA was able to ascertain that in fact, Kimia Madan was working for the civilian atomic energy organization of Iran, not for the military.
That meant that he could not have been part of that, could not have been managing a Gashin project under the alleged studies program.
Now that's a very complicated explanation, but what I'm trying to get at is that there is a direct contradiction between what is shown in the laptop document, as reflected in this presentation by Ali Heinonen on the one hand, and the document that the IAEA itself basically was able to say to its satisfaction, were accurate and authentic from Iran on the same subject.
So it sort of sounds like the people who did the forgery were kind of bluffing on this point and hoping that it would stand up later kind of thing?
Well, I mean, it's still a bit mysterious exactly what documentation the Ali Heinonen presentation was relying on to show this Kimia Madan project on Gashin as part of the alleged studies.
All I know is that it's made very clear, very stated, very boldly in the IAEA report of May of this year, that the description of the relationships among the various parts of this alleged studies that they've constructed was based on the documents that were given to IAEA to show, but not to allow the Iranians to actually keep to actually study, which means the smoking laptop document.
So this was allegedly not something that Ali Heinonen made up on his own, but was based on the laptop document.
That's the basis for my suggestion that there is a direct contradiction here, which would have to be explained, and which sheds a grave doubt on the authenticity of at least some of the laptop documents.
And if some of the laptop documents are suspect, then they all are suspect.
Right.
Well, and they're suspect anyway, just in the sense that they've never proven there's anything legitimate about them.
But you're right.
I want to make it clear that I think there are a number of bases for suspecting fraud in these documents.
I think there are a number of questions that have to be asked, some of which have been asked, by people including David Albright himself.
For example, Albright says, and I've just recently spoken with him again about this, he says, well, why is it that this alleged nuclear weapons program has only these few pieces to it, which makes it not much of a program?
I mean, it's a few bits and pieces that don't really make sense.
It doesn't cohere.
And no one's ever bothered to give any explanation for them.
Right.
And, you know, Albright wrote, I think, a series of angry letters to Broad and Sanger at the New York Times, and said, hey, listen, you guys are mixing up, first of all, you're mixing up the terms delivery vehicle and warhead when they're different things, and you're saying that the documents from this laptop, which indicate that the Iranians are working on a delivery vehicle for a warhead to put on the end of their missiles, is the kind of delivery vehicle that you could not fit except the most advanced atomic warheads in anyway.
And so this is all, you know, a big goose chase here, Broad and Sanger, like always.
And further than that, I mean, you know, the judgment on the part of the laptop document that is most spectacular, that is to say the reentry vehicle document, alleged document, you know, this is apparently regarded by those who have looked at it very carefully and who know the subject as a very poor job.
I mean, it's just it doesn't really hold up.
So the idea is that if indeed this were authentic, it's a very poor job.
It's the second team or third team.
It's not the best that Iran has to offer, that's for sure.
All of this obviously adds to the suspicion that this is a clever but still, you know, not very convincing fake.
Right.
And you know what?
As long as we're at it, I already know this one, too.
Another part of the accusation is that the Iranians were going to build this facility to make green salt.
That is uranium tetrafluoride.
And yet they had a factory down the road that was already able to churn out by the truckload, apparently, or however much they need uranium hexafluoride gas, which is the final stage of preparation before you introduce it into the centrifuges.
So we were supposed to believe that the Iranians were going to build this entire facility in order to enrich their yellow cake.
You know, basically uranium ore into tetrafluoride when they were already able to do the hexafluoride and made no sense whatsoever.
That's right.
And I think, you know, if you really look at the timeline very carefully, what you learn is that the potential faker of these documents would not have known enough about the Iranian plan for the actual facility that they were building and the process being used and how far along they were, crucially, to be able to avoid making that kind of mistake.
In other words, it's an error that would have easily been committed, would have likely been committed by a foreign intelligence agency seeking to manufacture these kinds of documents.
Making an educated guess and hoping that the truth didn't come out in order to bankrupt their guess before it was too late.
Right.
And of course, I think the key to the entire piece of the faking of it is Kimian Madan.
And that is because there is one document in the entire collection that Iran confirms is an authentic document.
And that is a document that is not a secret, a supposed secret document.
It's not from a government agency.
It's not from some researcher within the military or anything else.
It's from a private enterprise, which was a supplier of dual use technology used in many, many industrial processes, which the Iranian government was seeking to get on behalf of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization for the purpose of the uranium conversion, the facility that they were building.
So Kimian Madan was identified on the basis of this letter by the foreign intelligence agency as a target that they could sort of integrate into a broader range of documents and implicate in this in this alleged studies.
So, I mean, I am I'm convinced that there are a number of pieces here that fit together and point to the manufacture of these documents.
And, you know, in the broader sense, what we're talking about here is a fake Causus Belli.
We're talking about exactly like Iraq, years and years.
You know, in that case was a year straight of hardcore propaganda.
It's longer term and a little bit lower boil in the case of Iran.
But they're just straight inventing a Causus Belli.
What you and I are dealing with are the minutia of why it appears that way.
But, you know, there's a whole other kind of parallel story or something going on here, which I don't know if this ever had any life outside of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
But in the aftermath of the Israeli bombing of the supposed Syrian nuclear facility last September 2007, one of the pieces of propaganda that was coming out just a couple of months ago, Gareth, was that, ah, see, the North Koreans were helping the Syrians make plutonium, never mind enriched uranium now, that's something different, make plutonium to give to the Iranians for the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Oh, that's clever, really.
Introducing an entirely different technology that has nothing to do with what the Iranians are doing.
Now, where did that come from?
Did you ever trace down the origin of these accusations or do you know?
Not on the plutonium thing, no.
I did not follow the plutonium trail, I'm afraid.
All right, one more assignment for Gareth Porter.
Yes.
Remember, your responsibility is debunking in detail every single one of these lies, Gareth.
In my dreams.
Well, you do a damn good job.
You're batting the thousand or whatever it is.
I don't know the baseball stuff or I'm a skater.
But, of course, I mean, the reality, it turns out, is that the Bush administration could not muster the will, could not overcome its internal doubters to attack Iran.
And one must also now begin to ask the question, was there a crucial point in 2008 when really the threat to Afghanistan and from Pakistan began to loom so large that the administration could not entertain the notion of two major crises simultaneously?
I'm beginning to wonder if there wasn't another factor here that was further isolating the Cheney faction of the administration.
Well, I'll tell you this.
In terms of saying, look, we can't afford to take on Iran at this point.
Boy, yeah, this is my dream come true, right?
Somebody got through to George Bush Jr. and said, listen, you've got to err on the side of caution on this one, pal, and made him listen.
Yeah, and I think we're now seeing that that must be what happened in terms of Iran policy.
Well, I'll tell you, I talked with Daniel Levy from the New America Foundation a couple of weeks back, Gareth, a few weeks back now, two or three, three or four.
And I said to him that, listen, you know, when I talk to the smartest people, Scott Ritter, Gareth Porter, the real experts on this show, they seem to agree with me, too, that the time of the real danger of war with Iran has passed.
Whatever it is, you say it's Afghanistan.
Sounds plausible to me for whatever reason.
And even though there's all this hype and training exercises over Greece by the Israelis and all this stuff, it seems less and less likely now there's going to be a war.
And he was on the phone from Tel Aviv.
And what he told me was, don't you believe it, kid, because it's not over yet, and it's not just up to George Bush and a bunch of Americans.
I'm here to tell you there are people here in Israel right now who are hell-bent on bombing Iran, stopping their nuclear program before they've perfected even the ability to kick out the IAEA and then begin to try to enrich highly enriched uranium for a bomb.
They're not going to let it get that far.
The line has already been crossed, and they're pushing for it.
Not that they can't be stopped, but he said, don't you get lazy on debunking this case.
Don't think that the danger has passed because it hasn't.
And that guy, Levy, and the entire New America Foundation, these are not the alarmists among us.
You are absolutely correct, and that is certainly a cautionary note that needs to be passed on.
I think you're absolutely right.
To the extent that the Israelis are capable of carrying it out on their own, one should not rule it out.
Well, and they're at least capable of getting a war started and saying, come on, America, you have to have our back now.
Well, you know, if I were Israel, I certainly would not be counting on that happening.
That would be a very, very long shot, I would say.
Really?
You don't think that Bush, that Cheney would be able to say, all right, look, man, what are you going to do?
We've got to get in this fight now.
It's already started, it's escalating, and Israel can't handle it, we have to.
No?
Well, not when it's so clear that, you know, it was Israel which, you know, against the will of the United States, against the expressed wishes of the U.S. government, now, you know, quite explicitly stated, you know, carried out a, not a preemptive, but a preventive war, as you so rightly distinguish between.
I'm going to thank Alan Bach for that.
There's an article at antiwar.com slash Porter, Intel Council warned against raids in Pakistan, and just a brief setup, you're talking about the National Intelligence Council, which is where basically the leadership of all 16 intelligence agencies that we know exist in this country meet together at the table and decide what they all agree on, on the real big issues.
Usually they're actually producing a national intelligence estimate.
Apparently they forward on lesser opinions, too.
But this isn't just the CIA or just the State Department weenies.
This is all of them together, hashing things out.
And you report here that they told George Bush that all that he's been doing in Pakistan is exactly what he should not do.
And that is bomb the hell out of them across the border, apparently even sending ground troops across the border into Pakistan.
Yeah, I think it's clear that this National Intelligence Council warning was explicitly aimed at crossing the border with commando forces to carry out raids in Pakistan.
That was the issue that they were called upon to provide an opinion or a forecast on.
And I'm told by three sources, two of which went on the record, one of them being Colonel Pat Lang, a former defense intelligence officer in the Middle East for the DIA, that the National Intelligence Council issued a very blunt warning that if the planned commando raid across the border into tribal northwest Pakistan were carried out over some period of time, that this would have a very high risk of both making the situation worse within Waziristan, north and south Waziristan, and the other northwest provinces, but also would have a grave risk of weakening the Pakistani military, dividing the Pakistani military further by risking possible defections from the, first of all from the frontier corps, that is the locally raised militia in the frontier area, and secondly the regular Pakistani army's Pashtun officers, who would be more sympathetic than ever before with the people who were being the victims of U.S. operations there.
So in other words, it would have an immediate effect on the military forces that the United States has to have, in being, has to have their cooperation in order to have any chance of having a long-term impact on the situation in that part of Pakistan.
And further than that, of course, it would be destabilizing in terms of the Pakistani political system itself.
It would push everything more towards the opposition, not only opposition to U.S. presence of any kind in Pakistan, but also sympathy with the radical Islamic movement in Pakistan.
So they had very strong warnings to give to the White House, and the White House clearly anticipated that the message that they would get from the National Intelligence Council would not be what they wanted to hear, because they made it clear that they did not want anything on paper.
Now this is an issue that, normally speaking, is of the magnitude that would call for a National Intelligence Estimate, and that's what should have been passed on, was an NIE on this subject.
But instead...
That's too official, huh?
Well, that's too dangerous, because it would almost certainly leak to the press.
Yeah, let's not have any, I told you so's out in the public in advance, before we do what we know is wrong, because they just told us so.
That's right.
So instead, what they did was to give an oral briefing to the White House on this subject.
And strangely, I mean, this is a surprise to me, that no one else has picked up this story.
I don't really quite understand why no mainstream media has actually felt that this was sufficiently important to ask their intelligence contacts, gee, what's the story on the intelligence forecast on this issue?
Well, I'm coming to grips more and more with the actual willful ignorance of most people in the media.
I doubt they'd ever heard antiwar.com.
If they had, they'd read it every day, and they'd know better than a lot of the things they'd say.
But seriously, I mean...
Well, that's clear enough.
But even given the willful ignorance of the media on many, many issues, this is the kind of issue that is a natural for the New York Times and Washington Post to pick up.
You know, you have the sources there who presumably, in normal situations, would be not averse to having it leak out that they gave a warning on this to cover themselves and make it clear that it's not their fault when things start going south.
And yet there's absolutely nothing on this.
So, you know, it really is a very interesting question.
So, basically, Pakistan, I guess, translates to rock and hard place here for the United States Empire over there.
We have a country that, to my understanding, is basically four different kind of ethnic tribal regions that are united by a military.
We have a brand-new government headed by the widower of Benazir Bhutto, Zardari, Mr. Ten Percent, who used to be, you know, one of the chief kleptocrats in charge, who's been elected with a bare plurality in the Congress.
And now as soon as this has happened in their parliament, I guess I should say, and now as soon as this has happened, America invades their freaking country.
And we're warring against, as my guest pointed out on the show yesterday, what they call Taliban types, which is a nice new-speak term for the Pashtuns.
And yet these are the very same people who make up the officer corps in that nationalist military, which holds that country together.
These are their brethren up there in Waziristan.
They're not going to tolerate this too much longer, are they, or can they?
Well, I mean, you know, the hardest thing to predict is when something is going to happen.
And how long it may take before the stresses and strains which this exacerbates in the tribal areas of Pakistan and throughout Pakistan generally really have an overt and obvious effect, an obvious impact.
It's hard to say that, but certainly it's impossible to believe that continuation of this kind of situation will not have, you know, certainly within a matter of some months, very overt and very negative impact on the situation both in north and south Waziristan and in Pakistani politics generally.
And obviously if there were an election held any time in the near future, this would be a huge issue.
It would have a great impact on Pakistani politics.
It would shift everything in the direction of, you know, militancy and away from the kinds of sort of moderate, non-religious parties that the United States depends on for some stability in Pakistan.
You know, I can't help but think that if, I don't know, anybody but Dick Cheney had been running this government, that they would have gotten Bin Laden and Zawahiri by now.
They would have gotten the Pakistanis to get them by now.
They would have worked a deal that put all the incentives in all the right places to make sure that the Arabs got kicked out of Waziristan and then killed or captured or something.
And yet what happened was Dick Cheney supported this dictator Musharraf.
His incentive was to just take our money and not catch Bin Laden because then the money would get cut off.
And now this looks to me, all this recent violence, which of course in real terms means women and children having their lives blown apart by American high explosives inside their sovereign country.
That's what John McCain said.
You can't bomb Pakistan.
It's a sovereign country.
That was, I guess that talking point wore out.
I'm not sure where he's at now.
But, you know, it seems to me, Gareth, that this is what this violence is really about, is a last-ditch attempt to try to catch Bin Laden, Zawahiri, or bomb them or claim that they did or something before the election in November.
Well, that certainly is one angle on this, that the Bush administration has only a few months left.
They've obviously fumbled the ball on Bin Laden from the very beginning.
We all remember the famous Bush press conference of February of 2002 where he said, well, I don't really spend any time to speak of thinking about, worrying about Bin Laden.
He's not that important.
And that, of course, did reflect the belting shell of the neocon advisors that Bush was listening to at that point.
Bin Laden really was not important in their worldview at all because he was not a state enemy.
He did not have a state sponsor, at least one that they were willing to acknowledge.
He did, in fact, by then have a state sponsor, which was Pakistan, but that was another story entirely.
But he did not have a state sponsor that the United States wanted to target as an enemy.
So he did not fit into that worldview.
But I have to say that there's one point that I think I would disagree with or I would put my emphasis in a very different place, and that is that it is not, at this point, the problem is not so much Dick Cheney.
It has not been Dick Cheney since the NIE of July 2007 established that there is a major al-Qaeda safe haven in Pakistan.
I think from then on, you have a new political dynamic opening up, which is that all of these military and paramilitary bureaucracies began to lobby very hard for the kind of cross-border operations that we've now seen come to fruition, so to speak, in Pakistan.
You have the U.S. command in Afghanistan, which had an obvious vested interest in arguing that, well, we can't defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as there's a safe haven in Pakistan.
So they were pushing for this line of policy that said you had to address the safe haven in Pakistan.
So that's one of them.
Then you have the CIA's Covert Operations Directorate, which had a vested interest in getting approval for broader authority within Pakistan.
They wanted to have the responsibility for doing this.
We know that Henry Crumpton, the CIA official who ran the operation in Afghanistan in 2001, was working very hard to get the administration to approve this sort of authorization.
He's no longer in the CIA, but he's somebody who's quoted frequently.
He gets his name into the media.
David Ignatius quotes him twice now in the last year on this subject, and he's somebody who was helping to support the push of the CIA's case for doing this.
Then you have the Special Operations Command, which has become very powerful within the military bureaucracy.
It became powerful in part because, interestingly enough, the Secretary of Defense before Gates— Skeletor?
The Secretary of Defense was really pushing for SOCOM, the Special Operations Command, to replace the CIA as the premier paramilitary arm of the United States to carry out covert military operations, because he didn't like the CIA.
So they had their annual budget increase from $5 billion to $8 billion over a three- or four-year period under Rumsfeld.
You have them in the forefront of pushing for this as well.
Then you have the intelligence community and the State Department saying, whoa, wait a minute now, this doesn't really make any sense.
This is not a good idea.
I believe it's clear that Mullen and the Joint Chiefs were very skeptical about this as well.
That's why it took so long.
It took nearly a year, or more than a year, for the forces that were pushing for this to win a very tough struggle within the administration over this.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter.
You can read all he writes for IPS News at antiwar.com slash porter.
Thanks again very much for your time today, Gareth.
As always, I'm glad to be on your show.