11/19/10 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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And now our next interview on the show today is Gareth Porter.
And, well, really, he's my favorite.
He writes for IPS News, Interpret Service.
He's the author of the book Perils of Dominance.
And he's got a new article at Truthout.org.
Evidence of Iran nuclear weapons program may be fraudulent.
Oh, you don't say.
Welcome to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
I guess let's hear it.
What evidence was there that Iran ever had a nuclear weapons program?
And how dare you say that that evidence might be fraudulent?
Well, I actually said more than it might be fraudulent.
I said that it is almost, not almost, it is certainly fraudulent.
There's no way that it cannot be fraudulent, in fact.
I didn't choose that headline.
So this is the point.
This is a story about a fact that you will never read, I predict, in one of the reports, the official reports of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, because it's been covered up systematically for the last several years.
And the fact is that the schematics, that is to say the technical drawings, of the redesign of a warhead or a reentry vehicle of the Shahab-3 Iranian missile, which is certainly the centerpiece politically of the so-called laptop documents, the intelligence collection that has been used to show that Iran had a covert nuclear weapons program in the early part of last decade.
They show a missile warhead or reentry vehicle that is not the one that Iran was actually working on at that moment.
It's a completely different warhead.
It's one that the Iranians had already abandoned, in fact, as we now know from detailed documentation, detailed study of the Iranian missile program that was published this year by the London-based IISS, International Institute for Strategic Studies.
So this is an absolutely stunning fact about the laptop documents that has been covered up by the IAEA.
And I only got wind of it because of the most obscure possible document, which is an unpublished letter from David Albright of the IISS, the Washington, D.C.
-based think tank that Albright runs, to the co-authors of a New York Times story in November 2005 on these very laptop documents, a letter in which he reveals that indeed the schematics in the laptop documents on the redesign of a warhead were not the warhead that was revealed in the test that the Iranians carried out of a missile in mid-2004.
It turns out that there was a difference between the two.
And it's clear from the fact that David Albright knew about that that people at IAEA or the U.S. intelligence community or both had tipped him off.
And I didn't know quite what to make of this, but I kept thinking about it and finally came across the study of the Iranian missile program by the IISS, and that revealed for the first time, as far as I knew, that the Iranians had indeed made a major shift from the Shahab-3, the old Shahab-3, which is in fact the North Korean missile that they bought in the mid-90s called the Nodong missile.
They made a shift from that missile to a brand new missile throughout the period from 2000 to 2004.
And what the IISS study shows is that they had already made a choice.
They were already developing this new model of a missile and a new warhead throughout that period, and that the new warhead definitely had to be introduced well before this purported covert nuclear weapons program of Iran was supposed to have been organized.
So there's no way that the Iranians could possibly have directed a secret group to be redesigning a warhead of the old Shahab-3 or the Nodong missile.
Okay, now hold it right there for a second.
Three years ago, the National Intelligence Council put out a National Intelligence Estimate that really took the wind out of sails of Dick Cheney and the War Party and said that the Iranians don't have a nuclear weapons program now, that they did have one, but they called it off in 2003.
And now, do I understand correctly then that you're saying that the only evidence that they did have a nuclear weapons program of any description up until 2003 are these so-called alleged studies documents from this so-called Iranian laptop, supposedly the former property of a dead Iranian scientist.
And now we can get back to the point about the missile and the technicality of the point you're making there about how that discredits these documents.
But first of all, are these documents the only basis for the assertion that there really ever was a nuclear weapons program in Iran?
Is there anything else that you know of?
They're the only detailed documentation about a purported weapons program that has surfaced anywhere in the public realm or has been reported.
The only other...
Right, we don't have the classified version of the 2007 NIE.
Right, the only other evidence, if you want to call it that, that has been reported is snippets of conversation which were intercepted by the intelligence community in 2006 as they prepared, or 2007, excuse me, as they prepared for the writing of the NIE, and perhaps one or two notebooks that they got access to from somebody who had been in the program.
And on the basis of these snippets and notebooks, the statement was made that the Iranians had had a nuclear weapons program.
There has never been a single statement in the public realm that characterizes what is meant by this nuclear weapons program.
And I have two reasons for believing that, in fact, there was not much more, if anything more, than general statements that we were told we couldn't work on nuclear weapons by the government in late 2003.
And, of course, that coincides with the publicly announced decision by Iran that they would cooperate with the IAEA fully and that they would negotiate an agreement with the three European states, the UK, Germany, and France, that would essentially stop any work on uranium enrichment for some unidentified period of time.
And at the same time, this is not well known, but the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, also announced in the same time frame that nuclear weapons are at odds with or inconsistent with Islam, they are not legitimate, and Iran will never have any.
And so my thesis is this, that Iran did indeed make a decision against nuclear weapons, a very firm decision to not have nuclear weapons in that time frame of late 2003, and that many people in the military, particularly, were somewhat taken aback because it had been an open-ended question that had not been decided firmly against such nuclear weapons prior to that.
And so what we know is that they were forbidden to work on nuclear weapons.
What we don't know is if, in fact, there had been any concrete research and development of nuclear weapons prior to that.
To get back to the real point, though, of your piece today at Truthout, is that this smoking laptop, as they called it, the big pile, the smoking gun, all this evidence, basically, this is, I think, your third piece or fourth piece that you've done, debunking various aspects of these alleged studies and showing how, as you just described with the warhead there, they sound like pretty good educated guesses as to what might be plausible sounding about Iran's nuclear program or missile programs, whatever.
But on further inspection, it doesn't really add up.
And I think you've also reported in the past, Dr. Porter, that we know where these documents came from.
They came from the Mujahideen Al-Qaq, the communist, terrorist, Heaven's Gate, Boentie cult that launders so-called intelligence for the Israeli Mossad on a regular basis, right?
There is some evidence to that effect.
And I believe that there's much more circumstantial evidence, of course we have no smoking gun, that indeed the Israeli Mossad was the author of these papers.
But let me just point out that...
Very quickly.
Yeah, that a key point here about the difference, the anomaly, if you will, between what was shown in the laptop documents, in the schematics, and the actual missile warhead that the Iranians were working on at that point.
The significance of this is very important because the difference between the two missiles has to do with Israel.
Well, I'm sorry, we're going to have to hold it there, Gareth.
We're all out of time, we're up against the wall here.
But I will tell everyone again, please go and look at evidence of Iran nuclear weapons program may be fraudulent.
For all the details, skinny there, it's at truthout.org.
Dr. Gareth Porter, regularly from Interpress Service, and you can find him at Antiwar.com.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
Thanks, Scott.
And that's it for the show today, Antiwar Radio.
We're here every Friday from 6.30 to 7 Pacific Time on 90.7 FM here in LA.
All the archives are available at Antiwar.com.
Thanks to Angela for producing the show and Darren for running the board.