03/19/09 – Muhammad Sahimi – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Mohammed Sahimi.
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
I bet I'm probably not.
He's a professor of chemical engineering and materials science, and the NIOC professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California.
He's published extensively on Iran's nuclear program and its political developments.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you today?
I'm fine, and it's a pleasure to be in your program, and you pronounced my name perfectly.
Oh, really?
Sahimi.
Okay, good.
Lucky me.
It was purely luck.
But anyway, okay, great.
So this was a really good article here.
Really, not only do you tell the story of the possible Judy Miller of the Iran war era here in the form of ISIS scientist David Albright, but you also just give about the best recounting of the actual facts of the matter surrounding Iran's nuclear program that I've seen in a while.
It's just like all of Dr. Gordon Prather's articles in one or something.
It's just great.
So why don't you please, before we get into the controversy about ISIS and kind of the public record, what the war party wants us to believe about the Iranian nuclear program, why don't you please help inform our audience about what is the actual state of what's happening there?
What is the truth about that?
And then we'll get to the lies and the liars.
What we know about Iran's nuclear program is that Iran has set up a uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, which is in central Iran, and has been installing centrifuges there to convert uranium hexafluoride and enrich it to the fuel level, which is about 3.5% purity.
Every Iranian nuclear facility is safeguarded and monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
An International Atomic Energy Agency has affirmed and confirmed time and again in its report, which is released every three months, that it has found no evidence of any nuclear weapon program in Iran, there is no evidence of a secret facility in Iran, Iran has not diverted its nuclear material to non-peaceful purposes, and every Iranian nuclear facility is monitored and safeguarded by the agency.
This is what we know, and Iran in fact has been very open and transparent about this.
Iran had a number of minor breaches of its safeguard agreements with the agency, but the agency in February 2008, in its report, declared that all those breaches have been resolved, and there is no outstanding issue.
The only issue between Iran and the agency, which is actually pushed by the United States, is that the United States suspects that Iran has a sort of secret program somewhere that they don't know about, but as I said, the agency has found no evidence of that, and has been monitoring every Iranian nuclear facility.
So that's what we know about Iran.
Now, the point of the article was, given all these facts, some people have started speculating, some people have started exaggerating, and some people have even started lying about what Iran is up to, and what Iran is going to do.
And that was what I wanted to talk about in the article.
Well, I think that something that is quite obvious, if anyone decides that they want to start trying to keep up with the news about this, and all the sanctions and UN maneuvering and things aside, is there's a lot of wishy-washy language.
There's a lot of deliberately vague terms used, based on the premise, quite obviously, that most regular people don't know anything about nuclear technology, and can be buffaloed into thinking that this is tantamount to that, and that sort of thing.
And even when you talk about the accusations about a secret nuclear program of some kind that is not safeguarded, not declared, not known about by the West, existing somewhere, they hardly ever come right out and say that.
They usually only say that when they say, well, we can't bomb because they might have secret stuff that we don't even know to bomb it, and then where would we be?
We'd have bombed them, and yet they'll still be making nukes.
But it seems like even the accusation is a kind of a very vague muddled accusation that is never really clear whether they're saying that what is safeguarded at Natanz amounts to a nuclear weapons program, or whether there's some secret thing, or this, that, or the other thing.
Oh, I totally agree.
What the United States wants Iran to prove is a negative.
In other words, the United States wants Iran to prove that it doesn't have a secret nuclear weapon program.
And of course, that's impossible.
Because in order to prove that, you have to inspect every inch of Iranian territory to make sure that there is no such program whatsoever.
But there is also no evidence.
And because they cannot find any evidence, as you pointed out perfectly, they use this vague and double-sided language in order to make the reader or the listener think that maybe there is something that we don't know about.
One perfect example of it is in the latest report that the International Atomic Energy Agency released last month.
The agency said that Iran has a stockpile of about a ton of low-enriched uranium.
Now, low-enriched uranium means purity of 3.5%, which is good only for using as fuel in a nuclear reactor.
Low-enriched uranium can be converted and enriched to 90%, which is good for a bomb.
But what the pundits in this country say is that, oh yeah, Iran can take that and convert it to highly enriched uranium and make a bomb.
But they don't say that this is not like you can just do it whenever you want and Iran has all the facilities.
Iran doesn't have any facilities for that, first of all.
Iran has shown no indication that it's going to move in that direction.
Iran is not known to have the capability for designing and making a nuclear bomb.
And as I mentioned in that article, the process from going to low-enriched uranium to high-enriched uranium is a very long, tortuous, difficult process.
And it needs a lot of technology that, at least at this point that we are talking, there is no evidence that Iran has the technology or the know-how.
But as you said, the language that these so-called pundits or experts use is vague and double-edged and double-sided so that the people who are not really familiar with the issue may start thinking, well, maybe these guys are hiding something.
Maybe these guys are doing something that we don't know.
Maybe they are more evil than we think they are.
And that is the problem, and that is what motivated me to write that article.
And, in fact, I was really upset by what David Albright has been saying, because David Albright used to be a reasonable analyst, but he has increasingly distanced himself from an impartial posture and has been more and more belligerent in his language and in what he says about Iran's nuclear program.
And he's doing it while there is no evidence for anything that he's talking about.
And that's the sad and that's the critical thing about it.
Well, and he seems to be the most cited expert in media.
I mean, if there's a nuclear question, he's the easiest to get a hold of, I guess.
And so, basically, whatever he says goes.
But as Gordon Prather and Scott Ritter pointed out, this guy's not even a physicist.
No, well, he has a master's in physics, but he has never done any serious physics research.
Never, none, whatsoever.
You can never find any serious research physics paper published under his name.
Despite that, as I said, this is my personal opinion, he used to be a more moderate, a more reasonable analyst.
But he has been distancing himself from that.
Why?
I don't know.
But, look, if you want to present yourself as sort of impartial analyst of, let's say, Iranian nuclear program, you don't go to a conference sponsored by AIPAC, American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, and give a speech under how to stop Iran.
This is not what an impartial analyst does.
You know, AIPAC is the source of all anti-Iran rhetoric in the United States.
AIPAC is behind all sorts of resolutions that are introduced in Congress in order to provoke and justify an attack on Iran.
AIPAC was the one that wrote Resolution 362 a few months ago that had been introduced in Congress in order to put a naval blockade on Iran.
I wrote the construction of that resolution.
And it was posted on anti-war, and it was distributed widely among anti-war activists, which forced the resolution to be withdrawn.
So AIPAC is that type of organization.
You all know that.
Now, when you go to that organization and give a speech about how to stop Iran from making a nuclear bomb, where there is no evidence that Iran is actually trying to make a nuclear bomb, that to me says that David Albright is no longer the person that at least I consider as an impartial person, an analyst.
Well, and here's the thing, too.
I mean, I'm not a physicist at all.
I probably couldn't even pass college algebra at this point.
And yet I understand the detail of this enough to know that when I'm reading David Albright he's quite obviously deliberately fudging the facts and kind of skipping over important caveats.
Like, for example, you can't turn your low-enriched uranium into high-enriched uranium in the presence of the IAEA inspectors without them knowing.
That might be, oh, I don't know, an important point in telling the story of the terrible threat of these weapons.
Oh, precisely, because he says, well, Iran can take its low-enriched uranium to a secret place and convert it to high-enriched uranium.
Now, if you read what he says, you would immediately get the impression that he actually knows that there is a secret place waiting to receive low-enriched uranium and convert it to high-enriched uranium.
Well, there is no such place.
At least we have no evidence, even flimsy, even indirect, even vague, that there is such a secret place.
But the way he talks, as if he knows that there is such a place.
Well, maybe he does know something that nobody else knows, but if he does, then he should let the intelligence agency know.
But there is no evidence that there is such a place.
Or, when he's asked about how much uranium ore Iran has for its nuclear fuel program, he says, well, they don't have enough to fuel the reactor, but they have enough to make nuclear bombs.
Well, I mean, the answer is totally incorrect.
First of all, Iran's known uranium ore reserve is enough to fuel eight reactors for 15 years.
So that's a very significant reserve of uranium ore.
Secondly, he doesn't say that even if he's correct, even if Iran doesn't have enough to fuel its uranium reactors, he doesn't say that the process from going to uranium ore to a nuclear bomb is a very difficult process.
And Iran is not known to have the technology and know how to do it.
But by using facts and drawing conclusions that are totally unrelated to those facts, he's trying to give a message which is totally opposite to what we know about Iran's nuclear program.
And this is dangerous.
It is dangerous because in this country, the War Party, the Israeli lobby, and even the Israeli government, are trying to justify and provoke an attack on Iran.
So anybody, any analyst that presents any analysis of Iran's nuclear program should do it carefully, based on solid documents and solid credible sources.
And he's not doing that, and that is dangerous in my view.
Does your criticism apply as well to, well, for example, Broad and Sanger at the New York Times?
Oh yeah, of course.
Broad and Sanger do the same thing.
But Broad and Sanger are reporters, and they are fed information by all sorts of people.
Broad and Sanger do not claim, as David Albright does, that they have an institute for science and international security, and they don't present themselves as a non-profit, impartial scientific organization.
They're reporters.
The reporters can give all sorts of information.
Sometimes they're wrong, sometimes they're right.
Broad and Sanger do use vague language also.
Broad and Sanger also talk about things that are not really connected to reality.
But they're reporters.
They are different from a person who presents himself everywhere as a former UN nuclear weapons inspector, which according to Scott Ritter, he wasn't, but I don't touch that, that's none of my business.
And Broad and Sanger do not present themselves as somebody who is looking at this issue from a very impartial and scientific and objective point of view.
So we have to differentiate that.
But as you said, of course, Broad and Sanger...
Well, impartial.
They are supposed to be impartial.
And I don't expect them to be any more expert than me, but I expect them to be as expert as me.
And if they don't know the story as well as I do, then they have no business writing the New York Times whatsoever.
I mean, I'm nobody the radio show host for a website.
Come on.
It is true, for example, that the New York Times and Judith Miller and Michael Gordon and all those people contribute greatly to all the propaganda about the Iraq invasion, for example.
And Michael Gordon, in fact, a year or two ago, was also propagating all sorts of lies about how Iran is interfering in Iraq.
And it got to the point that the New York Times had to stop him.
He has been silent or quiet for some time.
But really, I'm proud, and David Sanger has been writing articles about Iran's nuclear program.
And they even talked to me once, which I quote in the article.
But again, I say that although they write articles and they publish articles in which they say a lot of things that at least indirectly can be said to be wrong or mistaken or vague, again, the expectation of a person like me, who is a scientist and has extensive research programs, and thinks of himself as objective, is different from my expectation of a person like David Albright, who presents himself every day as a scientist and somebody who is looking and analyzing Iran's nuclear program from a scientific, objective, impartial point of view.
So that's why people like him are far more dangerous than David Sanger and William Broad.
Because as you said, David Albright has become the go-to man in this country whenever they want to talk about Iran's nuclear program.
So if the guy's position about Iran's nuclear program are wrong, or have nothing to do with reality, and then if he propagates this view everywhere, and he's quoted everywhere, and he's referred to and cited everywhere, then this creates a very, very dangerous situation in which things that have nothing to do with reality or facts on the ground are accepted as facts, and planning and policy and everything else are constructed around such untrue statements, and that's dangerous.
Yeah, that's true.
If it's not Broad and Sanger, it'll be their replacements who quote the same guy about the same things.
All right, well, now, one thing that's going on here that Gordon Prather emphasizes in his columns is that when people talk about, oh, well, there are still questions that haven't been absolutely completely answered in every sense or those kinds of things, that they're not talking about the enforcement of the IAEA safeguards agreement with Iran at all.
What they're talking about is a separate United Nations Security Council mandated investigation into the accusations contained in the smoking laptop.
Yes, and that is one of the issues that I talked about in the article.
The laptop story is as follows.
Supposedly, a laptop that contained a lot of evidence of Iran's past efforts for making a nuclear weapon was stolen in Iran, taken outside Iran, and given to the United States.
Now, the United States supposedly has had that laptop since 2004, but the first time they actually used it to accuse Iran of doing something secretly was in 2008, right after the IAEA announced that all of the past problems with Iran have been solved.
So right after that, Ali Hainanen, the Deputy Director of IAEA for Safeguards, gave a presentation to the Board of Governors of the IAEA in which he used a laptop to accuse Iran of at least having some sort of program in the past for making a nuclear weapon.
Now, here is the point.
They say that the laptop contains a lot of documents that show that at least in the past, Iran has tried to make a nuclear weapon.
Iran has demanded to see the documents on the laptop, but the United States has refused to give the copies of the documents in the laptop to Iran so that Iran can inspect it and respond to the accusation.
In other words, Iran hasn't seen the documents, but is being asked to address the issues in the documents.
At the same time, as computer scientists know, any computer has a digital chain of custody.
In other words, you can easily analyze a computer to decide where each document in the computer was inserted in the computer.
So if we do that with the laptop, if the laptop actually exists, then we can easily say when each document in the laptop was actually put in the computer.
That hasn't been done also.
Why?
Because a lot of those documents, if they actually exist, most experts believe that they are fabricated, and then they were inserted in the laptop much later on.
So therefore, they refuse to do the digital chain of custody analysis, because that would reveal when those documents that indicate Iran had a past nuclear weapon program were inserted in the computer.
So here we have a situation.
Iran is confronted with documents that it has never seen, but is being asked and pressured to respond to, and the computer is not being analyzed for the authenticity of the documents, and the dates that those documents have been inserted in the laptop.
So that's what Gordon Prater is referring to.
And by the way, he's my hero, and I always read his articles on Saturday mornings.
So that's the story about what he's saying, and what I also mentioned in my article, and criticized David Albright, because David Albright has been totally silent about this.
And right now, this is the most important and perhaps the only issue between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But David Albright has been totally silent about what he thinks of this laptop story and the documents.
And why?
Because I know that he thinks that, he believes that a lot of those documents have been forged and fabricated, and have been put in the computer.
But he doesn't say anything, because if he does, then he will lose his source at the IAEA, who is Olli Heinemann.
And therefore he doesn't want to say anything to upset the guy, and therefore lose his source at the IAEA.
So he's basically trading his objectivity and his impartial analysis in return for a source, whom he's selling to Albright, fabricated stories and documents whose authenticity has not even been proven.
Well, another worry is that Albright is going, and I know there's an article in the LA Times this morning, about the fight over who's going to be the new guy.
But this guy, Heinemann at least, is not in the running, right?
That's what I don't know.
We have to wait and see who is going to replace Albright.
Remember, two, three years ago, when he was going to run for another term, the United States did everything that it could to prevent him from a reappointment.
But as Albright himself said, the United States could not get even one member nation to vote against him.
And therefore they had to go along with it.
John Bolton played a big role in trying to get Albright not to be reappointed as the Director General of the IAEA, but he didn't succeed.
Now, Heinemann, I don't know whether he's running.
I don't think he's running.
He has a very bad reputation, as far as I know.
He presents himself everywhere as sort of impartial Deputy Director, because he's originally from Finland, and Finland is the...
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, Mohamed.
We're just going to have to leave it there.
We're all out of time here.
Also, I just want to throw in real quick that Gareth Porter did a great job of debunking that laptop as a bunch of forged, educated guesses about what the Iranians may be doing and may be capable of.
But we are all out of time.
Everybody, please check Mohamed's archives at antiwar.com, slash, or ridge, slash, sahimi, S-A-H-I-M-I.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, folks, that's it for Antiwar Radio.