Good afternoon Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton from Antiwar.com, filling in for Maria Armoudian who's out today.
Very happy to be joining you, we're also rebroadcast on 98.7 FM up the coast in Santa Barbara and I'm very happy to introduce Mohamed Sahimi, he's a professor of chemical engineering at USC, now the truth is I was raised a fundamentalist evangelical UCLA Bruin, so I hope we can still get along though.
Yeah, we can, we can, all the anti-war people can.
That's right.
Alright, so we have really big news this week involving Iran's nuclear program which you regularly write about, especially for Antiwar.com.
Two big stories, but let's start with the first story today.
Fox News this morning carried a piece, there was a big press conference by something called the NCRI in Washington where they claimed to expose a new secret uranium enrichment facility at a place named Kazvin near Tehran.
What can you tell us about that?
First of all, NCIR is National Council of Resistance of Iran, which is basically the political arm of Mujahideen organization.
Mujahideen organization is a terrorist organization listed by the State Department as a terrorist group and most Iranians look at Mujahideen not even as a terrorist organization but rather as a terrorist cult.
These people left Iran about two decades ago and then they collaborated with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war against Iran.
After the Iran-Iraq war ended, Mujahideen helped Saddam to put down the rebellion by Kurdish forces in the north and Shiite in the south.
And since then they have basically been a tool of foreign powers just in order to reach, to get power to Iran.
So they have no credibility inside Iran.
I'm sure they have some followers in the United States, for example, or in Europe, but they have no credibility within Iran.
They have a terrible track record in making all sorts of claims about what's happening within Iran.
They were correct one time and that was when in 2002, in August of 2002, they made an announcement about the existence of the Natanz enrichment facility, which later was confirmed by Iran.
But even that time, the information was actually provided by Israeli intelligence services and my sources at that time, when I was writing about it, told me that the Israelis actually offered this to Iranian monarchists, who also opposed the Islamic regime in Tehran, but Iranian monarchists, out of their nationalism, refused to go with the information and to publicize it.
And then they offered it to Mujahideen and the Mujahideen made it public with information about the Natanz facility.
So they have no credibility within Iran and they have a terrible track record about what's happening within Iran over the past many, many years.
Now their latest announcement, I haven't known any place or site, even within a, I don't know, a circle of tens of kilometers from Qazvin, which is basically western Tehran, about 140 kilometers from Tehran, where anything close to a nuclear activity could be taking place.
In other words, there is no scientific center or any sort of lab that could be secretly converted into a nuclear site and where they can even enrich uranium, according to the claim that NCRI has made.
All right, now in Washington, D.C., Mohammad, there's a group called ISIS, the International Security, something, anyway, David Albright and his group, and they're kind of self-appointed private nuclear experts, and a couple of points about him, why I bring him up, is the first thing is, I spoke with him one time about the Mujahideen al-Khalq that you're talking about here, getting Natanz right.
If they got one thing right, they got Natanz right.
And he said, no, no, we got it.
They were two days later.
It was ISIS that really broke the story about Natanz.
And people should understand, at the time that that secret was exposed, it was just a big, empty, underground Walmart.
It didn't get centrifuges up and running for a couple of years after that.
So there was nothing illegal about it, even though it was secret.
And then the other thing is that Albright actually has a piece today on the ISIS website.
It's isis-online.org, actually, isis-online.org, and he actually dismisses these claims, these latest claims by the Mujahideen al-Khalq and the NCRI, but basically reduces what they say down to a claim of, well, they're apparently, perhaps, digging tunnels into mountains.
And that could be consistent, right, with what we saw at Qom last fall, where, and didn't the Iranians even announce that, yes, we are going to make secondary and, I guess, third dairy nuclear facilities separate from Natanz, enrichment facilities separate from Natanz, and we're going to put them under mountains because you keep threatening to bomb us.
So is it possible that they're onto something here, if there's a bunch of tunneling going on into some mountains out there near Kazim?
Of course.
I mean, it's always possible that they're doing something.
But as you pointed out, the head of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, said just a couple of weeks ago that Iran intends to set up eight more enrichment facilities in addition to what's been constructed of Qom and the Natanz facility.
So this is no secret.
Iran has announced its intention.
David Albright is president of Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, and yes, he selectively picks topics and, you know, he dismisses some and he comments on other things.
But as even he has said, according to you, he dismisses the credibility of Mujahideen and their political arm, which is National Council of Resistance of Iran.
So at this point, if I were to guess, I would say it is not likely at all, but the fact that the head of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran has already said that we are going to set up more enrichment facility, and the reason that they are going to do it is precisely because they're afraid of military attacks on Iran enrichment facility because they want to spread it out so that if they are attacked, they cannot all be destroyed at once.
And that's the reason.
And of course, when Iran does that, regardless of what we think about Iranian regime inside Iran, I must say, I should announce it here, anybody who knows me knows that I am opposed to the Tehran regime.
But we are not talking about an internal matter which is for Iranians, we are talking about the national right of a nation and the double standard that the United States has regarding the Middle East and the nuclear power in the Middle East.
So it's not so much supporting the position of the Islamic Republic, rather supporting the national right of a nation like Iran that has been under pressure by this country, by the United States for the past three decades.
So Iran has largely abided by its obligation under nuclear non-proliferation treaty, Iran has cooperated with the International Atomic Energy Agency, when Mohammad Al-Baradei was the director general of the agency, he said that the inspection of Iran's nuclear program is the most intrusive and the most extensive inspection of any nuclear program in the history of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And yet, even in the latest IAEA report that was publicized on Monday, Yukio Amano, the new director general, again confirmed that there is no evidence that Iran has diverted any nuclear material from peaceful purposes to non-peaceful purposes.
I must say that Yukio Amano, since taking over from Al-Baradei, has basically politicized IAEA to some extent, and we can talk about it if you want, and in fact the latest report that came out, there are several points of contention about it that we can discuss so that the listener can learn about it, but even Yukio Amano has not said that Iran has diverted, and in fact after the report came out, there was a lot of noise about it and what the new IAEA report means, to the extent that the IAEA had to issue a new statement clarifying what the report had said in order for people not to misinterpret what the report had said.
Well, the number one cause of misinterpreting what the report said is reading the New York Times and the writings of William J. Broad and especially David Sanger, and the Washington Post and the rest of the entire media on Monday night and Tuesday morning announced that oh my goodness gracious, the Iranians are stockpiling nuclear material, they're obstructing the International Atomic Energy Agency, this, that, and the other thing, and they reported every single part of that IAEA report in whatever context they wanted, except the one part that was the most important part of the report.
The only thing that the IAEA is actually mandated to do, really under their safeguards agreement with Iran, and that is the agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose.
So all the rest of these, whatever they are, and you can describe them in detail if you'd like Mohammed, but none of them have anything to do with the IAEA saying we are no longer able to verify what happened to the uranium.
It's all still right there, every atom is accounted for, and there is no reason to believe that at this time any of it has been diverted to any military or other special purpose inside that country, as per their safeguards agreement.
Exactly, and people should know that IAEA has cameras there, has inspectors on the ground, in Natanz, as well as in Bushehr reactor, which is coming online.
Now regarding Iran obstructing the work of the IAEA inspector, there were two points in the latest report.
One was that Iran has refused entry visa to two of the IAEA inspectors.
First of all, according to Iran's safeguards agreements with the IAEA, Iran has the right to reject any inspector that it wants.
Secondly, two out of a very large number of inspectors, while other inspectors are doing their normal work in Iran, is negligible.
So making a big issue out of two inspectors, that Iran has every right to reject, is basically propaganda.
The other obstruction issue was the fact that the IAEA asked Iran to allow it to take a sample of heavy water that Iran has produced in the Arak facility and has stored in the Isfahan facility.
In other words, the IAEA has no authority whatsoever to ask Iran for having access to samples of heavy water.
The IAEA has even acknowledged it in the past.
So the fact that Iran didn't allow it, and it has allowed it in the past, if you look at the previous reports, the IAEA says that they allowed the IAEA to look at where they are stored and take a sample, doesn't mean anything.
In other words, Iran has not violated its obligations towards its safeguards agreements.
But people in this country, or the mainstream in this country, make a big, big issue out of Iran obstructing the work of IAEA.
That's nonsense.
Iran hasn't done that.
And there are other issues in that report that we can discuss.
For example, Iran stockpiling low-enriched uranium.
Yes, Iran stockpiling low-enriched uranium.
But they are all safeguarded.
They are all weighted, they are inspected, they are checked, they are sealed in boxes and so on and so forth.
And the IAEA, as you said, can account for every gram of it that Iran is producing.
So what?
As long as they are safeguarded, it means nothing.
Alright everybody, it's Maria Armoudian's show, pardon me.
I'm Scott Horton from Antiwar.com filling in.
I'm interviewing Mohammad Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC and he writes for us at Antiwar.com.
We're talking about all the hype about Iran's nuclear program.
And you know how this works.
Mohammad, it's been years and years on end of, well, I don't know, hundreds of separate news stories about different details of Iran's nuclear program.
What that amounts to in the common understanding is a lot of smoke.
There must be fire.
Nuclear this, nuclear that.
It never stops.
And we all know what nuclear means.
Mushroom clouds, atom bombs, dead Americans.
And so it's Adolf Hitler's big lie technique.
You just say the thing over and over again and then people conclude that there just must be something going on that we must prevent.
Same thing happened with Iraq where people said, well, of course Saddam Hussein did 9-11 or else why would we have invaded the country?
They just concluded that he must have done it or else why in the world would we start a war there?
And it's the same kind of thing where people are left to form the false conclusion themselves based on the very heated and continuous propaganda through the TV.
And of course, nobody on TV understands what you understand about the nuclear program, Mohammad, and they don't ever invite you on Fox News or CNN to parse.
Well, what is the difference between the, for example, the mandate that the IAEA safeguards and continues to safeguard and verify the non-diversion of nuclear material versus all the rest of these things that they're asking questions about?
It seems to me pretty specialized knowledge, right, that the safeguards agreement is one thing and a John Bolton maneuvered UN Security Council mandate to obey and prove a negative or die is an entirely separate thing that has been mandated by the Security Council to the IAEA to enforce, even though that's not really their job, as you just said, when it comes to the heavy water.
It's really none of their beeswax other than the U.S. insists, separately from the safeguards agreement, separately from the law that they've signed on and agreed to.
Exactly.
And the other issues between IAEA and Iran that every time a new report is published about Iran's program is brought up, they have to do with a laptop that was supposedly taken out of Iran in 2004.
Now, that's the so-called alleged studies documents.
Exactly, alleged studies documents.
And the IAEA, under pressure by the United States, has asked Iran to clarify several things that allegedly were in the laptop.
Iran has said that it will be willing to answer any question, provided that the IAEA presents to Iran the original documents.
Ha, ha, ha.
Bad chance of that, but why?
Why?
Exactly.
And the United States not only has refused to do that, but it has also refused to put the computer under a simple test.
You know, if a computer, a laptop, actually did exist, you can actually check to see when was it that this or that document was uploaded in that computer and when and what time.
The United States has refused to put that laptop, that nobody has seen, under that test, which goes to show, which would show whether those documents are actually uploaded in that computer, and if they were, when was it that they were?
Because everybody says that that laptop was stolen from Iran, taken outside Iran, in 2004.
That means six years ago.
Now, the issue of the laptop never came out until the National Intelligence Estimate, in November of 2007 was published, that said that if Iran had a nuclear weapon program, it stopped in 2003.
All of a sudden, because the National Intelligence Estimate certified that about Iran, all of a sudden the laptop became important.
All of a sudden, immediately, almost immediately after that, in February of 2008, the IAEA announced that Iran, that was in six minor non-compliance cases with the Safeguard Agreement, all those issues had been clarified, and there was no active issue.
Immediately after that, Ali Heinonen, who was the Deputy Director for Safeguard Agreement, made a presentation to the Board of Governors, entirely based on that laptop, making all sorts of allegations against Iran's nuclear program.
None of it has been confirmed.
Nobody has seen those documents, nobody has seen the laptop, and yet they asked the Iranian government to explain these things.
This is, I mean, this is unbelievable, that it's like putting somebody on trial, but not showing him what he's accused of, or who is accusing him, and based on what evidence and what document.
And as I said, the laptop issue only came out after the National Intelligence Estimate was published about Iran's nuclear program.
So these are basically hot air, and a lot of smoke, as you said, but there has never been a smoking gun.
Al-Baradei, before he left IAEA, said many, many times that we have never been able to find a smoking gun.
He also said explicitly two things that are very meaningful.
He said Iran's nuclear program has been hyped, he said the program has been hyped by the Western power many times.
He also said that we cannot measure the intention of a nation.
The only thing that the IAEA can do is go to a nation, to a country, and check facts on the ground.
And facts on the ground, which means Iran's nuclear facilities in Iran, has been inspected by the IAEA, and as I told you, according to Al-Baradei himself, has gone under the most intrusive inspection in the history of the IAEA, and they have never been able to find any evidence of diversion of nuclear material from peaceful to non-peaceful.
But when Yukio Amano took over last year, he started moving the IAEA in a political direction.
In the first report that he issued, he talked about undeclared nuclear material.
Well, there has never been any talk of undeclared nuclear material, and he never presented any evidence that such material may exist.
So why do you talk about something that there is no evidence for it, that the IAEA has never mentioned it in the past reports, and all of a sudden you bring it up?
This is just politicization of the IAEA.
And then in the latest report, as we discussed, he mentions the fact that Iran didn't allow the inspector to take samples of heavy water, which is not within the authority of the IAEA, or he mentions that Iran didn't allow two inspectors out of a very large number of inspectors to inspect Iran's nuclear program.
These are all just moving IAEA from a scientific technological organization that should inspect a nation's nuclear program to a political arm of some Western powers, including the United States, to put pressures on the countries that this country, the United States, doesn't like.
Well, you know, my friend Gordon Prather, he always especially resented the fact that the IAEA was created to help spread, to help proliferate peaceful nuclear technology to the people of the world, and instead it was hijacked, it was taken over after the NPT was passed and turned into the global ATF or something here, and you're right, it really is sad to see ElBaradei go, maybe he'll be the president of Egypt one day.
But you know, something that you brought up in there is the outrage against the English language.
This is like a war crime against speech and whether words mean anything, whether logic counts.
This is the Donald Rumsfeld standard of evidence.
Prove what you're not doing or die.
And now, how is anyone ever supposed to be able to prove a negative?
They said the same thing about Saddam Hussein all the time.
Well, if he would just bring us his secret nuclear weapons and give them to us, then we'd destroy them and we'd know he wouldn't have them anymore.
The fact that he hasn't brought them to us means he's still hiding them.
This is the kind of argument that not only adults can entertain, but leaders can use to bring a country into war.
Prove a negative, which just doesn't work.
You can't do that.
How many grains of sand?
How many stones are there in Iran to be overturned to make sure there's not a secret atom bombs factory under them?
And meanwhile, we're still waiting for a single shred of evidence that such a thing exists there.
I mean, you say maybe there's a little smoke, but not a smoking gun.
I say there's nothing but an illusion of smoke, a projection of smoke created by Washington D.C. and Tel Aviv to make it seem as though this safeguarded, capital S, safeguarded civilian nuclear program must have some nefarious purpose to it.
And it's all about seeming that way, never really making a case that that is the way it is.
I totally agree.
And I agree with you.
Maybe I shouldn't have said there's a little bit of a smoke.
There isn't any smoke.
I mean, there's just only hot air.
And that hot air is the result of the propaganda.
That's for sure.
You have to remember, Iran is a country four times larger than Iraq.
So proving a negative in Iran's case is even more difficult than in Iraq's case.
And we know what happened to Iraq.
I mean, the guy, of course, he was a terrible dictator.
He was a bloodthirsty dictator.
I'm happy that he was gone, although I was against invasion of Iraq, I am still against invasion of Iraq.
I still think it was an illegal invasion.
But the fact of the matter is the guy didn't have a nuclear program.
And even the IAEA had said that the guy doesn't have a nuclear program.
There is no, there was no active program.
In Iran's case, there is a nuclear program.
But the nuclear program, at least to the extent that we know, up to the moment that you and I are talking, we know that it's peaceful, at least so far.
There has never been, as you said, a shred of evidence that there is any diversion from a peaceful program to a non-peaceful program.
Now, I don't know what goes on in the brain of the Iranian leaders.
Maybe they want to do something.
I don't know that.
But the evidence, the physical facts, the facts on the ground, as inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, tells me that at least up to this point, Iran's nuclear program is entirely peaceful and has nothing to do with making nuclear weapons.
In fact, to a degree, I guess they even have proven the negative as far as declared nuclear material, which would be all nuclear material that anyone has any evidence has been ever pulled out of the ground in that country or put to any use whatsoever.
They have verified the non-diversion.
They have proved, the IAEA, not the Iranians, the IAEA has proved what has not happened to the uranium, hasn't gone anywhere because it's still right there.
And I should point out that if Iran were to do that, if Iran were to divert nuclear material from peaceful to non-peaceful, the world would know about it right away because they couldn't do it, you know, secretly because everything is inspected by IAEA.
So the only way they could actually do it is go the way that North Korea went.
In other words, expel the IAEA inspectors from Iran and then declare that they are leaving the NPT, the Nuclear Non-Proficient Treaty, and then start a crash program in order to convert their stockpile of low-enriched uranium to high-enriched uranium.
But if they take this action, and this is the only sensible course of action that they can take, if they were going to go along that path, the whole world would know about it.
And in fact, the whole world would have enough time to negotiate something with Iran.
So this is all nonsense about Iran's nuclear weapon program.
In the mainstream in this country, they always talk about Iran's nuclear weapon program.
What weapon program?
There is no nuclear weapon program.
There is a nuclear program, but not there is a nuclear weapon program.
Where is the weapon?
Where is the plan for making a weapon?
None exists.
Well, you know, it's a very important point and something that I try to talk about as often as I can, that in order, if they did say that, okay, our technology is good enough now, it's reliable enough now, that now we do want to make nuclear weapons, they would have to publicly withdraw from the NPT, kick the inspectors out.
There wouldn't really be any secret about it.
They might as well literally beat their chest and say, we're making nukes now, if they were to take that step.
And the reason that that's especially remarkable right now is because it's only within the last couple of weeks that the New York Times even admitted as much.
And under David Sanger's byline, no less, although Mark Mazzetti was the principal author of the piece, that must be why there was some truth in the thing.
And what they reported, and this was from, it's either August 16th or 19th in the New York Times, Mazzetti and Sanger.
And they said, basically they rehearsed that exact same thing.
For Iran to be able to begin making nuclear weapons, they would have to withdraw from the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, kick the IAEA inspectors out of the country and begin.
And then they said, according to their intelligence sources, the, I guess they weren't so specific as CIA, but American intelligence now believes that if they were to do that, it would take them at least a year from that point, beginning at that point to make a bomb.
And they say in there, to make a single one.
And they say in there as well, that U.S. intelligence believes that the Iranians are having more trouble than ever with their centrifuges at Natanz, that they have technical difficulties of all kinds, that they're having problems overcoming, and that a year might even be a very short estimate.
And one more thing before I turn it back over to you, is that every other headline in America was Iran one year away from nuclear bombs.
Exactly, exactly.
And the very important point here is this, even if Iran went along this path, and even Iran succeeded in making two nuclear devices, not nuclear bomb, because nuclear bomb you need a delivery system, and Iran doesn't have the delivery system.
Yes, Iran has an active missile program, but that missile program, to the extent that we know about it, and they constantly test their missile, there is no indication that they can actually carry a nuclear warhead.
So it would be a nuclear device on a nuclear warhead, and this is an important distinction.
And on top of that, even if Iran did make those, they have to test them.
So that means that in two tests, one or two tests, they will get rid of all the stockpile of low-energy uranium that they have converted to high-energy uranium and make a bomb.
So that means they have nothing to say, nothing more to do with it.
But that's not really right, isn't it?
Because if they make a simple gun-type uranium nuke, then they don't really need to test that.
They didn't test the Hiroshima bomb, they only tested the Nagasaki bomb, the implosion plutonium bomb.
But they knew that the gun-type uranium nuke would work first try.
Well, they could, but you have to remember, even North Korea tried.
But that was an implosion bomb, plutonium harvested from the Soviet reactors.
That's true.
Which debunks another lie of John Bolton's, that there was a secret uranium enrichment program in North Korea, but that's a whole other story, isn't it?
That's very true.
They wouldn't need to test it this way, but they would still at least need a delivery system to deliver the nuclear warhead to wherever they are supposed to attack.
And I don't think they are going to attack any country, even if they have nuclear weapons.
Let's say, for example, if they have a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.
And this is just a hypothetical situation.
Let's say that all the propaganda in this country is that the Islamic Republic wants to attack Israel and wipe Israel off the map, which is not true.
The quote that Ahmadinejad made was mistranslated.
But let's say that even that's true.
The Iranian leader, as bad as they are internally, they know full well that any attack on Israel will bring a huge counter-attack, not only by Israel, but also by the United States.
Israel is known to have a nuclear arsenal, having between 200 to 400 nuclear warheads with all the delivery systems and everything else.
So any attack on Israel by an Iranian leader would evaporate Iran many times over.
So why would they want to do that?
Why would they want to destroy their own regime, even if they don't care about the nation, their own regime?
Why would they want to do that?
It just doesn't make sense.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm a professor at USC.
And I think that the War Party has an answer to that, which is that they want to blow up the world and force the 12th Imam to come back, and it'll be like the apocalypse, sort of like the John Hagee Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, only in power over there in Iran.
That's what they say.
Oh, that's nonsense.
I mean, Shiites have been talking about Mahdi, the 12th Imam, who is supposedly hiding, for over 1,100 years.
There has never been any evidence that Mahdi will come back any time soon.
And also, those who say that do not understand the internal dynamics of Iran politics.
Yes, there are groups in Iran who talk about the Mahdi, the 12th Imam, that is supposed to come back once the world is in chaos.
But that is basically a political agenda in order to get rid of certain factions within the power hierarchy, not that they actually believe in it.
For example, Ahmadinejad himself has been trying, and it is not reflected in this country, but he has been actually in a sort of a power struggle with Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.
The goal of the Ahmadinejad faction is to get the clerics out of power structure.
And in order to do that, they invoke Mahdi.
Why do they want to invoke Mahdi?
Because they want to say that we don't need you clerics in order to talk about Mahdi, and therefore we don't need you clerics in Iran's power structure.
So those who make these claims do not even understand what's going on inside Iran and what the dynamics of the politics is in it.
Wait, let me make sure I understand that correctly.
You're saying that the people who speak in these most apocalyptic religious terms, that their point is that we don't need the Ayatollah Khamenei to be our religious authority.
We don't need the Ayatollahs involved in the government at all.
We can have our parliament and our presidency and we don't need you guys.
Exactly.
You can see the justification for having a supreme leader in Iran is that he's basically the deputy to the heathen imam, and in his absence, the supreme leader should rule.
Now those who say that, well, we can talk to the heathen imam directly, what they really mean is that we don't need the supreme leader, we don't need the clerics in power.
So why should they stay in power?
So that's the dynamics of what's going on inside Iran, not that they actually want to blow up the whole world.
Well, isn't that interesting?
It's the moderates and the reformers that serve, in pieces, out of context, serve the war party so well.
I guess it's always been that way.
Moderates are the enemy of the American extremists.
Yeah, that's true.
All right, so I am Scott Horton, I'm from AntiWar.com.
I'm filling in for Maria Armoudian today on her show, and I'm speaking with Mohammad Sahimi, professor of chemical engineering at USC.
I think we're going to take a short break, and we'll be right back after this, y'all.
Thanks for listening.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Maria Armoudian's show, I'm Scott Horton from AntiWar.com, filling in for her today.
I'm speaking with Mohammad Sahimi from the University of Southern California here in Los Angeles.
We're talking about Iran's nuclear program, and if you guys would like to get involved on the air, ask some questions of Professor Sahimi, we'd be happy to take a couple of The phone number is 818-985-KPFK.
Be happy to take y'all's calls for Professor Sahimi.
Now, last end of October, very early November, Barack Obama, Nicholas Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, gave a joint press conference where they announced with tremendous fanfare the discovery of a secret uranium facility at Qom.
In Iran, caught them red-handed, Sahimi, what do you say about that?
Well, actually, what happened was, before the President, and Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown made the announcement, four days before that, Iran had already sent a letter to the IAEA formally informing them that Iran was building the Qom facility for uranium enrichment.
Now, this became a big issue simply because they thought that Iran has violated its obligation towards a safeguard agreement with the IAEA.
But Iran actually had not violated any obligation.
Let me explain this for the listener.
When Iran signed an agreement with the IAEA in 1974, the safeguard agreements that Iran signed has a part that is called the subsidiary arrangement.
The subsidiary arrangement spells out the way the safeguard regulations and provisions are enforced.
In that subsidiary arrangement, there is an article called Code 3.1.
Code 3.1 governs the time that a nation that has a nuclear program informs the IAEA of the existence of a nuclear facility in that nation.
The Code 3.1 that Iran had in 1974 stipulated that Iran was obligated to inform the International Atomic Energy Agency 180 days before introducing any nuclear material of the existence of any nuclear facility.
So, for example, when in February of 2003, Iran informed the IAEA about the existence of Natanz facility, it introduced nuclear material the following summer, six months after the notification.
Now, when Iran informed the IAEA in February of 2003 about the existence of Natanz facility, it also agreed to carry out on a volunteer basis the modified Code 3.1.
The modified Code 3.1 stipulates that a nuclear nation should immediately inform the IAEA once the plan is in place to construct a nuclear facility.
Not 180 days before introducing, but right away.
Iran agreed to do that subject to the ratification of that modification of its agreement with the IAEA by Iran's parliament, meaning Majlis, which in Iran is called Majlis, the Majlis.
Iran carried out that provision from February of 2003 to March of 2007.
But after Iran's nuclear dossier was sent to United Nations Security Council, and after Iran tried to prevent that and tried to convince that that is illegal, and in my view it is illegal, it was illegal, the nuclear dossier of Iran was sent to United Nations Security Council, and I have explained this in a long article back in 2007, then Iran withdrew from volunteer implementation of modified Code 3.1, and the justification that it gave was that our parliament never ratified it.
Was this the same time that they withdrew from the additional protocol whereby they had suspended progress on their enrichment at Natanz, or that was a different time?
It was a different time.
But it's the same thing as if the United Nations or the rest of the Security Council tried to dictate to the United States under terms of a treaty that our Senate had never ratified.
Exactly.
This is exactly the same.
If a nation signs an international agreement, so long as that international agreement has not been ratified by the parliament or congress of that nation, it has no legal place, and if a nation carries out the provision of that agreement, it's on a volunteer basis.
So the question was, when was it that Iran started to build the Qom facility?
All the evidence indicates that when Iran withdrew from modified Code 3.1, it was before it started to construct the Qom facility.
Other people like David Albaraz say, well, it's sometime between 2006 and 2007, but there is no hard evidence for it.
In fact, I posted an article on Tehran Bureau, PBS frontline Tehran Bureau site, in which I presented evidence that Iran actually started the Qom facility, making the tunnel, long before that.
Long before even it had agreed to modify Code 3.1, but then it set it aside because it decided to concentrate on the Natanz facility.
And once the threat to attack the Natanz facility became real, and Iran was afraid that the Natanz facility would be attacked, it decided to build a second facility, a smaller facility, so that the know-how and technology that Iran had built over these years would be protected if the United States and or Israel attacked Natanz.
So that's the gist of the issue regarding the Qom facility.
Well, you know, Albright today, in his piece, more or less, not really debunking, but not taking seriously the new accusations leveled by the Mujahideen al-Khalq, continues to bring up the false narrative and perpetuate the false narrative that Barack Obama busted Iran with a secret facility, the same one that you just explained.
They had declared to the IAEA four days before.
Now if time is aligned, the best we can perceive it, they didn't get busted hiding anything at all.
And yet, it didn't stop the New York Post from running a cover that said, Secret Atom Bomb Factory, in all capital letters.
And even if Iran hadn't sent a letter four days in advance, and the United States had actually discovered it, it would have still not represented a violation of Iran's obligation towards its safeguard agreement, simply because Iran had gone back to following Code 3.1 of its safeguard agreement, which stipulates that Iran has the obligation to inform the agency 180 days before introducing any nuclear material into the facility.
So even if that had happened, it would still have not represented a violation, but they presented it that way anyway.
In other words, we are way, way down the rabbit hole here, quibbling about language, bureaucratic terminology and interpretation of some digits way down in a code.
Not an actual thing that happened that was bad or wrong or in any kind of violation or implied any sort of nuclear weapons progress or nuclear progress of any kind, really.
OK, so I want to get back to the so-called smoking laptop.
You did a pretty good job talking about that.
There are a couple of points of clarification I want to get to, but I think we'd better go ahead and take some of these phone calls.
They're starting to stack up.
Let's first go to Eli, says here his phone might not last.
And he has a question about the Green Movement for you.
Eli, you are on the air with Mohamed Sahimi from USC.
Thank you, guys.
Dr. Sahimi, my question for you is whether the sanctions and the threat of war are helping the Green Movement or hurting it?
OK, your phone does sound terrible, but we will take that question.
Yes, the question is whether the sanctions imposed on Iran are hurting the Green Movement.
And the threats of war as well.
The threats of war will definitely hurt the Green Movement because Iran is not any exception.
Iran is just like any other country.
Whenever there is a threat, a foreign threat, an external threat against a nation, the ruling elite, the ruling establishment can use that threat in order to put down the opposition, to tell them to be quiet because there is an external threat.
Let me give you an example.
In 1983, the dictatorship, the military dictatorship of Argentina led by General Jorge Videla was almost on the verge of collapse.
What happened?
The Falkland Island War between Argentina and Britain started.
As soon as the war started, the Argentinian people rallied around the dictatorship, the military dictatorship, and then when the Falkland Island War ended, again, they went back to opposing the dictatorship.
Look at Iran in 1980 when Saddam Hussein rolled in.
Exactly.
When the war with Iraq started in 1980, people were already tired of what was happening within the country.
There was chaos and so on.
But as soon as the war started, Iranian people rallied around the government.
Just think how much Americans loved George Bush after September 11th, and there's the answer to your question.
Did that help or hurt the opposition to George Bush in this country?
Of course it didn't, and it hurt the opposition in this country, and it's the same with Iran.
Regarding sanctions, the sanctions as they stand hurt only ordinary people.
Yes, there are some provisions that are trying to restrict the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, but the bottom line is because the economy, to a large extent in Iran right now, is controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, anything that is done in that direction will ultimately hurt the Iranian people.
So although if some sanctions can be identified that only hurt the extreme elements in Iran, but not the ordinary people, that can be debated.
Sanctions as they stand only hurt ordinary people, and the leaders of the Green Movement have said many, many times that they are opposed to these sanctions, and they are opposed to any threats of war.
So we should get that very clear that even the opposition in Iran is against sanctions and military attacks or military threats.
Well, you know, it even goes to the question of the war itself.
The neocons and the people who push for military strikes on Iran by either Israel and or the United States, they basically say, well, we want to degrade the nuclear program here and there, but then they kind of concede the best they could do is put it back a couple of years, and then they start talking about how the people of Iran will take the opportunity to rise up and overthrow their government.
They will do a regime change for us, I guess, put the next Shah in power to be a good friend of America and Israel for him.
But let me explain this because this is very important.
Even if that happens, even if Iranian people rise up and overthrow the Islamic Republic and set up a democratic government, that democratic government will still support Iran's nuclear program because on that issue, every faction, every political faction in Iran is unified.
It's not really believable that the people would take the opportunity of a foreign attack to attack their own government, is it?
Of course not.
But just conceding that one ridiculous point.
Even if that happens, the outcome will not be Iran without a nuclear program.
The all political factions, all groups in Iran support this program.
Okay.
I'm Scott Wharton.
I'm talking with Mohammed Sahimi here on KPFK 90.7 in LA, 98.7 in Santa Barbara.
And we, geez, well, let's go ahead and take some more of these calls.
I'm going to put aside a couple of minutes to ask you again about the laptop, the all-important smoking laptop.
But first, let's go to Habib in Thousand Oaks.
Habib, are you there?
Hi, Mr. Sahimi.
Thanks for this program.
Mr. Sahimi, I think the time for this regime, Mullah's regime, is over and we don't need you to try so hard to keep these Mullahs.
The problem is Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah, all of them.
They got to go.
Their time is over.
And it's going to happen by majority silence with the rang-a-rang organization.
Thank you very much.
Have a good day.
What do you say, Sahimi, are you on the side of the Ayatollah Khamenei?
Well, let me explain, Habib.
If you follow my articles over the past many, many years, and especially over the elections last year, you will see that I am totally opposed to Ahmadinejad.
I'm totally opposed to the regime of Velayat-e Faqih, the supreme leader.
I'm opposed to all of that.
But as I said at the beginning of the program, this is not about them.
This is about the national right of a nation and the threat of military attacks against Iran.
I am doing this as an anti-war activist.
I don't want military attacks against Iran simply because I am a supporter of the democratic movement in Iran.
As I said, any military threat against Iran will only benefit the hardliners.
Mehdi Karoubi, one of the main reformist leaders, and somebody that everybody agrees has been very courageous and brave fighting the hardliners in Tehran, just said the other day that the sanctions and military threats are benefiting only the Islamic Revolutionary Guards.
So if you follow the news, you will see that they also say the same thing.
I agree Iran should be a democracy.
I agree I hope to see a democracy in Iran before I pass away.
But this is not about that.
This is an internal issue and we are talking about an external issue.
Well, and Mohamed, if I may be so bold, you're an American now and I think, I hope at least that you're concerned.
You don't want your country, America, to get into another war that we've got no business being in.
This is terribly destructive for us.
Not as deadly for us as for the people of Iran, the threat of this war.
But our empire has been driven over the edge of the cliff here.
This is just turbo boost.
That's exactly right.
I have lived in the United States for 32 years.
I love this country.
This country has been good to me.
I have made a good life for myself and my family.
And I don't want this country, even if I forget about Iran, I don't want this country to get into an illegal war that will only bring more destruction, not only to the Middle East, but also to this country.
We all know what happened after invading Iraq.
We all know what a terrible state of economy is in this country.
So even if we look at it from that perspective, we should oppose any sort of threat against Iran.
Let me ask you about the context of the broader war on terrorism here, too, because, of course, we have an American occupation unending in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We have covert wars raging in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
That's how covert they are.
We all know about them.
And of course, the second biggest story to me, I guess, this week is all the hoopla about the proposal since rescinded this church in Florida that was a proposal, the plan they had to burn some Korans.
And David Petraeus was saying this was going to inflame Muslim sentiment and endanger our troops in Afghanistan.
Even Sarah Palin came out and announced this as unnecessarily inflammatory.
And of course, there's a whole side argument about what was the motive of the attackers and whether Islam was to blame in the first place.
But it seems important that George Bush, despite all of the terrible things he did, tried repeatedly to tell people we are not at war with Islam.
We are at war with these people who have twisted this one branch of it or whatever and to try to explain that.
But now without George Bush here, the worst part of right wing demagoguery seems to have just spun out of control all across the Muslim world.
They must be saying to each other that maybe Osama was right.
Maybe their war really is against all of Islam and not those specific targets that you talk about.
And now here we are threatening to bomb off the face of the earth, the largest Shia controlled state in the world, which even more makes could very easily, it seems, make it appear to people in the Muslim world that look, they don't even care if we're Sunni or Shia.
They don't care if we're in Gaza or Lebanon or far away Pakistan or Iran in the middle.
They want to kill us all.
And now is that the kind of lesson that we want 1.3 billion Muslims in the world to take on?
That's the kind of blowback effect that we've been dealing with since 1953 to nth degrees here.
We could really turn this into the clash of civilizations that Frank Gaffney always wanted.
I totally agree.
From any angle that you look at this issue, you see that, first of all, the possibility of a war with Iran is very terrifying.
And secondly, if God forbid that happens, first of all, it will engulf the entire Middle East.
And secondly, God knows what happens to this country.
I mean, remember, Iran is not Iraq.
If there is a war with Iran, Iranians will respond.
And they will respond in many different ways.
They will close the Strait of Hormuz to cut off the flow of oil.
They will attack U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They will attack Saudi Arabia oil fields.
And who can blame them if they do that?
Because once you attack a nation and try to destroy it, that country will use whatever it has in its power to attack.
Again, I emphasize, I would like to see a democratic Iran and I hope that will happen.
And there are indications that the Green Movement has expanded its reach.
It has become broader.
Even the ruling establishment has recognized that things cannot continue.
So they have been talking about reconciliations and so on.
But again, this issue is not about Iran's internal situation.
Rather, it is about the double standard that the United States has with the Middle East country and Iran's nuclear program, which at least up to this point has remained a totally peaceful program.
Okay.
Now, I'm not going to get to ask you about the smoking laptop.
You already said a lot of very important things about it.
The archive of this will be at kpfk.org later for anybody who missed that part.
It's an all-important, very small detail in the larger argument, but an extremely important one.
I will go ahead and say that people can read Gareth Porter and Gordon Prather and Scott Ritter all about the so-called smoking laptop, the Iranian secret laptop, and what an Israeli forgery it is and why not to take it seriously.
And then maybe you can think about how to look at these UN mandate investigations based on these forgeries.
And let me add this, because I myself wrote an article about the laptop, which was posted on antiwar.com about two years ago, in which I explained why this laptop cannot be real.
If you go and look at it, Gareth Porter, of course, has a great job of explaining all of this.
And Gordon Prather, when he was writing more, he's one of my heroes, and I always look forward to his column.
They have done a great job, but myself, I've also written on the laptop.
Yeah.
Bottom line, it's already been completely debunked for a long, long time now, and anyone just search antiwar Iran laptop and have yourself a fun afternoon.
Okay.
Can we fit in a couple more calls here?
Let's talk to Matt about Iran's nuclear program with Mohammad Sahimi today on the show.
Yeah.
Hi.
Mr. Horton, I think you're awesome.
You should have your own show all the time.
And I was just wondering, is there any there?
Is this not just like an ace in the hole for further war industrial complex and imperial endeavors?
I mean, isn't this a whole lot of faffery and political crap?
I mean, much the way we give Israel undying support for things like attacks on a peace flotilla and basically everyday Holocaust almost behind the walls in Gaza.
Is there anything there?
Is this just a bunch of vapor?
Thanks.
Well, if you mean if this is sort of a grand plan for military industrial complex, if I understood it correctly, obviously, whenever there is war and there is a threat of war, the military industrial complex benefits from it.
And as we also know, the new conservatives want sort of eternal war.
They always want war everywhere.
Yeah.
Well, and read the Atlantic Monthly, Jeffrey Goldberg's new piece, the centerpiece of the war party and the push against Iran is based out of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office in Jerusalem.
All right.
That's it.
Right.
We're out of time.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thank you very much for listening, everyone.
It's been Maria Armudian's show.
I'm filling in here with Mohammed Sahimi from USC.
You can find what he writes and you can find all my radio shows at antiwar.com.
Have a good afternoon.
Bye.
