Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/30/23 Gareth Porter on Israel’s Lies about al-Shifa Hospital

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

Gareth Porter returns to the show to discuss the war in Gaza. First, Porter explains the project that has been keeping him from his typical daily journalism. He and Scott then dig into the story that has brought him back—the Israeli propaganda campaign to label al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City as Hamas’ headquarters.  Discussed on the show: “Israeli Deceit & the Ongoing Battle of Shifa Hospital” (Consortium News) “IDF Knew Real Hamas HQ While Lying About al-Shifa” (Consortium News) Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on the national security state. He is the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare and, with John Kiriakou, The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis. Follow him on Twitter @GarethPorter and listen to Gareth’s previous appearances on the Scott Horton Show. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All right, y'all, welcome to the show. It is anti-war radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton, celebrating 13 years here on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com, and I'm the author of the book, Enough Already. Time to end the War on Terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now. Going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show, and the rest of all the video sites, too.

and you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. All right, I am so happy to welcome back to the show. The great Gareth Porter, a man I consider to be the most important journalist of our generation. He may not be as famous as your Seymour Hershey's, but he is the most reliable debunker of lies going back for, you know, a solid 20 years here for the whole Terror War long, Iraq War II, Afghanistan. especially Iran. He wrote the book on all the hype about their nuclear program and the real truth about it called Manufactured Crisis. And he's just the best of the best, which is why I have literally interviewed him 326 times. This will be the 327th. My great friend, the wonderful Gareth Porter. Welcome back to the show, sir. How are you? I'm fine. Thank you so much, Scott. And you do know,

I'm sure how much I appreciate your interest in my work, which is, shall we say, unique to say the least. Well, no, you know what? That's only partially true because I know my audience feels the same way. And I hear from people all the time saying, where is Gareth Porter? Is he safe? Is he all right? And then I say, yes, he's fine.

He's just working on what? Gareth, where have you been, man? I've been working for the last two years plus, I guess, on a book on the Cold War, which the title of which is uh has been clear in my mind for a very long time it's the cold war as deception or as a deception uh-huh and now to be clear sure which one you're not you're not stepping on my toes writing about the new cold war this is about the old cold war the first cold war with the soviet union yes that i'm the one i'm way behind on is the new cold war i hope maybe we can go touring around giving speeches together or something if we ever get them finished by all means

wouldn't that be great um well you know what you want to talk to us a little bit about the book i know it's not available yet but why what is it that has you in 2022 and 2002 writing a book about the 1940s and 50s and the dawn of the old coal war gareth right um it's it's a good question because obviously nobody else has thought to take that kind of perspective on the Cold War, that it, I mean, basically my perspective is that it was all a lie. I mean, the essence of it was a lie. It would not have happened but for a whole long series of crucial strategic lives. So that in a nutshell is the thesis of the book.

And it has, if I remember correctly, 11 chapters on different parts of the Cold War, all of which not just illustrate, but essentially recapitulate that story of how the Cold War unfolded because of strategic laws, deceptions of the American public and in some cases of the President of the United States. All right. It's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton talking with. Gareth, Port of the Great. And, you know, I speak for a lot of people when I say that we really have missed you on the war in Ukraine here. And I know that a man's got to do what a man's got to do. And I can't wait to read this book. I know it's so important. But I also know that I speak for the audience, too, when I say, I'm so grateful, Gareth, to see you taking a break from the book to come and commentate for us on what's happening in the Gaza Strip right now. You have such a deep background knowledge of the situation.

understanding of moral and international law and the rest and and just you got the x-ray eyes when they're inundating us with so much propaganda all day long who knows how to make hiding or hair of it you do and so we're just so lucky to have you and I want to point we have three major ones but I want to start with these two in-depth articles at consortium news.com again the great gareth porter consortium news.com Israeli deceit and the ongoing battle of Shifa Hospital. And then the follow-up, IDF knew real Hamas H.Q, while lying about Al-Sheifa. Please tell us what in the hell is going on here, Gareth Porter.

Right. Okay. Thank you very much, indeed, for the opportunity to do this. the beginning point of this of this series of articles and the third one should be out very, very soon. We won't get into that because it hasn't been published. But the first one is really about how the Israelis have been propagandizing for literally decades or more than a decade about the notion that Hamas, has been using Al-Shifa Hospital as its command center. And this propaganda campaign really begins with the notion and the reality that the Israelis themselves built a bunker, if you will, an extra underground level of the main building in Al-Shefa Hospital, the most important, the biggest. and most important hospital in all of Gaza. And this was in, they would have built this in 1982, roughly, if I'm not mistaken, when the Israelis were actually in charge for some brief

period of years of Gaza. And so they were carrying out this propaganda campaign that this is where Hamas has been putting its command and control center for many years now. Now, we now know. Let me stop you for just one second here, Garrett, just to stipulate for people if they're not aware of this. The former Israeli prime minister and defense minister, Ehud Barak, confirmed your assertion on CNN to Christian Ammanpur. And I thought it was funny. She actually obviously doesn't read.

She only knows what she knows from watching TV, too. So she didn't know what he was talking about. And she said, excuse me, Mr. former prime minister, did you misspeak? Did you say that you built the tunnels? And Ahud Barak says, yes, of course, lady. This is what we did. We built it.

And he says, he explains, too, we were out of room at the campus. So we built down. So we would have more room for hospital business. You know, that's all. Right, right. So ever since then, they have been putting out this propaganda line that, of course, Hamas is using that for its own military command center. Now, it's clear from all the evidence that we have

and the lack of evidence that has been put forward by the Israeli side that they knew nothing of the sort. They had no evidence whatsoever of this. They simply made it up completely. And yet this has become almost an assumption on the part of those press people who have been covering this for many years now. I mean, there's a whole series of press articles if you go back and I cite some of them in my first article that assert precisely what the Israelis have been claiming and claim that the Hamas people were seen in the hospital. and, you know, strolling through the corridors and everything. And so they have been extremely successful in selling this idea.

And that's sort of the basis then for the second piece that I did, which was... You know what? Hold it right there. Let me stop you for just one sec to follow up because I think anyone who's very fair-minded and is trying to keep up on Twitter all day can see where obviously the Israeli government is overreaching on so many of their claims. Right? At the same time, there are people on the side of the Palestinians who, I won't say, are necessarily on the side of Hamas, but who seem to be willing to bend over backwards to excuse what's going on or to dismiss credible claims against Hamas and what they're doing here. And then sometimes they have to walk it back, sometimes not. But in other words, I just want to clarify that for people who are not familiar, that you're not some partisan of the people who nominally rule the Gaza Strip here and to whatever degree Hamas is or isn't

using those tunnels that's all you're trying to ascertain not carry water for them or tell their side of the story here so for example you would acknowledge garrett that the IDF released video of a tunnel and they said look we found it we went down we sent a dog with a camera on his back and he went down the tunnel and then here we are bonanza so eureka deny that mr. So what is the truth of, I mean, you said that, yeah, Israel built the tunnel, but they claim to find this secret shaft there or something. Is that important? Well, it's important insofar as the, there is a shaft, but it is misleading in that they are sort of conflating the fact that there's a shaft with the propaganda line that it is used. by Hamas in conjunction with, this is a key point here, which should not be not just forgotten,

but not given sufficient emphasis, the key point being that the Israelis have been arguing that the al-Shefa hospital is fully responsible for what's happening underneath it, that this is somehow, you know, the evidence that there's a tunnel underneath and there's reasonable assumption that somehow Hamas has used it, we'll get to that, that this, that this, that they have the evidence that the Al-Shifa Hospital administration bears responsibility for the use of that tunnel. They knew about it. They were fully cognizant of it. They were are part of the conspiracy. And that is another lie that I've taken on in the second article, and again, even more so, in the third article that hasn't been published yet. Because, and

this is a little bit complex, so we have to sort of take it a step at a time. When the, the IDF began this intensive propaganda campaign on El Shifa Hospital. And it's in the context, very briefly, one has to state, of the IDF, a firm policy and strategy of essentially taking out of commission and either bombing or otherwise destroying the effectiveness of the entire hospital system of Gaza. That was part, that was an essential part of their strategy. For obvious reasons that the IDF wants to impose the greatest amount of cost on the Palestinian population of Gaza.

That is, that is an essential part of the strategy. Well, it was part of driving them south, too, right? Was to cripple any survey. is available in the north? To cripple services in the north and then to essentially minimize, if not deny the services in the South as well. So this is, again, in the context of this Israeli strategy of essentially eliminating the hospital system of Gaza.

Now, al-Shifa, as I said, is the largest and the most important hospital in the entire hospital system by far. And so they have been gunning for it for a while, obviously, because of the idea. of the tunnel underneath. And so they began this propaganda campaign, and it built up over a few days with the resultant series of articles in the U.S. press, which mirrored, again, the Israeli propaganda line, that there was this tunnel that Hamas was using, and it was part of the strategy, of Hamas of using hospitals as a human shield.

That's the key term that is used by Israeli propaganda. A human shield to prevent the Israelis from being able to deal with Hamas. Yeah. Hey, guys, Scott here for Leo Hamill find jewelers out of San Diego at Jewelry StoreSD.com. They do business nationwide. They sell jewelry and watches, specializing and engaging. engagement rings. You know, in case you're in love with somebody. They also specialize in one-of-a-kind vintage and antique jewelry, fully serviced pre-owned fine watches, such as Rolex, Petec, Philippe,

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But this has got to be remarked upon about just the absolute miraculous success of the Israelis in the use of this propaganda term human shields. And somehow just simply begging the question or arguing past the sale with and just somehow building in. to those two words, the idea that, of course, you can kill a human shield. There's no restriction on killing an innocent civilian if a bad guy's hiding behind them. Everybody knows that. And so it's not even debated. It's just somehow baked into that thing so well. This has got to be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns since the Yellow Ribbons of 1990.

I agree. I agree, Scott. And you're very correct in pinpointing this. highlighting this, I should say, because it is a very important part of their, not just a very important part, I would say it is the epicenter of their propaganda campaign during this war that allows them or has allowed them through their success in getting the New York Times and the rest of the U.S. press to go along, essentially, with their line. Now, I'm going to, having stated that, I'm going to partially revise it by saying that when the Israelis invited the press, first of all, to visit what was the opening of the tunnel before they had gotten into it and gave them these briefings, they were, I think the word that I think there was the CNN correspondent who was one of those who visited. said that this evidence that you're presenting is underwhelming.

This is when they were laying out within the above ground hospital, one of the rooms of one of the rooms in one of the buildings in the hospital, a bunch of weapons and uniforms. I mean, not even a bunch, right? A handful. A handful. It's reasonable to say. And this was a kind of amateurish performance by the IDF, I must say, which simply did not convince anybody that they hadn't just brought this stuff in. I mean, it was so easy for them to do it. There was nothing to prevent them.

And they had no evidence to show otherwise. I think even the corporate press caught them adding a rifle behind the MRI machine. The earlier clip showed one and the second clip showed two. That's right. That's right. So we have these visits by the press to the underground tunnel. And this is where I think that this is the ultimate sort of part of my reporting here so far and involves the third report as well, that what the IDF showed when they have a video of the travel through the tunnel. from the beginning to the end. And, of course, what did they find? They didn't find anything.

There was nothing there. And the IDF spokesman who conducted the tours of the press and also took a tour himself where he gave his own sort of personal commentary on what he was seeing. what one can derive from that series of presentations by the IDF of what was in the tunnel is that their line doesn't really make sense because there was no evidence whatsoever of the use of that tunnel by Hamas during this war and in fact one of the reporters from a from one of the dailies

in in Israel who went it was Arrest actually it is the the Hebrew language newspaper which also has an English edition

which has been critical of the government of Israel but sent somebody the the correspondent the military correspondent was sent to accompany a group of journalists with the IDF spokesman to go through the tunnel. And he afterwards wrote a report which has been cited by Fred Kaplan of Slate magazine as convincing evidence of the truth of the IDF, you know, convincing evidence of the IDF that the tunnel was actually

used as the command center for this war. Well, it doesn't, the evidence doesn't show that at all. In fact, one other AP correspondent who'd taken the trip through the tunnel observed that it seemed like it hadn't been used for quite a while. And even the Horat's correspondent, who appears to be supportive of the Israeli war, admitted that it wasn't clear when it was elected. used. Right. And it was either used in a previous war or in this war. Meanwhile, that's the way to put it. Okay, so again, it's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton talking with Gareth Porter. And, you know, you had mentioned it's in the article, too, about the Israelis have put out this graphic of this massive multi-level complex that was reminiscent of the cartoon drawings

that they put in Newsweek about the hideouts at Tora Bora in Nangahar province in 2001, where they showed bin Laden having these massive computer banks. It looked like something from Cobra, from G.I. Joe, you know, the bad guys. Instead of just literally just being a cave in the side of a mountain where they're sleeping on the floor. This is, of course, the most interesting chapter in this entire tale, and I've skipped over it, and you are correct in bringing me back to it, because it illustrates just how far the IDF goes in putting out ridiculous propaganda that ultimately, of course, it was completely, it had to take back. This is propaganda that shows an artist's conception of how Hamas has colonized Al-Shefa hospital.

It shows them using five different buildings, no, sorry, four different buildings, shows the whole building as red, meaning that Hamas is using it. and then shows that there's connections between the hospital itself and the underground tunnel and the underground tunnel is shown, obviously, artist conception of Hamas using it with their command center. All right, you guys, it is anti-war radio, and I'm Scott Horton talking with my good friend, Gareth Porter the Great, back in action here at consortium news.com. got a few important pieces for you here, including Israeli deceit in the ongoing battle of Shifa Hospital. And now we got to discuss, Gareth, IDF new real Hamas headquarters while lying about al-Shifa. And as you say, this is open in the Israeli press. It's just

most Americans aren't paying attention, but you certainly are. So this really goes to undermine the claims about that hospital. Well, it's a kind of strange story that is not totally explained yet, but it starts with this leak from the IDF itself. somebody in the IDF leaked this to the Jerusalem Post, which is a conservative, you know, pro-government, obviously pro-Lucud newspaper in Jerusalem, that the IDF had discovered the headquarters of Hamas, the underground headquarters of Hamas,

underneath the above-ground headquarters of Hamas in northern Gaza, not about eight miles or so from the Shifa Hospital, but clearly not connected. And this discovery was obviously a big, it was big news, but nobody else picked it up. And, you know, I think it's reasonable to assume that the Netanyahu government called up everybody in the press in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and made sure that they knew that this was not to be to be published. This story was not to be published because it simply stopped. Nobody else published this key find key story that had been published on

November 11th. And so there's a very interesting backstory there. But then we go to the fact that this was just a few days before the IDF moved in physically into Al-Shefa Hospital to take it over. And the first thing they did was to prepare a propaganda. offensive. They went in in the middle of the night with a large crew. And the next morning, later in the morning, they gave a not a press conference, but they did a video tour of one of the buildings in Shifa Hospital. And they showed a bunch of weapons and paraphernalia,

uniforms and so forth, and they claimed that this showed that the Hamas had been, had taken over this building of the hospital and had been using it for their own headquarters and planning for their offensive. But it was a pretty poor show of propaganda, pretty amateurish, And it wasn't really, they didn't really sell in terms of the, the, certainly the American media didn't buy it at all. And they were told that by at least one journalist who was being interviewed on camera, who was interviewing the spokesperson on camera. And they got to be pretty full of it for the American major corporate media to say, wait a minute. That doesn't sound right. Indeed.

It was very transparently a phony. I think this is fair to say. Yeah. Well, listen, Gary, they've killed something like 15,000 people, and there are reports or estimates, I guess, that there must be five or 7,000 people or something still buried in the rubbles who aren't identified yet, or, you know, these kinds of just... Unnumbered thousands. Yeah, it's just incredible. And then, of course, I raised the question of whether they'll ever be, get a proper burial, or they'll just all be bulldozed away or whatever's going to happen to them. But I'm sorry, the point being that is there any real estimate of how much Hamas has actually suffered for this?

And particularly the Alcassan brigades who actually did the deed while all these 10, more than 10,000 civilians. And they say, I think the UN said it was 65% women and children dying in this thing. I mean, it's a few thousand. I mean, generally speaking, that's the round estimate. But they don't really know, but it's a fraction of the civilian casualties in short, right? It's just terrible. Listen, I'm sorry, Gareth, we are all out of time for continuing this interview. That's it for anti-war radio for today.

But I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you are back doing a little bit of daily journalism here. And I know the book is so important, and I'm all for it, but also we've missed you so bad. So we're so happy to have you. Everyone go to consortium news.com and look at so far three, about to be a fourth new piece there on Israel's war against the people of the Gaza Strip there at consortium news.com. And thank you so much, Gareth, for your time on the show again. Thank you so much, Scott. I appreciate it. All right, you guys.

And that is anti-war radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm at anti-war.com and Scott Horton.org. And you'll follow me on Twitter if you dare at Scott Horton's show. And I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on 90.7, KPFK in L.A. See you next week.