Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/20/22 Connor Freeman on the Effort to Sabotage the Iran Nuclear Deal

Episode Date: June 25, 2022

Scott interviews Connor Freeman, Assistant Editor at the Libertarian Institute, about the ways some American and Israeli officials are hindering JCPOA negotiations. Freeman has been following the story closely and gives a thorough background on the developments since Biden took office. He also lays out the many ways Israel has been using violent means to ensure no agreement will be reached between Iran and the United States.   Discussed on the show: Connor talks JCPOA on Conflicts of Interest Connor Freeman is the Assistant Editor of the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com and Counterpunch, as well as the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96 This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right you guys introducing connor freeman he's a regular writer at the libertarian institute and a co-host most often with kyle ann zalone of the great show conflicts of interest

welcome the show Connor how you doing I'm great Scott thanks for having me on happy to have here listen so I have a problem I have too many jobs far too many jobs and so I'm glad that I hired Kyle to basically do my job for me at antiwar dot com a couple years ago and a few years ago now and I'm very glad that you and he and Will are doing such a great job keep it track all the news Of course, Dave DeCamp, the new news editor at anti-war.com, and Jason Ditz, as always. But so you guys have just been doing such a great job writing for the Institute and for anti-war.com, all these kind of news write-ups and keep a track of everything. Now, I heard an episode of Kyle's show where you're kind of co-hosting there and explaining

all about what's going on with the Iran nuclear deal. And since Gareth is busy writing a book about the last Cold War, and I'm busy writing books about the new Cold War and nukes and all these other things all the time. I don't know the first thing about, say, the last half a year worth of Biden administration negotiations with Iran over getting, over the U.S., getting back into the JCPOA that they're actually still sort of within. Anyway, you sure explained it really well to Kyle. So, I'm stealing from him and poaching his guest and asking you the same question. What's up with all this Iran deal stuff, Connor? Yeah, absolutely.

So basically, you know, the original negotiations, the indirect negotiations that started in Vienna and April while Rouhani was still in power, the moderates, that failed. And Trita Parsi wrote an important piece for responsible state craft showing how, I believe, May, the Biden administration told them that, hey, by the way, you know, if you return to the deal, and you're still in compliance, we could still impose and reimpose sanctions and just screw you anyway. So basically sending a message like you're, you have no, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. So what happened was, you know, it looked like with Raeisi coming into power, you know, all the hype was that, oh, well, these are hardliners. They're not going to negotiate. can't reason with these people. They're out of their minds. And so, you know, they basically spent

the interim months between Raeisi's, you know, government taking power and, and returning to talks in the beginning of December, which they had said all along. They had the full intention, that was their intention to return to talks and to get back and get the Americans back in the deal. And in the interim, Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State, spent all of his time going around with the Israelis saying, they have a right to defend themselves and all options are on the table and, you know, basically say, we don't even think that they want to return to the deal. And we give the, you know, we give Tel Aviv a green light to do whatever they want. And so when they return to talks, the Israelis immediately came out and said, the Iranians are seeking a nuclear weapon. And we know we have all this evidence.

And, you know, previously when the talks started in April, they just attacked the Natanz's centrifuge building and uranium enrichment facility, caused a huge explosion, power outages and all this. And when the talks were originally announced back in April, they attacked an Iranian cargo ship in the Red Sea. But this time, they went more of a diplomatic route. And, you know, I should just add that a couple months before talks started, Bennett met with Biden and said, I'm going to lay out my strategic vision.

for how to deal with Iran, and it consists of a series of clandestine attacks and the gray area stuff, and basically said that the peaceful route won't last forever, and all this nonsense, you know, just more and more threats. So it was interesting because after the Israelis said they're seeking a bomb, William Burns, the CIA director, came out and said, that's not true. And so the talk started basically seemed to get off to a rough start because Blinken and Robert Malley were coming out and going, you know, the window is closing. The window is closing. And the Europeans were kind of saying the same thing. But they have a really good, the Iranians have a very adept negotiating team, arguably better than previously when the original deal was negotiated. And they've secured some concessions that are pretty interesting that are actually better than what they had before. And, but yeah, the lead negotiator is a guy named Ali Bagari Kani. And basically, he put forward two draft proposals, which were covering Iran's nuclear commitments that they would return to under the deal, which they only started to walk back

from after a year of the maximum pressure campaign after Trump left the deal in 2018. They waited until a year later in 2019 to start walking back their commitments. And then most of the things that they did that get hyped up are really, in response. Most of them were demanded by parliament or they were in response to Israeli assassinations of their scientists or attacks on their nuclear program. And so they put forward these proposals. And the original reaction was, oh, this is unreasonable. They're demanding too much. Basically, what they were demanding was a return to the 2015 status quo. They wanted a full implementation of the JCPOA, not what Obama did. Whereas Muhammad Murundi, the brilliant

academic, who's sort of their point man for international media in Vienna, who's, you know, because we haven't forgotten that the Obama administration imposed sanctions the day the deal was signed and that they went around telling foreign businesses, you know, not to work with the Iranians, even after the deal was implemented ostensibly. So they wanted a full reversal, like, you know, the rollback of the entire maximum pressure campaign and they wanted guarantees and a verification mechanism to guarantee that they would have all the sanctions lifted that are promised in the JCPOA. And they said to the Europeans, you know, you can write your own proposal if you don't like

ours. And the Europeans are like, yeah, they just never did. So by the end of December, you know, I got pretty optimistic and I think a lot of people did because all of a sudden, if you were reading, you know, the reports coming in for, wherever Al Jazeera, Reuters, Middle East Eye, you know, just reading all the quotes that were coming out of Vienna. The Russian envoy, the, you know, even the European Union broker of the talks, Enrique Mora, the nuclear negotiator. And the Chinese are all saying, look, the deal is now being negotiated on Iran's terms. And at that point, more and more progress started

to build. The Americans were still dragging their feet. Robert Malley has proved to be a just a horrible envoy, even though he was involved in negotiating the original deal and was you know marketed as a so-called, you know, an adult in the room. He's been very bad on this issue. You know, he recently just told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, all options are on the table and the chances of returning the dealer less, you know, they're more, returning the dealer way less likely than us just walking away and the deal failing. But it did appear like they were going to return to the deal. And so in February and in March, there was this, even, I'll just before I continue,

even the war in Ukraine did not seem to derail talks right away. So, I mean, there was a dispute over the Russians wanted guarantees that their, you know, their obligations in the deal to do business and, you know, process Iran's uranium stockpile and to fuel that that wouldn't be interrupted by the American sanctions blitz on Russia. And everybody was like, oh, well, this is it. The deal's done. There's no way it's going to happen. But that got resolved very, very quickly.

And even this issue originally of the so-called undeclared sites that Israel told the IAEA about years ago that have these trace particles of unprocessed uranium that date back decades and has always been a sort of an issue that the Americans and the Israelis use to thwart diplomacy whenever it seems things are going Iran's way, Even that seemed to be resolved because the IAEA cut, well, Raphael Grassey at the time, the director general, cut a deal in Tehran where they would provide documentation and explain everything about what happened at those sites. And the Iranians really wanted to put that issue to bed for good. But what happened in February and March was the Israelis started ramping up their attacks on Iran, including drone strikes in Kerman Shah on a drone facility and another attack that has. has been alleged that occurred in Tabriz on a similar facility, and also they bombed Syria and killed two IRGC members. And so in response to this, Iran made a drastic step.

They actually fired ballistic missiles at a site in Erbil that they claim was a Mossad intelligence operation. And not that that's actually been confirmed yet, but I mean, the attack on the drone facility in Kermanshaw destroyed hundreds of... drones and did severe damage to their drone fleet. And there's reports out of Iran that a few people were actually killed in Tabriz in this attack in that city. And so after that, or more or less concurrently, there was this massive push in Congress to thwart the deal entirely, led by not just Republicans, but Democrats. So Elaine Loria, she's a congresswoman from Virginia, she's famous for

supporting Republican legislation called the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act. She wants to make sure that we completely do away with Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution so that Biden or whoever is president next can launch a war on China immediately without any waiting time or any kind of deliberation in Congress, and God forbid, a declaration of war, we can just immediately go to war. But she led a, she, in the event of an attack on Taiwan, but she, with Josh Gotham, who is another huge Democratic Party, Iran Hawk in the House, they gave a huge speech where they said they spoke for more than a dozen Democratic Congress members who, and they basically said that, you know, we can't accept this deal. Iran is so close to a nuclear weapon. And this

IRGC issue. These are the, you know, they're the leading state sponsor of terror and just hyping up the threat and saying that they would not support the deal. Tom Cotton led a group of almost a dozen Republican senators saying we need to move, we need to get refueling aircraft to Israel now. We need to get the more F-35s and military helicopters. You know, we can't wait. They need to defend themselves against Iran. There was even a group of national security, former national security officials and administration officials, including Elliot Abrams, uh, who came out and said, if they removed the IRGC from this foreign terrorist organization blacklist, it's an affront to Gold Star families. And, uh, it's going to encourage daily attacks from this terrorist

organization on American troops. And, uh, the, the Republicans, uh, in the Senate, 49 out of 50 of them said that they would not support a deal with Iran unless it dealt with their ballistic missile program and their support for their allies in the region. The only Republican in the Senate who has been good on this issue, and quite frankly, he's been better than any Democrat I can think of, is Rand Paul, which is interesting because, you know, he was bad on the deal originally and he actually signed Tom Cotton's letter that was sent to Tehran, where he said, you know, don't get too comfortable. As soon as we get a Republican in office, we're going to rip up the JCPOA. But he's actually positioned himself to the left of Robert Malley, Biden's Iran

envoy, when he was speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rand Paul's like, why wouldn't you just put taking the IRGC off this foreign terrorist organization blacklist on the table? You know, if you want to change the behavior of the Iranian government, then you need to offer them something. That's how negotiations work. right now, just adding sanctions is not accomplishing anything. In fact, it's having the opposite of what you say are the desired effects, you know, with the advancements in Iran's nuclear program, which are, you know, purely for leverage, but, you know, it's hyped up as they're getting closer to Obama always. But so there was this massive push from Congress to just

completely send a message to Biden and Tehran that if a deal is signed, it would, you know, break Biden's political, you know, it would destroy Biden's political capital probably in the midterms and certainly the next time he, when he runs for re-election. And also to Tehran that, you know, whenever, if a deal is signed, we'll rip it up and even the Democrats will be behind it. Hang on just one second. Hey, guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt

reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug of salt or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Green Mill Super Critical is the award-winning leader in cannabis oil extraction. Their machines are absolute top of the line. They simply work better and accomplish more for less than any competitor in the world. We are talking anywhere from a couple hundred thousand dollars for the base model and up. So this is for serious business people here. But the price, as they say, will be worth it. Green Mill's supercritical customers' investments

pay for themselves oftentimes in just weeks. Simple enough for almost any operator, deep enough for master technicians. Their new novel techniques for in-line real-time winterization for leaving their competitors in the keith. That's greenmill supercritical.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level, and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org.

Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. Real history, real economics, real education. Hungry now. Now? What about now? Whenever it hits you, wherever you are, grab an O. Henry bar to satisfy your hunger. With its delicious combination of big, crunchy, salty peanuts,

covered in creamy caramel, and chewy fudge with a chocolate decoding swing by a gas station and get an oh henry today oh hungry oh henry so uh and in the meantime israel in the last uh really since may have ramped up a assassination program in iran that is much i mean the amount of they they might have killed six people here in just the last few weeks so the there was a high profile assassination of a senior Iranian of an IRGC colonel named Hassan Syed Koday. He was murdered in his driveway, parked in his driveway by two men on motorcycles, bearing the hallmarks of previous MEK attacks, Mujahideen-K-Kalc attacks on Iranian scientists.

And then they, there was now there's been, there was another drone attack shortly after that, a quad-crofter drone attack, just like they did. in the Israelis did in Karaj last year in the summer in June, where they destroyed the roof of the industrial shed at a nuclear facility in Karaj, destroying IAEA cameras. And it took Iran like most of the rest of the year to get the IA to say anything even approaching a condemnation of an attack that destroyed their equipment. And the only reason they did that was because the Iranian said, we won't reinstall your cameras unless you condemn Israel. And And so they, now there's Iran, according to the New York Times, believes that they also killed

a aeronautical engineer named Sayou Bantazari, who was poisoned at a dinner party. And there was another geologist that they killed who Israeli media reported, oh, this guy worked at Natanz, although that's been disputed. They say the Iranians and people close to this man have said that he actually worked for a private geological research company. But nevertheless, Iran reportedly believes both of these men were killed in Israeli assassinations. And now there have been, after they, this is on top of that drone attack at the Parchum military complex where they attacked another drone facility, killing an engineer.

There's also reports of two more IRGC members who were martyred, as the Iranian media is saying, in two mysterious accidents. And so, you know, in the midst of all of this, the Americans continue to basically say, we're never taking the IRGC off this foreign terrorist organization blacklist, which the Iranians were demanding, not as part of negotiations to revive the JCPOA, but as part of a side deal. And the, you know, of course, I already said there's this all this opposition to that in Congress and everywhere else the Israelis were against it. And so after they killed Koday, Biden comes out like a day later and, well, there's reported in Politico that Biden has made his decision.

He's not taking the RGC off the foreign terrorist organization list. And then there's a source in there in this report that goes, and he already had decided this like a month ago and called Neftali Bennett and told him about it. So the day that happened, Naftali Bennett tweets out, you know, Biden is a true friend of Israel. And we're glad to see that the IRC is going to remain on the foreign terrorist organization. list where it belongs. This is a huge issue because it's a sweeping sanction that the Trump administration implemented in 2019 at the behest of, you know, Israeli partisans like Mark Dubowitz, the head of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

It's part of what they call, the Iran Hawks call their sanctions wall. And what it is meant to do is preclude any of Trump's successors from ever returning the deal because it would be too politically toxic. And Elliot Abrams was bragging about all of this in the last days, the last several weeks of Trump's administration, where after they killed Fakhrazade, they just kept implementing new sanctions every week saying they'll never return to the deal now. It's going to be too costly and too complicated. We've just layered on all these sanctions, and so it makes it practically impossible. And so the Biden administration is basically, even if they intended to return the deal, which I'm not really. sure if that's the case, even if Biden had all his wits about him. He's been known for decades

as Israel's man in Washington. And the first thing he did when he came into office was fly a B-52 bomber over the Persian Gulf, eyeing Iran. And he named Richard Nephew, his deputy, Iran-on-boy, the guy who wrote a book about how he's a sanctions artist and how he destroyed Iran's economy under Obama and how proud of himself he was for it. And so at this point, basically, we now have, you know, Blinken coming out and saying that, oh, well, I should just add that the, in the background of all of this, is this, you know, Benny Gantz, the defense minister of Israel is urging like Naftali Bennett did last year in his meeting with Biden, I believe, in August, that they want to build this NATO-style alliance in the Middle East with Iran,

you know, in place of Russia, right, justifying all the armed sales and all the integrated missile and air defenses to build up and sell all these weapons. And of course, all these weapons sales that go to whatever it is, the UAE or Bahrain, it just, you know, the Israelis go, well, we need that qualitative military edge. So you're going to have to sell us twice as many or more advanced arms to be the most formidable power in the region. And so basically what they're doing now is you have, again, it's like the military, the Pentagon and the Congress working with the Israelis to promote all this hawkishness against Iran for all their, you know, for all their special interests reasons. You have the new general at CENTCOM, Michael Corrilla, who was saying

in his confirmation hearings how the most thing, the thing I'm most excited about is integrating missile and air defenses for Israel and the Gulf states in these Abraham's Accords countries because he goes, that's the greatest opportunity we have here. And they used the Houthi retaliatory strikes on oil facilities in the UAE to promote this. And so now there's a, there's what's called the Abraham Accords Caucus in both the, in both the Senate and the house and it's bipartisan. And so now they're pushing for the Pentagon to go ahead and do this and help integrate these military capabilities with Israel and these states. And now since Trump moved Israel and dissentcom, you know, everybody's, all these special interests are behind this.

And so that makes return to the deal, obviously, much less advantageous for more and more people because you need, you know, Israel relies on having the great phony Iran threat to justify billions of dollars in aid, you know, from the Americans every year. And so even though there's supposedly there's this sort of debate and factions between the military and intelligence apparatus of Israel, there's this Brigadier General Jor Shalom, who's the head of the political Military Bureau of the Israeli Defense Ministry. And I guess it's reported, I think, in the Jerusalem Post that he had a conversation with private conversation with high-level defense officials and State Department officials

where he's saying, look, Trump leaving the deal was a bad decision, and it's caused a much more, it's caused a much more dangerous situation here in the region. And we've heard, you know, arguments like this from different members of the Israeli security establishment, but the Bennett administration and Yarra-Lepeed and people like this and Gantz are determined to prevent Biden from returning to the administration. They're basically trying to kill the deal entirely. I mean, it's not hard to infer, it's not difficult at all to see what their strategy here is with killing people.

And they just carried out a massive military exercise that went on for a month called Chariots of Fire, where they're practicing for war. with Iran, including all the contingencies, like fighting Hezbollah at the northern border, they carried out a massive air exercise in the Mediterranean Sea that reportedly spanned 10,000 kilometers with over 100 military aircraft, Navy submarines. They did mock air strikes and practiced repeated strikes on Iran's nuclear program. And what was really, you know, especially provocative about this was the initial reports about that exercise, which was sort of the last week at this month-long series, they were saying, like, the U.S. Air Force is going to be contributing. They're going to be helping us. They're going to provide refueling aircraft and join in the exercise. And that ultimately didn't happen. But the Corrilla, the new head of centcom, I mentioned earlier, he was there observing many of these exercises. And so, yeah, I mean, it's just been, they have just not let up.

And in the meantime, there's been a lot of other controversies going on with the IAEA who are becoming more and more political. And basically, you know, this is ridiculous, but it sounds like I'm making it up. But Rafael Grassey, the director general of the IAEA, which is supposed to be, you know, They are monitoring Iran's nuclear program and they should be saying again and again that they're under a safeguards agreement and they've been verified for decades that they're not seeking nuclear weapons and that we want this deal, the Americans to return to this deal because it's the most comprehensive inspections regime ever implemented by the IAEA. But instead, what Grassee is doing is he's refusing to take, he says that Iran's documents that they provided on those undeclared sites are not credible and that he's. And then he goes to Tel Aviv and meets with Nafali Bennett, and Bennett starts making threats against Iran publicly and saying that we, I told Grassey that we are, we have a right to

defend ourselves and prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and to, you know, engage in self-defense and action against their nuclear program. And then Grassey just goes, I just want to say that we're, you know, we're really, you know, it's important that we talk about Iran because the safeguards agreement and the nonproliferation treaty is so important for global peace and security. You know, again, just extremely hawkish. And the director, Muhammad Islami, of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, called this out. And he's like, oh, you're making threats against us. You know, the Israelis are making threats with us and you're meeting with them?

How many inspections are you allowed to have in Israel? Or how many inspections do you carry out in Israel? Are you even allowed to do an inspection? And basically, they have taken this issue of the undeclared sites and the Americans and the Europeans at this Board of Governors meeting at the IEA very recently. They put forward a draft resolution that was passed with, I believe, only Russia and China opposing it, that basically condemned Iran for reportedly, because the IEA had put out a report based on the documents that they had provided, which I believe were even ahead of schedule after this deal was cut a few months ago with Grasman. to, you know, put this issue to bed. And they said, and the Iranians said that report was horrible and it was hasty and unbalanced and unfair. And what happened was basically the Europeans, the E3 and the Americans put forward this resolution condemning Iran and saying, it was just

basically saying that they're being uncooperative and this is very dangerous. And it was passed. And then now the Iranians have retaliated by deactivating 27 cameras, which were installed voluntarily as a part of the JCPOA. They weren't, the IAEA was not even getting access to that footage. They still have 80% of their cameras installed as a part of the safeguards agreement. And the, and so- See, that's the real joke. I'm so sorry, we're out of time, man.

I think the whole audience, I know what everybody's thinking right now, who needs Horton? This guy's got it all together. This is really great, but the problem is I have to go because Ramsey Baroud is next. But I think, you know, the real punchline here would be if the JCPOA completely falls apart. And then they're still in the MPT anyway, so who cares? They're still not making nukes. The Ayatollah already

said that God said they're not allowed to, so what the hell? But anyway, I'm sorry, man. I could have sat here and listen to you for another half an hour. It's been absolutely great, and I'm going to listen to it again later too, but I do have to go. But thank you so much, Connor. Really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Scott.

All right you guys, that's Connor Freeman. He's one of my guys at the Institute. We're doing good work over there. It's the Libertarian Institute, Libertarian Institute.org and you can also find them at anti-war.com and on Kyle's show, conflicts of interest as well. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com. Anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.