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Scott Horton

πŸ‘€ Speaker
4884 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

And Gareth Porter, who's a really great critic of all of these policies and claims,

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

says, hey, this was a good faith misunderstanding by DIA.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

They were doing their job.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

But it turned out the IAEA later, when America gave them that information, the IAEA went and verified, oh, there's the magnet and there's this and there's that.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

And all those dual use items actually were being used for civilian purposes.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

And so then, as Gareth writes in his book, the only real reason

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

that the NIE said that they even had a program before 2003 was essentially because they didn't want to dispute their last mistaken conclusion.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

So they said, OK, well, that was right up until then.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

But that was when that changed.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

And then the other half of their reason for accepting that there ever was a nuclear weapons research program in the country before 2003 was the smoking laptop.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

I'm sorry, I think I misspoke earlier when I said that the laptop was in 2005.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

That was just the Washington Post story that had a bunch of stuff about it.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

That was in 2003 as well, or 2004 possibly.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

But it was still all, again, forged by the Israelis and funneled through the MEK cult, but was obsolete essentially and had nothing in it.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

at least the accusations, and it weren't past 03.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

And so there's really no reason to believe that there was actually a nuclear weapons research program even before 03, which then, again, the National Intelligence Council says ended in 2003 and hasn't been restarted since then.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

Yes, nothing in the smoking laptop held up.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

You're thinking of like the big photo op with all the folders of documents behind them.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

Is that not all about the uranium tetrafluoride and the warhead that David Albright debunked and all the same claims that were in the smoking laptop from the Bush years?

Lex Fridman Podcast
#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

Now, this would have been before Natanz was even dug and before single centrifuge was spinning, right?