02/12/10 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
We're going to start with our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
It's Jason Ditt.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I really appreciate joining us on short notice like this, this morning.
But I figure we ought to go ahead and get an update about what's been going on all week.
You've actually been kind of taking part in the news a little bit here, my friend.
We started out with the AP having to pull a story by George John because of your dismantling of it on the front page of Antiwar.com.
And now here you are taking on the New York Times and, in fact, just taking on the broader narrative of what's happened with Iran's nuclear program this week.
So I guess, first of all, why don't you just give us the straight dope and then we can get to the narrative and how different it is than the truth.
Okay.
Well, basically, this week the Iranian government started enriching uranium to 20% to create fuel for their research reactor in Tehran, which produces medical isotopes.
Iran's got about 850,000 people that rely on that reactor for nuclear medicine, radiation treatments for cancer patients and things like that.
And there had been talk for months to get fuel for that reactor from a third-party enrichment plan, which would have had Iran send their uranium to Russia and, by way of France, get fuel rods back.
But as the deal seemed less and less likely to come in a timely fashion, Iran's trying to make it themselves, and a lot of people seem to be quite upset about it.
All right.
Now, there's a kernel of truth in the latest wave of propaganda that I think is worth covering here, and that is that the more enriched your uranium is, the easier it is to enrich it.
And this is what was asserted in the New York Times, but then confirmed to me by Dr. Gordon Prather, who actually knows what he's talking about, and he reminded me that, well, you know, you're really expelling the 238, and the more 235 you have in your centrifuge, the easier it is to separate from the 238.
And so, you know, really, all the politics aside, 20% is closer to 90% than 3.5% is, and that's just a fact.
Not only is that a fact just in pure numbers, but you could even, I don't know, wink and nudge and say, 20%, eh, call it 50 or something, because it really is, it could count as, say, 50 in terms of progress toward weapons grade.
Is that about right?
Yeah, that seems to be about right, but it's really beside the point, because the enrichment's going on under the watch of the IAEA, and they've repeatedly confirmed that Iran isn't diverting any of this uranium to any non-civilian purposes.
Okay, now, you know, it was just, what, the end of last week, or the very beginning of this week, where the Iranians were saying, listen, we'll go ahead and we'll go for the deal.
We will export our uranium, basically under Obama's terms, except with one exception, as I understand it, Jason, which was, we'll decide how much at any given time to export.
But they dropped their demand that we'll swap it in Turkey.
You know, you'll give us some 20% at the same time we're giving you our 3.5.
They dropped that, and said, we will go ahead and export to Russia and then to France and then the fuel rods, but then the Americans turned them down.
Well, I'm not so sure it was the Americans specifically that turned them down.
There seems to have been a lot of comments from a lot of different officials about it.
The State Department said, well, we welcome it, but they have to submit their acceptance proposal to the IAEA.
The French foreign minister termed it troubling that they were going to accept what they had been demanding that they accept all along.
And Germany's foreign minister essentially said that they were going to have to start the negotiations all over again, and that he made it sound like the offer wasn't on the table anymore, even though that very week, which was last week, officials were still demanding that Iran accept the deal.
So what happened?
Did the Iranians just say, fine, they threw up their hands, and then they just flipped a light switch, and all of a sudden they started cranking this stuff out at 20%, right?
Well, it sounds like they made the announcement over the weekend.
They started the enrichment Tuesday, which is a pretty quick turnover, which the IAEA is actually...
There are some people complaining today that it might be a technical violation that they're making that move so quickly after announcing it that some people are arguing that they should have given the IAEA more notice, but we're talking about a very small fraction of their enrichment program in the first place.
They're saying that 160-some-odd centrifuges out of thousands of centrifuges are actually involved in this.
It's not quite as easy as, well, maybe Ahmadinejad and John Bolton would like us to believe, huh?
Yeah, there certainly seem to be some problems with Iran getting up and running with the 20%, and in fact the White House just yesterday, amazingly enough, accused President Ahmadinejad of lying about their ability to produce the 20% uranium, and said that it was a political ploy, and that they don't believe Iran is capable of that.
Now, if Iran isn't capable of making 20% uranium, why is the White House and the State Department continuing to insist that Iran has a nuclear weapons ambition which would require them to enrich it to over 90%?
I don't know, but I guess they don't really have to answer you, so you can just ask it as a really good rhetorical question.
Well, so now, tell me about this.
You have this article here at news.antiwar.com, Jason.
New York Times spins Ahmadinejad's speech as claim about nuke capability.
And this seems to kind of be part of our common theme here, where the scariest parts of all these stories about Iran really devolve into such vagary and half-truth, if at best, whereas the actual details tend to continue to indicate no big emergency.
Right, and the New York Times article was called, Iran Boasts of Capacity to Make Bomb Fuel, and it claimed that President Ahmadinejad, in his speech at the revolution anniversary yesterday, claimed that Iran had capacity to make weapons-grade nuclear fuel, even though nothing in the speech really said anything close to that.
Well, what did he say in the speech?
Because they do have a quote in here about 80%.
What did Ahmadinejad say about 80% enriched uranium?
He said that if they could produce 20, they could produce 80.
They're only producing 20 because that's all they need and it's for civilian purposes.
Well, but for him to say 80, that's kind of a smart-ass way to say 90, isn't it?
It might well be, but the fact is, 80% probably would not count under any definition of weapons-grade nuclear fuel, and it sounded like an off-the-cuff comment about more or less defending why they're only producing it at 20%, because that's all they need for this research reactor.
Right, and as you say in your coverage of this speech here, which you point out that somehow this part of the statement didn't make it into the New York Times here, but he actually finished the sentence, or maybe they just downplayed or ignored it, we have no intention of making a bomb.
Yeah, they did put it in the New York Times piece, but it was sort of after the fact.
They ran with the big, if Iran wants to build a bomb, we will clearly announce it and build it, and then a little bit later, afterwards, they say, oh, and he said they don't have any intention of doing so.
Well, and then there's this one from a couple of days ago, here, William J. Broad, of course, small step in Iran's nuclear effort suggests ambitions for a weapon, and in fact, he says in the first sentence, well, you know, this could just be part of the game of negotiation, but never mind that, and then the entire rest of the article is that, boy, moving to 20%, there's pretty much no other conclusion we can draw than that they're clearly on their way to making nuclear bombs, Jason.
Well, and it certainly might be a diplomatic ploy, because the Obama administration announced shortly after Iran started this, earlier this week, that they're coming up with a deal to get Iran the isotopes they need now, which Iran has said that they will abandon their 20% enrichment and apparently go back to the 3.5 enrichment if they get a supply of those isotopes or the fuel for the reactor.
Right.
Well, now, by the way, I'm curious about that, because I saw where the Americans finally were saying, okay, we'll go ahead and give you the isotopes so that you don't need the fuel, but where did the Americans get them from?
Because I thought we got them from the Canadians and they were shutting their plant down.
What am I missing there?
Do you know?
They said they would help them acquire them from Russia, which Russia is apparently still producing the isotopes.
Okay, well, and as you say, the Iranians have said they would accept that, and now the Americans are offering that, right?
Well, it sounds like the Americans are planning to offer that, but the State Department said a couple of days ago that they were planning to submit the offer through the IAEA, and it's not really clear if that's happened yet.
So, it sounds like it's something that's in progress, and we don't really have all the details of, are there going to be conditions attached?
I would assume the condition that Iran has to give up their 20% enrichment, but there might be other conditions where they might demand that they give up enrichment entirely or something else that would be unacceptable and make this just another offer that's meant to be rejected.
Now, I'm sorry, because we're over time and I've got to cut you off, but just give me a yes or no on this, basically, and I guess we'll just have to elaborate some other time.
My understanding is, basically, that on one hand, Obama is saying, he's sort of implicitly saying he would accept them enriching uranium on an electricity-grade level of approximately 4% there, as long as they don't do the 20% or higher, while at the same time, his government is saying they must abide by the Security Council Resolution, that's quite apart from any safeguards agreement, which says that they may not enrich uranium.
Even though they don't have any legal authority to do that, there's the Security Council, so they get to write the law, and basically, so both of those things are true at the same time, is the position of the Obama administration.
Is that right?
That's basically right.
The administration talked about dual-track negotiations, and it sounds like the dual-tracks are both based on completely different assumptions of what's happening.
Alright, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today and great work all week this week, Jason.
Alright, thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
You can find all his stuff at news.antiwar.com, and we'll be right back after this.