04/10/15 – Yousaf Butt – The Scott Horton Show

Phone records, financial and location data, PRISM, Tempora, X-Key Score, Boundless Informant.
Hey y'all, Scott Warren here for offnow.org.
Now here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
And the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The offnow project of the 10th Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place.
In state after state, I've lost count.
More than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something.
Something important.
Something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to offnow.org.
All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, here on the Liberty Radio Network.
New to two weekdays.
Eastern time, that is.
11 to 1 Texas time.
ScottHorton.org for my archives.
All right.
Our guest today is Dr. Yosef Butt.
He is a nuclear physicist and senior scientific advisor to the British American Security Information Council.
BASIC in London.
And he's got this new piece in the Hill.
Poison pills in the Iran nuclear agreement.
Oh, man.
Raining all over my parade here, Yosef.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
How are you?
Good.
Good.
Good to be back.
Very happy to have you here.
I should have known better than to be hopeful and optimistic about things.
But I really wanted to be on this particular issue just because it's been going on for so long.
And basically I'm sick of it.
So it's my own personal problem.
Anyway, the agreed framework as detailed in the fact sheet released by the Obama-Kerry government, it hasn't held up.
It's not holding up.
Is that correct?
Well, there's different versions of the agreement.
The most authoritative is the joint statement by the EU and Iran.
And besides that joint statement, there's independent fact sheets, one that Iran released and one that the White House released.
So it's just not the details.
And the White House fact sheet is something that Iran has not signed off on.
So basically there still seems to be quite a lot of work to be done on hammering out the details and what will be in the actual final agreement.
All right.
Well, so the Ayatollah was on Twitter, not just the president of Iran, but the supreme leader himself saying, hey, you have to lift all the sanctions on day one of this thing, not as the terms of it are implemented on our side or any other kind of so-called phasing or anything like that.
And so that's a pretty harsh position.
Are they going to be able to climb down from that as far as the politics of it, do you think?
Yeah, I actually think this is more political.
I doubt the supreme leader is on all the technical details.
But I think it is just similar to what the hardliners in the Congress are doing.
He's doing an equivalent thing for the Iranian government.
My take on it is that they, you know, the supreme leader said that you'd have to lift the sanctions as soon as there's an agreement.
But I think it could be reworded to mean as soon as a deal is actually implemented and going forth to the agreement of everyone.
So, you know, they can pen the deal on July one and everything gets rolling and everybody agrees that everybody is doing everything they agreed to on September one.
And then they can begin, you know, they can lift the sanctions.
And so I think that there's there's some wiggle room in what they're saying.
And there's a lot of politics now trying to going into, you know, forming what will be actually in the final deal, both from the supreme leader in Iran and also folks on the hardliners and Congress on our side.
Yeah.
So.
So, yeah, I mean, you know, I wouldn't necessarily be too pessimistic.
But basically, I think the media narrative that was early on saying that, you know, hey, we have a deal already is a bit premature.
I think the details of the deal still need to be hammered out.
Well, and on this detail where the the Iranian side is saying that the Americans have to implement immediately.
You're saying that from the time they sign the deal, they really have, you know, it's supposed to kick in in 60 days or something like that.
So they can.
Whereas it's sort of true that as the Iranians put it, the Americans can basically flip the switch on the sanctions and begin to lift them in a very immediate way just by declaring them lifted.
In a sense, they also could really start doing their part of the deal pretty quickly in terms of beginning to dismantle the centrifuges that Natanz they've agreed to or converting the Fordow facility to a research facility.
I mean, that's just a matter of beginning to pull the trucks up and starting to get to work.
Right.
Yeah.
So, you know, things could work on both sides fairly quickly.
It's just, you know, what will they actually agree to?
So, for instance, in the U.S. fact sheet, one one thing that's kind of one of these poison pills that I mentioned is that it says the U.N. sanctions would not be lifted until the completion of all these key concerns, which are, you know, enrichment, Fordow, the Iraq heavy water reactor and so-called PMD, possible military dimensions.
So they're saying the White House fact sheet is saying that the U.N. sanctions could not be lifted until all these are completed, which would be a big red flag if it's true, because completed could take months to years.
And the IAEA has not been able to complete the PMD for more than a decade.
So why should everybody be optimistic that that'll wrap up in a few months?
So that's a big red flag for me.
And I think that's something that will probably be hammered out in the coming months.
I mean, this kind of sounds like, you know, just the basic setup of a haggling, like they're faking it.
They already have this these kind of details worked out.
Sounds like I mean, Carrie's not going into this kind of unaware that the possible military dimensions, however, they've been characterized to him by his staff as far as their credibility and legitimacy.
They don't have him misunderstanding that those issues could all be resolved at the snap of a fingers by, you know, which it's a long list of accusations there.
And we could talk more about that, I guess.
You have in your article you talk about, you know, the problems with them, et cetera.
But they don't really mean that.
Right.
That's just it sounds to me like both sides staking out a position that they can give a little and compromise by July, just like they've had to have something to more or less pretend to fight about.
The past couple of months when they both when both sides really knew what they were headed toward.
Right.
I think that's probably the case.
The problem is by putting it in a fact sheet and putting in black and white, it creates expectations, especially on Congress.
Now, you know, let's say they agree to yield on the PMD, the possible military dimension saying, OK, we don't need it to be completed, but we need to start seeing, you know, something we like from you.
Then people in Congress may object, saying that you told us in your fact sheet that you were going to get the Iranians to agree to PMD.
And now you're yielding on it in the final agreement.
And this is not what we expected.
So basically, I think going into the really gory details may have been a mistake to release publicly, at least maybe the White House could have shared it with Congress if they wanted to.
But completely publicly releasing this when it's not been agreed to by everyone seemingly seems to create some problems and some expectations that might not be filled at the end.
My own view on PMD is that they'll probably direct the IAEA to be happy with some subset of those, especially as some of them are known to be wrong and fabricated.
So I think certainly they can't demand Iran's cooperation on things that are fake because, you know, how are you supposed to cooperate with being confronted with something that you didn't do?
It's really hard for them to climb down, though, from pretending that they're real this whole time as well, though.
I could see the Americans thinking, disprove this fantasy right now.
Right.
So I think what will happen is they've already seemed to focus on three main concerns, you know, neutron transport and then the initiation of high explosives and the ballistic missile business.
But even those three, the problem is the IAEA is not outfitted to, you know, to investigate this type of thing.
They don't really know what to do with it.
The people there are nuclear material accountancy experts.
They're not weapons experts.
So they don't, you know, you're asking, you know, as we talked about last time, it's like you might ask the local sheriff to go in and investigate the PMD.
All right.
Hold it right there.
Hold it right there, Yosef.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody.
Yosef Butt, nuclear physicist.
All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Yosef Butt.
He is a nuclear physicist and senior scientific advisor to the British American Security Information Council based in London.
And so we're talking about one of the problems with the nuclear deal so far is the possible military dimensions, the alleged studies, the smoking laptop.
How do you prove a negative?
How do you disprove lies that are just made up lies other than showing that there's no reason to believe they're true and hoping that's good enough?
It's kind of Donald Rumsfeldian logic.
The Iranians and the Americans have themselves caught in here where absence of evidence is not good enough to be evidence of absence.
Am I right?
Well, you know, there may be some stuff in the file that is real.
Certainly, you know, for instance, the exploding bridge wire detonators are a real thing that actually Iranian scientists did work on.
But it turns out that they published openly on it and gave talks at conferences about it and that it's a dual use item.
It's something that's not just for nuclear weapons.
And this is what I mean, where the IAEA can get tripped up if they don't have weaponization experts on board.
So they can get confused and they can say, oh, exploding bridge wire detonators.
All we know about that is that they're for nuclear bombs.
But hey, no, actually, the oil and mining industry also uses these detonators because they're, you know, for some safety issues, they're very good.
So, you know, so there might be some stuff in there that's real.
There's certainly some stuff in there that seems to be fabrications.
And, you know, myself and other scientists have looked at it.
And it doesn't, you know, there's mistakes in there, you know, nothing of the quality that you'd expect from national research scientists and stuff that was leaked out, for instance, the associated press graphs.
So, you know, the bottom line is this, the possible military dimensions, even in the best case, it deals with stuff that's in the past, you know, a lot of it fabrications.
So why try to sabotage the deal that would restrict Iran's future program over questionable, dubious stuff that we don't, that's unauthenticated about Iran's past work.
So you're basically ruining your own future by obsessing about stuff over the past.
So, you know, if you want to throw a wrench in the work, you start talking about PMD and somebody somewhere is doing that, or else it's just a negotiating ploy that, you know, at the last minute, they'll lift it off the table as a big concession.
So, you know, who knows what's going on there.
It certainly doesn't submit to much logic.
Yeah.
Well, it's just politics, right?
Not the truth of the matter.
It's very useful with a name like that, possible military dimensions.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, I would hope that it's politics.
But, you know, my fear is that somebody actually thinks that this stuff is really worth pursuing.
And they'll actually end up ruining an agreement that would really tamp down Iran.
But, you know, Iran is actually willing to do a lot of things.
If you look at the joint statement by the EU and Iran, this is stuff that both sides have agreed to.
It's a joint statement.
You know, they're going just to do enrichment in one facility.
Fordow will be turned into an international research center.
There will be no enrichment there.
You know, various other things, you know, they'll redesign the Iraq and restrict their enrichment for 10 years plus.
So these are important things.
Now, are you going to just, you know, torpedo all these confessions that Iran has made over some questionable stuff of TMD, the possible military dimensions that's not even relevant to the future?
So, you know, just borderline idiotic, honestly.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that was what I was going to get to there after the TMD was just what's not in dispute or what else is in dispute in the different versions of different tales of the different sides ever since this agreed framework.
You know, the timing on the sanctions.
Yeah, you got the timing on the sanctions and PMD are the two main thing that's in dispute.
And I think there is various other things that need to be finessed, like what will happen.
You know, there's different time frames for things.
There's things in there that will be monitored for up to 25 years, according to the White House, the mine, you know, the uranium mines and things like that.
But other things will expire in 10 years and other things will expire in 15 years.
So all these timelines are not in the joint statement.
You know, the joint statement just says for a limited duration.
So I think the White House is very specific timeline.
So I think those might still be revised going forward.
But it sounds like what you're saying, though, is it's not really in dispute that they've agreed to expand monitoring all the way to the mines and womb to tomb for the entire project, even when you're not talking about the introduction of nuclear material into any kind of machines, that kind of thing.
They agree on that.
It's really just a matter of timing that's in dispute.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, basically what the joint statement says is, you know, the monitoring, the enhanced monitoring will be done for a limited duration that the additional protocol will be on a provisional basis.
And then what the joint statement says is this what the so-called Code 3.1 modified, which is just a fancy way of saying, you know, how early Iran has to alert the IAEA if they're building new nuclear facilities, that they'll, you know, give the IAEA a longer lead time than before.
And they also agreed not to make any more enrichment facilities for about 10 years.
So, you know, the things in the joint, basically things in the joint statement that Iran and the EU gave out are vaguer, but there's still large concessions.
The White House has very particular timelines of 10, 15, 25 years on different aspects of it.
But I don't know if I trust the White House as something that's already been set in stone as to those durations.
But certainly Iran is ready to make major compromises, according to even the joint statement that it gave out with the EU.
And the point is, let's not ruin this, you know, over piddling things, honestly, like PMD and sanctions relief.
Like, if you are ready to go to war with a country, if you're ready to give all that money and blood to, you know, reduce Iran's nuclear program, why wouldn't you, you know, be flexible on sanctions timing?
You know, it just honestly doesn't make sense.
You're trying to achieve the same goal.
Do you want to do it by sanctions relief, or do you want to do it by war?
Well, and they're already moving the goalposts all over the place.
I got in a Twitter argument with the publisher, or pardon me, the editor of Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf, where, and this is going on all over the place.
I see now everybody got their Karl Rove talking points in the email that, you know, the real problem here, never mind the pseudo-Atom Bomb program that we've been pretending is a controversy, the real problem is once we lift the sanctions, they're going to give all that money that we stopped stealing from them to Hezbollah, and then what's going to happen?
Yeah, exactly.
I was going to come to that too.
Basically, exactly, you framed it correctly, it's moving the goalposts.
We had a long period of negotiation with them, with the Iranians, about their nuclear program.
Now that it looks like they're agreeing to a lot of major concessions, and their nuclear program could be something that the White House would be happy with, and we could resolve this issue, people are coming up with new things that they're bad people.
Well, if they're bad people, why did you bother getting into negotiations about their nuclear program?
You know, it's just moving the goalposts.
Yeah, now we're getting closure on the nuclear thing, let's throw up some more problems that will keep things from being resolved.
And the other issue is, there's already sanctions in place for the Iranians being quote-unquote bad people, there's already sanctions on them for terrorism and human rights abuses, so all this deal would be referring to the sanctions relief as far as the U.S. sanctions is those ones that are nuclear triggered.
So it's not as if all the sanctions on Iran would come off, only the nuclear triggered ones.
So there would still be sanctions on them for human rights and for terrorism, so the people who are making those arguments should know better than what they're saying.
Now, hey listen, on one point of the details here, do I have it right when they say reconfigure Iraq, did you already say, or would you, does that necessarily mean they're turning it into a light water reactor that produces as waste substances that cannot be used as weapons-grade plutonium fuel for a bomb?
You know, the whole weapons-grade plutonium is an odd way to talk about it, it'll reduce the amount of plutonium that comes out, it's not weapons-grade until you reprocess it and collect it and separate it from other things.
So yeah, it'll still produce plutonium, but it'll be just less.
But it'll be a light water reactor and not a heavy water reactor, is that the change?
Yeah, I'm not clear on what the details of what they aim to do with it, but you know, it's not, the problem that it has right now would still, even with Iraq as set up right now, would still need reprocessing to extract the plutonium to make something into a bomb.
And the same goes with, in the future, and my understanding is it'll use low-enriched uranium instead of natural uranium as a fuel in the future, so yeah, you'll produce less plutonium with it, but Iran can legitimately say that they have more need now for enrichment because they're going to feed it with low-enriched fuel.
So yeah, it's a positive development overall.
But I guess my understanding was the point of doing a light water reactor is that the waste is so polluted with other isotopes and whatever that it makes that reprocessing basically moot.
Exactly, it's much more difficult because you're producing per amount of waste, there's less plutonium overall, so it's a more difficult separation at the end.
So it is a positive development, just except for the fact that...
But you're saying theoretically they could still get pure plutonium out of that, or as pure as they need it to make a bomb, it would just be much more difficult, and of course in both cases they would need a facility to do that that they do not possess at all, I understand that part.
Exactly, and my problem was with the phrasing in the fact sheet of weapons-grade plutonium, it's as if the reactor was by itself producing something that would be ready to go for weapons, so that's not the case.
Hey, do I understand right, as long as I'm keeping you into the break one minute here, do I understand right that in order to, like let's say they left it a heavy water reactor and it was producing more plutonium, etc., do I have it right that they would have to shut the thing down and basically wait a year for it to cool down a little bit and then take the lid, the roof off the whole damn thing in order to get it out of there and it'd be the kind of massive operation, it's not like they just turn a faucet and pure plutonium comes out kind of thing, right?
Is it that difficult to harvest the plutonium out of the reactor?
I'm not sure you need to lift the roof off or you could get the waste out somehow, but there certainly is a time for cooling off and majorly a separate facility to do the separation, so that just makes waste that includes plutonium, but it's not as if it's making bomb fuel immediately.
Right, but the point being there's no sneak out from that reactor even if it was a heavy water reactor, they couldn't get that fuel without everyone in the world knowing that they had to turn it off for a while first and everything.
Right, and then there's ways to detect that too.
And isn't it the case that the Russians have had the deal to get any waste out of there and take it back to Russia that they made with the Iranians bilaterally a long time ago just because the Iranians don't have another way to get rid of it?
Yeah, that's still a question mark what's going to happen with the Russians.
It seems to be a little bit of back and forth, so I think that's something under the heading of to be determined with the negotiations going forward.
I'm not sure about that.
Well, hey, listen, I really appreciate your time and I kept you over into the break here.
I'll let you go, but it's great to talk to you as always.
Yeah, thank you Scott.
Bye-bye.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government-generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at wallstreetwindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
Wallstreetwindow.com.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them, but still.
If you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
That's www.fff.org.
Subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.