08/28/15 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Our guest today is our good friend Grant F. Smith, director of the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And he also wrote, oh, I don't know, probably a score, almost, more than a dozen, I think.
Some incredible number of books about the Israel lobby and their malfeasance in this country, spying, stealing trade secrets, and military secrets, and weapons-grade uranium, and all kinds of things.
Check out his page at Amazon.com, Grant F. Smith.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, bud?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on.
Very happy to have you here.
Hey, so yeah, good to talk to you again.
You wrote a thing here with our buddy Phillip Weiss at the Mondo Weiss blog, and it's called Israeli nukes are finally newsworthy, as U.S. government both releases and gags info.
So I think, if it's all right with you, I'd like to do, like in the article, and do the Phil Weiss part first, summarize the recent news, beginning with, as he says here, because of the Iran deal and all the Israeli and Israel lobby screaming about the Iran deal, Israeli nukes are really in the news as never before.
Yeah, it is very interesting, because the press has overall done a pretty poor job over decades in reporting on Israel's nuclear weapons programs, reporting on leaks, etc.
And so it is something of a revelation.
But most of this interest, this week anyway, was powered by the release of a State Department volume, a compilation of what was going on in the Nixon administration between 1969 and 1976.
And some of this content has been released before to researchers like Abner Cohen, who wrote Israel and the Bomb, and other people.
But here you have kind of the whole discussion that took place and was secret for years about the US's extreme concern about Israel's nuclear arsenal and what to do about it, even as they struggled to shore up the idea that there should be a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
So Phil really was interested in that.
We were swapping some information about documents and the idea that Israel was skirting American demands that the Dimona reactor that Israel had built to produce weapons be inspected.
And I characterized it as Kissinger's role of being Israel's lawyer in saying, well, what's really important is not whether Israel has weapons or not.
It's really whether they become, as he said, an established international fact, which to me is probably one of the more outrageous things from a person who's continually steered US policies toward bad outcomes.
But that was what he said, and that was eventually what the US decided to do.
Decided to say, hey, we are going to stand aside.
We're not going to discuss the Israeli nuclear arsenal.
And Israel should not, you know, we're going to back away from demanding that they don't introduce them into the region as the Israeli formulation was.
We're just going to stand by.
Don't test them.
Don't announce them.
And we're not going to allow it to become an established international fact.
So that was Phil's very interested quotations from those files that were released.
All right.
Now.
So what about that?
Is it I was I was too young.
I found out, you know, all about this later on in life.
But the Venunu story in the Sunday Times alone, and that was in nineteen eighty five.
Is that right?
I think it was eighty six.
Eighty six.
Yeah.
And I mean, I remember learning that Israel is one of the nuclear weapon states when I was a kid.
So maybe it was right around then, the same time as everybody else, that that story came out.
But in the time between the LBJ and Nixon era and the 1980s, was it really secret or was it an open secret just like it is now?
Everybody knows we just don't.
Our governments don't officially acknowledge it.
Mostly.
Well, I can tell you, I don't know, because nobody ever took a poll like, you know, one of the first polls ever taken was done, maybe, as you know, by by good old IRMEP, IRMEP.
And it said sixty three percent of Americans, yeah, believe Israel has nuclear weapons.
But that was recent.
So in other words, you couldn't you just couldn't speak to, say, nineteen seventy nine, whether everybody in the world knew that Israel already had nuclear weapons or not.
Well, when I was writing Divert, I was surprised by the extreme low number of mainstream reports about Israel's nuclear weapons.
So I'm kind of basing my comment off the fact that there wasn't regular reporting.
If you're interested, if you're kind of in the game.
Well, I mean, that's the same as now, even really right up to now.
But well, I should ask somebody older, I guess, like at what point it really became public knowledge.
Well, you're not that old.
You know, you're a few years older than me, but no, I'm older than older than that.
But it's I would say, you know, even well, this is all.
Yeah.
I mean, this is a very valid discussion.
But the bigger point I'm trying to make is the infrastructure of what I would call continuing misrepresentation, which is another form of saying lie of omission is in place.
It's still in place today.
The U.S. government does everything it can not to formally acknowledge that there is a nuclear weapons arsenal in Israel.
The media, for the most part, follows suit.
Maybe you remember recently Fox News or NPR or, you know, Amy Goodman or anyone else saying, hey, the Jericho two medium range ballistic missile with a nuclear weapon on it could be launched from Israel.
It's you know, within the range that has a five thousand kilometer range and it could reach any target in Tehran or in Iran rather very quickly and deliver nuclear weapons and destroy the nuclear program.
So let's talk about that.
Let's open up discussion.
Here we have experts.
Let's go to the think tanks that are so good at proliferation studies.
Let's go to, you know, let's why don't we talk to David Albright?
Let's get him on and he'll talk about Israel's nuclear arsenal and capabilities.
OK, open phones.
You know, when does that ever happen?
Right.
Never.
That never happens.
And it it really hasn't happened in any of the periods you mentioned, despite the new new revelations, because, again, that wasn't an official acknowledgment.
It was, you know, a guy who took some pictures, escaped briefly, leaked them to The Sunday Times.
That wasn't official acknowledgment by anybody.
Yeah.
Well, but I mean, back then in 86, it did make Nightline and the Sunday morning news shows and everything that.
Oh, well, OK, I guess it's made The Sunday Times, right or not?
Sure.
Sure.
No, it did.
There was a there was a brief flash in the pan.
And of course, Seymour Hersh's book, The Samson Option, was a big deal for a while, you know, early 90s.
And, you know, again, admittedly, NUMAC and the diversion of weapons grade uranium, you know, it has had periodic reporting ever since the early 70s.
So, yeah, I mean, there are reports.
But again, I would say that just as the fact that the Foreign Relations Volume of 6976, which had the frank discussion about the Israeli nuclear weapons, when was it released?
This year.
When did the Pentagon reluctantly and after, you know, an expensive lawsuit finally release a current technology assessment in Israel and NATO nations, which describes the fact that they have infrastructure mirroring the American National Laboratories for Weapons Production.
When did that come out?
Oh, February of this year.
So Phil's right in saying that this is a big story.
The fact that, you know, there's this there is finally some government release driven balance coverage about this, but it's extremely late.
It's certainly not affecting the what I would call and what many of your guests have called the phony Iran nuclear weapons crisis.
It's too late.
It's too little.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
When we get back, we're going to talk about this gag order.
All right.
And its effect.
It's Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
He also wrote the book Divert about Israel stealing American weapons grade uranium.
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Hey, I'm me.
I'm talking with him.
It's Grant F. Smith from IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP dot org.
And we're talking about Israeli nukes and how they're getting a little bit more discussion in the media because of the Iran deal.
Not that they're really part of the argument either way about the Iran deal, but at least they are getting mentioned more and more.
And you know, and we're talking a bit about the contradiction between everybody knowing super majorities of Americans and Poles know that Israel has nuclear weapons.
Obviously, everybody in the Middle East knows they have nuclear weapons.
And yet, I guess I still don't really understand the import.
Before we get to the gag order thing, which is huge, Grant, but I still really don't understand what difference it makes whether they officially have nukes or not at this point, especially after this year, they threw FOIA.
You got your hands on these documents that showed the U.S. military talking about Israeli hydrogen bombs.
So now that that's as official as that can be, at least, what is exactly the point of the pretense?
Well, there are many reasons and many parties that don't want official acknowledgement beyond the U.S. federal government.
I mean, once you admit, hey, Israel has nuclear weapons, you begin studying more closely.
Well, how did they get them?
Where did they get them?
And have all of the protocols and safeguards involving transfer of nuclear technology know-how and material from the obvious source states, which are signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to Israel becomes a thing.
And so the minute these are officially acknowledged is the moment that those questions arise.
And of course, Israel and its lobby and affinity groups in the U.S. don't want to talk about that because the simple fact is organizations such as the Weizmann Institute for Science, which raises hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States, Hebrew University and other non-profits have contributed to the development, research and development of nuclear weapons funded largely from tax-exempt donations in the United States.
Nobody wants to talk about that, least of all AIPAC, which is in the position of representing and consolidating all the organizational power of those groups in Congress.
And so why doesn't the U.S., why doesn't the Department of Energy or the Atomic Energy Commission, its predecessor, ever want to do more to thwart nuclear materials theft or at least investigate it properly?
Well, they wanted to be in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which explicitly prohibits as part of its first articles any transfers and makes demands on nuclear weapons states to very rigorously investigate and prosecute that sort of thing.
So it makes the U.S. federal government look like a hypocrite in terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It calls into question the operations in the United States of major Israel affinity organizations that are raising huge amounts of tax-exempt donations to fund the Israeli nuclear weapons program and so they don't want that.
And official acknowledgments really challenging the government from getting these secrets out is basically a way of saying this is a big lie.
We're dragging this stuff out into the sunlight and now you're going to have to do something about it.
That's the reason these organizations have to be dragged into court and I'm talking about the State Department, the Department of Energy, the CIA, have to be dragged into court and challenged on this stuff because they're just not going to, they're very comfortable with the way things are right now if they're continuing misrepresentation.
Alright, now you mentioned in this piece here, Jonathan Landay's article from last week, we talked about it on the show, about, he asked the question, why isn't Israel's nuclear arsenal mentioned in the Iran deal debate?
And you have the answer and it's actually right in line with a lot of recent McClatchy reporting about insider threats and clamping down on leaks at all levels and this kind of stuff.
Sure, sure.
Well, yeah, again, we both know that for better and for worse that the federal government and people inside government are the background for a lot of news stories.
And so there is, in fact, a federal gag order, you know, the government would call it a classification guidance called the WPN-136.
Its official title is, quote, guidance on release of information relating to the potential for an Israeli nuclear capability, unquote, as if, you know, as if it doesn't exist almost.
It's an Orwellian title.
And it was issued by the Department of Energy and it's a, you know, it's a, it's a derivative of State Department classification guidelines.
But this one is specifically about Israel.
And it's mostly blacked out, but it does tell us that it's, it was highly classified.
It's Israel-centric.
It was issued in September 6th of 2012.
And it basically prohibits any federal employee from giving any knowledgeable, you know, background or to the press on Israel's nuclear weapons.
And it, it essentially, by doing that, gags informed discussion about the true nuclear situation in the Middle East.
You had Sam Husseinian recently, I think it was yesterday, he put together a great video of him pursuing, you know, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, John Kerry, and just asking them, does Israel have nuclear weapons?
Excuse me.
Tell me, can you say yes or no?
Blah, blah, blah.
It's a wonderful video.
It's linked in the Mondoweiss article.
And everyone, except for, surprisingly, John Kerry, who was a senator at the time, really dodged the question, didn't want to answer it, just like Obama himself when Helen Thomas asked.
Kerry basically says, well, yeah, of course.
And then he tried to dive into it a little bit and he, Kerry just basically says, well, I gotta go.
See ya.
But this is why there is a, in the interest of this continuing misrepresentation, there is a specific gag order.
People have been fired.
People have, you know, been pursued by the federal government for even the most passing references that would tend to substantiate that the U.S. government knows Israel has nuclear weapons.
And this is something that's obviously quite damaging to that discussion that, again, is not taking place in the media.
And now, is this the first time that it's been reported that there are official orders that government employees could be in real trouble if they talk about this on background?
There was a reporter who found about the existence of Gen 16, which is another classification item that was pursued and declassified.
It's on the web.
I picked up his reporting and went to the FOIA process to get this.
It's the first time this gag order has been, I would say, partially released.
It's heavily redacted.
We're appealing it right now.
We're going to go to court if they don't release the entire thing unredacted.
But yeah, it's basically, you know, it's, you know, it's as clear, it's a proof of malfeasance on this issue as you can get.
The fact that there's a single country gag order, you know, who wanted this, who wrote it, who's been its champion, we're going to find out and it's going to make people look bad, I'm sure.
But it's, it's really, you know, it is the height of hypocrisy to prosecute people for stating what most Americans already know.
And there are even contradicting declassification guidelines, such as Gen 16, which specifically state that if something is so widely known in the public that it's, you know, ridiculous to deny it, quote, the Department of Energy, Deputy Director for Operations, Office of Health, Safety and Security shall examine the possibility of declassification, unquote.
And we put that into our appeal just to show them that it's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous in the face of such widespread acknowledgement to continue prosecuting people and undermining public understanding of the function of government by denying people's rights as employees, contractors and informed individuals inside government to even talk about it.
Yeah.
Hey, man, tell me this.
And this part of the fun from the Israeli point of view, I guess, is keeping us guessing.
But there's so many wide and varied estimates of the numbers of Israeli nuclear weapons.
And I guess over a certain number of tens of them, it doesn't really matter anymore.
That's more than enough.
But Daniel Ellsberg told me on this show and multiple times, I've asked him repeatedly just to make sure, I think to the point of annoying him, that Mordecai Venunu told Ellsberg personally that they had more than 600 nuclear weapons.
And that's way more than any other estimate.
I think there used to be an Air Force estimate that said 400, but I couldn't find that anywhere.
I found different things at the Federation of American Scientists saying maybe guessing 150, something like this, and Landay reported just, I think, in high tens, 80 or something like this or that.
What do you think?
Do you know?
I don't know.
I don't think anybody really knows.
I mean, I read the document that you got about the H-bombs.
It doesn't have total numbers in there.
It doesn't have an arsenal count in it.
It just talks about the extensive infrastructure.
One person in a position to have known was obviously former President Jimmy Carter.
He said 150, and then on MSNBC, I believe it was last year, revised it upward to 300.
You know, all I have to say is any of these numbers, it almost doesn't matter.
I mean, once you're in the 50s, I think it almost ceases to be of importance.
And the other large question that needs to be answered is what is the U.S. posture toward all of this?
If nobody can even talk about it, is there even a posture?
You know, what do we think about the submarines running around in the Red Sea and going through the canal, which are probably loaded with nuclear weapons that Israel has acquired from Germany?
Right.
The subs, that is.
What is the U.S. position on nuclear coercion if Israel's in conflict like it was in 73?
What does it think about this dirty bomb test that Israel had, and does it believe that this enhances the possibility for a false flag?
You know, what is nuclear coercion as a major factor in Israel's?
What I would term undue influence over the U.S.
Well, you can't talk about these if the U.S. position is that this is something we can never put hard numbers around that the U.S. government can't acknowledge.
So it's extremely dangerous, extremely dangerous, the situation of gagging this sort of information.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
And I wonder, too, you know, America, Obama only, I guess, in his first year changed America's nuclear posture from nuclear weapons posture, official military posture from we reserve the right to initiate nuclear first strikes on any nation on Earth.
And he revised that down to we reverse.
We reserve the right to nuclear first strikes on any nuclear weapon state or Iran.
But everybody else, at least, is off the hook for a nuclear first strike.
And so I wonder if, you know, America, Jr. over there has the same damn, you know, principle or or worse.
Maybe they have the previous principle that they reserve the right to use nuclear weapons to start a war, which other nuclear weapon states, I believe their posture is the opposite that, no, we would never start a war with these.
But if somebody attacked us, then, you know, we we would defend ourselves with them, that kind of thing.
Well, I'm curious, too.
I mean, Obama, getting back to him in his American university speech, was very clear about differentiating between Israel and facing conventional threats.
So he's beginning to introduce some some qualifiers in his discussion of Israel, including the word conventional, which I found interesting.
But, you know, getting back to this whole question, Israel's posture is different than the rest of the world's.
Apparently they bragged.
Some of their scholars have bragged about, well, if we ever attacked, if we look like we're going down, we're going to give the world the gift of a nuclear winter.
And the whole Samson option book by Hirsch is basically talking about their willingness to pull down the entire world if it looks like they're going down.
So that's a nuclear posture that goes beyond mutual assured destruction.
It's basically saying if we are ever in under deep threat, we reserve the right to take the entire world down.
People should know about that and discuss it and then ask the U.S. government, especially if they're not in this Israel affinity ecosystem.
What is it exactly you're doing about that?
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's really that is unprecedented, man.
I don't even think in the in the, you know, worst strange days of the Cold War, it was like that strange.
Look, this is Dr. Evil level stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, this is and and specifically, I mean, I think I think there's like direct quotes there if you look on the Web about, yeah, no, really, we'll nuke Rome and Berlin and Madrid and London and Paris and D.C. and how do you like me now?
So we'll get all our Western allies, everybody who's ever been our friend.
If we're ever in trouble because of what Saddam Hussein coming after him or whatever crap.
Yeah, right.
Right.
And what is that?
Not we'd nuke Baghdad if Saddam was ever coming after, but they would nuke us.
Right.
That's the fulcrum of undue influence right there.
That is what is behind, again, what I would call this continuing misrepresentation.
Nobody wants to deal with that.
And in fact, Congress has prohibited any discussion on this in 2008.
In fact, they had hearings and were talking ostensibly about proliferation.
But the final report, quote, said, quote, We do not take a position on the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons, unquote.
There's your government responding to all of these questions, head in the sand.
Amazing.
Hey, thanks for coming back on the show, Grant.
All right, man.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
So that's Grant F. Smith.
He's at IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP.org.
Check him out on Amazon.com.
He wrote a whole mess of books about the Israel lobby and their malfeasance.
And then check him out here at Mondoweiss.net.
Israeli nukes are getting mentioned as U.S. government both releases and gags info.
Again, Mondoweiss.net.
We'll be right back in a sec.
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