02/25/15 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is our friend Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
The Institute for Research Middle East, Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP, IRMEP.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Grant?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
Very happy to see this headline.
Israel should pay for weapons-grade uranium smuggling site cleanup in Pennsylvania, says IRMEP lawsuit.
So, in other words, says you, Grant F. Smith.
You think so, huh?
You think Israel should have to pay for the cleanup of a smuggling site.
Whatever could you mean by that?
I do think so.
So, as we've dug and dug away at this, and this isn't the first time we've talked about the NEWMEC case, but it's become increasingly obvious that this plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, was a smuggling front, just like conventional smuggling fronts before it 20 years before, and that the American taxpayers should not be plunking down half a billion dollars to pay for the cleanup.
So we filed a lawsuit to get all of the remaining documents, the most authoritative documents, about why the Central Intelligence Agency has always insisted there was a nuclear diversion to Israel from this U.S. site, so that that can be used to change the funding equation in the cleanup.
Right.
Now, so just how dirty is this place?
What needs cleaning up?
Why don't you just send in some bulldozers and put that dirt somewhere where Eskimos live or something where nobody can fight back about it?
Well, imagine a giant dump site where this smuggling front, NEWMEC, was not only depositing its own waste from government contracts, but also trucking in waste from other plants and dumping it into an area that has a warren of defunct coal mines underneath it with aquifers and groundwater that can drip into the Kissimmee River, which is literally right next to it.
And then it's full of things, everything from contaminated trucks to clothing to waste that was produced during the process of converting hexafluoride into pellets for the Navy's nuclear submarines and ships.
It's a massive cleanup.
The site, though, especially the uranium processing facility that was in the middle of the town of Apollo, Pennsylvania, you know, it never should have been there in the first place.
And it's not only about the environment, it's also about the health of the people who grew up next to a uranium processing facility that was so undercapitalized, so suspiciously undercapitalized that it wound up dumping a lot more waste into the environment than a more modern facility would.
Yeah, so now, was the purpose of this entire operation just to get some weapons-grade uranium out of the country and divert it into Israel's nuclear weapons program?
Or how was it that the Israelis came to run this place in the first place?
The person who organized all of the funding for this, for Apollo Industries and NUMEC, is a guy by the name of David Lowenthal.
He was a smuggler during Israel's war of independence and had close ties to Israeli intelligence.
When all of a sudden he pops up wanting to finance a nuclear processing facility in the middle of a defunct steel town with Zalman Shapiro, chapter president of the Zionist Organization of America, and Ivan Novik, future national president of the Zionist Organization of America, they start putting together a plant, which is basically a building with very little else except for glove boxes and various equipment, in order to receive government contracts to process uranium hexafluoride into, again, fuel for the Navy and other projects.
They have very little capital involved, their safety controls are almost nil, and they go into business based on Zalman Shapiro's excellent work on the Nautilus nuclear submarine program, which gave him contacts and the ability to convince the Atomic Energy Commission and the Navy to send him contracts.
It was supposed to be kind of a model, but it really was a model in corruption in terms of the safety record, the huge amount of losses that occurred until it was bought out and taken over by another company, and the suspicious characters who were being invited into the plant, all of whom initially had ties to the Israeli nuclear weapons program, such as Avram Ermoni, and then later Rafael Itan, Avram Bender, and a bunch of other guys who showed up just in time of the highest losses at the plant.
They would later go on, at least in the case of Rafael Itan, to be widely known as the guy who handled Jonathan Pollard's espionage against the U.S.
You know, the assessment that this was an Israeli operation from the beginning was John Haddons, the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, who was there when the sampling went on to determine that somehow Israel had gotten hold of highly enriched uranium that bore the signature of the specialized type given to Pneumax.
So it's very clear from, if you take all of the pieces together, that this was a smuggling front from the beginning, just like the Sonneborn Institute, Martech, Materials for Palestine, and a host of predecessor organizations that were set up in the United States to smuggle conventional weapons during Israel's war of independence.
Man, and so then not only did they set this thing up, but they invited all the neighboring companies to come and dump all their nuclear pollution there, just as a thank you very kindly.
Yeah, that was their business toward the wind-down of this little operation.
And not only that, they got the Atomic Energy Commission, because it was so badly run, to get another company to buy it out, Atlantic Richfield, in exchange for $30 million a year Hanford contracts that had nothing to do with this plant.
If you read the book Divert about this entire thing, it's just a nexus of corruption which is buried up in continual cover-ups from LBJ to Nixon to Carter, in which there's always a reason for trying to keep it secret from the public and Congress, which frankly thought that a diversion had occurred, and continually moving the ball and trying not to deal with the perpetrators, or heaven forbid, hold the Israelis accountable for it.
All right, and now, earlier this month, you published a piece at Antiwar.com and at IRMEP.org about some new reports, a report that you got released through the Freedom of Information Act, I guess, from the DoD, on the Israeli hydrogen bomb, which, as I hope people know, that's the thermonuclear bomb, the super, as Truman called it, the one that, as Daniel Ellsberg says, the Nagasaki-type implosion plutonium fission bomb is just the percussion cap to set off an H-bomb, the kind of bomb that could kill all of Houston in one shot.
And I already knew they had them because only by hearsay, but it's the best hearsay of all, and that is that Mordecai Venunu told Daniel Ellsberg that they have 600 nuclear weapons, including H-bombs, and I don't think we had an exact number on the H-bombs, but that's where I heard that from, was from Daniel Ellsberg, so that's pretty damn good hearsay, but here you got the documents where the American Pentagon is saying Israel has the H-bomb.
Right.
This was a report that, it wasn't just a FOIA, we had to sue them for it because they were so unresponsive and evasive in this, and they really showed, you know, sort of the degree to which the federal agency will stoop to avoid trying to release something, but the document unequivocally states that the Israelis have weapons laboratories every bit as sophisticated as the U.S. production facilities.
They compare them to Lawrence Livermore in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, and the fact that they're also having this technology base for nuclear weapons design and fabrication and laser enrichment and H-bomb development.
So I think, and this may be too hopeful, but I think by releasing this, the government has taken a step away from so-called nuclear ambiguity, and no longer has the deniability they had before this report to say, oh, we just don't know if the Israelis have a program, and that can have all sorts of good consequences, but one of the earliest of which I think is the fact that Reuters seems to have dropped the pretense in its recent articles of stating that they think Israel has a nuclear weapons program.
They're not equivocating anymore.
All right.
That's the great Grant F. Smith, author of Divert.
Check him out at irmep.org.
Thanks, Grant.
Thanks, Scott.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
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