04/14/10 Grant F. Smith: Israeli Theft of U.S. Nuclear Material

I try, I think I'm alright, I, I think I'm alright.
Welcome back to the show, Grant, how are you doing?
Hey Scott, great to be back, thanks for having me on.
Well I appreciate you joining us this morning, so cool, history lesson here.
It's in the news because Obama did a big nuclear summit thing, and then for some reason Benjamin Netanyahu, virtually alone among world leaders, other than I guess the mullahs in Iran weren't invited, pretty much everybody showed up for this thing except the Israelis, right?
Well no, actually the Israelis sent Dan Meridor.
Oh they did go, oh I see.
Yeah, but he wasn't obviously of the same profile or same level as most of the other leaders who attended the summit, so it was notable for that reason that you send your intelligence guy to a high-level nuclear summit, and some people have been commenting on that.
And now the nuclear summit is about, well, it's something that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush completely failed to follow up on, the Nunn-Lugar plan, still Senator Lugar pushing this, and apparently he's got a little bit of a mentor relationship with President Obama, and his first order of business, Dick Lugar, for years and years and years has been, let's buy up, let's do whatever we can to get rid of any loose, fissionable weapons-grade nuclear material left over from the Cold War on this planet.
Right, especially Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and decommission it, get it out of the reach of anybody who might misuse it.
Now why wouldn't Benjamin Netanyahu show up at something like this?
Sounds like a great PR for Israel, they sure could use some good PR this week, right?
Well, of course, any country wants to keep the PR spotlight shining on the right things, and by sending Meridor, the bid was to not expose Israel's own clandestine nuclear arsenal, and to also keep up the drumbeat of attention on Iran's civilian, well, you and I would say civilian nuclear program, but they would say it's a clandestine weapons program.
By sending Meridor, it was kind of a way to keep any, what they would call, ambush from occurring, particularly by some of the Arab states to shine a light on Israel's clandestine arsenal, and put that front and center.
Now we have this weird relationship with Israel about their nuclear weapons, I'm sure there's a diplomatic name for it, I can't think of it off the top of my head, but it's where we pretend to be ignorant, the world pretends to not know, or the West at least pretends to not know, that Israel has nuclear weapons.
According to Daniel Ellsberg on this show, he says that Mordecai Venunu told him that they have as many as 600 nuclear weapons, including hydrogen bombs, Grant.
But the deal is, they're not members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and they don't openly declare that they're a nuclear weapons state.
Strategic ambiguity, that's the term I was thinking of, right?
Right, that's what you're thinking of, and it's their policy, but because of the power of the lobby and overall position of just wanting to keep this kind of thing away from the kids, we are complicit in that ambiguity, and it makes a lot of other moving parts of the U.S.
-Israel relationship possible.
Because if the U.S. were to come out and openly say that Israel is a nuclear weapons state, immediately the Symington and Glenn amendments to the foreign aid law would kick in, and the U.S. would no longer be able to deliver any taxpayer-funded military or civilian aid to Israel, because there are restrictions prohibiting that to any country found proliferating or managing a clandestine weapons program.
In fact, for Pakistan, the President has to sign a waiver every single year saying that, although it is not in compliance with the Symington and Glenn amendments, the U.S. nevertheless finds it in its national interest to support Pakistan in some way.
So there are a lot of moving parts in the U.S.
-Israel relationship, and by being complicit in strategic ambiguity, the U.S. is actually thwarting some of its own laws.
Well, of course.
Am I telling you anything new?
Well, that's the way it works.
The law is for them to use against us, but when they don't want to obey it, they don't have to.
Scalia got up there and said, look, the Eighth Amendment bans torture for punishment, not for interrogation.
Whatever.
They can do whatever they want.
The deeper you dig in this, and certainly whenever you have Glenn Reynolds on, that's all you do.
You really do reveal the corrupting nature of it.
Oh, no, no.
You don't want to confuse Greenwald with Reynolds.
No, no, no.
But I was just referring to somebody who's able to really show how these laws are bent and are essentially meaningless at the elite level.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, Reynolds is the one cheering for that.
Greenwald's the one explaining how they do it.
Right.
Now, so teach me a history lesson here.
The article on AntiWar.com today is called, America's Loose Nukes in Israel.
What do you mean by that?
Well, you can make the argument, and that's what this essay does, in saying that this whole catchphrase that everyone that's buzzing around here in Washington about loose nukes and the need to get all these loose nukes in the Nunn-Lugar spirit, as you just mentioned, if we're going to do that, then we're going to have to gather up a significant quantity of material from Israel, because the history lesson, in short, is that some major Israel lobbyists with very tight connections to Israeli intelligence set up in Pennsylvania a nuclear reprocessing facility called New Meck back in the late 50s.
And beginning in the early 1960s, this facility was visited by Israel's top economic espionage agent, Rafi Itan, and subsequent Atomic Energy Commission audits found that close to 600 pounds of highly enriched uranium were no longer present at the plant.
And this was a plant run by a very meticulous person, Zalman Shapiro, who's still around with us today, who seemed to exhibit financial acumen that was extraordinary, but he just couldn't seem to keep track of the uranium according to the audits.
And the CIA-FBI consensus opinion, made even by 1968, is that, quote, New Meck material had been diverted by the Israelis and used in fabricating weapons, unquote.
So if we're going to be gathering up loose nukes, this is one of the outstanding things that's got to be on the list.
Wow.
You know, it really is amazing, isn't it?
Something like the USS Liberty, where, you know, certainly the majority of the people who just heard that term out of my mouth don't know what that means.
I mean, I guess it sounds like a ship, but they don't know the story of Israel attacking the USS Liberty.
Here you're telling me they stole at least a few bombs worth of weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium for their nuclear weapons?
I've never even...
I mean, I guess I've heard rumors of that or whatever, and I haven't read your books, I'm sorry, but...
It seems like that would be a big deal, that everybody would know that, that one time that Israel stole nuclear weapons worth of highly enriched uranium from Pennsylvania.
Well, this was only one component in a long-standing flow diversion from the United States.
A lot of the people who were top-level scientists in the Manhattan Project had strong ties to Israel, strong sympathies, and they wanted to help it out.
And so they were uniquely positioned to do that through scientific collaboration, inviting friends over to be in nuclear laboratories.
And so the uranium and plutonium issue is just one small piece of what has been a long-standing sort of sovereign position of the Israel lobby, which stands quite apart from the official position of the U.S. government, which is that Israel is entitled to this support, it's entitled to have its own nuclear arsenal, and that it's vital to its survival.
I think a lot of people would contest that and say that no, actually their conventional deterrence is quite adequate, but...
Well, you know, we're talking about during the Cold War here, during the 1950s, why wouldn't, I mean, with the Soviet Union as the enemy and China and all that, you know, I guess right around this time China's detonating atom bombs and then even fusion hydrogen bombs, why wouldn't America just decide, like Eisenhower, John Kennedy, why wouldn't they just say, yeah, Israel's our ally in the Middle East, let's arm them up.
Why wouldn't we just give them nuclear weapons or sell them?
Because they're a loose cannon, and that was a problem, for example, in the 1967 war, the Johnson administration referred to them as a tiger and something that had to be kept on a leash, and they didn't, you know, they were really trying to negotiate a climb-down and get the Egyptians and Israelis together when Israel went and preemptively attacked Egypt and all of the other neighboring countries.
That was Ike's view, too?
Excuse me?
That was Ike Eisenhower's view, or even back to the very beginnings of the Cold War?
Eisenhower was very concerned that his foreign policy position was being usurped by all of these groups sending tax-deductible donations overseas and then that some of that was being recycled back into the U.S. for lobbying.
He really felt that that needed to be controlled and even made some moves toward the Treasury to get that under control, which is something that Kennedy inherited.
And I mentioned in the article, 1963 is a critical year, the early 60s, because Kennedy also wanted to sort of reclaim sovereignty over such vital issues.
He not only was sending ultimatums that Israel's Dimona nuclear weapons facility had to be put under U.S. inspection, but also during the same couple of years, 1962-1963, he was saying that they were going to regulate APEC's parent organization, the American Zionist Council, as an Israeli foreign agent because they were fed up with being constantly preempted and enrunded by an organization with such strong ties to a foreign government.
He wanted to recover the sovereign power of being able to make decisions about nuclear weapons within the U.S. government, but they failed on both counts.
Israel proceeded with its nuclear program after Kennedy's assassination, and the American Zionist Council just staged a shell company reorganization, and it's still with us today, only it's known as APEC.
Well, you know, as long as we have nation-states in this world, it seems to me like America ought to be friends with Israel from here on out, forever and ever, free trade and open relationships, but this alliance doesn't seem to be working out very well, and it's not even really an official alliance, is it?
No, it's really not.
I mean, if you take most of the positions as the lobby advances, which is that Israel is a strong ally of the United States, that it's a vital trading partner, the opposite is actually true.
Israel couldn't really exist without massive U.S. aid.
It couldn't exist without the U.S. giving it trade preferences that allow it to export to the United States while shutting out U.S. exports to its own market.
I mean, just about every theory advanced, particularly the one about shared values.
The U.S. doesn't have very many shared values with Israel anymore because we've been struggling to overcome some of the sort of Jim Crow-type discrimination.
We've been striving to overcome our own legacy of long-term territorial seizures, and we've kind of moved beyond the stage that Israel finds itself in.
So it's a very – I don't call it the special relationship.
I call it the S-special relationship.
It's especially costly.
It's especially troublesome.
It especially sucks a lot of air out of other diplomatic initiatives.
If you think about the amount of time and resources that government officials are forced to spend on one country with 7 million people while they neglect much more important, closer and bigger economies and countries, it's an especially troubling relationship.
Well, what did you think of what Barack Obama said in his news conference yesterday?
Well, every headline from those things that they call newspapers that they still print on paper and throw, spinning onto your doorstoop, should say something like, Obama orders Israel into the Non-Proliferation Treaty, because that announcement, which came late yesterday, was a fundamental alteration and challenge to the idea of this sort of hush-hush former treatment of the Israeli nuclear program.
Back in early spring, they began to chip away at ambiguity when some of Obama's lower-level State Department officials said that they'd like to see everybody, including Israel, in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which involves, as you know, inspections and responsibilities.
Well, to have Obama say that, and without saying anything about the Israeli nuclear weapons, because, again, they want to maintain their flexibility...
Well, they can't let them in as a non-nuclear weapon state, and then Yahoo's going to buck and not do it anyway.
I'm not sure what it really means.
Why would Obama even say that?
This is the first time a U.S. president has said, we want Israel in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
And that is a major, major deal.
Well, and he also complained about, you know, expressed frustration, I guess is how they say it in the news, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, too.
And I'm sorry, because the news story that I have about it doesn't have the quote that I was looking for.
But he did kind of refer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict as not being just, you know, some issue for our hearts, but it affects our national interests, which was, I guess, you know, a veiled sort of reference to the Petraeus Doctrine, I guess we could call it now, that our guys get shot because of what Israel does in Palestine.
Never mind our office workers have to jump to escape burning because of what Israel does in Palestine.
Well, that's not new.
If you look at Secretary of State George Marshall, you know, of the famous Marshall Plan, he had pretty much the exact same sentiments that the U.S. was going to be, you know, dragged into a lot of confrontations with Israel's neighbors if it were allowed to have a state.
So what Petraeus is saying is something that's been voiced a long time.
I mean, you and I might spend a lot of time looking at things like the Office of Special Plans, but at the top levels of the Pentagon, a lot of honest thinkers, particularly maybe on the third tier, have always viewed the relationship as restrictive and problematic because they've seen, for example, you know, congressional and interest group insistence that the U.S. transfer lots of military technology starting back in the late 70s and early 80s, which really have been binding the Pentagon to the Israeli defense military industrial complex.
And again, the lobbyist position and people like Stephen J. Rosen, who first worked at RAND coming up with this and later at AIPAC, put this initiative exactly backwards.
The U.S. did not need Israel as a regional power to confront the Soviet Union or client states during the Cold War.
Israel, in fact, needed the United States and access to all sorts of high-end weapons because it wanted to become a major exporter of high-tech military industrial goods.
So, you know, at the Pentagon, they're aware of all of this.
A lot of them would prefer that all of the fighter planes and high-tech military assets remained under direct U.S. control rather than turning them over to the Israelis who can do things like bomb the daylights out of Lebanon on a moment's notice or create events in the region that will preempt any sort of stability that peace negotiations could bring.
Well, you know, in Meir Sharmer and Walt's book, The Israel Lobby, they talk about how America has all this military equipment pre-positioned in Israel under this illusion that, yeah, right, like they're a useful ally if we get into a war in the Middle East.
We've had two wars with Iraq or one really long one, and our governments have had to bend over backwards to keep Israel from intervening in them, especially in 1991 when they wanted to keep, you know, all the Arabs and the Arab states in the coalition and all of that.
But then they talk about how all that pre-positioned military equipment, it's just there for the Israelis, just another uncounted, doesn't get counted into that $3 billion a year, but it's just another uncounted, you know, welfare payment from the American people to the government of Israel.
And they talk about exactly that, the Lebanon War of 2006.
That's exactly what they did is they raided that so-called pre-positioned equipment and they used it without even asking.
Well, again, that was Rosen, Stephen J. Rosen's entire project, while he was at the Rand Corporation, was getting pre-positioned units.
And you mentioned Meir Sharmer.
And in the name of so American military can use them in the event of some war, right?
That's what that pre-position means.
Yeah, Meir Sharmer used to talk about it.
He wrote a book called Conventional Deterrence in which he mentioned POMCUS units in Europe, which were pre-positioned equipment to be used by the United States.
The U.S. Army would train to go and get it and be able to use it to conventionally deter the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe if there was any sort of, you know, big, massive conventional attack.
But what you've said is exactly right.
It's been entirely misused back during the Iran-Contra affair.
We know, of course, that the Israelis were raiding U.S. taxpayer-funded TOW missiles to send those to Iran because they wanted to topple the government and go back to the honey-gravy days before 1979 when they were major military contractors and able to get oil exports from the friendly Shah of Iran.
So, you know, these things have tended to be misused in the case of Israel, whereas I'm not aware of any European government that ever raided the POMCUS units and started selling ammunition or diverting it for their own political ends.
So it's another case where the argument, in this case by Stephen J. Rosen, that pre-positioning was helping American security.
Again, if you flip it to its polar opposite, that was true.
If you flip it to exacerbate U.S. problems in the region, it tended to be a misuse of American resources.
All right.
Now I want to share a couple of news stories with you here and get your comment real quick in the last couple of minutes.
But I guess, first of all, I want to set this up correctly by explaining that, at least from what I understand, Obama's push against Israel is virtually all talk and no real – I mean, and even as far as talk, it's just hot air.
It's not – he hasn't insisted that they stop expanding settlements, stop expanding settlements.
He said, well, you know, we'd kind of like for you to slow down the rate of growth or whatever, like a Republican talking about a spending program or something.
The whole, you know, spat or whatever between Netanyahu and Obama, although it seems like there's – you know, personally, there's a problem here.
In policy, there hasn't really been much of a change or much of a push about East Jerusalem or the West Bank or Gaza or anything else, as far as I understand.
But at least politically, it's a really big deal, even if not in the facts on the ground or whatever.
And so now here's the two headlines.
Seventy-six senators sign on to Israel letter, and that is telling the Obama administration they better back off.
Seventy-six senators taking the side of Israel over the president of the United States, and that's in the Democratic-controlled Congress.
But then check this one out from Haaretz.
Seventy-three percent of U.S. Jews approve of Obama's approach to Israel.
Yeah.
It's amazing because, you know, there's definitely dissonance between evolving public opinion, what Obama's trying to do, which is polling well among many different influential groups, and what the Congress wants.
I mean, the Congress is used to, since, you know, the mid-'70s, of really climbing on board virtually anything AIPAC wants, because AIPAC's hardwired to all of the key donors of most senators and congresspeople who, you know, want to get reelected.
So it's really not surprising, of course, that, you know, that Congress can be, you know, signing a letter so quickly.
Some AIPAC lobbyists used to say, hey, we can get them to sign a napkin in a number of hours so we can get all of the senators to sign.
Right.
That was Rosen again.
But here, image is reality, because there is no public session where Netanyahu and Obama are photographed shaking hands with key members of the lobby scattered around and talking about Iran, because that's not happening.
There is a crisis.
And it is not revolutionary, but evolutionary that this has gone on so long without Obama collapsing and following the AIPAC program, which is, again, deemphasizing peace with the Palestinians, deemphasizing focus on illegal settlements, and simply moving ahead on Israel's hit list while providing full diplomatic cover and virtually consequence-free, responsibility-free aid.
So this is a big deal.
And Obama, you know, there's even been some talk, and it hasn't been confirmed, but that, getting back to the nuclear issue, that some Israeli scientists are having problems renewing visas so that they can go and learn things at America's nuclear lab.
So some news sites have said that's true, others have said it's not true.
But you say there are no facts on the ground, and I agree with that.
But, you know, image is reality in this case.
The fact that there is this push against maintaining the fiction of nuclear ambiguity, the firm statement that settlements have to stop, doesn't, I mean, that is very tough maneuvering in this relationship.
I wouldn't expect loan guarantee cuts or aid cuts or, you know, making some of these tax-exempt charities in the U.S. funneling close to a billion dollars to Israel.
But you're saying that Obama has a lot of room between here and there, he doesn't have to go that far?
No, he doesn't have a lot of room.
The thing is, I've got to go.
I'm sorry, Grant.
I've got to cut you off here.
All right.
Appreciate it.
Hey, everybody, that's Grant Smith.
He's from IRMEP, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And his latest book is Spy Trade, How Israel's Lobby Undermines America's Economy.
You can read his antiwar.com article today.
It's right there in the viewpoint section, America's Loose Nukes in Israel.
We'll be right back with Roger Charles after this.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here for LibertyStickers.com.
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