02/09/10 – 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 go ahead and start off with our first guest right now.
It's Antiwar.com's news editor, Jason Ditz.
You can find all his stuff at news.antiwar.com.
And Jason's got an interesting story to tell us today.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, man?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
I'm doing good.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I guess we can't really prove the causation to the correlation quite yet.
We'll see.
But it sure looks to me like the Associated Press has had to retract a story by the horrible George John, that's J-A-H-N, because of your piece at news.antiwar.com, deconstructing his AP article fuels Iran war hysteria.
That's news.antiwar.com.
So let's go through this.
Now, what was it that George John asserted so strongly in that article that you had to refute it that way?
Well, I mean, the whole article was just terrible.
It made a lot of misleading, you know, half quotes and misleading assumptions.
But the major thing was that he accused Iran of moving closer to creating nuclear warheads.
Nuclear warheads, as in the actual bomb that you would place inside a delivery vehicle on top of a missile.
Right.
And so what evidence did George John provide for Iran moving closer to a nuclear warhead?
He basically didn't provide any evidence at all.
He just made that his, that was the headline of the article, Iran moves closer to nuke warhead capacity, and that he claimed that they were moving closer to being able to produce nuclear warheads than in his first paragraph.
And then he goes on speculating about Iran's attempt to produce 20% enriched uranium for medical isotopes and speculating that that was all part of a secret weapons plot.
Well, so now help us out with a little bit of context here.
We know that Obama, unlike Bush, has opened up talks with Iran, and America made an offer for what they could do with their nuclear program that we would accept.
And it's been going back and forth.
There were a ton of news stories late last week about Ahmadinejad in a press conference, I guess, announcing that it sounded like America's conditions for the agreement would be good enough for their government.
What's happened with that?
Well, right.
Iran initially proposed a third-party enrichment deal in September.
And after some meetings with the P5 plus one, which is the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, there was a draft agreement which was being debated in the Iranian government, but never formally ratified, because there were some concerns about France as a reliable partner, because France has reneged on previous deals with them.
Now what happened was, as the Iranians are getting closer and closer to just running out of medical isotopes, Ahmadinejad last week said the terms of that draft agreement are good enough, and we're ready to accept it.
And seemingly that would have moved the process forward, but it really hasn't, because as soon as he made that announcement, all the Western officials that were condemning him for not accepting the agreement started condemning him for accepting the agreement.
Right.
Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton and everybody said, oh, they're not serious, they're just stalling for time by accepting our offer.
Right.
And German officials even said that Ahmadinejad's acceptance would have to be the subject of debate, and they would have to hold new talks to basically come up with a new deal.
All right.
Now, I mean, the Iranians actually did have a little bit of qualification in there, right, where they said, okay, we'll accept your deal, but we decide how much uranium we export to be further enriched to 20% by the Russians and then converted to fuel rods by the French, rather than we'll go ahead and give you all of our low-enriched industrial-grade 3.6% uranium we've got now, right?
That was Barack Obama's version of how this ought to happen.
Well, my understanding is Iran is prepared to send 70% of the uranium overseas to get it back in the form of fuel rods.
No, they're just stalling for time, Jason.
Yeah.
But this is the key to the article by George John, which now somehow is missing from the Associated Press website.
It's basically the Iranian announcement that, fine, if you won't accept our offer, our part of the deal, 70% sounds reasonable to me, but since you won't accept that, we have to have our medical isotopes.
So we are now, they announced, going to begin to change the configuration of our centrifuges where we can begin to enrich up to 20%.
And now, rather than this being seen by George John and the Associated Press as an obvious case of the Iranians just ratcheting up their position from the point of view of trying to get a solution accomplished in these talks, no, this is them moving closer to nuclear weapons now, just like George John, coincidentally, has been accusing them of all along, huh?
Well, right, and really, Iran has had little choice but to attempt to make it themselves because they're really running quite low on the isotopes and they would pretty much have to abandon all nuclear medicine in the country fairly soon if they aren't able to come up with some source for those fuel rods, whether it's an international deal or to try to make them themselves.
Well, and you know, the common refrain about the Iranians is, well, what do they need nuclear fuel for?
They have so much oil.
Well, this is for a US-built medical reactor.
They just shut down the last one that produces these isotopes in Canada, right?
And there's no other one on Earth that's producing the kind of isotopes that they need for medicine in Iran or anywhere else.
Well, right, they definitely need to come up with a solution for this that gives them access to medical isotopes for thousands of patients in Iran that need nuclear medicine, I mean, cancer patients and what have you.
All right, now, here's the technical thing that this is going to keep coming up, I'm sure, especially when we're dealing with Broad and Sanger in the New York Times and George John over at the AP, and that is the technical definition of highly enriched uranium.
Now, I don't know exactly what percentage it's got to be, but apparently 20% counts as highly enriched.
The difference, of course, the all-important difference between 20% high enriched uranium or highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade is a matter of still some 70%.
It's got to be above 90% purity.
In fact, Dr. Gordon Prather recommends that uranium-235 be above 94%, closing in on 100% pure uranium-235 to be able to make a bomb out of it.
And, I mean, if I understand the science right, and I don't know how much you know about this, but right now they would have to change their configuration of their centrifuge cascades in order to change their purity from 3.6% U-235 up to 20%.
It would take a whole other accomplishment to even get their centrifuges in place to begin to make actual weapons-grade 90-plus percent uranium-235, right?
Right.
And they're saying that going from 20% to 90% is quite a bit easier than going from 3.5%, 3.6% to 90%, but there would still be an enormous amount of advance notice before they were able to do that because, of course, the IAEA has inspectors on their enrichment site.
Right.
Well, and see, this is another all-important detail, too, is that there is a safeguarded nuclear program, an electricity program, medical isotopes, et cetera, in Iran that is within the Non-Proliferation Treaty that is, as you say, safeguarded by the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And yet, I think for most Americans who, you know, even Jon Stewart only gets his news from TV, right, doesn't read about it.
So there becomes kind of a confusion about whether there's a secret nuclear weapons program in Iran where maybe that's where they're making nuclear weapons, or whether, as George Johns seems to be trying to push on us here in this formerly existing AP article, that somehow their regular safeguarded nuclear program is, in fact, a weapons program and is, in fact, simply for moving them closer to making, I guess, nuclear warheads, as he'd call it.
Well, right.
And certainly we can't prove that they don't have an entirely separate secret program, although there isn't really any evidence that they do.
But the current program is under such close scrutiny that there's no way they could divert a good chunk of their uranium stockpile for civilian purposes, divert it to military use, without it sending up an enormous number of red flags.
Right.
Well, and can you tell me, do you know offhand, when was the last time that the IAEA delivered a report to their headquarters saying that they've continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material?
Oh, I want to say it was either October or November, but I'm not sure on that.
It's fairly recent, though.
Yeah, at the end of last year.
Well, and we know now that Mohammed ElBaradei is gone and has been replaced.
Do you know if there's been any indications of, like, the politics inside the IAEA as to whether the new guy is more on the side of Olly Heinenen and the more hawkish inspectors there?
I know this is a little bit inside baseball here, but it is important.
The initial indications were that he was perceived to be a little more hawkish than ElBaradei was, but his only comments so far on the nuclear program have been basically what ElBaradei and others have been saying all along, that the IAEA has no evidence to suggest that they have a secret nuclear weapons program.
All right, everybody, there you have it.
News.
AntiWar.com, it's our news editor, Jason Ditz.
Again, if you tuned in late and you missed it, the big headline is, well, not just that George John at the AP is a war propagandist, but that after being called out for it by our own Jason Ditz, the Associated Press pulled his article.
Now, we don't have proof of the causation.
I think we're still trying to get a statement from AP as to why exactly they pulled George John's story, but it sure seems like you get the credit to me.
So tentatively, the credit is yours, Jason.
Great job, man.
Well, thanks, Scott.
I'm not sure that I deserve all the credit for it, but it's certainly nice to think that it was one of the factors.
Yeah, well, it must have been.
Great job, again, and everybody, please go and check out AP article, Fuels Iran War Hysteria.
It's our top headline today at AntiWar.com.
You can find it at News.
AntiWar.com.
Thanks again, Jason.
Thanks, Scott.