“WAR ON IRAN WILL TRIGGER WORLD WAR III”

September 24, 2012, Global Research http://www.globalresearch.ca (Canada)

Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/a-war-on-iran-will-trigger-world-war-iii/

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

 “Our defensive power has been created on the basis of our defensive strategy and the presumption ruling our defensive strategy is that we will enter an massive battle with a US-led coalition.” Brigadier General Hossein Salami, IRGC Deputy Commander, September 2012)

Both the US and Israel have threatened to implement a preemptive first strike attack against Iran, the consequences of which would be devastating.

Responding to these ongoing threats, Iran’s Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) General Amir Ali Hajizadeh has warned that a US-Israeli military attack against Iran could lead to the outbreak of a Third World War. He also intimated that Israel cannot launch a war without the green-light from the US.

If such a war were to be launched, according to General Hajizadeh, a scenario of uncontrolled military escalation is likely to occur. If attacked, Iran would retaliate against both Israeli and US targets including US military facilities in neighboring countries (ie. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gulf States):

Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force General Amir Ali Hajizadeh warned the US and the Zionist regime [Israel] that an attack on Iran will likely trigger World War III.

Speaking to the Arabic news network, Al-Alam on Sunday, General Hajizadeh said the US and the Israeli regime may not enter war with Iran “independent from each other, meaning that either one of these two starts the war, it will be joined by the other one”.

“We see the US and the Zionist regime standing fully on the side of each other and we cannot imagine the Zionist regime initiating a war without the US backup. Due to the same reason, if a war breaks out, we will definitely wage battle on both sides and will definitely be engaged with the US bases,” he said.

“In case such conditions arise, a series of incidents will take place which will not be controllable and manageable and such a war might turn into a third world war. That means, certain countries may enter the war for or against Iran,” added the general.

The IRGC commander warned that in case such war is waged on Iran, the US bases in “those countries around us and inside the neighboring countries will be targeted and they will even be threatened by the nations of these very states”. (Fars News Agency, September 23, 2012, emphasis added)

The World is at a dangerous crossroads. The statement of General Hajizadeh must be taken seriously.

Active war preparations against Iran have been ongoing for the last eight years. Since 2005, the US and its allies, including America’s NATO partners and Israel, have been involved in the extensive deployment and stockpiling of advanced weapons systems. The air defense systems of the US, NATO member countries and Israel are fully integrated. Israel cannot act without the support of its allies.

This is a coordinated endeavor of the Pentagon, NATO and Israel’s Defense Force (IDF) directed against Iran. Several non-NATO partner countries including the frontline Arab states (members of NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative) are also involved.

Media Disinformation

Public opinion, swayed by media hype is tacitly supportive, indifferent or ignorant as to the likely impacts of what is upheld as an ad hoc “punitive” operation directed against Iran’s nuclear facilities rather than an all out war.

The war on Iran is presented to public opinion as an issue among others. It is not viewed as a threat to humanity. Quite the opposite: it is viewed as a humanitarian endeavor.

Retaliation

The Western media is beating the drums of war. The purpose is to tacitly instil, through repeated media reports, ad nauseam, within people’s inner consciousness, the notion that the Iranian threat is real and that the Islamic Republic should be “taken out”.

Iran has significant military capabilities. The fact that an attack on Iran could lead to retaliation and escalation which could potentially unleash a “global war” is not a matter of concern.

While the Islamic Republic does not constitute a threat to the security of Israel, Iran’s military brass has emphasized that in the case of an attack on Iran, retaliation against Israel is contemplated, with potentially devastating consequences:

On Saturday, IRGC’s top Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said an enemy invasion of Iran is possible, but such a war would put an end to the life of the Zionist regime of Israel.

….

“War may break out, but if Zionists [Israeli government] start something, that will be the point of their annihilation and the endpoint of their story,” he added.

Jafari, meantime, underlined that “no one dares to wage an extensive ground assault on Iran”.

The General said if the enemy were wise, there wouldn’t be any problem, “but the problem is that there is no guarantee for this rationality and we should be prepared too.

Later yesterday, his deputy, Brigadier General Hossein Salami, cautioned that any possible attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran by the Zionist regime would provide an opportunity for Tehran to wipe the regime off the earth.

“If the Zionists embark on attacking Iran, it will provide a historical opportunity for the Islamic Revolution to wipe them off the world’s geographical history,” Salami said on Saturday night on the state-run TV.

“We are now through with concerns about the Zionist regime’s threats,” he said, adding that Israel has bitter memories of its last-decade wars with the regional allies of the Islamic Republic, including Hezbollah and Hamas Movement.

“(Given the above-mentioned failures) how does it (the Zionist regime) want to be a threat against the Islamic Republic of Iran?” Salami asked.

He, meantime, underlined Iran’s preparedness to confront any aggression against the country, and said, “Our defensive power has been created on the basis of our defensive strategy and the presumption ruling our defensive strategy is that we will enter an massive battle with a US-led coalition.”

On Friday, Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Seyed Hassan Firouzabadi also warned that Tehran would reciprocate any aggression against the country with an “immediate” and “non-stop” response, stressed.

“We do not feel threatened by the boastful remarks of Zionist leaders, because they are creatures with deep fright who continue crying out since they know that Iran’s response to threats will be readymade, immediate and non-stop,” Major General Firouzabadi told reporters on the sidelines of September 21 military parades marking the anniversary of the Week of Sacred Defense here in Tehran on Friday morning.

“The Zionist regime officials have declared in their (military) estimates that military operations against Iran neither can be done by Israel nor is useful for them,” he added.

He also stated that Iran’s armed forces today are unpredictable and their strategy and actions cannot be foreseen by the enemies.

The Sacred Defense Week, commemorating Iranians’ sacrifices during the 8 years of Iraqi imposed war on Iran in 1980s, started on Friday with nationwide parades by various units of the Islamic Republic Army, Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and Basij (volunteer) forces in Southern Tehran. (Fars News Agency, September 23, 2012, emphasis added)

Reverse the Tide of War

We call upon our readers to spread the message far and wide.

We call upon people across the land, in America, Western Europe, Israel, Turkey and around the world to rise up against this military project, against their governments which are supportive of military action against Iran, against the media which serves to camouflage the devastating implications of a war against Iran.

The people of Israel are largely united against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s resolve to attack Iran.

A protocol of non-aggression should be reached between Israel and Iran.

* * *

The object of this book is to forcefully reverse the tide of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.” (Michel Chossudovsky, Towards a World War III Scenario, Global Research, Montreal, 2012)

Order your copy of

“Towards a World War III Scenario” by Michel Chossudovsky

Reviews

Professor Chossudovsky’s hard-hitting and compelling book explains why and how we must immediately undertake a concerted and committed campaign to head off this impending cataclysmic demise of the human race and planet earth. This book is required reading for everyone in the peace movement around the world.”
-Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law, University of Illinois College of Law

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
-John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
-Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute

ISRAELI LEADER PRESSES OBAMA TO SET TRIGGER FOR WAR AGAINST IRAN

18 September 2012, World Socialist Web Site https://www.wsws.org (Australia)

By Peter Symonds

In another provocative move, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on two prominent American TV talk shows on Sunday to press the Obama administration to set a “red line” for military action against Iran over its nuclear program.

While denying that he was intervening in US politics, Netanyahu’s inflammatory language was obviously aimed at generating a nuclear scare over Iran and pressuring Obama to set a trigger for war in the midst of the American presidential campaign. Republican challenger Mitt Romney has already branded Iran’s nuclear program as Obama’s “greatest failure” in foreign policy and accused him of abandoning Israel.

Netanyahu told CNN’s “State of the Union” that: “They [Iran] are moving very rapidly to completing the enrichment of the uranium that they need to produce a nuclear bomb. In six months or so they’ll be 90 percent of the way there.” Speaking to NBC’s “Meet the Press”, he declared: “They’re in the last 20 yards, and you can’t let them cross the goal line,” adding that would have “grievous consequences for the peace and security of us all.”

Netanyahu’s remarks are a deliberate falsification, designed to create the impression that the country is on the brink of building a nuclear device. Tehran has signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and its uranium enrichment facilities are all monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Regular IAEA reports detail Iran’s stockpile of uranium, which has been enriched at no more than 20 percent, well short of the 90 percent required for a nuclear bomb.

Tehran has repeatedly denied any plans to build a nuclear weapon. Moreover, US intelligence agencies have assessed that Iranian leaders have not made a decision to construct a nuclear bomb. Netanyahu provided no evidence to the contrary. His comments are completely cynical given that Israel has a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them anywhere in the Middle East.

In his remarks, Netanyahu seized on the wave of anti-US protests in the Middle East to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment. Referring to the Iranian regime, he declared: “It’s the same fanaticism that you see storming your embassies today. You want these fanatics to have nuclear weapons?”

The crude anti-Islamic video produced by elements of the American Christian right may have triggered the protests, but the underlying resentment and hostility throughout the region has been fuelled by decades of oppression and wars by US imperialism and its allies, including Israel. Netanyahu raises the spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran, but it is Israel that has waged brutal wars of aggression in the Middle East.

Netanyahu made similarly provocative remarks last week, implying that Israel would take unilateral military action against Iran if the US did not. “Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel,” he told a press conference in Jerusalem.

To date, the Obama administration has rejected Netanyahu’s demands. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has bluntly stated that the US was “not setting deadlines” for military action. Appearing on the same talk shows as Netanyahu last Sunday, US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice reiterated that all options, “including a military one,” were on the table. But she insisted that there was still “time and space” to force Iran to bow to international diplomatic pressure and sanctions.

These differences between the US and Israel are purely tactical. Obama is just as willing as Netanyahu to resort to military force against Iran. Since the beginning of the year, the Pentagon has been systematically building up US military presence in the Persian Gulf—doubling the number of aircraft carrier battle groups to two and stationing sophisticated F-22 fighters in the region.

Under the guise of “defence”, Washington has bolstered the anti-missile systems of its regional allies, including Israel, to block possible Iranian retaliation against an American attack. This week, the US navy commenced the largest ever anti-mine exercise in the Persian Gulf, involving warships from 30 countries, including Britain, France and Japan. While the US navy claimed these war games were purely defensive, the clear aim is to be able to neutralise Iran’s capacity to mine the Gulf and thus enhance Washington’s ability to attack with impunity.

The Obama administration has also collaborated closely with the Israeli government in waging a covert campaign of sabotage and assassination against Iran. It is widely acknowledged that the US and Israel were responsible for the Stuxnet computer virus that damaged or destroyed gas centrifuges in Iran’s uranium enrichment plants. In the past two years, four top Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed, almost certainly by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad operating with direct or indirect US support.

On Monday, Iran’s nuclear chief Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani claimed that “terrorists and saboteurs” operating under the cover of the IAEA were responsible for explosions earlier this year that cut power to Iran’s uranium enrichment plants at Fordow and Natanz. While there is no independent evidence for such an attack, it cannot be automatically ruled out, given the close association of IAEA inspectors with foreign intelligence agencies, including the US and Israel.

The Obama administration might have rejected Netanyahu’s demand for a “red line”, for the present at least. But its highly provocative actions, including the imposition of crippling economic sanctions, the military build-up in the Gulf, and its involvement in covert operations inside Iran, have raised tensions throughout the region and greatly heightened the danger of war. The chief target of any American attack will not be Iran’s nuclear program, but the Iranian regime itself, which Washington regards as an obstacle to its ambitions to consolidate its dominance of the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.

A MESSAGE FROM ROMNYAHU

A MESSAGE FROM ROMNYAHU September 12th, 2012 Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel) Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי ONCE UPON a time, President Richard Nixon wanted to appoint a certain lawyer to the US Supreme Court. “But the man is a complete moron!” one senator exclaimed.

“So what,” answered another, “There are a great many morons in the US, and they have a right to be represented in the court as much as any other sector of society.”

Perhaps the United Morons of America have a right to elect Mitt Romney president. But for the sake of the US and Israel, I hope that this will not happen.

Some people say that Israel is the 51st state of the Union. Some say that it is the first among the 51. Whatever, our lives – and perhaps our deaths – depend to a great extent on the man in the White House.

So, with all my misgivings (and I have a lot) about Barack Obama, I very much hope that he will be reelected.

IN HIS latest seizure of wisdom, Romney did not only disclose that 47% of Americans are parasites, but also that “the Palestinians” want to destroy Israel. According to him, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has no solution, it will go on forever.

I wonder where he got this last piece from.

In Nazi Germany there was a certain Herr Doktor Otto Dietrich, a functionary of the Ministry for Propaganda. Every day, he would gather the editors of the important newspapers in Berlin and tell them what their headline and editorial were going to be the next day.

That was before the Internet and fax. Nowadays, the Prime Minister’s office faxes a daily ‘page of messages” to Netanyahu’s ministers and other stooges, telling them what messages they are to spread.

I strongly suspect that Romney read this page of messages just before he met his audience, composed of billionaires (or mere millionaires). After all, he couldn’t have invented these astounding pieces of insight all by himself, could he?

“THE PALESTINIANS” means “all Palestinians”. All nine million of them in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, Israel, not to forget the refugees around the world.

Well, I suppose that if by divine intervention Israel were to disappear from the globe, very few Palestinians would shed a tear. Neither would many Israelis shed a tear if, again by divine intervention, all the Palestinians disappeared. Quite a few Israelis would even volunteer to help God Almighty in this task. Who knows, if Romney’s evangelical friends pray enough, their God may dematerialize all those Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians and assorted other miscreants.

Alas, such fantasies belong to the realms of dreams and nightmares. In the real world, peoples do not disappear even after gruesome genocides, nor can states which possess nuclear bombs be eradicated by foreign enemies.

I know quite a number of Palestinians, and not one of them believes that Israel can be annihilated. Since Yasser Arafat decided in late 1973 that he must come to terms with Israel, the great majority of Palestinians want a deal that will enable them to set up a state of their own in a part of historical Palestine. This is called the “two-state solution”.

The present government of Israel does not want this, because they are not ready to give up the 22% of historical Palestine which would become the State of Palestine. Since they have no viable alternative, the government’s spokespeople assert that “this conflict has no solution”.

One of the fathers of this slogan is Ehud Barak. After the failed 2000 Camp David meeting, Barak, then Prime Minister, famously declared that “we have no partner for peace”. Since Barak was the main cause for the meeting’s failure, I dubbed him “peace criminal”.

Netanyahu gratefully picked up Barak's cry, and now the great majority in Israel believes this message implicitly. (Recently I was interviewed by a Danish journalist. I told her: When we finish, stop the first taxi. Ask the driver about peace. He will tell you “Peace would be wonderful. I am ready to give back all the territories for peace. But unfortunately the Arabs will never make peace with us,” An hour later the journalist excitedly called me: “I did as you told me, and the driver repeated your words one by one.”)

“No solution” gives an impression of “everything will remain as it is”. That is a mistake. Nothing remains as it is. Things move all the time, settlements expand, Palestinians will rise up, the world is in flux, the Arab world changes, some day an American president will put the interests of the US ahead of those of Israel. Where will we be then?

THE GIST of Romney’s message is that the two-state solution is dead. This reminds me of Mark Twain’s famous: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

It is now in fashion to say so. Quite a trend. However, different people have different reasons for believing that the two-state solution is dead.

Parents, teachers, pedophiles and cannibals all say they love children. But their motives are not the same. This is also true for the would-be undertakers of the two-state solution. They include:

One: Idealists, who wish for people of different nations to live together in harmony and equality in one state. (I would like them to study the history of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Sudan, and the present situation of the French in Canada, Scots in Britain, Flemish in Belgium and Basques and Catalans in Spain.)

Two: Arabs, who really believe that this is a peaceful way to get rid of Israel.

Three: Settlers, who want to turn the whole of historical Palestine into their dominion and, if possible, “cleanse” the country of non-Jews.

Four: Israelis, who believe that the settlements have created a situation that is “irreversible”. (Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, coined this phrase already in the early 1980s, when there were less than 100 thousand settlers. I told him then that nothing was irreversible except death. Situations created by human beings can be changed by human beings.)

Five: Anti-Zionists, including Jewish anti-Zionists, who hate Zionism indiscriminately, with all its good and bad aspects, and for whom the very existence of a “Jewish” state is an abomination.

Six: Muslim fanatics, who believe that Palestine is a Muslim waqf (religious grant), so that allowing any part of it to non-Muslims is a deadly sin.

Seven: Jewish fanatics, who believe that all of Eretz-Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates, has been promised to the Jews by God, so that conceding any part of it to non-Jews is a deadly sin.

Eight: Christian fanatics, who believe that the second coming of Jesus Christ will be possible only after the ingathering of all the Jews in this country (with no place in it for anyone else.)

Sorry if I have forgotten someone.

SOME OF these people have invented something called the “one-state solution”. That is an oxymoron. There is a one-state problem, there is no one-state solution.

From time to time it is worthwhile to come back to the basic facts of our life:

There are two peoples living in this country.

Neither of the two will go away. They are here to stay.

While the Arab Palestinians living in the country are still a minority, they will constitute the majority quite soon.

Both peoples are intensely nationalistic.

The two peoples have different cultures, languages, religions, historic narratives, social structures, standards of living. At present, after some 130 years of continuous conflict, there is intense hatred between them.

The possibility that these two peoples could live peacefully in one state, serving in the same army and police, paying the same taxes and abiding by the same laws enacted by the same common parliament, is nil.

The possibility that these two peoples could live peacefully side-by-side in two states, each with its own flag and its own elected government (and its own soccer team), does exist.

Such co-existence can take different forms: from a loose confederation with open borders and free movement to closer forms of evolving structures, like the European Union.

I hope that this is not too complicated for Mitt Romney to understand. But this may become irrelevant if – as I fervently hope – he is not elected.

I would hate for an ignoramus to be given the opportunity to learn world affairs on our

backs.

SECRECY PACT OVER ISRAEL’S NUKES, REACHED BY NIXON AND MEIR, SERVES POLICY OF ‘NUCLEAR COERCION’ TO AVOID PEACE DEAL

7 May 2012, Mondoweiss http://mondoweiss.net (USA)

Philip Weiss

This morning we learned that the proverbial smoke-filled room of political dealmaking in American politics has now been merged with the smoke-filled room of Israeli politics-- with Netanyahu's plans to have an election just ahead of our own, so the Israel lobby can play one election off against the other.

Well, in that connection, I cannot say enough about a new book by Grant Smith of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy about the idea of Israel exercising nuclear coercion over policymakers. Smith shows how Israel gamed the American system going back to its apparent diversion in the 1960s of enriched uranium from an American front plant in Pennsylvania owned and operated by Israel lobbyists, guys who'd worked for Zionist organizations and run guns during Israel's war of independence.

At a time when the entire international community is now engaged on the issue of Iranian nuclear enrichment activities lest we have an arms race in the Middle East, it's amazing to read about how casual was American oversight of a plant from which hundreds of pounds of uranium disappeared in the 1960s even as John Kennedy was opposed to Israeli nukes. Meantime, Israeli officials were visiting the plant and company officials were going over to Israel. And all the while the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, or NUMEC, was contaminating the small town of Apollo, Pennsylvania, because its retrofitted steel mill was ill-suited to nuclear work. Collateral damage.

Divert! is based on government documents that the tireless Smith has obtained through FOIA requests over many years. The book chronicles the progress of Zalman Shapiro, a brilliant chemist, but it is most notable for Smith's argument about the power granted to Israel by the secrecy surrounding Israeli nukes, a "pact" Smith says was effected by Golda Meir and Richard Nixon, who like Lyndon Johnson was more compliant than their predecessor, the late John Kennedy.

Smith argues that that unspoken nuclear coercion-- the behind-closed-doors threat of using nukes, has permitted Israel to avoid serious negotiations for decades. (I've frequently argued that Netanyahu played Obama on the peace process with all the Iran threats.)

We'll do an interview of Grant Smith soon. Meantime, shortly after his book was published, Smith was interviewed by Shelton Walden on WBAI's Walden Pond. Here's a partial transcript (boldface mine):

SHELTON: And your book kind of goes into a little bit of how the Israeli government obtained a nuclear weapon and by subterfuge and frankly you allege by outright theft of U. S. uranium materials. So if you could just explain a little, first of all how, why did you decide to write this particular book and give us a little bit of the overview of it before we go into…...

GRANT: Sure. Well, back in the late fifties there was an enterprising chemist by the name of Zalman Shapiro who was keeping an eye— along with another person called David Lowenthal—on the Atoms for Peace Program which was going to encourage the development of nuclear industries in the U. S. and abroad. And in 1958-1959 he incorporated a company in Pennsylvania at a steel plant site in a small village called Apollo which they acquired for either free or $500 and immediately turned it into a nuclear fuel processing plant. And so this plant was ostensibly going to receive U. S. government owned U-235—which is bomb grade material—and convert it into fuel for the Nautilus nuclear submarine program where Zalman Shapiro had worked and actually done quite a number of brilliant innovations to have nuclear power plants on Navy vessels.

They began receiving large quantities of materials in the early sixties and had a lot of strange things going on at the plant such that even the Admiral Hyman Rickover who was running the Nautilus program sent them letters saying they should not have Israeli chemists working on this, that they should tighten up their security at this plant, and they were basically operating out of an old steel mill. And they had basically just gone in and painted the walls and then began handling very highly enriched nuclear materials for the Navy.

What happened in 1963-1964 is that the Atomic Energy Commission discovered that significant quantities of materials were missing. And they discovered this when NUMEC was unable to kind of "roll over" another contract and it became evident that there was a bit of a Ponzi scheme going on at the plant where they were actually using material from recent contracts to cover losses from earlier contracts. The plant's management and Zalman Shapiro, the president, claimed they were processing losses; that they had lost the materials into the environment and water of Apollo—and certainly they lost a lot of toxic materials that way, but not this uranium— and they faced down an Atomic Energy Commission investigation over the uranium losses. This put the plant on the map of the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency and through investigations they discovered that the NUMEC had a joint venture with the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission which was called Isorad.

The Israel Atomic Energy Commission was a front for the Israeli nuclear program and their relationship necessitated the shipment of a lot of sealed containers to Israel. In fact a lot of them left from Pier 34 which is about 15 miles north of where your studio is, Shelton.

But anyway, after a while the FBI began wiretapping Shapiro and trailing him and found that Shapiro was interacting with Avraham Hermoni who was part of an Israeli spy network in the United States called LAKAM. That he had invited in Raphael Eitan to the plant in 1968 which was another year of high losses. Raphael Eitan is the same person that ran Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard against the United States. And they discovered that he was having so much contact with Israeli nuclear weapons program officials that it raised concern that they thought the uranium had been diverted to the Israeli program and that is in fact what the CIA and FBI concluded by the late sixties and early seventies.

The Atomic Energy Commission was embarrassed by all of this and they had the plant acquired by another provider of the AEC [Atlantic Richfield] so that they could get rid of this. Shapiro could no longer really manage the plant and direct its activities toward Israel and so in coordination with the Israelis he was in contact with he left. And although he was a power plant specialist he got a job which would have been giving him access to the most advanced hydrogen bomb technology that the U. S. had in its arsenal. That created another crisis in the White House with the Nixon administration fighting to keep him from getting into that position, threatening to revoke his security clearances, and it just, the whole incident and the documentary record shows pretty much how the president was more afraid of this person and the lobby that supported him than he was—or should have been in my opinion.

So the case has been, it was effectively closed by 1971. He [Shapiro] was thwarted from getting this job. But then Edward Levi, an Attorney General from the Ford administration, decided to reopen the case because there were so many questions raised by the theft. So many members of Congress wanted to know what actually happened. And when they opened the investigation in the late seventies they found reason for investigating U. S. government officials for having covered up this and they also, by the early 1980s, had found eyewitnesses who had witnessed Shapiro and some unknown outsiders stuffing equipment with U-235 for shipment to Israel. They also discovered material which was mainly given by the U. S. government to NUMEC [Shippingport U-235], they also found traces of it in Israel. So they were pretty sure at that time there had been a diversion. But of course there was never any accountability, no indictments, no prosecutions, and everything was shut down by the entrance of the Reagan administration. So that's a synopsis.

On the issue of nuclear proliferation:

John F. Kennedy was working very hard to prevent the Israelis from going nuclear because both the Central Intelligence Agency and national security officials could see that once this small state and this extremely volatile region acquired a nuclear arsenal that it would have what is called a coercive, or less charitably, a nuclear blackmail, option over the United States. Israel would be able to say to the United States, if you don't toe the line and have policies that are favorable to us then we might have to actually unleash this arsenal against one or more enemies in the Middle East. And so this has really tied the United States' hands.

But as is documented in the book, one of the reasons that no American president except for Jimmy Carter—after he was long gone from office—ever talks about the Israeli nuclear arsenal, is that its existence relied on a lot of covert and illegal activities that the U. S. government was actively trying to resist. The current policy of course was pacted in 1969 with Golda Meir in which the president [Nixon] would not actually discuss the nuclear arsenal, it would not subject Israel to any pressure to join the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and this was, as Henry Kissinger put it, designed to keep the existence of the arsenal from becoming an established international fact.

And so by keeping this topic off the table and by continually shielding this arsenal from scrutiny, the American people never really get a clear picture of the actual dynamics that are driving the region. And exploring the NUMEC cases provides a good viewfinder for seeing how the entire policy was put together and how much it harms this country.

...SHELTON: I did find it interesting that in the book, your book President Kennedy was rather resistant to a lot of the requests that the Israeli government had made regarding this and when he made his unfortunate and untimely demise President Johnson came on the scene and things began to clear up quite quickly for the Israeli government regarding nuclear activities.

GRANT: That's true.... what we see doing the primary research is that at the time Kennedy was assassinated he was fighting three battles against the Israelis. One of them was to get their nuclear facility inspected internationally and he wanted to shut down their nuclear program and the second one was that he was taking on the top Israel lobby group and actively ordered them to register as foreign agents which kind of put all of their public relations out for public view and really put a damper on their activities in the United States. And so the more research that we've done this 1962-1963 period the more questions come out about the circumstances of the Israeli nuclear weapons program and the absolute reversal that took place between '63 and '64 where you had LBJ coming in and his top campaign financier, Abraham Feinberg, was there helping set policy objectives, finance Johnson's campaign and as Avner Cohen put it so eloquently in his book Israel and the Bomb, this was the man who was designated by David Ben-Gurion to be the fundraising coordinator for the Israeli nuclear weapons program in the United States. And that's just how close to the administration the Israelis were.

SHELTON: I have to tell you. Seeing the activities of President Johnson before he took office and after, vis-à-vis Israel and-- I have done shows on the USS Liberty and other activities, you know I think that to me President Johnson really did a disservice to this country and in some cases he looked like a crook.

GRANT: Well he was just very malleable and he didn't want to take on or have any sort of accountability over what the Israelis were doing in the United States. And that is very clear from the documentary record. Although I suspect it's even worse than what we know.

SHELTON: And one person you quote who is a former military person said that... [Israel] spent a great deal of money cultivating career officials throughout the Defense Department and the department[s] of intelligence and it was understood that to raise this issue was a career-killer.

GRANT: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's still the case. This has been described, this incident has been described, as a self-healing problem. Whenever there was any momentum toward getting out more information about it, it just sort of automatically self-seals because there is no upside for anybody. For presidents raising this meant endangering access to the campaign contribution network. For a person like an FBI director or a Justice Department political appointee, they had already seen how almost a hundred investigations of conventional weapon smuggling back in the late forties had been shut down by political maneuvers, so they knew that they couldn't win, that at a certain point there would be political pressures and changes in DOJ employees and other subterfuges so that it would be unprosecutable.

And so this case in my view clearly illustrates just how corrosive and corrupting the lobby-backed demand for this sort of access and unaccountability has been. But the cover-up is clear. Even today there are hundreds and hundreds of pages of CIA documents about the financier behind NUMEC whose name was David Lowenthal that they refuse to release. The FBI has released quite a bit of information about its investigation but what was actually going on in Israel is kind of a black hole at this point and you know there's no upside for the U. S. government to talk about this. Because it will make Americans, if it ever comes out and more people become aware of it, question whether the U. S. government…if it's not even capable of protecting this most precious military material – what is it capable of doing. So it just raises too many questions that no party really wants to look at.

SHELTON: Yeah. Absolutely. You mentioned Helen Thomas in the book. You mentioned when she was at the White House she asked our current president, President Obama about the Israeli nuclear program and he punted.

GRANT: Right. But he did do a couple of good things. Early on I think, before somebody clued him in, he talked openly about getting Israel into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Probably without realizing that if the U. S. ever formally found and made it an "established international fact" that Israel had a nuclear arsenal there's all sorts of legislation such as the Symington and Glenn Amendments which would prohibit any further U. S. aid to Israel and so by kind of moving into that, and he also Victoria Nuland his State Department person, his appointee, talked about a nuclear free Middle East. But this was early on. This was before somebody…reined them back in.

SHELTON:.. one of the people you mentioned who was in part, another person was Ivan Novick. And he was head, he was one of the head lobbyists. And he had some connection also with NUMEC as well.

GRANT: Well yeah and Zalman Shapiro himself was the head of the Pennsylvania chapter and so just by being so hooked into the Zionist Organization of America which had its own battle with the Justice Department which tried to get them also to register as appendages of the Israeli government in the 1940s. Just by being connected with that organization, which is then interconnected with so many other members of the Israel lobby, that's one of the reasons why the Justice Department and the Executive Branch didn't feel like it could actually have any sort of indictments and accountability. These were people who— well I like the saying of Lawrence Franklin who was caught up in the AIPAC espionage scandal— these people are "beyond good and evil." They really can't be held to any sort of account to violations of the Atomic Energy Act, or any other statutes for that matter.

[Caller] STEVE: I would like to ask him, does he feel there is anything that can be done to undo this situation?...

GRANT: I think a great deal can be done and the first step is more awareness. The fact that nobody knows about this incident and the fact that mainstream corporate media doesn't feel any need to discuss in an accurate fashion the actual nuclear situation in the Middle East, people can affect that by complaining about it, by turning to alternative media, by becoming media and I think people who turn to the Internet and begin going to credible alternative news sites will see information like this come out. I think that is a real positive step. Until people begin understanding more about what is going on they won't be in any position to resist kind of the propaganda, particularly the big drive against Iran right now....

And just let me pick up on one thing [another caller] said. Shimon Peres, current President of Israel. He has been responsible for overseeing many of clandestine operations. And he is also on record as having offered nuclear weapons to Apartheid South Africa. That was uncovered by Sasha Polakow-Suransky from the Council on Foreign Relations in 2010. This is a man who President Barack Obama is going to award a Presidential Medal of Freedom this summer if people don't get together and protest that we should not award something like that to the biggest nuclear proliferator in the Middle East.

SHELTON: Well you know something your book is great, but I have a feeling the American public has been kept like a mushroom about all these issues for so many years. And frankly I think a lot of people either some people don't care or they certainly are scared to so anything about anything. They figure that's business as usual, I think people should protest, but I think that people are going to say Ehhhh. You know what I mean.

GRANT: I think you're right about the mushroom effect. People have been kept in the dark, but I'm also optimistic that people are beginning to get more of their information from credible Internet-based sources and turning away from kind of the propaganda networks that have been feeding them disinformation. And they are doing that even more so now that we're seeing Iraq II being played out over the networks.... So I'm optimistic that some of the dark is beginning to fade.