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AIPAC, Apollo Pennsylvania, Chemical weapons, CIA, Corruption, Coverup, Divert, Enriched Uranium, FBI, Grant F Smith, Hiroshima-yield bombs, IRmep, Israel, Israeli, Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program, Israelis, Mossad, Non Proliferation Treaty, Nuclear Weapons, NUMEC, Theft, United States, US Presidents, Zalman Shapiro, Zbigniew Brzezinski
NUMEC – Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation – USA
The NUMEC Cover-up: The Diversion of U.S. Weapons Grade Uranium from NUMEC to Israel (1:41:04 Hours)
The Rise of AIPAC – Occupy AIPAC 2012 Workshop (23:33 minutes)
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On January 31, 2013 the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy hosted a public education event just north of Apollo Pennsylvania. Author Grant F. Smith discussed key findings Non-proliferationfrom his 2012 book, “Divert! NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro, and the Diversion of US Weapons-Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program” at the Parks Township Volunteer Fire Hall.
Smith’s talk covered the corporate histories of NUMEC and Apollo Industries, how regulators dealt with the plant’s massive losses of bomb-grade nuclear material, the FBI’s investigation of NUMEC’s joint venture with a front for Israel’s nuclear weapons program, and the ongoing clandestine interactions of NUMEC executives with Israeli intelligence and covert nuclear weapons program operatives.
Smith also unveiled a major new effort to declassify all remaining CIA, NSA, Justice Department and National Security Council files revealing how American presidents quietly grappled with NUMEC as a proliferation and safeguards issue from the LBJ to the Carter administrations.
In an article not publicized in the Main Stream Media
Last month the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), the nation’s highest classification authority, released a number of top-level government memoranda that shed additional light on the so-called NUMEC affair, “the story that won’t go away—the possibility that in the 1960s, Israel stole bomb-grade uranium from a US nuclear fuel-processing plant.”
The evidence available for our 2010 Bulletin article persuaded us that Israel did steal uranium from the Apollo, Pennsylvania, plant of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC). We urged the US government to declassify CIA and FBI documents to settle the matter. In releasing the current batch—the release being largely due to the persistent appeals of researcher Grant Smith—the government has been careful to excise from all the released documents the CIA’s reasons for fingering Israel. Despite this, the documents are significantly revealing. For one thing, the excisions themselves are a backhanded admission of the persuasiveness of the CIA’s evidence. (Why these excisions are legally justified is not apparent—after nearly 50 years, the “sources and methods” issues have long ago dissipated.)
While we still don’t know exactly what the CIA told high government officials, we do know from the released memoranda that top officials thought the CIA’s case was a strong one. Also, as described in our earlier article, one of us was present at the CIA’s February 1976 briefing of a small group at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). At that session Carl Duckett, then-CIA deputy director for science and technology, told the NRC group the CIA believed the missing highly enriched uranium ended up in Israel.
The newly released documents also expose government efforts, notably during the Carter administration, to keep the NUMEC story under wraps, an ironic twist in view of Jimmy Carter’s identification with opposition to nuclear proliferation.
The context of NUMEC. A bit of background is in order here. After a 1965 inventory, NUMEC was found to be missing about 100 kilograms of bomb-grade uranium, even after accounting for all processing losses. The close personal and commercial ties to Israel of the plant owners and operators raised suspicions that remained unresolved. The affair of the missing bomb-grade uranium was revived in 1976. The newly formed NRC was in the process of writing licensing regulations for commercial fuel firms—of which NUMEC was one—and had heard rumors of possible theft in the 1960s from NUMEC’s Apollo facility.
The NRC asked for a CIA briefing. Duckett startled the NRC group with CIA’s conclusion that the missing uranium was in Israeli bombs. The NRC chairman informed the White House, and President Ford took an interest in the case. Ford’s Attorney General, Edward Levi, discovered that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the NRC predecessor nuclear licensing agency, had previously convinced the FBI not to open a criminal investigation into the material’s disappearance. The AEC was concerned that the public revelation of the NUMEC case would draw attention to its lack of control over nuclear bomb materials in the hands of private firms, and thus undermine the commission’s efforts to get nuclear power programs underway. In addition, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was not eager to get into a technical area with which his agents were unfamiliar. Levi gave the FBI its first instruction to investigate the material’s disappearance, a decade after the 1965 inventory that was the object of concern. In fact, although they attracted little attention, NUMEC inventories through 1968 showed even larger unexplained losses.
After the 1976 election, the Ford White House alerted the incoming Carter administration to the NUMEC affair. In December 1976, according to a July 1977 National Security Council memorandum, then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush briefed President-elect Carter on the case. Congress had been pressing for public disclosure of records of large unexplained losses of bomb-grade material (in government parlance, “material unaccounted for,”or MUF) from the government’s nuclear weapons complex. The White House feared the story was sure to hit the headlines if there were any suggestion of Israeli theft from the NUMEC facility. And any disclosures about Israel’s bomb program would of course have threatened the Carter administration’s Middle East policies.
Carter instructed his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to deal with the NUMEC matter in the context of the impending public release of MUF data. Brzezinski’s staffers John Marcum and Jessica Tuchman posed questions to the CIA about the NUMEC affair. Ted Shackley, then-CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, called Marcum on a secure line on July 28, 1977, to provide answers. Marcum’s entire two-page description of the call in his memorandum to Tuchman is blanked out in the version just released by ISCAP. As noted in our earlier article, other evidence suggests that the next day Shackley briefed senior officials of the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), the principal successor agency to the AEC. He told them that environmental samples taken by the CIA in Israel in 1968 contained highly enriched uranium, whose enrichment level was so high it pointed to the Portsmouth, Ohio, uranium enrichment plant as the source. Portsmouth was where NUMEC obtained uranium stock for its naval fuel products. We don’t know whether this information is in the excised portion of Marcum’s memorandum. We do however now have Marcum’s unredacted conclusion: “The CIA case is persuasive, though not conclusive.” Marcum preceded his conclusion with the pregnant observation, “At this point, despite the FBI clean bill of health, I do not think the president has plausible deniability.”
The unusual Brzezinski interlude. The matter passed up to Brzezinski, who submitted a memorandum to the president on August 2, 1977. (The president’s diary records a discussion on NUMEC the same day.) Brzezinski summarized for President Carter the views of ERDA, the FBI, and the CIA regarding Israeli involvement. His characterization of the CIA’s views is excised in the version just released. His descriptions of the other agencies’ views omit important evidence.
For example, the memorandum understates by about a factor of six the unexplained amount of missing uranium—more than 330 kilograms by 1968, or enough to make over a dozen Hiroshima-yield bombs.
He reported ERDA’s statements that there was “no evidence” of theft, adding that the agency had no basis for that conclusion. Nevertheless, when it came to his conclusion for the president, he used the same formulation (with our emphasis): “while a diversion might have occurred, there is no evidence—despite an intensive search for some—to prove that one did. For every piece of evidence that implies one conclusion, there is another piece that argues the opposite. One is pretty much left with making a personal judgment—based on instinct—as to whether the diversion did or did not occur.” Leaving aside the contradiction between saying there is no evidence of theft and then saying there is more or less equal evidence on each side of the case, there was in fact a great deal more evidence of Israeli involvement already available in ERDA, FBI, and CIA records that Brzezinski apparently did not take the trouble to look into.
Brzezinski took at face value the AEC’s claim that it had investigated the NUMEC affair. As we showed in our 2010 article, however, the commission’s inquiries into the NUMEC affair were mainly designed to exculpate NUMEC and the AEC itself from any charges of wrongdoing. In evaluating these past so-called investigations, Attorney General Levi wrote President Ford on April 22, 1976 that federal officials might have violated criminal statutes, including those that cover accessory after the fact and failure to report a felony.
Brzezinski also passed off the FBI’s findings as amounting to no more than confirmation that the president of NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro, had frequent contacts with Israeli officials, including a science attaché “thought to be an intelligence officer,” and received unexplained VIP treatment in Israel. In fact, Shapiro was by then known to have had contacts with Israel’s head of military intelligence and the head of its nuclear weapons program. He later acknowledged knowing Binyamin Blumberg, head of Israel’s “bureau of scientific liaison,” which engaged in high-risk intelligence capers. On one strange occasion in 1968, Shapiro hosted an Israeli intelligence foursome at the Apollo plant. One was the Mossad agent who headed the team that spirited former Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann out of Argentina and who later ran Jonathan Pollard’s spying on the United States for Israel. (Mossad is the Israeli agency that handles foreign intelligence collection and covert action.) Another was that agent’s deputy in the Eichmann kidnap, who went on to become head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. A third was Mossad’s director of technical services. The last was Israel’s science attaché, who had held a senior position in Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
The FBI, Brzezinski told Carter, had just concluded its latest investigation and “was unable to uncover any evidence of theft, although the interviews included many current and former NUMEC employees.” In fact, the FBI investigation continued for two more years, and its interviews of NUMEC employees revealed many suspicious circumstances concerning NUMEC shipments to Israel.
The last part of the Brzezinski August 1977 memorandum to President Carter is the most revealing of the Carter administration’s intentions regarding the NUMEC affair: “We face tough sledding in the next few weeks (particularly in view of [Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s] Mid-East trip) in trying to keep attention focused on ERDA’s technical arguments and, if necessary, on the FBI investigations, and away from the CIA’s information.”
Time for real transparency. It’s fair to ask, in view of the other losses in the US nuclear weapons complex, why the CIA and others singled out NUMEC for grave suspicion as the source for Israeli bomb-grade uranium. In brief, the reasons are these: NUMEC’s unexplained losses were a significantly larger proportion of its throughput of highly enriched uranium than was the case for other firms that dealt with nuclear materials. Sloppy accounting and lax security made the plant easy to rob without detection. NUMEC had commercial relationships with Israel’s defense and nuclear establishments and regularly made sizeable nuclear shipments to Israel, which at that time were not checked by the AEC. NUMEC’s owners and executives had extremely close ties to Israel, including to high Israeli intelligence and nuclear officials. Israel had strong motives to obtain the highly enriched uranium before it was producing enough plutonium for weapons. High-level Israeli intelligence operatives visited the NUMEC plant. Israeli intelligence organizations were used to running logistically complicated, risky operations to support nuclear weapons development, and it would have been very much out of character for them to pass up an opportunity like this. On top of all this, records show the CIA believed its 1968 environmental sample taken in Israel evidenced an enrichment level unique to Portsmouth.
Nearly 50 years have passed since the events in question.
It is time to level with the public.
At this point it is up to the president himself to decide whether to declassify completely the NUMEC documents, all of which are over 30 years old. He should do so. We know that is asking a lot given the president’s sensitivity about anything involving Israel, and especially anything relating to Israeli nuclear weapons. But none of his political concerns outweigh his responsibility to tell the US public the historical truth it deserves to know.
Reported By Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
http://thebulletin.org/did-israel-steal-bomb-grade-uranium-united-states7056
PR Newswire Reported the Following
WASHINGTON, March 27, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — On March 18, 2014 ISCAP, the highest declassification authority in the U.S., released 84 pages (PDF) of formerly secret information about investigations into the illegal diversion of weapons-grade nuclear material from a Pennsylvania plant into the clandestine Israeli nuclear weapons program. Files now available to the public from IRmep’s ISCAP process include:
4/2/1968 Letter from the Director of the CIA alerting the Attorney General (PDF) about a huge loss of material fromPennsylvania’s Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC). “It is critical for us to establish whether or not the Israelis now have the capability for fabricating nuclear weapons which might be employed in the Near East.”
03/09/1972 FBI memorandum (PDF) “On the basis of the foregoing it must be assumed for the purpose of U.S. national security that diversion of special nuclear materials to Israel by Dr. [Zalman] Shapiro and his [NUMEC] associates is a distinct possibility.”
07/28/1977 Notes of a briefing from CIA’s Associate Deputy Director for Operations Theodore Shackley to the Carter administration National Security Council (PDF) “I also asked Shackley to get us a rundown on the political aspects—e.g. when were the President and Congressional officials briefed on the Israeli weapons program, on the NUMEC connection, and what were their reactions. In December, Carter was briefed on the NUMEC problem as President-elect by Bush in Georgia…I do not think the President has plausible deniability. The CIA case is persuasive…”
08/02/1977 Memo to Carter from Zbigniew Brzezinski “So far as we know however, (and we have made serious effort to discover it) there is nothing to indicate active CIA participation in the alleged theft…There is a tremendous amount of interest in this issue in Congress…We face tough sledding in the next few weeks in trying to keep attention focused on ERDA’s technical [overall U.S. nuclear material loss] arguments..on the FBI investigations, and away from the CIA’s information.”
All released CIA evidence and former Tel Aviv Station Chief John Hadden suggest the severely undercapitalized NUMEC was “an Israeli [smuggling] operation from the beginning.” Multiple health-related lawsuits have been filed targeting companies that later assumed NUMEC ownership. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers currently estimates its toxic cleanup of NUMEC will cost$500 million. No damage claims have yet been filed against the Israeli government.
IRmep is a Washington-DC based nonprofit researching U.S. Middle East policy formulation.
SOURCE Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy
Description of “DIVERT” written by Grant f. Smith
Based on an exhaustive review of formerly classified government documents-as well as previously unexplored corporate filings, office diaries and unguarded interviews-Grant F. Smith has written a riveting story of the 1960s diversion of US weapons-grade nuclear material from an Israeli front company in Pennsylvania into the clandestine Israeli atomic weapons program. The talented but highly conflicted founder of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC)-Dr. Zalman Mordecai Shapiro alongside his close friend and financial backer David Lowenthal-engaged in a ferocious clandestine drive to funnel the most valuable military material on earth that forever tilted the balance of power between Israel and the world. Divert! chronicles Zalman Shapiro’s journey from crafting ingenious innovations for the Nautilus nuclear submarine in the 1950s to his costly pursuit of America’s most advanced hydrogen bomb designs in the 1970s. Tasked during secret summits with high-level Israeli intelligence agents, guided by Israel’s top nuclear arms designers, and defended by Israel and its US lobby, Shapiro and NUMEC drove the CIA and FBI from furious outrage to despair. Presidents from LBJ to Jimmy Carter secretly grappled with how to respond to Israel’s brazen theft of American nuclear material before finally deciding to bury the entire affair in classified files. But NUMEC’s toxic secrets have refused to be buried alive. Newly declassified wiretaps have risen from the grave, detailing Shapiro’s utter contempt for worker and nuclear safety. David Lowenthal’s role as an international refugee smuggler between the US, Europe and Israel-before organizing financing for NUMEC-is placed under new scrutiny. This explosive story emerges even as the US Army Corps of Engineers struggles to quietly clean NUMEC’s toxic waste near Apollo, Pennsylvania with $170 million in taxpayer funding. At a time when America is coming under intense pressure to attack on the mere suspicion that Iran is diverting nuclear material, Divert! stands as the ultimate cautionary tale of how US Middle East policy is continually undermined from within by corruption, immunity, deceit and unwarranted secrecy.
From the Prologue of the book
Grant F. Smith writes the following for Veterans News Now
Does the US-Israel “special relationship” transcend rule of law?
A brief history of unprosecuted Israeli foreign agent, smuggling and espionage cases.
I’m not going to tell you about the ten years of research that have gone into trying to answer one single, hard question which is “is Israel and its U.S. lobby above the law in the United States?” I’ve spent ten years trying to answer that question, I am going to share with you a few case studies very quickly.
Grant F Smith at the First American National Summit Reassessing US-Israel Relations (13.58 minutes)
Video By MyCatbirdSeat
We got off on the wrong foot back in the 1940s. If you look closely enough, you can see ongoing damage from that poor launch in which the United States was visited by the government-in-waiting, the Jewish Agency, led by David Ben-Gurion, and rather than do anything else, they set up a vast, illegal smuggling network through an archipelago of non-profit organizations that were there specifically to steal WWII surplus and channel it to Jewish fighters in Palestine. Some of the materiel was bought for cents on the dollar; some of the materiel was stolen outright from the U.S. Marines in Hawaii, as was the case of Nathan Liff and .50 caliber machine guns.Materials and Manpower for Palestine stole the entire list from the U.S. Chaplain so they could recruit more effectively in sending veterans of WWII to fight in Palestine.
The Sonneborn Institute, which was organized by a former Zionist Organization of America chair, was very effective by channeling through second and third countries all sorts of tank, ammunition, aircraft, explosives, and was able to get it for pennies on the dollar completely in violation of the Arms Export Control Act and all sorts of laws including the Neutrality Act.
They cared little about American shipping materiel inside boilers and mismarked boxes dropping onto piers in New York. They didn’t care about that because they had a higher purpose. That purpose was to win a state, and they were successful.
If we look at some of the activities inside the Justice Department to cover up all of this, what you see is a very effective counter-force.
Whenever the FBI was getting close, and there is a 7,000 page file in the National Archives with surveillance photographs of B-17s and materiel and guns moving through the U.S. logistics system, what you would find in the Justice Department’s own files lobbyists such as Abraham Feinberg—the uber-lobbyist, cash-bundling king—would assemble a “war-chest” and mobilize people to quash prosecutions.
They had a hundred people they were going to arrest and prosecute on the West Coast alone—never happened. There were only a handful of people who ever suffered felony convictions, relatively low-level people, the big fish of the Jewish Agency—Nahum Bernstein, writing the checks from New York—never indicted. And this was because there was a vast amount of influence over the president. A vast amount of access to the Justice Department attorney general. And so the basic advice and consent rights of Americans were fundamentally undermined. They had no say; they had no choice about what was happening to this military equipment. That had been decided for them, and the necessary prosecutions didn’t happen. Hank Greenspun, he has a balcony on Pennsylvania Avenue named after him at the Newseum, became rich smuggling weapons to Palestine. He offered $25,000 to many people in Washington to quash those prosecutions, and only got a felony [no jail time].
Well, some of these people graduated. One of the biggest problems in Pennsylvania right now is this: There is one plant that lost more highly enriched uranium—weapons-grade uranium—than any other nuclear fuel plant in the United States. It just happened to be run by two Zionist Organization of America officials, Ivan Novick and Zalman Shapiro and a smuggler from the 1940s network of smuggling, David Lowenthal, who was very active with Israeli intelligence. So what happened to NUMEC (Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation)? It was constantly inviting in the top spies from Israel to visit the plant. In particular Rafael Eitan, who would later run Jonathan Pollard, and a number of other extremely effective cover operations people. There were eyewitness accounts of Zalman Shapiro and other people sealing weapons-grade uranium for shipment to Palestine, excuse me, to Israel, on an accelerated basis. And the amount of material unaccounted for today is 339 kilograms. They lost 2 per cent of the entire throughput when Shapiro and the ZOA crew were in charge, it only went back down after they were forced out of ownership.
What happened in the LBJ, Nixon and subsequent administrations? The record shows they were fearful of the political consequences of going after these people. They tried to move them around. They tried to assuage their concerns. But there are others who are more forthright. The CIA Chief of the Tel Aviv Station John Hadden said NUMEC was an Israeli operation from the beginning—and that is exactly what the record shows.
Unfortunately for the people who have to live in the environs of a defunct weapons smuggling plant, they are facing a $500 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleanup, and their water and township is completely polluted.
There were a few questions about the connections between Israel lobbying groups and foreign principals. Abraham Feinberg was also extremely effective at providing seed funding to AIPAC, writing various checks, he also was the head of the organization that was, according the Avner Cohen, the prime organization for putting together fundraising for Israel’s nuclear weapons research. The Weizmann Institute.
He would also give money to AIPAC which would write helpful articles [saying things] such as “Israel could never become a nuclear power,” running a counter propaganda ring whenever the U.S. was looking too closely.
Now there was a good question this morning about the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act. Why are Israel lobbying organizations which are closely coordinating with foreign principals—and in some cases receiving money—able not to be as transparent as other organizations that are lobbying for a foreign principal? The simple fact of the matter is, when ordered to register, they don’t, they fight it. When forced to register, they undergo a transformation into something else, and continue their operations. And there’s no better case of that than the case that led to the creation of AIPAC.
But first, the Zionist Organization [of America] was ordered seven times to register because it was a subsidiary of the World Zionist Organization. But they, according to Justice Department documents, by underlings, “got to” the AG who said I’m not going to enforce the law, you don’t have to register, you don’t have to be transparent in your communications.
They also “got to” the biggest attempt to register Israel lobbying groups in America which was in the 1960s when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Justice Department—concerned about overseas provocations dragging America into war, they cited in their chartering investigating document the Lavon Affair twice, in other words Israel twice as being provoking activities that would drive America into unwise overseas interventions—and so they decided to raid the Jewish Agency, to raid the American Zionist Council, to seize documents, and saw that they were bringing in money from the Jewish Agency for public relations and for publicity. So what happened?
Well, they [the AZC] were ordered to register by the Justice Department as foreign agents in 1962. The [AZC] unincorporated lobbying division, however, split off six weeks later and is still with us today.That organization is called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and it continues the work of the original American Zionist Council that was ordered to shut down under this FARA order. So foreign agent registration orders have never really been applied rigorously, even in cases of documented violations of its transparency provisions. There’s a little copy of the Kennedy registration order [motioning to slide].
What’s happened because of that?
Here’s a snapshot of our worst free [bilateral] trade agreement ever signed, in which exports are half of what imports are. This is the U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement. It was lobbied against by seventy organizations in the mid-1980s, including Monsanto, Sunkist, AFL-CIO—they didn’t want to lower U.S. trade barriers to Israel.
On the other side was AIPAC and a group of small organizations. They [AIPAC] stole the trade secrets of their opposition, which had been given to the International Trade Commission, and used it against them [those opposed] in public relations and lobbying and got a heck of a deal for being able to—once again—thwart American interests and get their own way. It’s resulted in a chronic $10 billion per year deficit, it’s resulted in a $100 billion cumulative deficit to the United States, and the question is, was it worth it?
Well yes! It created 120,000 jobs in a foreign country instead of here. It really transferred a lot of secrets to the Israelis about production costs, transfer pricing, and the Justice Department ultimately refused, even though they tracked it back to Dan Halpern of the [Israeli] Ministry of Economics, refused to continue the investigation when he claimed diplomatic immunity. So, it’s a bad deal, but it’s not the only prosecution that’s been thwarted.
In December [2013] we had declassified documents of a counter espionage investigation of the ADL [Anti-Defamation League]. The ADL back in the 90s had been investigated for holding FBI and other classified documents in a campaign that they were launching against pro-Palestinian and anti-Apartheid activists—two of whom died under mysterious circumstances—but what the [internal] memos once again reveal if you read them online, is that there was an intervention at high levels.
The record reveals that two high-ranking Israeli generals were dispatched to talk to Janet Reno, she dropped the case, the espionage investigation died.
2005 the same thing happened. Two AIPAC lobbyists were indicted. They were using [stolen] secrets to try to gin up a war with Iran. They were passing it to [Washington Post reporter] Glenn Kessler, Steve Rosen [of AIPAC] said that he was trying to show that Iran was engaged in “total war” against the U.S. in Iraq. And, of course, the Obama administration and the judges involved, didn’t keep it in the system.
So, it’s gotten to the point of ridiculousness. We have other documents revealing a smuggling ring in the 80s that involved not only Arnon Milchan, Hollywood producer, and Richard Kelly Smyth, but also Benjamin Netanyahu himself working on the Israeli side. Where are these people now? Have they ever suffered any consequences for being involved in the documented theft of nuclear triggers called krytrons? No. Milchan was hiding out at the Academy Awards [this week] clearly there in the center picture, he doesn’t seem to be too afraid. And of course Netanyahu is with his favorite group here, AIPAC (American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee).
The problem is ongoing. It hasn’t gone away. Nuclear technology continues to flow from the United States, but we’re not prosecuting it. We’re disbanding them through regulations, or we’re sealing off warranted criminal investigations instead of pursuing them, such as the case of Stewart Nozette.
My conclusion is there is no U.S. law—that if it stands in the way of Israel and its U.S. lobby—that cannot be thwarted, overcome, subvented, and the Justice Department—in most cases—collapses well before any warranted prosecutions take place.
Grant F. Smith is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) in Washington, DC. He is the author of two unofficial histories of AIPAC–America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department’s Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government and Foreign Agents: AIPAC from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal, as well as the books Divert, Spy Trade, Deadly Dogma, Visa Denied and editor of the book Neocon Middle East Policy. Before joining IRmep, Smith was senior analyst and later program manager at Yankee Group Research, Inc. in Boston. Smith has a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the University of Minnesota and a Masters in International Management from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Jeff Stein of The Washington Post designated Smith “a Washington D.C. author who has made a career out of writing critical books on Israeli spying and lobbying.” Nathan Guttman of The Jewish Daily Forward recognizes Smith as leading a public effort to “call attention of the authorities to AIPAC’s activity and demands public scrutiny of the group’s legal status.” John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago claims “Grant Smith’s new book is a major step forward in correcting that problem. He provides a fascinating–and disturbing–account of how I. L. Kenen laid the groundwork for AIPAC, the most powerful organization in the lobby.”
Watch the Entire 2014 Summit Here (8:14:20 Hours)
Video By AnalistReview
“One speaker put it this way: “The ‘Special Relationship’ isn’t working! We want it instead to be a “normal” relationship between the U.S. and Israel. We believe that will serve better the “national interests of both countries.”
On the agenda as speakers were individuals from the Defense and Law enforcement communities; the Non-Profits and the Public Policy field; former members of the U.S. Congress, to wit: Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and Rep. Paul Findley (R-IL); along with a host of distinguished authors, law professors, journalists and ex-intelligence officials, from both the military and the civilian side.
A former CIA official, Ray McGovern, raised this issue in his remarks, “Does Israel act like a U.S. ally? In the 1980s, he used to prepare the “President’s Daily Brief.”
One of the speakers that brought the capacity audience to its feet with a standing ovation was Ernie A. Gallo. He’s an author and the President of the “USS Liberty Veterans Association.” He was a survivor of the Israeli attack on the “USS Liberty.” Gallo’s 2013 book is titled: “Liberty Injustices: A Survivor Account of American Bigotry.”
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