Opinion Editorials, January 2012

Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, January 9, 2012

This spring, Israel and US will showcase the largest ever missile defense exercise and establish US command posts in Israel and Israeli Forces will occupy EUCOM headquarters in Germany.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Lt.Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the US’s Third Air Force based in Germany, visited Israel and finalized the plans for “Austere Challenge 12”.

This misguided action will deploy several thousand American soldiers in Israel and establish joint task forces that further entwine US-Israeli policies that favor military muscle over diplomacy, equal human rights and justice.

Presidential candidates pontificate over the dangers of nuclear weapons in Iran and are oblivious to the danger to the American people because of US support of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine and collusion in Israel’s nuclear ambiguity/deceptions.

As the West was adopting more sanctions against Tehran claiming Iran is manufacturing WMD, Iran responded in a 10-day war game naval exercise near the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

All of the oil output of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Iraq and Iran run through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is well equipped with missile boats and land-based missiles. It doesn’t require much intelligence to comprehend that Iran would close off the Strait of Hormuz as soon as the first plane from Israel or US entered Iranian airspace. The blowback to the world’s economy with the elimination of nearly a fifth of the industrial nations’ supply of oil would lead to the end of the world as we all now know it.

What we all need to know is what Mordechai Vanunu, Israel’s nuclear whistle-blower said just prior to Israel sending him back to solitary confinement for 78 days in 2010-the outcome of his historic freedom of speech trial and punishment for speaking to foreign media in 2004: "Everyone knows Israel has 200 bombs-hydrogen, nitrogen...No one wants atomic weapons in the Middle East....No one wants Israel or the Middle East to have atomic weapons, because if Israel has the bomb Iran will have the bomb."

What Americans desperately need to know is what Vanunu told me in 2005:

“President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons. In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’

“Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection. The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago. Back then,the Dimona descended seven floors underground. In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on.

“Kennedy demanded inspections. When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.

“Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.” [1]

On 2 October 2009, The Washington Times reported that Obama agreed to keep Israel's nukes 'secret' and reaffirmed a 4-decade-old understanding that has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections." [2]

Three officials spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were discussing private conversations, but all said Obama pledged to maintain the agreement when he first hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in May 2009. Under the understanding, the U.S. has not pressured Israel to disclose its nuclear weapons or to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would require Israel to give up its estimated several hundred nuclear bombs. This nuclear deception was reached at a summit between President Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on 25 September 1969, with "the United States passively accepting Israel's nuclear weapons status as long as Israel does not unveil publicly its capability or test a weapon."[Ibid]

In 2007, the Nixon library declassified a 19 July 1969, memo from Henry Kissinger, the then national security adviser stating: "While we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession, what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact."

The "established international facts" were exposed in 1986, when Mordechai Vanunu told the truth and provided the photographic proof of Israel's seven story underground WMD Facility that can be viewed on You Tube:

Another established international fact occurred on 17 April 2010, when Iran hosted a conference in Tehran on nuclear disarmament with sixty countries represented.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a statement delivered at the conference stating that nuclear weaponry was "haram" meaning prohibited under Islam and he also blew the doors off Israel's and America's nuclear deceptions:

"If America’s claims of fighting the proliferation of nuclear weapons were not false, would the Zionist regime be able to turn the occupied Palestinian lands into an arsenal where a huge number of nuclear weapons are stored while refusing to respect international regulations in this regard, especially the NPT?

"There is only one government that has committed a nuclear crime so far. Only the government of the United States of America has attacked the oppressed people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs in an unfair and inhumane war…using or even threatening to use such weapons is a serious violation of the most basic rules of philanthropy and is a clear manifestation of war crimes.

"The greatest violators of the NPT are the powers who have reneged on their obligation to dispose of nuclear weapons mentioned in Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. These powers have even surpassed other countries with respect to promoting nuclear weapons in the world. By providing the Zionist regime with nuclear weapons and supporting its policies, these powers play a direct role in promoting nuclear weapons which is against the obligations they have undertaken according to Article 1 of the NPT.

"We believe that besides nuclear weapons, other types of weapons of mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons also pose a serious threat to humanity. The Iranian nation, which is itself a victim of chemical weapons, feels more than any other nation the danger that is caused by the production and stockpiling of such weapons and is prepared to make use of all its facilities to counter such threats. We consider the use of such weapons as haram (religiously forbidden) and believe that it is everyone’s duty to make efforts to secure humanity against this great disaster."[3]

In 1987, from Ashkelon prison, Vanunu wrote:

"The passive acceptance and complacency with regard to the existence of nuclear weapons anywhere on earth is the disease of society today.

"This struggle is not only a legitimate one - it is a moral, inescapable struggle.

"Already now there are enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world many times over [and] this issue should unite us all, because that is our real enemy.

"Is any government qualified and authorized to produce such weapons?" [4]

In 1961, John F. Kennedy warned:

"Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” The ties that bind US-Israeli policies are not in the best interests of Americans-or anyone else in the world.

Notes:

1. BEYOND NUCLEAR:Mordechai Vanunu's FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010

2.http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/02/president-obama-has-reaffirmed-a-4-decade-old-secr/

3. http://www.juancole.com/2010/04/khamenei-us-only-nuclear-criminal-for-hiroshima.html

4.BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu's FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010

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