Israel and Silkwood: Like the JFK and RFK Assassinations, Is the Israel Connection Again Being Avoided?

A major conclusion with respect to the JFK assassination is that it might have been done to ensure that Israel got nuclear weapons. Was Silkwood a victim of the same goal some eleven years later?

Ramy Abdu of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, reports: “After arrest warrants for war criminals Netanyahu & Gallant, Israeli forces escalated mass killings of civilians in Gaza. At least 9 massacres were documented.”

That’s how Israel responds to legal action being taken against it, more lawless carnage. Here’s a bit of it:

What explains this level of impunity?

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Today is the JFK assassination “anniversary” — my piece from last year on Israel and the Kennedy assassinations is below.

Part of what compelled me to write it was how raising Israel in connection to that seemed to be systematically avoided.

Well, it looks like there’s a similar pattern with Karen Silkwood, it was just the 50th “anniversary” of her death.

Robert Alvarez is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and was senior policy adviser to the Energy Department's secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999.

He recently wrote “The death of Karen Silkwood—and the plutonium economy” for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “On the evening of November 13, 1974—that is, 50 years ago—Karen Silkwood was driving to a meeting with a New York Times reporter and an official of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) union. Her car flew off the road and hit a culvert on a lonely highway in western Oklahoma, killing her instantly. Karen was a union activist working as a technician at a plutonium fuel fabrication plant in Cimarron, Oklahoma owned by the Kerr-McGee Corp.

“Several days before her death, Silkwood’s apartment was purposefully contaminated with highly toxic plutonium—which she had no access to—from the nuclear plant where she worked. Because of her activism, the company had put her and her roommates under constant surveillance. Documents about problems at the plant that two witnesses had seen before Silkwood’s fateful drive were missing. An independent investigation found evidence that her car was run off the road—contradicting official conclusions.”

It’s an important, compelling article.

He repeatedly refers to “Danny Sheehan, a Harvard law graduate with boundless optimism. After a stint working on Wall Street and then for the American Indian Movement, Danny dedicated his career to public interest law. We first encountered him as he was preparing to enter divinity school to become a Catholic priest while working for the Jesuit Office of Social Ministries…

“In the spring of 1976, Danny agreed to represent the Silkwood family. There was growing pressure as the statute of limitations would run out unless a lawsuit was filed before November 13 of that year. Danny came up with a complaint…

“As trial approached, Danny and his investigators tried to shine a light on efforts by Kerr-McGee to spy and intimidate Silkwood, possibly to the point of running her off the road, and the FBI’s efforts to conceal Kerr McGee’s wrongdoings. Even though Danny and his colleagues found a considerable amount of evidence to back these claims, the federal judge on the case, Frank Thies, ruled that conspiracies to violate Karen Silkwood’s civil rights were not covered by the law. This left the legal liability against Kerr McGee for contaminating Silkwood in her home as the only issue to be argued in court.”

Well, I met Sheehan about two years ago. He made reference to Israel having a role in the Silkwood case.

I asked Robert Alvarez about Sheehan’s remarks about Israel, pointing him to a tweet someone posted responding to his article which had some brief remarks:

Alverez was kind enough to respond. He was clearly aware of Sheehan’s charge but said he had no knowledge.

A major conclusion with respect to the JFK assassination is that it might have been done to ensure that Israel got nuclear weapons. Was Silkwood a victim of the same goal some eleven years later?

A bit more searching turns up these remarks by Sheehan:

I ended up becoming chief counsel in the Karen Silkwood case, the woman that was killed out in Oklahoma at the nuclear site out there. And during our investigations of that we discovered that 98 pounds of bomb-grade plutonium were being smuggled out of the Kerr-McGee nuclear facility, the reprocessing plant. And we discovered that it was actually being transported secretly to Israel.

So I touched on that old third rail. There it was. And we went and we briefed Peter Stockton — he was the chief investigator for John Dingell.

John Dingell was chairing the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment and because of the oversight authority they had over nuclear facilities, environmentally, we briefed them and told them all about this.

And they actually set up a real-time National Security Agency satellite to actually monitor the smuggling of these materials, and actually track them onto being put on charter oil company ships and then boarded by Mossad and brought to Israel.

And at that time they were under the condition that they had to share some of the special nuclear materials -- 98 percent pure bomb-grade plutonium -- that they had to share them with the Shah of Iran. So that they actually were providing 98 percent pure bomb-grade plutonium, reprocessed plutonium, to the Shah of Iran — and to South Africa, the [apartheid] Afrikaner government

Now, because of my discovery of that — it was a clear absolute blatant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And so I briefed the judge — Frank Thies, was the judge on that case. I provided a memorandum to him, an affidavit to him, explaining the whole thing.

And the following Monday he contacted me and said the Central Intelligence Agency had contacted him and wanted to have an in camera ex-parte meeting with him and he met with them and immediately dismissed one of the counts in our case, in the Karen Silkwood, case: The whole her death on the highway. The whole interfering with her right to travel on the highway, her First Amendment right to meet with the New York Times, because David Burnham was waiting for her at the Holiday Inn to receive the documents — showing that these 40 pounds of 98 percent pure grade plutonium  was missing. And when we gave that information to the congressman, nobody ever talked about it after that.

They called [CIA head] Stan Turner in, they brought him downstairs, put him under oath, challenged him about this. And the only reason I knew about this is Peter Stockton told us about it. But so it became obvious again to me at that point that there were secrets that virtually everybody agreed within the political circles had to be kept secret. And this supplying, our supplying, in complete violation of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, 98 percent bomb-grade plutonium to Israel was one of those things.

[Peter Stockton died in 2019. David Burnham died last month.]

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It’s been a cliché that Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal is the “worst kept secret” — but it’s possible that how it got them is the best kept secret.