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Sept. 23, 2022 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:11:54
Investigative journalist Karl Grossman reveals the secrets of Plum Island...
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All right, welcome everybody to this highly anticipated interview.
I am absolutely thrilled to be joined tonight by a guest that I did not think that I would be able to find and get on so quickly.
Carl Grossman is an author.
He's an award-winning investigative reporter.
He's a full professor of journalism at the State University of New York.
He has been conducting and writing about investigations of Plum Island and many other issues, including nuclear power.
A pleasure.
Well, you have been making waves, to say the least, for quite a few years.
I ran across your material when I was researching Plum Island, actually, and the USDA and the DOD. And so I quoted you in a recent article.
Could you set the stage for our audience?
Give a little background of what you know about Plum Island and what it was used for and how it got transferred to, I think, Homeland Security.
I think that was in 2003.
But could you give us a little...
A little overview of that, please.
Yeah, well, I began investigating Plum Island.
It's a little island, a mile and a quarter off Long Island, where I live, off the North Fork of Long Island.
And it was set up...
The facility added by the U.S. Army in 1953.
And, well, this is stuff that a newspaper on Long Island, Newsday...
I used to work for the other major newspaper on Long Island, the Long Island Press, where I specialized in investigative reporting.
But Newsday was able, through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, to...
Well, get information regarding the original mission of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.
And in fact, a facsimile document, a very, very important document, was posted on the front page of Newsday.
Let me, if I could, just...
Reed, this is the lead, the beginning of the Newsday story.
A 1950s military plan to cripple the Soviet economy by killing horses, cattle, and swine called for making biological warfare weapons out of exotic animal diseases at a Plum Island area.
Now, declassified Army records reveal.
And on that front page of Newsday was this facsimile.
What year was that published?
That was in, let's see, it was 1993.
1993.
And on the front page was, well, among the documents obtained through FOIA, One which states, Plum Island will permit the Chemical Corps, this is the Army Chemical Corps, to execute required projects in connection with imported agents and others of BW, which is Biological Warfare Significance.
So what you have here is a U.S. laboratory A federal facility set up, and this is again the midst of the Cold War, to go after the livestock of the Soviet Union.
So this is a...
Strategically, this was being developed as a biological weapon to attack or to weaponize famine, in essence.
Yeah, in fact, that's why ultimately...
This army planned for what was more than a plan.
It was over a year.
This 1953 operation on Plum Island was ultimately canceled.
This is in 1954.
And, well, an excellent book on Plum Island.
I would suggest people get a hold of it.
I have it in my hand here.
It's Lab 257.
The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory.
And it was published by William Morrow.
It's authored by Michael Carroll, who's an attorney, actually a top-notch lawyer.
Well, I'm just looking here at the back of the dust jacket.
Here's Nelson DeMille, who's The famous writer saying, if you lost sleep after reading The Hot Zone, then Michael Carroll's Lab 257 will keep you awake all night.
It's one of the best pieces of investigative reporting you'll read this year.
Lab 257 is must-reading for the post-9-11 world.
And here after that is...
Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York.
In fact, Carroll was in his law firm.
Quote, if we're lucky, someone in the media will read this carefully researched, chilling expose of a potential catastrophe and force the government to do something about it.
Wow.
And here's Lowell Weicker.
He's a former U.S. senator and governor of Connecticut.
And Connecticut is just...
Well, 10 miles away from Plum Island, just across the Long Island Sound.
Lowell Weicker, Lab 257, proves that scientific fact on Plum Island can indeed be stranger than science fiction.
Mike Carroll has the uncanny ability to transport the reader inside the frightening world of Plum Island.
And the book was published in...
Let me just look at the publishing date of the book so we get it all very accurate.
Published, let's see, 2004.
So I have so many questions stemming from this.
So when you were first writing about this, you said you did not work for Newsday.
Newsday was a different paper than the one that you worked for, correct?
Yeah, I worked for the Daily Long Island Press.
Okay, Daily Long Island Press.
Oh, that would explain, yeah, I saw Daily Press as one of the sources on one of these articles.
Okay, so did you receive, at the time, did you receive a lot of pushback at the time?
Because, you know, in today's context, looking back, all of this that you're talking about makes a ton of sense when thinking about the Wuhan laboratory and, you know, SARS-CoV-2 bioweapons, the NIH, and all of that.
But back then...
Wasn't this considered pretty far out there, really fringe type of stuff?
Well, it's always been an island of mystery.
It was off-limiting, certainly when the Army ran it, and then it was transferred to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Oh, let me just insert here why.
And this was Mike Carroll came up with this.
This is...
Something I didn't really understand or know.
And it's in Lab 257.
And I'll just quote from the book how the mission ostensibly changed.
Mike writes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff found that a war with the USSR, Soviet Union, Whoa.
Destroying the food supply meant having to feed millions of starving Russians after winning a war.
So that's why the mission shifted, though it's questionable as to whether it truly shifted.
In any case, I did investigative reporting at the Long Island Press.
Also, I had a column at the Press, which still runs decades and decades later, in weekly newspapers on Long Island and on Long Island news sites.
And this is the kind of, well, he had an island of mystery.
And when you do investigative reporting, you try to get to a mystery, to expose a mystery.
And here was this little island.
And I had heard talk through the years.
Now we're going back to...
Early 70s, late 60s, and it was on my agenda as something that I wanted to expose.
And a pivotal event occurred as I was getting closer to what Plum Island was about.
This is 1971.
The Department of Agriculture decided to, for the first time, open Plum Island to the press.
Oh, the tour.
This is the tour.
And what the Department of Agriculture really wanted to do was to dilute anything that I would end up writing about What's really going on on Plum Island by organizing a dog and pony show, inviting national reporters to a tour of Plum Island in 1971.
And the idea is they'd write these stories about all these wonderful things happening on Plum Island, and they wouldn't have the kind of background that I had in looking into Plum Island, and again, my work would be diluted.
However, the night before, I called the Department of Agriculture the PR operation the night before, just to make sure everything was set up.
I'd meet These PR people with other reporters at a motel in a town called Greenport on Long Island.
And as we had this conversation and My attendance the next day was confirmed.
The PR guy said, hey, look, Grossman, you know, he was talking about my focus on biological warfare.
We do defensive biological warfare.
And rigging in my head was, what's the line between defensive and offensive?
But in any case, I started to, that night...
I wrote a story about, for the first time, the Department of Agriculture has acknowledged that biological warfare research activities go on on Plum Island, but according to this PR guy, and I named him and so forth, of a defensive nature.
That was plastered over the front page of the Long Island Press, which had a circulation of 600,000 or 700,000 paper.
I mean, it was a major newspaper in the New York metropolitan area.
Next day...
Get to Greenport, go to Orient, which Orient Point is on the North Fork of Long Island.
The end of it is Orient Point.
Plum Island is just off Orient Point.
And we head out.
And again, it's a dog and pony show, but a little crazier than you could possibly imagine.
For example, as we went through the various laboratories, Well, it was a fairly frightening experience.
I mean, there you see animals dying as they do all kind of experiments and work with animal disease research.
And there were freezers in the hall, freezers, one after another, where various...
Various poisons, essentially.
Animal disease, viruses, and so forth.
So they were walking reporters right through our labs?
Yeah, you had to take off all your clothes.
I mean, ultimately, you had to take...
It was showers.
You went through showers to kind of, what would be the word, to decontaminate you.
But you didn't have your regular clothes on as you walked through this area.
And this was my story the following day, how this scientist in a white lab coat lifts a vial of foot-and-mouth disease virus And he comments that there's enough foot-and-mouth disease virus in this vial to kill all the cattle on Earth.
In fact, there's enough foot-and-mouth disease virus in this vial to kill all the cattle that have ever lived on Earth.
And I popped up, popped out, and I said, what do you need?
All that foot and mouth disease virus.
And like defensively, he said, well, it isn't for biological warfare.
It's not for biological warfare.
But I mean, it was like, it was kind of, it was mad science, frankly.
And in any case, the This little PR stunt, this horse and pony show that the Department of Agriculture had planned, got screwed up.
And I saw the original reason for military activity on Plum Island goes back to the Spanish-American War.
And a fort was built, Fort Terry it was called.
And on the eastern portion of Plum Island, it's like Corregidor.
There are these trenches where they had cannons.
And the fear was if a...
A Spanish fleet would be heading to New York City, going past Plum Island, then through the Long Island Sound on its way to Manhattan.
They'd be able to intercept that fleet with these guns on Plum Island.
In any case, we were having lunch.
The reporters, the Dog and Pony Show reporters, and suddenly I see a clutch of some of these PR guys pointing at me.
And talking to each other, well, it turned out that my story at the Long Island Press Well, it ran on the Associated Press wire.
So all over the nation, like all over the world, was a story about how for the first time the U.S. Department of Agriculture has acknowledged that, well, defense of biological warfare goes on, work goes on on Plum Island.
So that screwed up the dog and pony show.
I would guess so.
Yeah, they were probably having second thoughts.
They probably wish they would have invited someone who would just read scripts instead of asking questions like you do.
Yeah, well, I mean, I've visited Plum Island now three times.
That was the first time in 71.
The next time was in 1978 when there was, they have what they call negative pressure in this big lab building.
Yes.
So even if there's a hole is caused to break open and because of the negative pressure, everything stays in.
Well, that's what they said.
But in 1978, there was an accident.
Foot and mouth disease virus gets out, affects cattle on an outdoor pen.
Ultimately, they have to slaughter the cattle.
And that caused local officials on Long Island to demand that they be allowed at long last to go to Plum Island and find out what's going on on Plum Island.
And that was the second time I went.
The third time I went came, this was after Lyme disease, became a real problem on Long Island.
And Lyme disease, not too incidentally, is named after Lyme, Connecticut, just across the sound from Plum Island.
And Lyme disease was, I mean, suddenly people who I knew I had Lyme disease, and there was a book, an important book that I learned about and picked up.
It was published in 1982, Linking Plum Island to Lyme Disease.
It was written by, and he's still around, John Loftus.
He's an attorney, and he had worked for the Office of Special Investigations in the U.S. Department of Justice.
Pursuing Nazis.
Former Nazis, maybe, but Nazis.
And he, in this book, and I'm reading here from the book, He tells of Nazi germ warfare scientists brought to the U.S. after World War II. Yes.
This is in something called Project Paperclip?
Yeah, Operation Paperclip.
Yeah, our audience knows all about that.
Right.
When Werner von Braun was born, 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers were brought to this country who experimented, I'm reading from Loftus, who experimented with poison ticks Drop from planes to spread rare diseases.
I have received Loftus Wright's information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range during the early 1950s.
In any case, a couple of years later, then I start writing about this possible link between Plum and And the congressperson who then represented Eastern Long Island, Mike Forbes, read my stuff and called me up and he said, Carl, we're going to do a raid on Plum Island tomorrow.
And he would take me and John McDonald, who was the reporter who broke the Freedom of Information Act, broke all this information about Plum Island's original mission to poison Soviet livestock and so forth.
So we go back to now Orient Point and Mike, with the two of us in tow, There are ferries that take the scientists and so forth and other employees of Plum Island back and forth from a U.S. government lot on Orient Point.
And he tells the captain of the ferry that I'm Congressman Mike Forbes and I'm...
Going to Plum Island today, and I want to go speak to the director, and so forth.
And the captain, you know, said, oh, do you have permission?
Do you have that?
And Mike just bulldozed his way.
He was a tough and excellent, frankly, congressperson.
A conservative Republican, might I note.
Later he became a Democrat, but For either party, he was a stand-up person in government.
You don't find too many of them, but Mike was there.
He got us and Mike himself on that ferry.
We marched then to the director's office at Plum Island, and Mike insisted that he get all the records on Plum Island of experiments with ticks.
Hours went by, and various officials on Plum Island and scientists on Plum ran around, and the claim was, after these hours, oh, we can't find any records.
It was so unbelievable to me.
I mean, the U.S. government keeps records of everything.
Well, and plus, in a science lab, record-keeping is a meticulous practice for lots of reasons.
If you're doing science and you don't keep records, then you're not doing science, right?
Oh, yeah.
Well, in any case, Mike persisted when he got back to Washington to get records.
No way.
And just most recently, if I can note, this is...
We're jumping just a few years ago...
In 2019, another congressman who tried to get involved learning about a governmental point of view, exposing what's been going on at Plum Island and any connection to Lyme disease.
Let me read from Newsweek.
The headline, this is 2019, Pentagon may have released weaponized ticks that help spread Lyme disease investigation audit was a headline in Newsweek.
The article below it was about how the U.S. House of Representatives have quietly passed a bill requiring the inspector general of the Department of Defense to conduct a review into whether the Pentagon experimented with ticks and other blood-sucking insects for use as biological weapons between 1950 and 1975.
And the article continued, if the inspector general finds such experiments occurred, then they must provide the House and Senate Armed Services Committees with a report of the research and so forth.
The measure was introduced by Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who was inspired by several books, including Lab 257, and articles claiming that the U.S. government had conducted research at facilities and articles claiming that the U.S. government had conducted research at facilities such as Fort Detrick in Maryland and Plum Island, For this purpose.
And again, it isn't just Mike Carroll, though Mike Carroll's book is a gem.
I mean, indeed, it's just what Mario Cuomo said, a chilling exposé.
But another book published, this is later, this is just actually in 2019, was Bitten.
The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by a Stanford University science writer, Chris Newby.
And it includes interviews with Willie Bergdorfer, who is credited with having discovered the pathogen that causes Lyme disease.
So, I mean, here you have three solid books.
So, let me jump in here with some questions, because...
You know, it's also rather extraordinary.
So I think a lot of the work that you did as an investigative journalist, if you were to be doing that right now today in 2022, seemingly the, quote, fact checkers would come out and just blast everything you tried to write and no newspaper would publish it.
So you were able to do this in a time when asking questions and doing FOIA requests and getting that was still...
Right now, if you go online and you search for Lyme disease biological weapon, all it is is page after page of so-called fact checkers that say, no, it's impossible.
It's not a biological weapon.
But I think our audience, and probably many millions of Americans, especially those in the Northeast, They are absolutely convinced that Lyme disease came from this facility.
Well, I'm convinced.
Yes.
Mike Carroll.
Yes.
In fact, he has a big chunk of Lab 257.
I mean, when I was a boy scout, I was an Eagle scout, we used to go camping on On Long Island.
I grew up in Queens in New York City, but we'd go camping on Long Island.
My family used to camp at Wildwood State Park on Long Island.
My father was the scoutmaster.
Oh, nice.
There were dog ticks.
I mean, we knew about dog ticks.
We had to, with tweezers, take...
But deer ticks...
I mean, it's said that there are versions of these very small little...
Ticks, deer ticks, but, you know, of various kinds.
But the sort that carries Lyme disease, that's new.
That is truly, I mean, Bergdorfer, again, he came up with the diagnosis, so to speak.
As to the government being uncooperative when it comes to doing investigative reporting, I want to talk about leaks next on this, which I think is where you're going.
Sorry to interrupt.
But even you mentioned the book Hot Zone, which described, I think, the Fort Detrick, Maryland research on primates that was a simian Ebola, if I'm not mistaken, that did escape and infected some of the researchers, but it wasn't spreadable by humans.
And they had to, quote, nuke that facility, right?
Yeah.
Does that ring a bell?
They had to kill every animal.
And when they say nuke it, they don't mean nuclear weapons.
They mean, you know, chemical, sterilizing the whole facility.
But does that...
Yes, go ahead.
Since my work, which continues, frankly, because this is not over.
I mean, right now...
I mean, again, I'm so happy to talk about this issue now because...
Right now, to replace Plum Island, the government has built, at a cost of $1.25 billion, what's called the National Bio and Agro Defense Facility, It's a Level 4 facility, which is to replace Plum Island.
The concern about Plum Island after 9-11, and the Government Accountability Office did a number of reports on this, is that it's just sitting there.
It's right on...
The marine lanes between East and Long Island, like the ferry that goes from Orient Point to New London, Connecticut, passes right by Plum Island.
I mean, it's right there.
And so forth.
So after 9-11, The federal government became very concerned about terrorists getting onto Plum Island and getting possession of some of these toxic, poisonous stuff that they've been dealing with on Plum Island.
And importantly, too, and the Government Accountability Office notes this in its reports, some of these poisons carry over to humans, to people.
Oh, wow.
Right.
And they already showed you one vial can kill all the cattle on the planet.
And Boston is 60 miles to the northeast of Plum.
Manhattan is 100 miles to the west.
115.
But this is in the population center of the Northeast.
So what happened was the Department of Homeland Security then takes over Plum Island.
Homeland Security now manages the island.
And Because this biosafety lab has been built in Manhattan, Kansas, in the middle of cattle country.
Oh, that's the one.
I know about that one.
People keep sending me those.
Yes, it's in Kansas.
It's a brilliant place.
To continue research on foot and mouth disease, which is cattle and stuff.
But nevertheless, some well-meaning environmentalists have been pushing to preserve Plum Island because, well, it's the natural, the island beyond Fort Terry is pretty much undisturbed.
and beyond those corregidor-like trenches for the guns.
However, through the years, until actually relatively recent years, nothing ever left Plum Island.
When the folks there would do their experiments with animals, after they were done, they either incinerated them or just buried the garbage.
So the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has found all kinds of hazardous waste sites on Plum Island.
Oh, boy. boy.
Right, right.
No, no.
Welcome to the Plum Island Tour.
Don't mind the cannons, the trenches, the buried biohazard waste, and the pathogens in the freezers.
Everything else is nice.
Well, I mean, it's like creating Love Canal National Park.
Right.
But beyond that, what these characters want to do, Zeldin and these other politicians want to do, is they want to keep the jobs safe.
On Plum Island.
So even though the federal government has shelled out over a billion dollars to build this replacement laboratory at a higher level, At four as opposed to three.
They want to keep this lab and ostensibly keep whatever it's been doing on Plum Island operating.
And I mean, that's happening right now.
And I think people should challenge whether there's lab on Plum Island and whatever it's been doing over the decades.
I mean, if they built this lab in Kansas, it's supposed to replace Plum Island.
It's supposed to...
Do the research on foot and mouth and African swine fever and so forth.
Well, if that's the plan, that's the plan.
And that's a whole other issue.
If I was working as an investigative reporter in Kansas, I would be right on the issues of safety protocols and all that stuff in regard to this national bio and agro-defense facility.
Well, and then there was a time over the summer when a lot of cattle died in Kansas.
And of course, the official explanation was that it was heat and dehydration.
And me being in Texas, I know a lot of cattle people, including cattle people who operate in Oklahoma and Kansas.
And they were texting me and saying, no, the official explanation doesn't make any sense.
Because if cattle died of heat, they would die at different times on different days.
But all these cattle, thousands of them died all on the same 24-hour window.
So there was a lot of speculation from that of what had happened.
And that's why people were texting me about that.
And I haven't drawn any conclusions.
We don't know.
But I agree with you, Carl, that If I were a reporter there in Kansas, I would be looking into that hard.
Because I think what you've established in the other books you mentioned, Lab 257, Bitten, Hot Zone, even, was that Richard Preston?
Is that the author of that one?
All of these books, I think, exhaustively establish that these labs leak.
They leak.
I mean, you've written about that quite a lot.
What...
If you could summarize that situation to our audience, how would you do so?
Well, you know, accidents happen.
And when you're dealing with toxic biotechnology, you're talking about huge impacts.
Just go back to Kansas.
I don't think that, but I don't know.
I'm not in Kansas.
As Dorothy said.
Right.
We're not back in Kansas.
We're not in Kansas anymore, that's for sure.
I've been to Manhattan, Kansas.
In fact, this lab is on the campus of University of Kansas.
When you go into the airport in Manhattan, Kansas, there's a A little statue of a famous writer, Damon Runyon, who apparently came from New York City Guys and Dolls, was based on his work from Manhattan, Kansas.
Just two other things which really can't be missed.
The origin of Plum Island, and this was dug up by Mike Carroll, not by me and not by John McDonnell, but by Mike Carroll.
The origin of Plum Island involves talking about Nazi scientists and Project Paperclip.
Well, among the scientists that were brought here after the war to Under this paperclip operation to assist the U.S. in...
Well, in all kinds.
I mean, Wernher von Braun...
Rocketry, aerospace, everything.
Well, Wernher von Braun, he and his...
These were engineers and scientists who worked on the V-2 rocket.
Yes.
And they went to the Redstone Army arsenal in Alabama, and they developed for the U.S. government essentially a version of the V-2 rocket, V for Vengeance, called the Redstone rocket, which was capable of...
Of the first U.S. rocket capable of carrying a nuclear bomb, nuclear weapon.
In any case, with the Plum Island situation, it was a scientist named, Nazi scientist named Eric Trout.
And again, Mike Carroll dug all this stuff up from the National Archives.
A lawyer, he was...
I suppose, better accustomed to going through a place like the National Archives than just a plain old investigative reporter.
And what he found out was Trout, who had background on Long Island here in New York in the 30s, He had studied at the Rockefeller Institute and also was involved in Nazi activity here on Long Island.
There was a place in Yappank, Long Island, called Camp Siegfried, which the Bund set up as a parade grounds for Nazis from the New York metropolitan area.
Surrounded by a A community of Nazis' streets like Hitler Street.
Wow.
That is crazy.
In any case, Traub...
Would go there regularly, be involved.
He was a member of Nazi...
He was involved in Nazi-born activities.
During the war, he goes back to his homeland, Nazi Germany, and he's given the assignment.
He worked directly under Himmler.
I mean, again, Mike, in detail in Lab 257, provides information about this.
And he was assigned to, on an island in the Baltic, the island of Reims, develop...
It's biological warfare to be used against Soviet livestock.
Wow.
So after the war, he came, and Mike writes about the possibility at that point of the use of ticks.
In any case, he comes back after the war.
He goes to Fort Detrick.
He's his buddies there.
Fort Detrick being the center for...
For years of biological and chemical warfare activities for the U.S. Army and convinces them that the U.S. set up a little island laboratory like he had on Reims to develop biological warfare to use against Soviet livestock.
So, I mean, there it is.
I mean, there you have...
He is considered the father of...
The father of Plum Island.
Also just, and this is very important too, this is my competitor newspaper years ago called Newsday.
Newsday in 1977 ran a story by, in addition to John McDonnell, a superb investigative reporter.
These two fellows, also superb Newsday investigative reporters, Drew Featherston and John Cummings, they wrote about how African swine fever Had suddenly broken out in Cuba.
And hundreds of thousands of swine had to be slaughtered.
And what they do is connect African swine fever with Plum Island.
They explained that African swine fever...
Just didn't exist anywhere in the Western Hemisphere other than on Plum Island where experiments, research was being done with it.
And then they connect the dots how a container of African swine fever was bought by boat to Cuba from...
A CIA base in what was then the Canal Zone in Panama.
So when that guy told me originally in 1971, we only do defensive biological warfare research here.
I mean, what happened with Cuba and African swine fever, that doesn't sound too defensive to me.
Well, no, exactly.
And I know that For example, COVID hasn't been your focus, but this is the exact same story that we're told by Fauci and the NIAID and so on, and NIH grants, is that, well, we needed to fund the Wuhan lab in China, which is literally run by the People's Liberation Army, by the way, you know, the Chinese military.
They said we had to fund that because we had to have defensive...
We had to do gain-of-function research, you know, adding toxic attributes or bioweaponized attributes because we needed to study this for defensive purposes.
And, you know, early in 2020 and even in 2021, it was verboten for anyone to say that that came out of a lab, that COVID came from a lab.
Now, the Lancet just recently published a paper that said absolutely it could have come from the lab.
I think the overall question in people's minds is that...
Are we really dealing with, are these all just natural, spontaneous, you know, emerging threats like West Nile virus and bird flu?
Or are some of these things, or perhaps even many of them, actually built and then they get out, like you just said?
And there's also like Rift Valley fever, I think, and things like that.
And there was a Zika virus.
That was talked about recently.
I think this is a question in people's minds.
And I think there's a lot less trust right now in any of these institutions based on what people just went through with COVID. What are your thoughts on that?
Well, when COVID first broke out, my first thought And the Wuhan laboratory was cited as a possible source, and then the claim quickly was that there was bats sold in the food market.
Right.
My first thought was because of my experience with Plum Island.
Right.
Hey, was it an accident or was it some sort of, well, again, I believe it's completely necessary to expose the origins of Of COVID-19, considering that it's become a...
I mean, how many people have died now worldwide?
And the economic implications of all the lockdowns.
Oh, it's...
Destroyed communities.
Absolutely.
This is a horrible these past two years because of this disease.
I mean, I was teaching for two years with Zoom.
Yes.
Teaching with a mask on and the students had...
I mean, what we went through and the fear...
And I've known people who have died.
From COVID-19.
Some wonderful people I know.
A guy named Sam Markowitz.
He was a great Newsday reporter.
Old friend.
One of the earliest victims here on Long Island of COVID-19.
But I've been to China.
And if you think it's difficult, years ago or now, to expose inner workings of secretive government activities, Or corporate activities, too.
You can't blame it all on government.
Big business and, frankly, big government have a lot in common in terms of The lack of sense.
Oh, clearly.
At the highest level.
But to...
I remember opening up...
It was an English-language newspaper in Beijing.
First morning there.
And the story was...
I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but I'm close to what...
The glorious prime minister in a wonderful presentation yesterday.
I mean, the media there...
They're really, well, they're not...
In the United States, we have this ideal that we should have a press that challenges authority.
I mean, I teach this, that you'd have three branches of government, the Well, I'm glad you're teaching that, Carl, because we don't see many examples of that in the media today, right?
It's just reading official press releases so much.
Well, I don't know.
I think the press has done an excellent job, and I'm talking to the mainstream press, with what Trump does.
I mean, these new books that are coming out during the Trump administration, and I'm not being partisan here, because as a journalist, I am not partisan.
I'm enrolled in no political party.
Nobody can say I'm a Democrat or Republican.
I'm an equal opportunity critic.
I'll take them all on.
I've written critical things about Big things about the push...
Nuclear power.
You've covered pollution, nuclear power, and how corporations disregard their responsibility to the biosphere, frankly.
Well, it's what you want to do.
Originally, it was called crusading journalism.
Benjamin Franklin and James Franklin and...
You know, John Peter Zenger, and this goes way back before there even was a United States, and the Muckrakers, 1900 to 1914.
Incredible.
Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens and so forth.
And in my generation, obviously Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein, but what you were mentioning before about the difficulty of getting information from the government, well, just for an example,
that bill that was passed by the House of Representatives, Representative Chris Smithsville looking into a government connection, looking into a connection by government between Plum Island and Lyme disease.
Well, it's passed in the House of Representatives a couple of times, but it can't get through the Senate like somebody's been able to get through the Senate.
So, you know...
It's a real challenge, often, and it's always been that way.
This is nothing new.
And if you do investigative reporting, you just barrel ahead, and they'll come after you.
They'll try to stop you like Nixon tried to stop Woodward and Bernstein, his administration, but you just keep going.
You're committed to I'll give you a corny story.
I became a journalist.
It was an internship in college.
I went to Antioch College in Ohio, and I interned, and I was all of 18, at the Cleveland Press.
And above the entrance, corny story of the Cleveland Press was its motto.
It's the motto of the Scripps Howard chain.
Give the people the light.
And they'll find their own way.
And it's the obligation, it's the commitment of journalists, and particularly investigative journalists, but all journalists, to give people the light.
Not tell them to be didactic, but to give them the light, to give them the information and have them find their own way.
In fact, when I saw those investigative reporters at the Cleveland Press I was just a copy boy.
But when you, well, when you'd work at night, you'd handle phone calls, and it was a story about Cleveland, you gave it to the city desk.
Suburbs, you gave it to the suburban desk, something about Shaker Heights.
But if it was a horror story, you gave it to these investigative reporters, about 12 of them there, a dozen of them there.
And amazing to me as a kid was that the documentation of the information and its publication, maybe six weeks later, maybe a month later, I was able about half the time to resolve the problem.
Actually, I came back to New York, where I'm from, with my girlfriend, who was from Long Island.
This is 63 years ago, and we've been married together for well over 60 years, and focused on becoming an investigative reporter, which I did.
And now, not only do I continue to do it in books, on TV, I've done it on radio, in newspapers, now a lot on the internet.
And just let me say, too, you were talking about the difficulty of publishing.
I think now with the internet, with websites like Counterpunch, and there's a bunch of investigative...
I write a lot for Counterpunch.
Excellent, excellent website.
I suggest that listeners go to Counterpunch.
Every day publishes one blockbuster expose after another.
Nation of Change, a wonderful website.
And stuff that I might have had to go through years ago filters at a magazine and be subject to, I don't know, again, journalists are not supposed to Particularly take sides politically, but just be there to give light so people can find their own way.
These days, I'll send my piece to Nation of Change or to Counterpunch or to other websites, but particularly those two I love.
Op-Ed News is a great one, too.
I can go on.
There's so many of them.
And man, you know, half an hour later or the next morning, boom, my piece is there and it can be read not just like when I was in Cleveland.
Those folks wrote to an audience in Cleveland.
Now, and as an investigative reporter working the internet, You could reach the world.
You know, my TV show, the Enviro Close-Up with Carl Grossman, and people want to see my programs, just go to envirovideo.com, envirovideo.com, and there are hundreds and hundreds of programs I've done since 1991.
Yeah, I'd like to...
Let me give out some of your work here.
Your website is carlgrossman.com, and that's Carl with a K. And then you've got a book called Cover Up, What You're Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power.
That's available online.
And other books.
You've done, what, is it seven books that you've written?
Seven books.
And just let me note with Cover Up, which is all kind of information.
And I use government documents that I've obtained, some with the Freedom of Information Act, and corporate records.
And I publish them in the book as facsimiles.
So nobody could accuse me of taking things out of context.
And if you want that book, you can get it for free.
Just go out of the goodwill and community support of my publisher.
Just go to carlgrossman.com.
And my website, and just click on books.
Okay.
And that'll take you to the book page, and then you can download the entire book, cover up what you're not supposed to know about nuclear power.
And these are things that people still don't know.
Oh, yeah.
Published in 1980 for free.
Wow, for free.
Okay.
So that's at carlgrossman.com.
And we're a little bit over time already, Mr.
Grossman, but I want to just say I really, really honor the process that you have described of what you do and how you do it.
And asking questions, digging, not being afraid to take criticism and so on.
I gotta say, you know, our audience is going to love to hear this message because the people listening to this or watching this, they're full of questions too.
And they do not trust corporations and they do not trust governments, both.
And they have just as much disdain for, let's say, Monsanto, well, now Bayer, as they might for any government or any political party.
Our audience tends to be Well, they tend to be more conservative just in terms of their personal ethics, but not loyalist to any party.
Rather, loyalty to humanity.
You know what I mean by that?
I know exactly what you mean.
Yeah.
It's principles that matter.
Yeah.
We're skeptics.
We're critics.
We're critical thinkers.
Lifelong critical thinkers.
And we're not easily swayed by corporate promises or press releases or whatever.
I guess we're old and jaded now.
Maybe that's the best description of what we're...
Because we've seen it all at this point.
You've seen a lot too.
Well, marvelously, in this country, for all its faults, and there are many faults, the founders of this republic, this democratic country, they figured out you needed a free press, again, challenging authority.
And the muckrakers took on...
When these trusts, these huge corporations arose, the muckrakers took, I mean, originally the founders were thinking of the press challenging governmental power, but then get all this corporate power and the muckrakers Went and challenged the trust.
We're flexible enough in the United States, in the press, to expand the original mission.
I think, too, these days, it's not just big government, not just big business, the corporations and so forth, but it's also big science.
Yes, exactly.
There are these strings of national nuclear laboratories Around this country.
They grew out of a Manhattan Project, the crash program to build atomic bombs.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore and The whole drive for nuclear power has to do...
I mean, some say it had to do with those scientists after the war and the bombs were dropped and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they felt guilt.
So they looked for atoms for peace.
My research, my investigations show it was greed.
They wanted to keep the money flowing, the corporations, GE and Westinghouse, major contractors during the Manhattan Project, and so forth.
So...
Big business, big government, big science.
In fact, in his farewell address, Dwight Eisenhower is quoted as talking about the military-industrial complex.
Yes, we're very familiar with that speech.
The original draft, and you Google this, and you can see all kind of confirmation from what I'm saying now.
The original draft, the original speech, was beware of the military-industrial-scientific complex.
Oh, was it?
And his science advisor was so upset that they knocked that out.
Now, I'm not saying at all that science is wrong or bad.
Science is so important.
It's a key.
Many of our advances...
And it's also the key to many things that have been our downfall, that have been our downfall, and it's so necessary that, like that scientist at Plum Island, all the foot-and-mouth disease virus kill all the cattle it ever lived on.
That kind of science, mad science, absolutely has to be challenged.
A science for profit that hurts people, or science...
At a national laboratory, it might necessarily hurt people.
That must be challenged.
Yes.
Yes, exactly.
Science has to be tied to...
Ethics and some balance with risk of what happens if unexpected events occur, because they always do.
I mean, look at Fukushima.
So General Electric builds this massive nuclear facility right in the path of tidal waves from underwater fault lines and earthquakes, which is exactly what happened.
How could they not have anticipated that?
That, oh, sooner or later, there's going to be a giant wave that knocks this thing out, and we end up in a meltdown criticality type of event.
I mean, surely, with all the scientists who have the raw IQ to do all the math and all the engineering and everything, surely they could have figured out, oh, there's going to be a tidal wave.
It's actually even worth it.
Give me just two minutes.
Sure, yeah, go ahead.
And let me talk about zirconium.
As I was doing research for cover-up, what you're not supposed to know about nuclear power, I get a call from a retired engineer from Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, and he wants to meet me in New York.
So I meet him in Manhattan, and he tells me about how when we first began, Westinghouse and GE, the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power, actually worldwide, when we first began developing nuclear power, we were looking for cladding.
For the fuel rods.
We tried stainless steel.
We tried all kinds of other metals.
Finally, what we settled on was zirconium.
The problem with zirconium Is that pound for pound, it has the explosive power of nitroglycerin.
Really?
And at a certain temperature, what happens is that if zirconium is affected by the heat, it releases hydrogen gas, which is explosive.
And then you go up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is what you'd have in a meltdown.
The zirconium explodes itself like nitroglycerin.
Unreal.
So they coated the fuel rods with explosives.
Explosive.
Real smart, right?
There are tons, tons of Of zirconium.
Because all the fuel rods, and there's thousands of them in any nuclear power, tens of thousands, coated with zirconium, cladding with the zirconium in a spent fuel pool.
This is on page 12 of cover-up, what you're not supposed to know about nuclear power.
Unreal.
No, I did not know that about zirconium.
Nobody knows it.
I mean, the engineer, he called me up.
I met him.
Did research.
He was absolutely right on.
What a stupid thing to build power plants based on fuel rods with mixed uranium.
The only other major industrial use at the time, he mentions to me, was the speck on a flashbulb.
We used to use flashbulbs before.
Yes.
When that would explode and provide light, what was it caused by?
Zirconium.
Really?
Explosive.
And you have that in every nuclear power plant.
The Three Mile Island accident, everybody was concerned about the hydrogen bubble.
Guess what caused the hydrogen bubble?
And it was the sphere of an explosion.
Fukushima?
Guess why those three nuclear power plants blew up?
It wasn't a nuclear explosion.
That was a hydrogen explosion.
And in Chernobyl too, wasn't that part of what happened?
That was a little different engineering.
But...
I mean, that's a graphite moderated, but it's a little different.
But basically, zirconium has been at the heart, literally at the heart of nuclear power.
And again, you can't blame that on government.
Well, you could blame it on the Atomic Energy Commission allowing it.
But it was Westinghouse's, you know, according to this engineer, Westinghouse, this is what we did at Westinghouse, GE. And those nukes at Fukushima were all GE, Mark 1, nuclear power plants.
So it's, again, it's what Eisenhower...
I really wanted to say the military, industrial, and then scientific.
And what you just said before, ethics.
Ethics are absolutely...
I teach journalism, and I spend days on the importance of ethics, journalistic ethics.
But there must be true scientific ethics, too.
And...
That often, when there's a vested interest involved, somebody who works at Oak Ridge or somebody who works at Los Alamos, their bread is buttered with nuclear technology.
At these national labs, some of them call themselves nukies.
Nukies, like a cult.
And then you have people who work for corporations who take the money and I did this book on chemical poisons called The Poison Conspiracy, and the publisher said, could you find somebody who worked for a chemical company and get their rationale?
So I found this fellow.
He worked at a big chemical company in New Jersey, the cancer capital of America.
And I asked, I said, you know, in fact, his first assignment, this is an old-timer, went back, this is in the book Poison Conspiracy, to try and discredit Rachel Carson.
And I said, well, why did you do this?
And he said, look, I had four kids.
You know, I had to make a living.
Wow.
I mean, there's...
People...
So often lose their way and ethics...
Again, I mentioned I was an Eagle Scout.
One way I learned a little bit about ethics.
But...
Our great religions are all about ethics and morality.
And unfortunately, vested interest, which is key here, vested interest.
And it can be monetary, it can be power.
It just corrodes.
It corrodes the direction that we must take if we're to survive.
I mean, you talk about some of these issues of power.
I mean, like right now, as we speak, There's this six nuclear reactor site, Zaporista, in the Ukraine, and the crazy Russians are shelling it.
I mean, all that you have to happen is the emergency core cooling systems and those reactors go.
The coolant process and the spent fuel.
And you're going to have, with that zirconium issue, you're going to have hydrogen bubbles and you're going to have explosions and you're going to have the zirconium itself explode.
And that radiation, that radioactivity could...
I mean, just give me one other minute.
When Admiral Hyman Ricko...
Yeah, but I know we're so much over time and I'm keeping you late.
But just...
Just on the last thing you said there, just for the record, I do have other guests who would say that it's the Ukrainians that are shelling it, right?
So there's that debate about who's doing what and how do we trust information coming out of that theater because there's so much disinfo.
I've been to Russia a lot.
Alexei Yablokov, who was the – he's passed now a few years ago.
He was the environmental advisor to Yeltsin and Gorbachev.
He invited me – when Russia opened up – He invited me there to speak.
And I've spoken seven times I've gone.
Wow.
I've given presentations at the Russian Academy of Sciences about environmental issues and nuclear issues and the use of nuclear in space.
I addressed 2,000 people In a sports stadium, Saratov.
It was a conference on environment.
And it was opening up then.
It really, Russia was opening.
And the press after Stalin, you know, and after the totalitarian...
Time.
Suddenly it was open.
The press was...
And now with Putin, I mean, the last time I saw Alexei Yablokov, he was there, Rachel Carson, wrote many books, a biologist, was in New York.
He'd come to the UN to speak about the whales being slaughtered and so forth.
And Alexei was telling me, this is the top scientist being followed and how fascism had come to Russia with Putin.
And they've lied so much about this invasion.
From the beginning.
We're not going to do it.
They do it.
We're not going to do that.
And now you have the horror stories of just the massacres of Ukraine.
I don't...
Again, and I have great faith and affection for the Russian people.
I mean, I've spent plenty of time in Russia.
And...
That's why they're protesting.
They're demonstrating now as he tries to pull them into the war in Ukraine, Putin.
Putin is like a little Hitler.
I think that's why Fundamentally, you and I and our audience, we want every human being to be able to live in peace, in health, in prosperity, without being manipulated, exploited, lied to, threatened.
These basic principles are just like you.
We pray for the people of Ukraine, and we also wish no harm upon the people of Russia, either, because many of them are just, you know, hey, I'm just trying to run my farm, right?
That kind of thing.
Thank you.
I really honor what you do, Mr. Grossman, with asking questions, being willing to speak about these issues.
Any final thoughts, I mean, we're way over time.
I apologize, but I really appreciate you spending the time.
Don't get me wrong, but I got to wrap this up, too.
Any final thoughts for today?
We can talk again.
Well, just give me one minute.
Okay.
In terms of nuclear, Hyman Rickover, who was the father of the nuclear Navy, he was in charge of the construction of the first nuclear power plant of the U.S. in Shippingport in Pennsylvania.
He finally must have had an epiphany.
And when he retires from the Navy, Admiral Rickover in 1982, and this is an afterward in cover-up, not in the original edition, but because it was 82, first was published in 80, I do two pages of his remarks.
And he talks about how a few billion years ago, there was so much naturally occurring radiation, radioactivity on this planet, on Earth, that life couldn't exist.
And only when these radioactive poisons went through their half-lives, their hazardous lifetimes, could life begin.
And then he goes on, this is Rickover, not Greenpeace, by having these nuclear reactors, these nuclear power plants, We are recreating the very poisons, radioactive iodine, radioactive cesium, that precluded life from existing.
And a direct quote, Rickover says, there I think the human race It's going to wreck itself.
And we must outlaw nuclear reactors.
We must outlaw nuclear power plants.
And then he goes on to talk about war.
This is an admiral out of Annapolis.
In every war, a nation ends up using whatever weapons it has on hand.
Yes.
And inevitably, nuclear weapons will be used.
Yes.
And so we're talking about the word that's being used a lot these days as Putin threatens nuclear war.
We're back to the Cold War.
Perhaps going into a hot war.
The word is being used, existential.
So a lot of these issues are existential.
To the whole planet.
Between people existing or not existing.
Right.
We do stand on the verge of global nuclear war right now.
And if that happens, obviously...
Then humanity has failed.
We failed the cosmic IQ test or something like that.
It would be devastating.
Let's hope cooler heads prevail and we don't get to that point.
But, Mr.
Grossman, this has been truly fascinating, and I surely want to have you back on again, maybe to talk more about nuclear next time.
But this has already been fascinating.
Thank you for spending this hour with me.
A pleasure.
No, the pleasure is all mine.
Thank you for what you do, and thank you for your courage.
And again, the website, folks, is carlgrossman.com, and Carl also has a show called Enviro Close-Up.
And I think, is that freespeech.tv?
Is that where that is?
Yeah, it's Free Speech TV, but you can go to my web.
It's on cable stations and satellite TV. But just go to the website, envirovideo.com, and actually you can just watch from your computer hundreds of shows.
Okay, great.
All right.
Outstanding.
Well, thank you, Mr.
Grossman.
I'm sorry to keep you up so late.
You're later than I am because you're on the East Coast time, so it's very late.
I apologize.
Don't apologize.
It's really an honor being with you and getting this information out.
Well, the honor's all mine.
This has been great.
So, we'll talk again soon, and this will be posted in less than 12 hours.
Great.
Okay.
Well, have a wonderful night, or whatever's left of the night, but have a wonderful night.
Thank you, Mike.
Okay.
All right.
Take care then.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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