Steinitz responds to comments US Secretary of State John Kerry made Friday that were interpreted by some as a warning for Israel to temper their criticism of Iran deal.
Efforts to muzzle Israeli voices in the US debate over the Iran nuclear accord are unacceptable, illogical and even immoral, national Infrastructure, Energy and Water Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Sunday.
Steinitz, a close confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, responded in an Israel Radio interview to comments US Secretary of State John Kerry made Friday that were interpreted by some as veiled threat to Israel to tamp down its criticism of the nuclear deal.
Kerry, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said that if Congress overturns the accord, “our friends in Israel could actually wind up being more isolated and more blamed, and we would lose Europe and China and Russia with respect to whatever military action we might have to take because we will have turned our backs on a very legitimate program that allows us to put their [Iran’s] program to the test over these next years.”
Steinitz completely rejected warnings that Israel should stay out of the debate. “To demand from a country which Iran threatens publicly to destroy, to wipe it off the map, that it not express its opinion on something so relevant for our national security, future and existence is an illogical and even immoral demand,” Steinitz said.
If there is harsh criticism inside the US – among the public, in Congress, in the media and among experts – then it is because the accord is “full of holes,” Steinitz added.
“This hint that if the agreement will be rejected by Congress, then Israel will turn into a scapegoat, is unacceptable to us,” he said.”Congress is sovereign to make any decision. If it rejects it, that means there is a big majority among the Republicans and also many Democrats who think the accord is not good and is full of holes, and needs to be rejected.”
Steinitz said that hanging the spectre of “isolation” over Israel’s head is not acceptable dialogue between friends.
It is, however, not the first time Kerry has warned Israel of isolation if it does not adopt policies he favors.
In a joint television interview in November 2013 with Israeli and Palestinian television networks, Kerry said. “I believe that if we do not resolve the issues between Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not find a way to find peace, there will be an increasing isolation of Israel, three will be an increasing campaign of the delegitimization of Israel that has been taking place on an international basis.”
During that same interview he asked, after saying that the potential of chaos was the alternative to getting back to negotiations. “Does Israel want a third intifada?” Two months later, at the Munich Security Conference, he said that the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians cannot be maintained.
“It is not sustainable. It is illusionary,” he said. “You see for Israel there is an increasing delegitimization campaign that has been building up. People are very sensitive to it, there is talk of boycott and other kinds of things. Are we all going to be better with all of that?”
European Union-American acceptance of the lie of “Arab Susiya” is a twisted anti-Semitic libel on which the entire Arab claim to all of Israel is based.
Arab girls with sign promoting the lie that they have lived there for decades. Aerial maps prove no Arabs lived there.
A fictional Palestinian Authority village is on the throes of becoming a reality that threatens a Jewish presence next to the Talmudic-period Jewish village of Susiya and would be a catalyst to support the blood libel that all of Israel was stolen from Arabs.
Arab Susiya, with several dozen tents and structures, has been built like a Broadway stage, complete with props that enable the Arabs to spin the yarn that it has existed for centuries but that the mean IDF is trying to destroy their ancient lifestyle.
The U.S. State Dept., the European Union and lazy and inherently biased international media have swallowed the tale that is chock full of romanticism and anti-Zionism.
The southern Hebron Hills until recent years was a forgotten rural region. Archaeological evidence clearly proves that Jews lived in Biblical and Talmudic times until as late as the 9th century, coinciding with the birth and rise of Islam.
Modern aerial photographs and academic researchers have categorically established that Arabs never lived in Susiya, but the world prefers to believe starry-eyed fairy tales that Jews are land thieves.
For centuries, only a few thousand Arabs populated the relatively vast southern Hebron Hills. Other Arabs came from the Hebron area to stay in caves for two months during the season for planting and reaping wheat or to grave sheep and goats.
Other than that, they were never to be seen because their homes were elsewhere.
All of that changed soon after the early 1980s when the Jews returned after 1,500 years.
The presence of Jews in the southern Hebron Hills woke up the Arab neglect of the region, where the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate and the Jordanian occupation after the War for Independence in 1948 never issued a solitary deed of land ownership.
Yasser Arafat in Ramallah and Arabs in Hebron started getting antsy about the Jews moving into a strategic area from which Arabs staged several deadly terrorist attacks before the Six-Day War in 1967, but they had a problem. Arabs did not want to move from the urban areas of Hebron and adjacent Halhoul and Yatta and into the mountain desert where the biggest crop is rocks.
The European Union and leftist organizations came to the rescue. They pay Arabs to live in the region and to claim that their families have done so for centuries.
B’Tselem, the EU and other pro-Arab group built structures for Arabs, give them tents, solar power and water purification systems.
They have built new villages that never existed before, dotting the hillsides with a nearly contiguous presence trumpeted with a fictitious “historical claim.” For the record, the Jews have an older historical claim, as evidenced by the ancient synagogues in Susiya and in neighboring Samoa.
The focus of the creation of this lie has been Susiya, the largest Jewish community in the area, although less than 200 families live there. It is located several hundred yards from the Talmudic city, which is protected as a natural park.
The European Union and leftist groups have invested tens of thousands of dollars to bring Arabs to the narrow stretch of land separating modern and ancient Susiya. The IDF, with the approval of the Supreme Court, has issued demolition orders for some – but not all – of the illegal Arabs structures.
Most of them exist with the classic Bedouin and Arab ruse of cement buildings covered by tents to give the romantic impression they are inhabited by a group of Arabs whose love for the land is greater than the temptations to live a life of convenience in the city.
Their love for money and the love for hating Zionists are even greater.
The EU and leftists fund the Arabs to allow them to live through cold, windy and sometimes snowy winters, as well as the hot and sultry days of summer.
There are aerial photographs from two decades ago showing that not one Arab lived in Susiya, but the European Union is giving away free tickets to a play that is being billed as reality.
It has all of the elements that the anti-Israel establishment needs to beat their breasts and berate Israel for being so cruel as to destroy the lifestyle of Arabs and expel them from their ancient lifestyle, which in truth dates back to approximately 10 years.
The spokesman for the fake Arab Susiya is Nasser Nawaja, the author of today’s fiction presented as “opinion” by The New York Times. He wrote, and is quoted over and over by dummy journalists, that his mother was born in Khirbet Susiya.
And I was born in Antarctica, and you, dear reader, were born in Saudi Arabia.
Nawaja makes his living as a paid servant for B’Tselem and the European Union and whose job is to dupe the United States to adopt the illusion on which is based the Palestinian Authority claim to the rest of Judea and Samaria as well as all of Israel.
The oft-documented reports that the Palestinian Authority teaches that Haifa and Jaffa (Yafo) are part of “ancient Palestine” always were laughable and ridiculous, so thought the Israel government.
It now has woken up, years too late, and Foreign Minister spokesman Emmanuel Nachson shared with The JewishPress.com a directive it issued to its emissaries around the world to put a finger in the dike to stop the flood of fabrication.
Unfortunately, the Foreign Ministry is using logic, which is of no use, and rests its case on “long-standing agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including the Oslo agreements,” which no longer are a reference point for anything except for a study of idiocy.
The Foreign Ministry also told its foreign staff:
These clusters of structures… were built illegally and adjacent to an ancient Jewish archeological site.
Contrary to Palestinian claims that these structures have been permanently inhabited for decades, in fact, only a handful of families resided there in the 1980s and they only used the structures on a seasonal basis….
On 4 May 2015, the Supreme Court declined to issue another temporary injunction preventing demolitions.
The government is not taking to heart Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely’s advice to emissaries when she took office two months ago and said that the world needs to be reminded that Israel – all of Israel – belong to Jews by Biblical birthright. Anyone who does not agree can take his complaint to God.
The European Union the United Nations and especially the Obama administration do not care about the logic of legal or illegal buildings because they have adopted the entire Palestinian Authority hate libel that Israel is an “occupier” and that Jews have no right to live where Arabs want to live.
This has nothing to do with the “West Bank.” It has to do with all of Israel.
The “government of Tel Aviv” has closed its eyes for decades to the Bedouin and Arab rape of the Negev, well inside the “Green Line.” The squatters, many of whom have been imported from Judea and Samaria, have stolen tens of thousands of acres of state land – their “ancient land” – and the government has done nothing except to pay them to procreate their population bomb by winking an eye at polygamy and doling out outrageous child benefits.
“Arab Susiya” will be Israel’s Waterloo if it falls to international ignorance, in which the State Dept. has a stake.
When Indian reporter Goyal Raghubir, supposedly one of the better journalists covering Foggy Bottom, asked State Dept. spokesman John Kirby last week if he has “a reaction to reports that Israel may demolish part of a village called Susiya in the West Bank for expanding settlements,” the spokesman was ready with a prepared answer:
We’re closely following developments in the village of Susiya in the West Bank, and we strongly urge the Israeli authorities to refrain from carrying out any demolitions in the village. Demolition of this Palestinian village or of parts of it, and evictions of Palestinians from their homes would be harmful and provocative. Such actions have an impact beyond those individuals and families who are evicted. We are concerned that the demolition of this village may worsen the atmosphere for a peaceful resolution.
A “peaceful resolution” in the eyes of the Palestinian Authority, the European Union and the Obama administration is the expulsion of every Jew from all of Judea and Samaria, the Golan Heights and half of Jerusalem.
The “peaceful resolution” is build on the foundation of the lies of the “Palestinian people” and of Israel as “ancient Palestine.”
The international community has hidden its inherent anti-Semitism under propaganda spewed out as the truth by such groups as B’Tselem and Rabbis for Human Rights, who hand out to the media a perfume bottle full of a poisonous potion.
The Palestinian Authority-based Ma’an News Agency, one of the foreign media’s favorite sources for lies, told its readers last week that “Susiya villagers reportedly built homes in 1986 on agricultural land they owned, after being evicted by Israel from their previous dwellings on land declared as an archaeological site.”
Horse manure.
I have been living in this area since 1991 and frequently visited the archaeological site of Susiya. There never was a single structure in “Arab Susiya” until the late 1990s.
The State Dept. will not believe me. The European Union will not believe me. The United Nations will not believe me.
Why?
It is not because I am an “occupier;” it is not because I am a “settler’” and it is not because they care about Arabs, or “Palestinians.”
“Mr. Bean” has the answer in his portrayal of someone at the entrance to Hell, where the devil tells the Christians, “Yes, I am sorry. I am afraid the Jews were right,”
The world cannot admit it, and that is why it adopts the lie of an “Arab Susiya.”
2004 satellite image of the military complex at Parchin, Iran. (AP/DigitalGlobe-Institute for Science and International Security)
WASHINGTON — As top administration officials prepared for what will be their first day of unclassified testimony in Congress Thursday in support of the Iran nuclear deal, a very public row erupted Wednesday over whether the administration could — and would — disclose what some lawmakers called the “secret side deals” of the agreement.
Even as the White House deployed Secretary of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz to Capitol Hill for a series of classified briefings Wednesday meant to shore up support for the Iran deal in a dubious legislature, lawmakers demanded more details on agreements reached between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran with the consent of the P5+1 group of world powers. Those agreements were not previously revealed to Congress as part of the 60-day review process required under law.
One day after Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Mike Pompeo said that an IAEA official in Vienna had told them about the agreements with Iran, administration officials denied these constituted “secret side agreements” that were kept out of the nuclear agreement presented to Congress for review.
“There’s no side deals, there’s no secret deals, between Iran and the IAEA, that the P5+1 has not been briefed on in detail. These kinds of technical arrangements with the IAEA are a matter of standard practice, that they’re not released publicly or to other states, but our experts are familiar and comfortable with the contents, which we would be happy to discuss with Congress in a classified setting,” State Department Spokesman John Kirby said during his daily press briefing.
Tom Cotton (Courtesy United States Congress)
Kirby explained that the so-called “side deals” involved “issues between Iran and the IAEA,” referring to them as “technical agreements” and emphasizing that such agreements “are never shared outside the state in question in the IAEA.” At the same time, the US had been briefed on the agreements and administration officials were willing to discuss them with lawmakers.
US National Security Adviser Susan Rice during an interview with Charlie Rose on the Public Broadcasting Service, February 24, 2015. (screen capture/YouTube/Charlie Rose)
National Security Adviser Susan Rice on Wednesday confirmed the existence of the side agreements, telling reporters that they dealt with Iran’s documentation of previous military dimensions of its nuclear program, a key aspect of intelligence about the program that enabled a better assessment of its scope and purpose.
Although Rice claimed that the arrangements between the IAEA and Iran were “no secret,” the firestorm began when Cotton and Pompeo, following a meeting in Vienna Friday with representatives of the IAEA, said officials from the watchdog group had told them the agreements would remain secret.
“The agency conveyed to the lawmakers that two side deals made between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the IAEA as part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) will remain secret and will not be shared with other nations, with Congress, or with the public,” the lawmakers said in a statement.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), left, shakes hands with ranking member Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) during a committee markup meeting on the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran on April 14, 2015. (JTA/Win McNamee/Getty Images)
One of the agreements covers inspection of the Parchin military complex, a site that the IAEA suspects was being used for experiments related to weaponization of Iran’s nuclear technology. The second details how the IAEA and Iran will resolve outstanding issues in determining the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program, Cotton and Pompeo said.
Although Rice and Kirby claimed that US negotiators were familiar with the contents of the IAEA-Iran agreements, Cotton and Pompeo said that they were told that the agreements would not be released even to the P5+1 member states who negotiated the broader deal.
Under the terms of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act passed earlier this year, the administration is required to provide Congress with all documents related to the agreement, including “annexes, appendices, codicils, side agreements, implementing materials, documents, and guidance, technical or other understandings and any related agreements, whether entered into or implemented prior to the agreement or to be entered into or implemented in the future.”
On Wednesday, the author of the law, Senator Bob Corker, a Republican, teamed up with Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat, to write their second letter to the administration in as many weeks expressing concern over whether it had adhered to the law’s requirements.
This time, the bipartisan duo reportedly requested that Kerry provide them any available documents related to the IAEA-Iran agreements.
Cardin is one of many Democratic senators who have yet to say whether they will support or oppose the deal with Iran when it comes to key Senate and House votes on deal-killing legislation that will likely be placed before Congress within the allotted 60 days. The administration needs to win over at least 34 senators or 146 House members to ensure President Barack Obama’s veto of any such legislation cannot be overturned.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, an announced supporter of the deal, has expressed optimism that the White House can prevail, and Senator Dick Durbin, a member of the Senate Democratic leadership, declared his support for the agreement this week.
Best speech of the night: Judging by how widely it is being shared on Facebook, this was the winner, from former U.S. Rep. Allen West.
Quote:
I want President Barack Obama to know one thing: You may say that you have done something that no one else has ever done. You know why no one else has ever done it? ‘Cause it’s a damn stupid thing that you just did.
A close second–Caroline Glick’s speech, which brought tears to more than a few eyes:
8:30 p.m. EDT: The rally finally ends. As the speakers continued, a full hour past the scheduled end of the rally, so did the enthusiasm and intensity.
Juan Hinojosa traveled from Brooklyn to participate in the rally. He said, “As an American I am disgusted with President Obama, the Democratic Party and the weak GOP in Congress. They are a disgrace to this nation and I cannot wait until 2016 when Obama’s gone.”
Stop Iran Rally (Breitbart News)
7:30 p.m.EDT: The rally, stretching six blocks long and over 10,000 strong, was due to end at 7:30, but continues with a roster of speakers, including Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), and many others.
7:10 p.m. EDT: Conservative Jerusalem Post columnist (and occasional Breitbart News contributor) Caroline Glick gives a fiery speech attacking the Iran deal: “This deal gives the mullahs $150 billion as a signing bonus…that’s real money that you’re putting the hands of murderers!”
She warns that even if Iran abides by the agreement, “in ten years’ time it can build nuclear weapons at will.” She calls on Sen. Schumer and several of New York’s Democratic U.S. Representatives.
“You know what to do, unless you have no honor and no shame….You will not only vote against this deal, you will talk to all of your friends in the Democratic Party…you will tell them you can claim to care about the security of the United States of America and support this deal.”
She concludes: “Tell your lawmakers. Tell your friends. Tell the President of the United States to kill this deal. To preserve life, to preserve liberty, to preserve freedom, this deal must be killed.
“Thank you, God bless America, Am Israel Chai.”
6:55 p.m. EDT: Advocates for the American captives, and for victims of Iranian-backed terror, take the stage. The anger against Obama is severe: “You couldn’t even pronounce their names properly….You, Mr. President, have become our national nightmare.”
The organizer takes the stage as well to lead chants: “Where is Chuck? Kill this deal! Where is Chuck? Kill this deal!”
6:45 p.m. EDT: Former CIA director James Woolsey, another Democrat, criticizes the Obama administration for ignoring the pro-democracy protests in 2009, and focuses his remarks on the totalitarian nature of the Iranian regime.
6:35 p.m. EDT: Alan Dershowitz, noted Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter, comes to the stage. He says that it is important that opposition to the Iran deal remain bipartisan: “It is a bad deal for Demcorats. It is a bad deal for liberals. I am here opposing this deal as a liberal Democrat.”
Dershowitz attacks the way in which the deal is being handled, with democracy being “ignored” as the Obama administration circumventing Congress. “That is not the way democracy should operate. This deal is essentially a treaty. It binds the United States in a multi-national way. This treaty should be submitted to the Senate for two-thirds approval. But the president won’t do that.”
Dershowitz criticizes Obama for taking the military option “off the table,” which allowed Iran “to negotiate with us as equals,” which is how the deal that resulted was so good for Iran and so bad for everyone else.
He warns that Benjamin Netanyahu will take “whatever actions” he has to take to stop Iran. The crowd cheers.
6:20 p.m. EDT: Organizers estimate attendance at the Stop Iran Rally at over 10,000 in Times Square.
The rally hears from presidential candidate and former New York governor George Pataki, who led the state during 9/11.
He takes a dig at Hillary Clinton: “She has embraced this agreement…Hillary, let me tell you one thing: America does not need as our next president another appeaser-in-chief.”
6:10 p.m. EDT: Organizer Jeffrey Wiesenfeld continues the focus on Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), “Where are you, Chuck?” He tells the crowd about White House efforts to twist the arms of wavering Democrats, warning that the Obama administration will give a green light to “pro-Israel” Democrats to vote against the bill once they have enough votes in hand to pass it.
“This is our civil rights! Our right to live! It will not be enough if those Congress members say they are opposing the bill
because they got permission from Valerie Jarrett.”
He warns Schumer to round up votes against the bill, or “we will throw you the hell out.” The crowd roars. He offers Schumer “a chance for redemption” if he stands up to Obama and rallies opposition to the deal. “Chuck, this is your moment! This is your time to make the decision.”
5:50 p.m. EDT: Fox News contributor Monica Crowley offers the most powerful speech of the rally so far: “Everybody who’s here tonight in Times Square wants to save Western Civilization before it’s too late,” she says. “Never again! Seventy years after the Holocaust, have we forgotten already?”
She adds: “Of the countless destructive things President Obama has done, this deal is the most dangerous of all….President Obama says that he can basically do what he wants because ‘he’s got a pen and a phone.’ Well, guess what, Mr. President? We’ve got pens and phones, too.”
Crowley singles out
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY)
2%
, daring him to lead. She said that Schumer would not be able to get away with voting against the deal once enough votes were secured for its passage.
Finally, Crowley attacks Hillary Clinton, who received a round of boos from the crowd, taking her to task for supporting the Iranian regime while toppling the Egyptian regime of Hosni Mubarak. At a black-tie dinner in Bahrain, Crowley says, “She [Clinton] literally chased the Iranian foreign minister around the room, and got blown off by the Iranian foreign minister, not once, but twice.”
— Jonathan Margulis (@eliyahumargulis) July 22, 2015
5:40 p.m. EDT: The rally is well under way, kicking off with a speech by prominent publisher and editor Mort Zuckerman. His address is heavy on detail, but mentions of the Iranian regime and Secretary of State John Kerry draw loud boos from the crowd, now apparently several thousand strong.
5:00 p.m. EDT: One very important theme at the rally, as Jacob Kornbluh points out in the tweet below, is the central role that New York’s own Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) will play. The self-described “guardian of Israel” has declined to oppose the Obama administration in recent battles, but is said to be carefully weighing his response to the Iran deal. The entire rally could be described as a giant message to Schumer, because if he opposes the deal, other Democrats will follow (and vice versa).
4:45 p.m. EDT: Demonstrators are arriving in significant numbers, along with national media. Fox News devoted a segment to the rally, and their cameras are there to record the action.
One of the main organizations behind the protest, StandWithUs, has tweeted a list of 19 key U.S. Senators, all Democrats, that it is asking the public to contact.
If just 13 Democrats join Republicans in opposing the deal, they will override a presidential veto and the deal will fail (assuming a similar two-thirds majority can be assembled in the House).
***
The event was coordinated by the Jewish Rapid Response Coalition, a grassroots organization concerned with the potential for a nuclear-armed Iranian regime.Over 100 partners are sponsoring the rally.
Other rallies are scheduled this week and next nationwide. A partial list is here.
The idea for the Stop Iran Rally came to fruition following the nuclear accord agreed to by the P5+1 world powers (US, UK, Germany, France, China, Russia) and the Iranian regime. Organizers expect that thousands of concerned Americans will be at the Times Square rally.
Featured speakers will include:
Caroline Glick (Jerusalem Post Columnist)
Alan Dershowitz (Harvard Law Professor)
George Pataki (Fmr. Gov. of New York and Current Republican Candidate For President)
Monica Crowley (Political Commentator)
James Woolsey (Fmr. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency)
Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ)
88%
Former Congressman Allen West (R-FL)
Richard Kemp (Fmr. Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan)
Breitbart News will be there with timely interviews from the major players at the event.
State Department spokesman John Kirby depicted the arms embargo lift on Iran in the nuclear deal as a victory for the United States Tuesday.
Last week, President Obama announced that a nuclear agreement had been reached with Iran.
As written in the agreement, Iran is allowed to continue uranium enrichment and maintain 6,000 centrifuges. In exchange, the U.S. and the U.N. will lift economic sanctions over time, remove a conventional weapons embargo after five years, and remove a ban on the research and development of ballistic missile technology after eight years.
The agreement said other restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program would last ten years. After ten years, Iran would be free to develop nuclear weapons.
Associated Press reporter Matt Lee asked Kirby, “Can you think of one instance in which what you ended up with was better than what you were seeking?”
“Well I think remember the–on the arms embargo and the–and the missile program sanctions, under the U.N. Security Council resolutions which put those sanctions in place and drove Iran to the negotiating table, it was always understood that all of those sanctions would be lifted at once when Iran complied with their requirements under Lausanne,” Kirby said.
Kirby also said the arms embargo and the ban on ballistic missile technology would have been lifted immediately if it were not for the United States, which held out for a five-year ban and an eight-year ban.
A 2010 U.N. Security Council resolution put a ban for member countries to sell conventional arms such as tanks, missile launchers, and fighter jets. Kirby continued to defend these victories by saying they were only enacted to get Iran to negotiations.
“But the U.N. Security Council resolutions, which put those sanctions on did so with the intent of driving Iran to the negotiating table, specifically over their nuclear program,” Kirby said. “So it was always understood by all the members of the P5- plus-1 members, that as a part of–to have a deal, without the sanctions relief, all of them, there would be no deal.”
Lee said that previous U.N. Security Council resolutions called for stricter restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program.
“But the problem that exists there is that those U.N. Security Council resolutions to which you refer, which have now been superseded by yesterday’s resolution, are stronger,” Lee said. “They call for Iran to suspend or halt enrichment altogether. So, when you say that well, Russia and China wanted the arms embargo and ballistic missile stuff to go immediately, they wouldn’t have gone immediately, because Iran wasn’t in compliance with the terms of the previous resolutions.”
Some Congressional Democrats do not share the Obama administration’s view that the embargo on arms is lifted as a victory.
“But you’d say that those are two things that you exceeded your expectations?” Lee asked.
“Yes, that’s one example, and if you need more, I’m happy to provide that for you,” Kirby said.
The Obama administration will not be able to claim these numerous issues as “victories.”
US freed top Iranian scientist as part of secret talks ahead of Geneva deal’
Mojtaba Atarodi, arrested in California for attempting to acquire equipment for Iran’s military-nuclear programs, was released in April as part of back channel talks, Times of Israel told. The contacts, mediated in Oman for years by close colleague of the Sultan, have seen a series of US-Iran prisoner releases, and there may be more to come
Iranian scientist Mojtaba Atarodi speaks to journalists, upon his arrival at the Imam Khomeini airport outside Tehran, Iran, Saturday, April 27 (photo credit: AP/Vahid Salemi)
The secret back channel of negotiations between Iran and the United States, which led to this month’s interim deal in Geneva on Iran’s rogue nuclear program, has also seen a series of prisoner releases by both sides, which have played a central role in bridging the distance between the two nations, the Times of Israel has been told.
In the most dramatic of those releases, the US in April released a top Iranian scientist, Mojtaba Atarodi, who had been arrested in 2011 for attempting to acquire equipment that could be used for Iran’s military-nuclear programs.
American and Iranian officials have been meeting secretly in Oman on and off for years, according to a respected Israeli intelligence analyst, Ronen Solomon. And in the past three years as a consequence of those talks, Iran released three American prisoners, all via Oman, and the US responded in kind. Then, most critically, in April, when the back channel was reactivated in advance of the Geneva P5+1 meetings, the US released a fourth Iranian prisoner, high-ranking Iranian scientist Atarodi, who was arrested in California on charges that remain sealed but relate to his attempt to acquire what are known as dual-use technologies, or equipment that could be used for Iran’s military-nuclear programs. Iran has not reciprocated for that latest release.
Solomon, an independent intelligence analyst (who in 2009 revealed the crucial role played by German Federal Intelligence Service officer Gerhard Conrad in the negotiations that led to the 2011 Gilad Shalit Israel-Hamas prisoner deal), has been following the US-Iran meetings in Oman for years. Detailing what he termed the “unwritten prisoner exchange deals” agreed over the years in Oman by the US and Iran, Solomon told The Times of Israel that “It’s clear what the Iranians got” with the release of top scientist Atarodi in April. “What’s unclear is what the US got.”
The history of these deals, though, he said, would suggest that in the coming months Iran will release at least one of three US citizens who are currently believed to be in Iranian custody. One of these three is former FBI agent Robert Levinson.
Solomon told The Times of Israel that the interlocutor in the Oman talks is a man named Salem Ben Nasser al Ismaily, who is the executive president of the Omani Center for Investment Promotion and Export Development and a close confidant of the Omani leader Sultan Qaboos bin Said.
The latter tells the fictional tale of John Wilkinson, a successful American businessman who fails in all of his business endeavors in the Gulf until he meets Sultan, who explains to him, according to the book’s promotional literature, how to forgo his hard-charging Western style and “surrender to very different values rooted in ancient tribal customs and traditions.” Those mores have been central to the murky prisoner swaps surrounding the nuclear negotiations, Solomon said.
Solomon said he identified Ismaily’s role back in September 2010, when Sarah Shourd, an American who apparently inadvertently crossed into Iran while hiking near the Iraqi border, was released, for what were called humanitarian reasons. She was delivered into Ismaily’s hands in Oman and from there was flown to the US — the first release in the series of deals brokered in Oman. One year later, in September 2011, her fiancé and fellow hiker, Shane Bauer, was set free along with their friend, Josh Fattal. The two men were also received at Muscat’s Seeb military airport by Ismaily before being flown back to the US.
The US began reciprocating in August 2012, Solomon said. It freed Shahrzad Mir Gholikhan, an Iranian convicted on three counts of weapons trafficking. Next Nosratollah Tajik, a former Iranian ambassador to Jordan — who, like Gholikhan, had been initially apprehended abroad trying to buy night-vision goggles from US agents — was freed after the US opted not to follow up an extradition request it had submitted to the British. Then, in January 2013, Amir Hossein Seirafi was released, also via Oman, having been arrested in Frankfurt and convicted in the US of trying to buy specialized vacuum pumps that could be used in the Iranian nuclear program.
Finally, in April, came the release of Mojtaba Atarodi.
The facts of his case are still shrouded. On December 7, 2011, Atarodi, a faculty member at the prestigious Sharif University of Technology (SUT) in Tehran — a US-educated electrical engineer with a heart condition, a green card and a brother living in the US — arrived at LAX and was arrested by US federal officials.
He appeared twice in US federal court in San Francisco and was incarcerated at a federal facility in Dublin, California and then kept under house arrest. The US government cloaked the contents of his indictment and released no statement upon his release. His lawyer, Matthew David Kohn, told The Times of Israel he would like to discuss the case further but that first he had to “make some inquiries” to see what he was allowed to reveal.
In January, shortly after Atarodi’s arrest, his colleagues wrote a letter to the journal Nature, protesting his detention. “We believe holding a distinguished 55-year-old professor in custody is a historical mistake and not commensurate with the image that America strives to extend throughout the world as a bastion of free scientific exchange among schools and academic institutions,” they said.
Solomon, who compiled a profile of Atarodi, believes that the scientist, prior to his arrest, played an important role in Iran’s missile and nuclear programs. Atarodi, he said, has co-authored more than 30 technical articles, mostly related to micro-electric engineering and, in 2011, won the Khwarizmi award for the design of a microchip receiver for digital photos. “That same technology,” he said, “can be used for missile guidance and the analysis of nuclear tests.”
Solomon further noted that the then-Iranian defense minister and former commander of the revolutionary guards, Ahmad Vahidi, attended the prize ceremony and that Professor Massoud Ali-Mahmoudi, an Iranian physics professor who was assassinated in 2010, was an earlier recipient of the prize.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Atarodi came to the US at the behest of the logistics wing of the IRGC [the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps],” Solomon said.
On April 26 Atarodi was flown from the US to Seeb military airbase in Oman, where he met with Ismaily, and onward to Iran. “The release of someone who holds that sort of information and has advanced strategic projects in Iran is a prize,” Solomon said. The US, said Solomon, must have already received something in return or will do so in the future.
Thus far, US-Iran prisoner swaps have been conducted in a manner utterly distinct from the old Cold War rituals, in which, as was the case with Prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky, spies or prisoners from either side of the Iron Curtain walked across Berlin’s old Glienicke Bridge toward their respective home countries. Instead, with Iran claiming it knows nothing about the whereabouts of former FBI agent Levinson, for instance, and the US eager to show that it will not barter with hostage-takers, the deals have taken the form of a delayed quid pro quo.
There are currently three US nationals — Levinson, Saeed Abedini, and Amir Hekmati — still believed to be held in Iran.
US President Barak Obama raised the issue of the imprisoned Americans in his historic September phone call to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Tony Blinken, told CNN that aside from the nuclear program it was the only other issue that was brought up in the call.
The interim deal in Geneva did not include any reference to prisoner dealings. Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN, “you’ve got to decide how much you’re going to try to accomplish, and just tackling all the dimensions of the nuclear agreement is ambition enough.” A spokeswoman for the National Security Council added that the “talks focused exclusively on nuclear issues.”
The omission prompted the chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, Jay Sekulow, who is representing Pastor Saeed Abedini’s wife Naghmeh, to charge Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry with turning their backs on an American citizen. On the center’s website, he called the decision “outrageous and a betrayal” and said it sends the message that “Americans are expendable.”
Abedini, who was born in Iran and later converted to Christianity, was arrested earlier this year in Iran for what would seem was strictly Christian charity work and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was recently transferred from Evin Prison, a notorious jail for political prisoners in Tehran, Sukelow wrote in a letter to Kerry, “to the even more notorious and brutal Rajai Shahr Prison in Karaj.”
Amir Hekmati, a 31-year-old former Marine from Flint, Michigan, who allegedly obtained permission to visit his grandmother in Iran in 2011, was charged with espionage and sentenced to death in 2012. In September, Hekmati managed to smuggle a letter out of prison. Published in the Guardian, it contended that his filmed admission of guilt had been coerced and that his arrest “is part of a propaganda and hostage-taking effort by Iranian intelligence to secure the release of Iranians abroad being held on security-related charges.”
Levinson, a 65-year-old veteran of the FBI, was last seen on March 9, 2007, on Kish Island, Iran. According to Solomon, Levinson was stationed in Dubai at the time as part of a US task force comprised of former officers operating in the United Arab Emirates, training officials there to combat weapons trafficking, and was tempted to come to Kish for a meeting.
The last person he is known to have had contact with, and with whom he shared a room the night before his abduction, according to a Reuters article from 2007, is Dawud Salahuddin, an American convert to Islam, who is wanted in the US for murder. According to a New Yorker profile of the Long Island-born Salahuddin, he showed up at the home of Ali Akbar Tabatabai’s Bethseda, Maryland door in July 1980, dressed as a mailman, and shot Tabatabai, a Shah supporter, three times in the abdomen, killing him. From there he fled to Canada and on to Switzerland and Iran.
Salahuddin has indicated that Levinson had come to Kish to meet with him.
In September, Rouhani denied any knowledge of Levinson’s whereabouts. In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, he said that, “We don’t know where he is, who he is. He is an American who has disappeared. We have no news of him.”
This is highly doubtful. In 2010 and 2011 Levinson’s family received a video and photographs respectively of him in captivity. In January of this year the AP reported that “despite years of denials,” many US security officials now believe that “Iran’s intelligence service was almost certainly behind the 54-second video and five photographs of Levinson that were emailed anonymously to his family.” The photos and the videos traced back to different addresses in Afghanistan and Pakistan, suggesting, perhaps, that Levinson, the longest-held hostage in US history, was imprisoned in Balochistan, a desert region spanning the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
On Tuesday, Levinson’s son Dan wrote a column in the Washington Post calling Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif “well-respected men committed to the goodwill of all human beings, regardless of their nationality.”
Several hours later, White House Spokesman Jay Carney published a statement saying that the US government welcomes the assistance “of our international partners” in attempting to bring Levinson home and, he added, “we respectfully ask the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to assist us in securing Mr. Levinson’s health, welfare, and safe return.”
As was the case with the Geneva negotiations, and as is likely happening with the upcoming round of talks regarding Syria, there is good reason to believe, and in this case to hope, that the movements played out under the spotlights of the international stage have been choreographed well in advance, perhaps in the sea-side city of Muscat, under the careful tutelage of Salem Ben Nasser al Ismaily.
Iranian long-range Shahab-1 missiles. Photo Credit: Press TV
Iran’s Foreign Minister buried the Obama administration’s claim that the nuclear agreement will curtail Iran’s ballistic missile production and maintained that the prohibition is in a non-binding appendix of “ObamaDeal.”
Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was quoted by the state-controlled Fars News Agency as saying:
Using ballistic missiles doesn’t violate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA); it is a violation of a paragraph in the annex of the (UN Security Council) Resolution (2231) which is non-binding
This paragraph (of the annex) speaks about missiles with nuclear warheads capability and since we don’t design any of our missiles for carrying nuclear weapons, therefore, this paragraph is not related to us at all.
That is pretty fancy mouth-work, even better than President Barack Obama’s.
Zarif is laughing all the way to the nuclear bank. He admits that the nuclear agreement prohibits ballistic missiles but since it is non-binding, so what?
And it doesn’t make any difference because the missiles are not meant for carrying nukes.
If anyone wants to inspect the military sites to make sure he is telling the truth, he can’t because military sites are off-limits. The Islamic Republic’s international affairs adviser to the regime stressed on Tuesday that Iran will not allow international inspectors visit our military centers and interfere in decisions about the type of Iran’s defensive weapons.”
Velayati added:
Missiles like Shahab, Sejjil and the like, have never been used for carrying nuclear warheads, and therefore, are not subject to the paragraphs of the Vienna draft agreement.
Just take his word for it.
Zarif’s Foreign Ministry reassured everyone who still is listening that “Iran will continue its pioneering role in campaign against terrorism and violent extremism.”
For the record, just in case Congressional Democrats are awake, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey told a Senate committee just before ObamaDeal was concluded:
We should under no circumstances relieve pressure on Iran relative to ballistic missile capabilities and arms trafficking.
Secretary of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who is in Israel to go through the motions that ObamaDeal is good for Israel, told the Senate Armed Services Committee:
We want them [Iran] to continue to be isolated as a military and limited in terms of the kinds of equipment and material they are able to procure.
That is what he wants. That is not what he – and Israel – is going to get.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Kingdom’s former chief of intelligence and ambassador to Washington.
A Saudi prince’s reaction to the nuclear agreement with Iran makes last week’s White House’s rosy spin of official reaction by Saudi Arabia to “ObamaDeal” look like an act that should never have gone on stage.
Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Ambassador to the United States, warned that the nuclear agreement with Iran “will wreak havoc in the Middle East” and that Gulf Powers are willing to attack Iranian nuclear sites, even if the United States is not interested.
One of King Salman’s first actions after taking the throne earlier this year was to yank Prince Bandar off the National Security Council, but he still is an advisor and an important voice, one that totally contradicts what President Barack Obama would like people to believe about Riyadh’s reaction the nuclear agreement.
White House Press Secretary, after a meeting between Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir and President Obama, glossed over Saudi skepticism of ObamaDeal and blah-blahed “about the important bilateral relationship that exists between the United States and Saudi Arabia.”
Believe that and then believe that President Obama has “an unbreakable bond with Israel.”
Prince Bandar’s comments to Beirut Daily Star and also reported by the Times of London were the first public criticism from Saudi Arabia, and he was straight to the point.
He warned that ObamaDeal will “wreak havoc” and then bluntly asserted:
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf powers are prepared to take military action without American support after the Iran nuclear deal
Prince Bandar is not a small voice. He was ambassador to Washington for 20 years, and MRC TV noted that it is unlikely that he would have conducted a major newspaper interview without King Salman’s blessing.
The prince’s view of the Obama administration sounds like Israel’s when it comes to relying on the United States.
“People in my region now are relying on God’s will, and consolidating their local capabilities and analysis with everybody else except our oldest and most powerful ally,” Prince Bandar told the Beirut newspaper.
He was even more candid in an article he wrote for the London-based Arabic news Web site Elaph, where he compared ObamaDeal with Bill Clinton’s agreement with North Korea, which supposedly would keep its word and not develop a nuclear bomb.
But Prince Bandar can forgive Clinton because “it turned out that the strategic foreign policy analysis was wrong and there was a major intelligence failure,” according to translation of interview provided by The Washington Post.
He said that he is “absolutely confident he would not have made that decision” if he had all the facts.
Prince Bandar said the case of Iran is different because:
The strategic foreign policy analysis, the national intelligence information, and America’s allies in the region’s intelligence all predict not only the same outcome of the North Korean nuclear deal but worse – with the billions of dollars that Iran will have access to.
He quoted a phrase first made by Henry Kissinger: America’s enemies should fear America, but America’s friends should fear America more.”
It sounds like Saudi Arabia and Israel are on the same page.
Last year Iran was selling gasoline for less than 50 cents a gallon. This year a desperate regime hiked prices up to over a dollar. Meanwhile, Iranians pay about a tenth of what Americans do for electricity.
Unlike Japan, Iran does not need nuclear power. It is already sitting on a mountain of gas and oil.
Iran blew between $100 billion to $500 billion on its nuclear program. The Bushehr reactor alone cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $11 billion making it one of the most expensive in the world.
This wasn’t done to cut power bills. Iran didn’t take its economy to the edge for a peaceful nuclear program. It built the Fordow fortified underground nuclear reactor that even Obama admitted was not part of a peaceful nuclear program, it built the underground Natanz enrichment facility whose construction at one point consumed all the cement in the country, because the nuclear program mattered more than anything else as a fulfillment of the Islamic Revolution’s purpose.
Iran did not do all this so that its citizens could pay 0.003 cents less for a kilowatt hour of electricity.
It built its nuclear program on the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, “Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world.”
Iran’s constitution states that its military is an “ideological army” built to fulfill “the ideological mission of jihad in Allah’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of Allah’s law throughout the world.”
It quotes the Koranic verse urging Muslims to “strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah”.
Article 3 of Iran’s Constitution calls for a foreign policy based on “unsparing support” to terrorists around the world. Article 11, the ISIS clause, demands the political unity of the Islamic world.
Iran is not just a country. It is the Islamic Revolution, the Shiite ISIS, a perpetual revolution to destroy the non-Muslim world and unite the Muslim world. Over half of Iran’s urban population lives below the poverty line and its regime sacrificed 100,000 child soldiers as human shields in the Iran-Iraq War.
Iran did not spend all that money just to build a peaceful civilian nuclear program to benefit its people. And yet the nuclear deal depends on the myth that its nuclear program is peaceful.
Obama insisted, “This deal is not contingent on Iran changing its behavior.” But if Iran isn’t changing its behavior, if it isn’t changing its priorities or its values, then there is no deal.
If Iran hasn’t changed its behavior, then the nuclear deal is just another way for it to get the bomb.
If Iran were really serious about abandoning a drive for nuclear weapons, it would have shut down its nuclear program. Not because America or Europe demanded it, but because it made no economic sense. For a fraction of the money it spent on its nuclear ambitions, it could have overhauled its decaying electrical grid and actually cut costs. But this isn’t about electricity, it’s about nuclear bombs.
The peaceful nuclear program is a hoax. The deal accepts the hoax. It assumes that Iran wants a peaceful nuclear program. It even undertakes to improve and protect Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear technology.
The reasoning behind the nuclear deal is false. It’s so blatantly false that the falseness has been written into the deal. The agreement punts on the military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program and creates a complicated and easily subverted mechanism for inspecting suspicious programs in Iranian military sites.
It builds in so many loopholes and delays, separate agreements and distractions, because it doesn’t really want to know. The inspections were built to help Iran cheat and give Obama plausible deniability.
With or without the agreement, Iran is on the road to a nuclear bomb. Sanctions closed some doors and opened others. The agreement opens some doors and closes others. It’s a tactical difference that moves the crisis from one stalemate to another. Nothing has been resolved. The underlying strategy is Iran’s.
Iran decided that the best way to conduct this stage of its nuclear weapons program was by getting technical assistance and sanctions relief from the West. This agreement doesn’t even pretend to resolve the problem of Iran’s nuclear weapons. Instead its best case scenario assumes that years from now Iran won’t want a nuclear bomb. So that’s why we’ll be helping Iran move along the path to building one.
It’s like teaching a terrorist to use TNT for mining purposes if he promises not to kill anyone.
But this agreement exists because the West refuses to come to terms with what Islam is. Successful negotiations depend on understanding what the other side wants. Celebratory media coverage talks about finding “common ground” with Iran. But what common ground is there with a regime that believes that America is the “Great Satan” and its number one enemy?
What common ground can there be with people who literally believe that you are the devil?
When Iranian leaders chant, “Death to America”, we are told that they are pandering to the hardliners. The possibility that they really believe it can’t be discussed because then the nuclear deal falls apart.
For Europe, the nuclear agreement is about ending an unprofitable standoff and doing business with Iran. For Obama, it’s about rewriting history by befriending another enemy of the United States. But for Iran’s Supreme Leader, it’s about pursuing a holy war against the enemies of his flavor of Islam.
The Supreme Leader of Iran already made it clear that the war will continue until America is destroyed. That may be the only common ground he has with Obama. Both America and Iran are governed by fanatics who believe that America is the source of all evil. Both believe that it needs to be destroyed.
Carter made the Islamic Revolution possible. Obama is enabling its nuclear revolution.
Today Tehran and Washington D.C. are united by a deep distrust of America, distaste for the West and a violent hatred of Israel. This deal is the product of that mutually incomprehensible unity. It is not meant to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. It is meant to stop America and Israel from stopping it.
Both Obama and the Supreme Leader of Iran have a compelling vision of the world as it should be and don’t care about the consequences because they are convinced that the absolute good of their ideology makes a bad outcome inconceivable.
“O Allah, for your satisfaction, we sacrificed the offspring of Islam and the revolution,” a despairing Ayatollah Khomeini wrote after the disastrous Iran-Iraq War cost the lives of three-quarters of a million Iranians. The letter quoted the need for “atomic weapons” and evicting America from the Persian Gulf.
Four years earlier, its current Supreme Leader had told officials that Khomeini had reactivated Iran’s nuclear program, vowing that it would prepare “for the emergence of Imam Mehdi.”
The Islamic Revolution’s nuclear program was never peaceful. It was a murderous fanatic’s vision for destroying the enemies of his ideology, rooted in war, restarted in a conflict in which he used children to detonate land mines, and meant for mass murder on a terrible scale.
The nuclear agreement has holes big enough to drive trucks through, but its biggest hole is the refusal of its supporters to acknowledge the history, ideology and agenda of Iran’s murderous tyrants. Like so many previous efforts at appeasement, the agreement assumes that Islam is a religion of peace.
The ideology and history of Iran’s Islamic Revolution tells us that it is an empire of blood.
The agreement asks us to choose between two possibilities. Either Iran has spent a huge fortune and nearly gone to war to slightly lower its already low electricity rates or it wants a nuclear bomb.
The deal assumes that Iran wants lower electricity rates. Iran’s constitution tells us that it wants Jihad. And unlike Obama, Iran’s leaders can be trusted to live up to their Constitution.
ihadis with nukes, that’s Obama’s legacy. And remember, he was desperate for this surrender. He usurped Congress, the American people, and our allies — his name will go down in history as one of the most notorious enemies of freedom.
“Iranian President Rouhani Describes Nuclear Deal, Says: The Superpowers Have Officially Recognized a Nuclear Iran,” MEMRI TV, July 20, 2015
On July 14, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani delivered a speech detailing the accomplishments of the new nuclear deal. President Rouhani declared that prayers of the Iranian nation had been answered and described the deal as a “win-win,” adding that Iran was not seeking a nuclear bomb. Following are excerpts:
Rouhani: “I hereby declare to the great Iranian people that their prayers have been answered. Today, we are at an important stage in the history of our state and of our [Islamic] Revolution, and in the history of conditions in the region – conditions that, I must say, have continued for the past 12 years, and which were accompanied by illusions on the part of the superpowers, which spread them throughout society and throughout public opinion. The page has been turned over, and a new page has begun.
[…]
“In order to resolve the nuclear issue, we had to take necessary steps in various areas. With regard to politics, we had to prepare the necessary preliminary political steps. With regard to [Iranian] public opinion, [we had to make] them realize that the negotiations were not a recitation of statements, but a give and take. Negotiations mean paying money and buying the desired house. We did not seek charity or to get something for free. We sought negotiations, and sought to advance a fair and just give and take, based on national interests. We have always stressed the point that these negotiations would not be a ‘win-lose’ situation, because such talks are not viable. If negotiations are ‘win-lose,’ they will not be lasting. Negotiations and agreements will be durable and lasting when they are win-win situations for both parties. We explained this to our society, and our negotiation team began the talks on this basis 23 months ago.
[…]
“From the day that I was sworn in [as president], I said that the West would be able to engage in talks with us if it abandons the path of threats and humiliation and embarks upon a path of respect. What was achieved today under the title of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is rooted in dialogue on the part of Iran and respect on the part of the P5+1. Without these two components, we would not have achieved a thing.
[…]
“In the negotiations we sought to achieve four goals. The first goal was to continue the nuclear capabilities, the nuclear technology, and even the nuclear activity within Iran. The second goal was to lift the mistaken, oppressive, and inhumane sanctions. The third goal was to remove all the UN Security Council Resolutions that we view as illegal. The fourth goal was to remove the Iranian nuclear dossier from Chapter VII of the UN Charter and from the Security Council in general. In today’s agreement, in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, all four goals have been achieved.
“At the beginning of negotiations, the other side used to tell us that during the period of restrictions – which today is set at eight years – Iran would be able to have only 100 centrifuges. After many deliberations, they have reached the figure of 1,000 centrifuges. Following much opposition on our part, they said: ‘4,000 centrifuges, and that’s final.’ Today, the agreement specifies that Iran will retain over 6,000 centrifuges, of which 5,000 will be at Natanz and over 1,000 at Fordo. All the centrifuges at Natanz will continue to enrich [uranium].
“They said: ‘The period of your restrictions will be 20 years, in addition to 25 years.’ Later they said: ’20 years and 10 years.’ Then they said: ‘Our last word is 20 years, and we will not capitulate any further.’ In the final days of the negotiations, these 20 years shrank to eight years.
“On the issue of research and development, they used to say that Iran would be allowed only [first-generation] IR-1 [centrifuges]. This was ridiculous and unrealistic. Research and development under such conditions is meaningless. Then they said: ‘IR-2 at most.’ Eventually they said: ‘IR-8 is impossible.’ What Iran sought was IR-6 and IR-8 centrifuges. We wanted an agreement in which we would begin, on the very day of its implementations, to inject UF-6 gas into [advanced] IR-8 centrifuges. That is exactly the agreement that we achieved today.
“On the issue of Arak, they used to say: ‘The reactor can remain, but not as a heavy water facility. This is an absolute red line for us.’ Today, according to the terms agreed upon, the joint agreement explicitly mentions the Arak heavy water reactor. This reactor will be completed with the same heavy water nature, and with the characteristics specified in the agreement.
“On the issue of Fordo, they used to say: ‘It is hard to pronounce the name Fordo, even harder to hear it, so you will not say it and we will not hear it.’ Then they said: ‘At Fordo there should not be a single centrifuge, and it will be a center for isotope research.’ After months of bargaining they said: ‘Only one cascade of 164 centrifuges will remain at Fordo.’ Let me say, in a nutshell, that today, over 1,000 centrifuges will be installed at Fordo, and that part of Fordo will be used for research and development of stable isotopes.
“On the issue of sanctions they used to say: ‘The lifting of all the sanctions all at once – never. As for the gradual lifting of the sanctions, first you need to gain our trust over the course of months, and even then, the sanctions will be gradually frozen, not lifted. Do not use the term “lift the sanctions.” We will freeze them.’ [They further said]: ‘In the years to come, if the IAEA issues a positive report and you gain our trust, the sanctions will be gradually lifted.’ Today I declare before the honorable Iranian nation that according to the agreement, on the day of its implementation, all the sanctions – even the embargo on weapons, missiles, and [dual-use technology] proliferation – will be lifted, as is stated in a [Security Council] resolution. All the financial sanctions, all the banking sanctions, and all the sanctions pertaining to insurance, transportation, petrochemical [industries], and precious metals, and all the economic sanctions will be completely lifted, and not frozen. Even the arms embargo will be stopped. There will be a kind of restriction [on arms] for five years, after which it will be lifted. With regard to proliferation [of dual-use technology], a committee will examine goods with a dual use. With regard to the revocation of the UN [Security Council] resolutions, they used to say: ‘You have not implemented any resolution, so how can we revoke the resolution? At the very least implement it for six months.’
[…]
“According to today’s agreement, which will be approved in the coming days by the UN Security Council, all six previous resolutions [against Iran] will be revoked. With regard to the permanent removal of the Iranian nuclear dossier from the Security Council, they used to say: ‘The IAEA must report for 20 years,’ then ‘for 15 years.’ In today’s [agreement], regardless of the IAEA, after 10 years of implementation of the agreement, the nuclear dossier will be completely removed from the Security Council.
[…]
“This agreement is, of course, reciprocal.
[…]
“Today, [we are talking about] the implementation of a reciprocal agreement. If they adhere to this agreement, we will too. Throughout history, the Iranian nation has always stood behind the treaties to which it committed itself. We will stand firmly behind the current treaty, provided the other side also strictly adheres to it.
[…]
“This is the most important day in the past 12 years. Historically, this is the day on which all the large countries and the superpowers in the world have officially recognized Iran’s nuclear activities.
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