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Saturday, June 27, 2015

IRAN UPDATE: 6.26.15 - The Iranian-American nuclear project

The Iranian-American nuclear project - Caroline B. Glick -
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0615/glick062615.php3
 
Under President Barack Obama, the US has implemented policies toward Iran that are catastrophic for Israel specifically, for US Middle East allies more generally and for US national security itself.
 
Consider, first, the known details of the soon-to-be- concluded nuclear deal.
 
In an article published by The New York Times this week, Prof. Alan Kuperman explained that Obama's central justification for the agreement - that it will lengthen Iran's breakout time to the bomb from the current two months to 12 months - is a lie.
 
Based on nothing more than the number of centrifuges Iran will be allowed to possess and the amount of enriched uranium necessary to make a nuclear bomb, Kuperman demonstrated that far from prolonging Iran's nuclear breakout time by 10 months, the deal will only prolong its breakout time by one month. In other words, the deal is worthless.
 
Actually it's worse than worthless.
 
Wednesday, the Associated Press reported on the details of one of the agreement's five secret annexes.
 
Titled "Civil Nuclear Cooperation," the annex demonstrates that, far from merely failing to block Iran's development of nuclear weapons, the deal will facilitate Iran's development of nuclear weapons.
 
The leaked secret annex has two central components.
 
The first involves the underground uranium- enrichment facility at Fordow. Built inside a mountain, the Fordow complex is considered resistant to air strikes.
 
According to the AP report, the Iranians have agreed to re-purpose the installation from uranium enrichment to isotope production. In turn, the six powers have agreed to provide the Iranians with next-generation centrifuges to operate it. Yet, as the AP report makes clear, "isotope production uses the same technology as enrichment and can be quickly re-engineered to enriching uranium."
 
In other words, the six powers will teach Iran how to operate advanced centrifuges capable of quickly enriching uranium in an installation that is protected from aerial bombardment.
 
The second section of the annex relates to the heavy-water reactor at Arak. The reactor, whose construction is near completion, will be capable of producing plutonium-based atomic bombs.
 
According to the AP report, the six powers have agreed to provide Iran with a light-water reactor that is less capable of producing bomb-grade plutonium.
 
Yet, as Omri Ceren from the Israel Project explains, a sufficient number of light-water reactors are capable of producing bomb-grade plutonium. Moreover, since the reactors are powered by uranium, the very existence of the light-water reactors provides Iran with justification for expanding its uranium-enrichment operations.
 
Then there are the US's stated redlines in negotiations.
 
These have collapsed in significant ways over the past few weeks.
 
Because the US agreed that Iran can continue to enrich uranium, perhaps the most critical means of preventing Iran from acquiring military nuclear capabilities involve requiring Iran to expose all of its previous nuclear work that is still unknown, and requiring Iran to agree to unfettered inspections of is nuclear work and access to its personnel involved in its nuclear work on the part of UN nuclear inspectors.
 
Clearly, without meeting both requirements, Iran will be able to breach its commitments easily and the agreement will be worthless.
 
Due to the general understanding of these requirements, the administration's public position has been that it will require Iran to both expose its previous nuclear work with possible military dimensions and permit the US unfettered access to all its nuclear installations.
 
For its part, Iran refuses to accept either demand.
 
Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei reiterated this refusal on Tuesday.
 
Rather than present Iran with an ultimatum that it either abide by these basic requirements or receive no nuclear deal, the administration abandoned its position.
 
Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that there is no reason for Iran to expose its previous nuclear work because, "We know what they did. We have no doubt. We have absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities they were engaged in. What we're concerned about is going forward."
 
This statement is a lie. As Yukiya Amano, the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog IAEA, reiterated just weeks ago, "We don't know whether they have undeclared activities or something else. We don't know what they did in the past. So, we know a part of their activities, but we cannot [say] we know all their activities. And that is why we cannot say that all the activities in Iran [are for] peaceful purposes."
 
Another key position that the Obama administration has staked out on behalf of the nuclear deal is that the sanctions that would be canceled under the deal are limited to those that were instituted in retaliation for Iran's illicit nuclear program. The other sanctions, levied due to Iran's illicit work on ballistic missiles, its support for terrorism and its human rights abuses, would remain intact.
 
But, on June 10, AP reported that the administration intends to cancel both the nuclear-related sanctions and those imposed due to Iran's illicit ballistic- missile development. As a consequence, tens of billions of dollars will become available for Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.
 
Then, there are Iran's repeated breaches of sanctions restrictions. Under the Iran-North Korea Sanctions Act of 2006, the State Department is supposed to submit a report of sanctions violations to Congress every six months. This week Al-Monitor reported that the General Accounting Office issued a report blasting the State Department for failing to uphold its legal commitment. The last report submitted was in 2014 and its reporting covered the period up to 2011. The previous report had been submitted nearly two years earlier.
 
Among the reasons for the delays, according to the report, "Officials told the GAO that negotiations and relations with counties can delay the process."
 
In other words, the State Department's failure to uphold the law owes to the administration's desire to shield Iran from further sanctions.
 
James Clapper, Obama's director of national intelligence failed to list either Hezbollah or Iran as threats to the US in this year's Worldwide Threat Assessment.
 
And the State Department has yet to submit its annual Human Rights Report. This failure is allegedly due to the administration's reluctance to report on Iran's miserable human rights record.
 
Not only does the Obama administration refuse to view Iran and its terrorist arms as threats to the US, this week Bloomberg reported that US forces in Iraq are arming, training and providing close air support for Iranian controlled Shi'ite militia and terrorist groups led by the commander of Hezbollah forces in Iraq Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
 
So, too, US forces deployed to the Taqqadum base in Anbar share the base with Shi'ite terrorist groups.
 
Several of the terror operatives are reportedly spying on US forces at the base. Terrorist commanders have participated in US operational briefings ostensibly provided to official Iraqi security forces.
 
As one senior administration official told Bloomberg, "Even if these guys don't attack us... Iran is ushering in a new Hezbollah era in Iraq, and we will have aided and abetted it."
 
Beyond rendering US forces in Iraq hostages of Iranian-controlled terrorists now sharing a base with them, US support for Iranian controlled militia, as well as its policy of only transferring military assistance to forces fighting Islamic State through the Iranian-controlled Iraqi government and security forces, has facilitated Islamic State's territorial expansion.
 
As Jacob Siegel and Michael Pregent explained last month in the Daily Beast, a key reason for Islamic State's success in Ramadi and Mosul is the Baghdad government's refusal to arm Sunni militias. As they explained, the security forces, guided by Iran, will only fight in areas important to the Shi'ites. So they refused to defend Mosul or Ramadi.
 
Siegel and Pregent argued that if Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi were to arm Sunnis to fight Islamic State in Anbar province, he would likely lose the support of Iran and the militias, and so be ousted from power. Consequently, Sunnis who oppose Islamic State are no obstacle to the march of the jihadists.
 
By supporting the Iranian controlled government, and refusing to directly arm Sunni or Kurdish forces, the US is supporting Iran and its terrorist groups on the one hand and abetting Islamic State expansion on the other.
 
The nature and scope of the Obama administration's collusion with Iran require us to draw a number of conclusions.
 
First, from an American perspective, under the Obama administration, the US has destroyed its reputation as a responsible and trustworthy ally. It has endangered its allies, its armed forces and its own national security.
 
The US alliance system in the Middle East has collapsed.
 
In the short term, all that Congress can do to check Obama is reject his nuclear deal with Iran with a two thirds majority. Although the possibility that a sufficient number of Democratic senators will oppose the deal to override a presidential veto is remote, it is critical that every resource be used to convince them to do so.
 
In the medium term, in order to secure US national security, the next president will have to cancel US acceptance of the nuclear deal with Iran. To this end, US Jewish groups and other organizations must demand that all presidential candidates - including Hillary Clinton - commit themselves to canceling the agreement in the event they are elected.
 
If the US fails to reverse Obama's policies toward Iran in the next two years, it is hard to see how it will be able to rebuild its strategic posture in the future.
 
The pace of change in the region and the world is too rapid today to rely on past achievements as a basis for future power.
 
As for Israel, it is now clear that there is no "crisis" in Israel-US relations. The Obama administration is betraying Israel. The centerpiece of Obama's foreign policy is his desire to transform Iran's illicit nuclear program, which endangers Israel's existence, into a legal Iranian-American nuclear program that endangers Israel's existence.
 
Consequently, the last thing Israel should worry about is upsetting Obama. To convince fence-sitting Democratic senators to vote against Obama's Iran deal, Israel should expose all the ruinous details of the nuclear agreement. Israel should let the American people know how the deal endangers not just Israel, but their soldiers, and indeed, the US homeland itself.
 
By doing so, Israel stands a chance of separating the issue of Democratic support for Obama from Democratic opposition to the nuclear deal. Obama wants this deal to be about himself. Israel needs to explain how it is about America.
 
At the end of the day, what we now know about US collaboration with Iran brings home - yet again - the sad fact that the only chance Israel has ever had of preventing Iran from getting the bomb is to destroy the mullahs' nuclear installations itself. If Israel can still conduct such an operation, it makes sense for it to be carried out before Iran's nuclear program officially becomes the Iranian-American nuclear project.
Khamenei sacks Qassem Soleimani from command of the Syrian war -
http://www.debka.com/article/24690/Khamenei-sacks-Qassem-Soleimani-from-command-of-the-Syrian-war-
 
Uproar in Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has relieved Gen. Qassem Soleimani,the  Al Qods Brigades chief and supreme commander of Iranian Middle East forces, of his Syria command after a series of war debacles. He was left in charge of Iran's military and intelligence operations in Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. This is revealed by debkafile's exclusive Iranian and intelligence sources.
 
 Since Soleimani last visited Damascus on June 2, in the aftershock of the historic town of Palmyra's fall to the Islamic State, the situation of President Bashar Assad and his army has gone from bad to worse.
 
The Iranian general's bravado in stating then that "In the next few days the world will be pleasantly surprised from what we (the IRGC) working with Syrian military commanders are preparing," turned out to be empty rhetoric. The thousands of Iranian troops needed to rescue the Assad regime from more routs never materialized. Since then, the Syrian forces have been driven out of more places. Hezbollah is not only stymied in its attempts to dislodge Syrian rebel advances in the strategic Qalamoun Mountains, it has failed to prevent the war spilling over into Lebanon. There is strong evidence that the high Iranian command in charge of the Syrian and Lebanese arenas are stuck.
 
 These reverses have occurred, our military sources report, owing to Tehran's failure to foresee five developments:
 
1.  The launching of a combined effort by the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE - among the wealthiest nations in the world - in support of rebel groups fighting Bashar Assad. Their massive injections of military assistance, weapons and financial resources have thrown Iran's limitation into bold relief.
 
2.  The ineptitude of the Shiite militias mustered by Soleimani in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight Iran's wars in Syria and Iraq. None of those imported troops met the combat standards required in those arenas and become liabilities rather than assets.
 
3.  Those shortcomings forced Tehran to admit that it had come up short of military manpower to deploy in four ongoing warfronts: Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq.  Soleimani took flak for the over-ambitious plans he authored which pulled Iran into military commitments that overtaxed its resources and did not take into account the messy political and military consequences which followed.  Above all, he miscalculated the numbers of fighting strength needed on the ground for winning battles in those wars.
 
4. In the final reckoning, Iran funds has been drained of the strategic reserves that should have been set aside for the contingency of a potential ISIS encroachment of its territory.

Iran bullies region, broadens influence outside Persian Gulf - Rowan Scarborough - http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/24/iran-bullies-region-broadens-influence-outside-per/

 
Iranian diplomats have sat down for a series of cordial negotiations with the West over nuclear arms, as all handshakes and smiles were captured in network news photo ops.
 
On other fronts, Tehran uses a hammer, not a handshake. The Islamic regime continues unabated in its drive to dominate the Middle East and export terrorism, according to a new government report and national security experts.
 
In fact, Iran is broadening its influence, moving outside the Persian Gulf by sending intelligence operatives into South America and Asia. Such agents typically work to destabilize a regime or to prop up an anti-American one.
 
In its neighborhood, Tehran's ruling mullahs routinely violate a United Nations resolution by arming the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah with thousands of missiles. It bolsters Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, who has killed thousands of his citizens. And it trains Iraqi Shiite militiamen, who have committed atrocities against Sunni Muslims in the war against the Islamic State.
 
Tehran's undiminished endgame is to dominate all the states that encircle archenemy Israel, while turning the Persian Gulf into an Iranian-regulated waterway. Its top security officials openly talk of world conquest, predicting the Islamic flag one day will fly over Washington, D.C. Iranian parliament members joined in a "Death to America" chant last week.
 
"Tehran aims to control the entire Middle East, and the ruling mullahs espouse a theological view that leads the regime to world dominance," said Robert Maginnis, a retired Army officer who is writing a book, "Never Submit," on world threats such as Iran. "Therefore, the mullahs believe they should use every resource to accomplish dominance, including nuclear intimidation, sectarian fights, terrorism, economic pressure and religious manipulation."
 
Iran's determined agenda comes despite six years of friendly outreach by President Obama in letters and videos, as well as what appear to be amicable talks with Secretary of State John F. Kerry. In the international negotiations over Iran's contested nuclear program, Mr. Kerry has confined the focus to atomic weapons only, not Iran's militarism.
 
"Iran would be foolish not to take advantage of what U.S. allies in the region see as the Obama administration's approach to Iran," said Simon Henderson, an analyst at the nonprofit Washington Institute.
 
Its goal? "Its rightful regional hegemony in terms of population size, land mass, hydrocarbon wealth plus respect for Shiites, regarded as second-class [citizens] across much of the Middle East," Mr. Henderson said.
 
'A significant threat'
 
While Iran fights the Sunni extremist group Islamic State in Iraq - becoming an unspoken, and odd, U.S. ally - its foot soldiers work to dominate the majority Shia Iraqis and thus the country.
 
In Yemen, Tehran helped Shia rebels oust a U.S. ally from power, just weeks after Mr. Obama deemed a counterterrorism strategy in that al Qaeda-infested country a success.
 
Assertions that Iran is on the march do not come solely from administration critics. The State Department's new report on world terrorism, released June 19, states: "Iran's state sponsorship of terrorism worldwide remained undiminished."
 
Iran's hammer is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its foreign special operations branch, the Quds Force, as well as the Ministry of Intelligence and Lebanese Hezbollah.
 
The State Department report said these actors "remained a significant threat to the stability of Lebanon and the broader region."
 
As a backdrop to Iran's current interventions, there is still the fact that Iran and the Quds Force became merchants of death - American deaths - in the long Iraq War. Iran imported Iraqi Shiite militiamen and trained them in terrorism, including the building of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that they then unleashed on American service members.
 
Regional and global reach
 
Iran holds a special place in the realm of terrorism. It is one of only three countries - the others are Sudan and Syria - the U.S. has designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. This means the regime and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei actively approve and support terrorist attacks abroad.
 
The State Department report said that Iran:
 
* Deploys the Quds Force to "provide cover for intelligence operations and create instability in the Middle East." The Quds Force "is the regime's primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad."
 
* Provides financing and training "to support the Assad regime's brutal crackdown that has resulted in the deaths of at least 191,000 people in Syria."
 
* Supports radical Iraqi Shia groups, such as Kataib Hezbollah, that have "exacerbated sectarian tensions in Iraq and have committed serious human rights abuses against primarily Sunni civilians."
 
* Repeatedly violates United Nations resolutions by arming Lebanon's Hezbollah militants.
 
Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, who heads the Revolutionary Guard Corps aerospace force, said, "The IRGC and Hezbollah are a single apparatus jointed together."
 
* Deploys the Quds Force to Africa, Asia and Latin America in a bid to influence political events.
 
* Operates a human pipeline to allow al Qaeda fighters to move west to Syria and east to South Asia.
 
The Persian Gulf
 
"Iran's behavior remains unchanged," said James Russell, an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, and a former Pentagon official. "This is not surprising. There is no 'deal' to readmit Iran to the community of nations."
 
Mr. Russell added that once a nuclear deal with Tehran is signed, "I would look for Iran to start a gradual adjustment towards behaviors more consistent with internationally accepted norms. It's not like flipping a switch, however. It will take time and strategic patience on the part of the international community."
 
For now, Iran's actions and statements show a different track.
 
A U.S. Army think tank issued a report last spring that said Iran is building an arsenal of "suicide" drones that can be guided into American warships in the Persian Gulf. The regime has a history of trying to disrupt shipping in a bid to one day dominate who can and cannot use the strategic waterway and the all-important Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly one-fifth of the world's oil production is transported daily.
 
A U.S. Navy carrier is always in, or close by, the Gulf, much to Iran's irritation.
 
"There is little doubt Iran's mullahs seek a return to those former glory days, as evidenced by its aggressive naval actions throughout the gulf," Mr. Maginnis said.
 
Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria
 
The mastermind of the nefarious Quds Force is Gen. Maj. Qassem Suleimani, whom Western leaders concede is a smart strategic thinker. He personally has traveled inside Iraq to supervise how Iran is helping Iraqi Shiites. He justifies his country's interventions in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.
 
"We have a clear duty to support them," he said in a May speech. "We are helping all of them."
 
An example of this "support": The State Department said Iran maintained a massive arms flow to Hezbollah in 2014. Israel now estimates that Hezbollah, which went to war with the Jewish state in 2006, has stockpiled about 100,000 missiles in Lebanon that include long-range rockets that could strike population centers in Israel. Iran also provided anti-aircraft missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles.
 
Iran also sends rockets to the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, from which Israel is attacked with some regularity.
 
Both Hamas and Hezbollah are U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.
 
Meanwhile, Gen. Suleimani is putting tremendous resources into supporting Mr. Assad. He has recruited Shiite militiamen from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Lebanon to fight in Syria.
 
According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Iranian agents are organizing Mr. Assad's depleted army units, whose numbers have fallen from more than 100,000 to about 70,000 today. There is little doubt that if Iran had not intervened with fresh foreign troops three years ago, Mr. Assad would have fallen, leaving his country to pro-democratic forces and Islamic extremists to fight it out.
 
A MEMRI report, "Iran Tightens Its Grip on Syria Using Syrian and Foreign Forces," said Syria essentially has become an Iranian army and intelligence base from which it could attack Israel.
 
"Some of the Iran-operated Syrian so-called 'popular resistance groups,' such as the Syrian Hezbollah, stress that their aim is to operate against Israel, not only against the Syrian opposition," MEMRI said.

Prophetic Iran nuclear deal modeled after North Korea - Bill Wilson - www.dailyjot.com

 
AP reports that it has obtained confidential documents confirming the "president's" intent to offer Iran high-tech reactors and other state-of-the-art equipment "if it agrees to crimp programs that can make atomic arms." AP says, "the draft, entitled "Civil Nuclear Cooperation," promises to supply Iran with light-water nuclear reactors instead of its nearly completed heavy-water facility at Arak, which would produce enough plutonium for several bombs a year if completed as planned." AP says, the US has also offered "arrangements for the assured supply and removal of nuclear fuel for each reactor provided," and offers help in the "construction and effective operation" of the reactors and related hardware.
 
Let's roll back the clock to October 1994, where after 17 months of negotiations, President Bill Clinton committed the US to a nuclear deal with communist North Korea. Clinton is quoted as saying, "This US-North Korean agreement will help to achieve a long-standing and vital American objective: an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula." Heritage Foundation archives document in an October 20 letter to North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il, Clinton vastly expanded America's commitments under the formal agreement to finance fuel shipments and reactors, and to ease its long-standing trade embargo and move toward first-ever diplomatic relations with the North.
 
Within 13 years on January 6, 2007, North Korea confirmed it had nuclear weapons. It had leveraged Clinton's agreement to develop technology and fund a nuclear weapons program. It's a sure fire bet that Iran will have nuclear weapons once yet another Democratic "president," this one a Muslim sympathizer, hands the technology and reactors to one of the Middle East's greatest sponsors of terrorism. History is repeating itself. This time, however, it is with a nation mentioned prominently in Ezekiel 38-39 as coming against Israel in a colossal end time battle. The "president" has admitted that the agreement will only slow Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon, effectively kicking the nuclear can down the road apiece.
 
The "president" is taking giant steps toward giving nuclear weapons to an end time player and a terrorist sponsoring state. While many will continue to point to the schism between Sunni and Shiite, Islam is first Islam and its unification is evident in the Ezekiel 38 passages. Even when the Lord returns and is defeating the forces against Israel, the division between Shia and Sunni is evident. Ezekiel 38:21 says, "And I will call for a sword against him throughout all my mountains, saith the Lord God: "every man's sword shall be against his brother." Notwithstanding, the US will suffer consequences for the decisions of its president to support Islam at the expense of Israel. Zechariah 12:9 says, "And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem."

Ahmadinejad: US is after Hidden Imam -
http://www.timesofisrael.com/ahmadinejad-claims-us-wants-to-arrest-hidden-imam/

 
Americans view mythical religious savior as threat to their 'evil empire,' former Iranian president says
 
Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the United States of seeking to apprehend the Hidden Imam, who according to Shi'ite belief vanished in the 10th century and will reappear in the end of days as the ultimate savior of humankind.
 
Speaking on Sunday to clerics at a speech marking the beginning of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, Ahmadinejad claimed that members of US academic institutions were engaged in tedious studies aimed at locating the Imam, Radio Free Europe reported.
 
"They've done so much research about the Hidden Imam in the human science universities of the United States that I am not exaggerating by saying that it is a thousand times more than all the work done in the seminaries of Qom, Najaf, and Mashhad," he said, referring to three Shiite holy cities, according to a transcript posted on the website Dolatebahar.com and translated by Radio Free Europe.
 
"To quote a friend, they've completed a case against the Hidden Imam, and closed it also for his arrest... the only [evidence] they lack is his picture," he added.
 
Ahmadinejad went on to assert that the US was concerned the Hidden Imam would pose a threat to its "empire" as well as to its "evil" plans.
 
"It is really a government established by Satan to prevent reaching God and the Hidden Imam," Ahmadinejad said. "This evil government knows that its end will come if the Hidden Imam reappears."
 
The former president conceded that "some in Iran laugh about these comments," and indeed, following the speech, the country's leading reformist daily newspaper, Shargh, described his musings as "strange."
 
Ahmadinejad was known in the West for his harsh rhetoric toward Israel, at one point saying it should be wiped off the map. Inside Iran, his administration faced a growing chorus of corruption allegations, particularly during its latter years. President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate who succeeded Ahmadinejad in 2013, has repeatedly alleged widespread corruption under the administration of his predecessor.
 
Earlier this month, Iranian authorities arrested former vice president Hamid Baghaei, who served under Ahmadinejad, the official IRNA news agency reported. In January, Iran's Supreme Court convicted and sentenced former vice president Mohammad Reza Rahimi to five years in prison and fined him 10 billion rials ($300,000).
 
US rebuffs Israel's last-ditch bid for nuclear constraints in Iran accord -
http://www.debka.com/article/24683/US-rebuffs-Israel's-last-ditch-bid-for-nuclear-constraints-in-Iran-accord
 
Israel's National Security Adviser Yossi Cohen was invited to join two top US officials for dinner in Washington on June 15 to try and make Israel's case for amending the disastrous nuclear accord taking shape in Vienna between the six world powers and Iran, before it was too late. This meeting is reported here by debkafile for the first time. It was hosted by US National Security Adviser Susan Rice and senior US nuclear negotiator Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman.
 
The occasion was arranged by CIA Director John Brennan at the end of his visit to Jerusalem in the first week of June. He had come to offer senior Israelis, led by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a behind-the-scenes briefing on the provisions the Obama administration had accepted for the final nuclear accord with Iran due to be signed by June 30.
 
 This briefing was greeted in Jerusalem with shock and alarm. Very few of the conditions for a deal stipulated by the US upon embarking on the negotiations had survived: Iran would continue to enrich uranium, be allowed to bar international inspections of military facilities suspected of hosting nuclear research activity (where were Obama's "intrusive inspections?) and - Israeli officials heard this for the first time - the Iranian UCF facility at Isfahan would be expanded. This plant is engaged in the conversion of "yellow cake" to enriched nuclear material.
 
 They also discovered that President Obama, who had originally promised the deal would provide for "snapping sanctions back" in the event of violations, had assured Tehran that once sanctions were lifted, they would not be re-imposed.
 
 Netanyahu asked Brennan for time to digest the full extent of the Obama administration's retreat in the face of Iran's nuclear aspirations. He then asked for his national security adviser to be given a chance to propose changes that would allay some of Israel's concerns.
 
Brennan quickly set up a date for Cohen to be received in Washington.
 
debkafile's Washington sources reveal that at the dinner in Washington, the Israeli official tried a new tack with his hostesses, Rice and Sherman. On the understanding that the main clauses of the nuclear accord had been finalized and gone past the stage of amendment, he nonetheless suggested a number of insertions in the various clauses that would make it a better deal for American as well as Israeli security.
 
 Rice and Sherman politely allowed him to finish talking and then turned his proposals down flat.
 
US and Israeli official sources agree that the invitation to Cohen had not been intended for any serious discussion between the two governments on the Iranian nuclear issue. The two top American officials dealing with the nuclear question barely heard a word that Cohen said. His journey to Washington was a complete waste of time.
 
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