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You Won’t Believe The Latest Revelations About The Flaws In The Nuclear Agreement With Iran
While Iranian leaders continue to issue belligerent statements about the United States and Israel, new revelations about the deep flaws of the nuclear agreement between the P5+1 countries and Iran have surfaced.
First, there were reports that Iran wants to renegotiate certain aspects of the deal, especially regarding the lifting of the sanction regime.
On Wednesday, Western Journalism reported that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, recently made a new demand that sanctions be lifted immediately.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) suggested that, in light of Khamenei’s demand, the scheduled New York meeting of the P5+1 countries and Iran at the General Assembly of the United Nations (UNGA) could be an indication that Iran wants to re-open the negotiations.
“The apparent meaning of all the above is that the nuclear negotiations, which Iran considers unfinished, will be reopened, with the aim of achieving the complete lifting of sanctions – instead of a mere suspension of them as was agreed in the JCPOA and adopted in UN Security Council Resolution 2231,” MEMRI wrote.
Although the Iranians indeed indicate that the negotiations are not over yet, the reality is somewhat more complicated than MEMRI suggests.
First, the Obama administration has made clear that Iran must first implement parts of the agreement before sanctions can be lifted. Immediately after Khamenei demanded that sanctions must be lifted, White House spokesman John Earnest said this:
We’ve been crystal clear about the fact that Iran will have to take a variety of serious steps to significantly roll back their nuclear program before any sanctions relief is offered — and this is everything from reducing their nuclear uranium stockpile by 98 percent, disconnecting thousands of centrifuges, essentially gutting the core of their heavy-water reactor at Arak, giving the IAEA the information and access they need in order to complete their report about the potential military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program. And then we need to see Iran begin to comply with the inspections regime that the IAEA will put in place to verify their compliance with the agreement.
“And only after those steps and several others have been effectively completed, will Iran begin to receive sanctions relief. The good news is all of this is codified in the agreement that was reached between Iran and the rest of the international community. And that’s what we will be focused on, is their compliance with the agreement.
Even if the administration should want to give in to Iran on this issue, there are serious obstacles that make such a concession unlikely.
The first obstacle is that in order to lift sanctions now, UNSC Resolution 2231 would have to be canceled, which is very unlikely. The second obstacle the administration would face is that Congress must OK sanction relief, something that is even more unlikely than the cancellation of UNSCR 2231.
No doubt the Iranians will come with new demands at the UNGA meeting, and immediate sanction relief is probably one of them. The Iranians always conduct negotiations in this way, and they will do so this time too because they know Obama sees this deal as the foreign policy achievement of his presidency, and because they want to buy time.
In a worst case scenario for President Obama, Khamenei will make good on his threat that there will be no agreement if the administration and the other negotiation partners do not cave in. In this respect, it is important to remember that the JCPOA has not yet been signed by Iran and a number of experts have already said that Iran won’t sign the deal at all.
Dyer told Western Journalism that Iran won’t announce that they will not sign the deal, but instead will come up with new demands. She said the reason for this behavior has to do with Israel.
Another bombshell report about the implementation of the agreement came from Reuters, who reported that Iran took environmental samples of the suspected facility, Parchin, without International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors being present, something that is highly unusual for the Nuclear Agency.
Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman of the Atom Energy Organization in Iran, told the official Iranian News Agency, “Iranian experts took samples from specific locations in Parchin facilities this week without IAEA’s inspectors being present.”
Parchin is the site where Iran is suspected of conducting tests with detonators for nuclear warheads.
The highly controversial arrangement between the IAEA and Iran concerning the way Parchin would be inspected was part of a so-called secret side-deal. Under the agreement, Iranian experts, rather than IAEA inspectors, would collect the samples and the IAEA would oversee the process via cameras.
The text of the agreement was published by Associated Press at the end of August after it was leaked by unnamed IAEA officials.
Western Journalism reported that sources affiliated with the Obama administration suggested that the draft text of the side agreement published by AP was a forgery, something that was vehemently denied by the entire AP staff.
Now, the Iranians and later the IAEA confirmed that the AP story was correct.
The Obama administration reacted to the news by pointing out that there was no problem; the State Department was perfectly satisfied with the IAEA procedure.
During a press conference on Monday, spokesman John Kirby made clear that because the samples were delivered to the IAEA for “inspection”, there was no reason to suspect that the Iranians hid something.
Kirby said that since IAEA director general Yukiya Amano was comfortable with the procedure, there was no reason for the administration to think otherwise.
But former IAEA inspector David Albright, who is now the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, delivered evidence indicating something is totally wrong in the way the IAEA deals with Parchin.
Albright told a panel of experts at the Hudson Institute the following:
What you have is, is the situation where there’ll be videotaping of the potential locations where sampling would take place. Then the IAEA would direct the Iranians to take the samples. And that’s not the normal way to do things.
If I could give the example in Iran of Kalaya Electric, a secret centrifuge research and development facility that Iran denied was such a thing. The IAEA got access and it brought in a very top level centrifuge expert with that access, who looked around. And when they did the sampling finally they didn’t find any trace of enriched uranium in the areas that had been heavily modified. But in a another, a secondary building they found in a ventilation duct – which had not been modified – they found traces of enriched uranium…
You need the eyes and the brain to look where to sample.
I brought an example of sampling in North Korea… they sampled in the Yongbyon reprocessing plant in the early 90s… you can see in the sampling they’re looking behind this box… Look for where it’s dusty. The idea is that it’s not been disturbed. In the case of Parchin, I would look for where the paint doesn’t look solid. And so, that’s very hard to do with a video camera. So I think the video camera opens up additional methods of deceiving the IAEA. And it’s not the normal way they’ve been doing it. And so I think that’s a problem…
The sampling would be done, and then the IAEA access would follow. And so the access is coming at a point where it’s not as useful…You want it to drive the inspection effort and the environmental sampling effort, not be done at the end of the process.
Source: http://www.westernjournalism.com/you-wont-believe-the-latest-revelations-about-the-flaws-in-the-nuclear-agreement-with-iran/
