22-Sep-15: If Iran's march to a nuclear arsenal leaves US officials comfortable and satisfied, how should the rest of us feel?

Before we drill down into what has just happened in Iran, and some astounding words of explanation from an official spokesperson for the US government, a few words of introduction.

The intentionally-unsigned nuclear weapons development deal that media reports keep wrongly calling a “signed” agreement, made in July between Iran and the United States (accompanied by a few other countries that also did not sign) is being widely hailed by those who support it as unprecedented in its rigor and of vast significance. Whatever people think of its merits, it's clearly one of the most weighty pacts to have happened in our lifetimes.

Over here in Israel where Iran's blood-curdling threats of murder and destruction ["25-Aug-15: Hard to ignore how much Iran believes its old goals are the right goals"] are not merely the stuff of headlines (or footnotes) but amount to a genuine, massive-scale physical threat, there's wall-to-wall opposition to it, along with fear, trepidation and incomprehension. 

We can't help but notice how most Americans, far less threatened than we are but no less capable of reading news reports, agree with us.

As the ultimate owner of the process, President Obama himself spared no superlatives in singing the praises of the framework that preceded the pact:

"This deal is not based on trust. It's based on unprecedented verification," he said. Part of that verification, Obama said, was "the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history.” [Public Radio International, April 8, 2015]

Then once the agreement was finally not signed, the praise from figures deep within the political process rose several notches, starting with the president himself who, speaking from the White House, said

We don't trust Iran... But this deal doesn't rely on trust. It relies on verification [and] The commitment to Israel is sacrosanct...

The amen choir rapidly chimed in, mainly along partisan party-political lines. Democratic senator from California Dianne Feinstein called it

historic. It offers a verifiable, diplomatic resolution to one of our most pressing national security challenges. This is a strong agreement that meets our national security needs and I believe will stand the test of time. I stand behind the U.S. negotiating team and will support this agreement in the Senate.. .Iran will be subject to unprecedented and highly intrusive inspections to verify it is living up to its commitments. The IAEA will have 24-hour access to all declared nuclear sites and this agreement provides a process for inspection of military bases. No sites are off limits to inspection... [Source, July 14, 2015]

California's second Democratic senator, Barbara Boxer, spoke of the “unprecedented inspections and verification regime” in endorsing it. Along similar lines, Bill Nelson, Florida's Democratic senator, reiterated that:

this agreement can't be built on trust. We must have a good enough mechanism in place to catch them when and if they cheat; in other words, don't trust but verify. [C-SPAN, August 4, 2015]

Large parts of the mainstream media joined in. For instance: "Iran nuke deal depends on most intrusive inspection system ever", McClatchey, July 14, 2015]

And there were the lobbyists:

That's why this deal is so important: by subjecting Iran to the most intrusive inspections regime in history, it leaves nothing to trust. Inspections at all nuclear sites. 24/7/365 monitoring. Tracking every ounce of uranium. It all adds up to unprecedented assurance that Iran cannot cheat their way to a weapon undetected. [From the Iran Deal Facts website, the work of a political group closely aligned with the White House]

In fact, there has been colossal amount of parroting going on as those on the side of this agreement provide reasons political or moral or logical for why it could hardly be better, and how trust doesn't come into it. Not at all. Not even a little.

This leaves those of us astounded at the unforgivable weakness being displayed by the US side, along with the ongoing unbalanced concessions, wondering what's really going on. And wondering whether the news of this past weekend has caused the holders of any of these utterly-certain viewpoints to undergo some self-doubt.

The wondering is still going on. Only now the contradictions between the case for the unsigned pact and reality are mounting.

The following somewhat bizarre exchange between the official spokesperson of the United States Department of State and a journalist we think is Matt Lee from Associated Press took place at yesterday’s (Monday’s) daily press briefing at the State Department. The text below is extracted without change from the official transcript and appears on the State Department website here.

The head of the IAEA found time in his weekend visit
to call on Rouhani, the Iranian president [Image Source]

The dueling between the two relates to what did and did not happen inside one of the most significant of the Iranian military/nuclear facilities ["06-Aug-15: Parchin: Keep the name in mind"] this past weekend when the head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, came visiting. 

Soil samples were taken during the visit. And lo and behold, exactly what critics of the JCPOA said was going to happen (because of a secret side deal between Iran and IAEA), happened:

[A] top Iranian official said that IAEA inspectors had not taken part in the sampling procedure at Parchin. Iranian technicians took the samples and handed them to the IAEA, Atomic Energy Organization of Iran spokesman Behruz Kamalvandi was quoted in Iranian state media as saying. ["IAEA inspects Iran's Parchin military site for first time", CNN, September 21, 2015]

(Worth noting that when reports first emerged that Iran was going to be doing the soil sampling of its suspected nuclear facilities on its own and without anyone watching, supporters of the Iran deal said this was mere rumors, and that Israel was probably behind them. Turns out they weren't rumors at all.) Amano's own words after emerging from Parchin are enough to get ordinary worried people like us thinking:

This was the first time that the Agency had visited the location. We entered a building which the Agency had previously only been able to observe using satellite imagery. Inside the building, we saw indications of recent renovation work. There was no equipment in the building. Our experts will now analyse this information and we will have discussions with Iran in the coming weeks, as foreseen in the Road-map. ["IAEA Director General's Remarks to the Press on Visit to Iran", September 21, 2015]

State's John Kirby [Image Source]

It would be a pity to highlight some of the words, and not highlight others. The whole State Department media briefing exchange from yesterday is simply breathtaking. 

QUESTION: Thank you. The two main areas of what I wanted to ask you about have already been asked at the White House and answered – well, kind of answered – but I’m going to give it a whirl anyway. Let’s start with Iran.
MR KIRBY: With what?
QUESTION: Iran --
MR KIRBY: Okay.
QUESTION: -- and the inspections of Parchin. And your colleague at the White House was asked whether the Administration is satisfied with the process that we saw unfold over the past couple of days. I just wanted to make sure that you’re on board with his answer; he said yes.
MR KIRBY: Yes, we are.
QUESTION: You are. And you don’t have any issue with fact that the inspectors were not allowed in, or that they were not there?
MR KIRBY: I would point you, Matt, to what the director general himself noted, which was that the verification activities at Parchin were conducted in the manner consistent with their standard safeguards practices. So the director general himself made it clear that he was comfortable with the verification process and that it was in keeping with the arrangement that they had made with Iran.
QUESTION: That’s great, but you – so you don’t have a problem with them not being physically present?
MR KIRBY: I’m not going to get into the details of the process itself. That resides inside this confidential arrangement between Iran and the IAEA, so I’m not going to confirm or deny whether inspectors were present here or there. What I am going to say is we’re comfortable that the process was conducted in accordance with the normal procedures and the agreement that the IAEA had already made with Iran.
QUESTION: And so it remains your position that the confidential agreement and whatever it contains is sufficient to investigate? Okay.
MR KIRBY: Absolutely. And again, I’d point you to the fact that Director General Amano made it clear before and I think certainly made the implication today that there’s no self-inspection by Iran in this process.
QUESTION: There – okay. The other thing, at the – that your colleague at the White House seemed to suggest was that the courtesy call that Director General Amano made to Parchin was somehow evidence that – or was evidence that the Iranian military facilities are open and available for IAEA access. Is that really – is that the position of the State Department?
MR KIRBY: Well, in a short answer: yes. I mean, it’s not insignificant that the IAEA and the director general himself – I mean, I don’t know that we would characterize it as a courtesy call –but the fact that he and his team had access to Parchin is not insignificant.
QUESTION: His team, meaning the one person that went with him.
MR KIRBY: Look, I don’t – I’m not going to --
QUESTION: A brief – a brief visit to an empty room at Parchin, you think counts – qualifies as an inspection? That – was that the –
MR KIRBY: It’s not insignificant that they had access to Parchin. The director general himself – and I’m not going to get into the details of his visit or what that – that’s for the IAEA to speak to. But it’s not insignificant that they got – that they were granted access to this.
QUESTION: Is it your understanding that the director general of the IAEA conducts inspections? Or would that normally be done by --
MR KIRBY: I’m not an expert on their --
QUESTION: -- lower-level people?
MR KIRBY: I’m not an expert on their protocols. I don’t think it’s our expectation that he has to personally inspect everything.
QUESTION: Do you think he got down on his hands and knees and --
MR KIRBY: I’d point you to the director general to speak to his personal involvement. I don’t know that that’s our expectation, that he has to, as you said, get down on his hands and knees. But certainly he had access to Parchin, and that’s not insignificant – the first time that that’s been done. If we had this --
QUESTION: Well, do you recall how big a site Parchin is?
MR KIRBY: I don’t. I’m not an expert on the site itself.
QUESTION: It’s rather large.
QUESTION: It’s pretty huge.
MR KIRBY: Okay.
QUESTION: So do you think that two people from the IAEA going into an empty room briefly --
MR KIRBY: Matt.
QUESTION: -- counts – I’m trying to find out whether you guys think or are trying to say that Amano’s courtesy call, his very brief visit – he even said that it was very brief – counts as some kind of an inspection. That’s all.
MR KIRBY: I would point you to what the IAEA has said about their --
QUESTION: Not even the IAEA said this was an inspection, but your colleague at the White House suggested that the fact that Director General Amano was able to briefly visit one room or one part of the site was evidence that the Iranians have opened up their military sites to IAEA access. And I just want to know if the State Department thinks that it’s – thinks the same.
MR KIRBY: We believe it’s significant that Iran granted access to this facility at Parchin for the first time in the history of this issue, both in his visit and the technical verification activities. What’s more important is we look forward to Iran’s fulling implementing its commitments under the roadmap. That’s what matters here.
QUESTION: Would you be confident in this being the standard of inspection going forward?
MR KIRBY: It’s not that that is – this is an issue between Iran and the IAEA, and as we said at the very outset, Brad, that having been briefed on the details of that confidential arrangement, the Secretary remains comfortable that it will allow for the IAEA to get the proper access it needs and the ability, through various techniques, of effectively monitoring.
QUESTION: But you don’t think there needs to be – you’re not saying that whatever the confidential arrangements are of future inspections going forward, that they will have necessarily more access than this?
MR KIRBY: That is between the IAEA and Iran to work out. What matters to us, we’re not going to micromanage the inspection activities of the IAEA. It’s an independent, international agency that can speak for itself about what it will or will not do. And as you know, many of those arrangements are confidential and they won’t speak to them. What matters to us, having been briefed on the protocols, is that we remain comfortable, should this – should Iran continue to meet its commitments in keeping with that arrangement, we believe they will get the access and will get the information they need.
But look, this is the first visit, so – at least to Parchin anyway. So we have a ways to go here. As I said, there’s a roadmap that has to be implemented, and we expect Iran to meet its commitments.QUESTION: Wait, are you saying that – are you saying this is the first visit? You’re expecting there will be more?
MR KIRBY: I don’t know. I’m saying it is a fact that it’s first visit. I’m not making prognostications about the future.
QUESTION: My last one and I’ll defer to anyone else that wants to ask. Are you – do you know if members of Congress in their confidential briefings with Administration officials, which would have included people from this building, including the Secretary, were told that IAEA inspectors would have direct access and be able to take their own samples at Parchin?
MR KIRBY: I do not know what specifics of the confidential arrangement were briefed to members of Congress.
QUESTION: Okay.
MR KIRBY: What we’ve said all along is that – and the director general himself had said – that reports that Iran would be self-inspecting were not accurate, and that he himself was comfortable in the protocols laid out in the arrangement.
QUESTION: That’s not my question. Were they --
MR KIRBY: Well, your question is do I know what Congress were briefed.
QUESTION: Do you know – several members of Congress came out and said that they had been told by the Administration that there would be inspections by IAEA personnel. Do you know if they were told that by the Administration or is that outside --
MR KIRBY: I’m not going to comment on specific communications about a confidential arrangement with members of Congress. What I will go back to say, though, is having been briefed on this arrangement, the Secretary remains comfortable that if Iran meets its side of it, that the IAEA will get the access and the information it needs to properly verify compliance.
QUESTION: Can I change subject?
MR KIRBY: Sure.

Worth recalling what comedian Jackie Mason said about this recently: that in New York City, the restaurants get more intensive inspections from health inspector than the US agreement with Iran calls for. Only the food officials get genuine anytime, anywhere access rights. Because, you know, a spoiled tuna sandwich can really ruin things. 

Incredible, in the literal sense of the word. 

And it's getting clearer that the ruling clique in Tehran do indeed pay attention to the American news media [see "24-Jul-15: If the Iranians read the Wall Street Journal, we're all in deep trouble"]

19-Aug-15: Yes, Iran gets to inspect its own nuclear facilities in side-agreement endorsed by US. Now read that again.

Is this the point at which someone turns on the light in the darkened living room and everyone yells "Surprise"? (And unfortunately, the report we quote below is not from The Onion.)

For US Congress people still trying to keep a straight face as they parry increasingly insistent questions from irate voters and from the puzzled media about the Iran Nuclear Enablement Deal™, life just got a little harder. Here's the latest Iran bulletin from Associated Press, issued in the past hour:

AP EXCLUSIVE: UN TO LET IRAN INSPECT ALLEGED NUKE WORK SITE | Associated Press | George Jahn | August 19, 2015 - 3:56 PM EDT |
VIENNA (AP) -- Iran will be allowed to use its own inspectors to investigate a site it has been accused of using to develop nuclear arms, operating under a secret agreement with the U.N. agency that normally carries out such work, according to a document seen by The Associated Press. The revelation on Wednesday newly riled Republican lawmakers in the U.S. who have been severely critical of a broader agreement to limit Iran's future nuclear programs, signed by the Obama administration, Iran and five world powers in July. Those critics have complained that the wider deal is unwisely built on trust of the Iranians, while the administration has insisted it depends on reliable inspections.
"International inspections should be done by international inspectors. Period. The standard of `anywhere, anytime' inspections - so critical to a viable agreement - has dropped to `when Iran wants, where Iran wants, on Iran's terms,'" said U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce in a reaction typical of opponents of the broader deal.
The newly disclosed side agreement, for an investigation of the Parchin nuclear site by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, is linked to persistent allegations that Iran has worked on atomic weapons. That investigation is part of the overarching nuclear-limits deal...

Satire, you say? Check out The Onion.

John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Republican senator, said, "Trusting Iran to inspect its own nuclear site and report to the U.N. in an open and transparent way is remarkably naive and incredibly reckless. This revelation only reinforces the deep-seated concerns the American people have about the agreement."
The Parchin agreement was worked out between the IAEA and Iran. The United States and the five other world powers were not party to it but were briefed by the IAEA and endorsed it as part of the larger package...
Olli Heinonen, who was in charge of the Iran probe as deputy IAEA director general from 2005 to 2010, said he could think of no similar concession with any other country. The White House has repeatedly denied claims of a secret side deal favorable to Tehran...
Iran has refused access to Parchin for years and has denied any interest in - or work on - nuclear weapons... The IAEA has cited evidence, based on satellite images, of possible attempts to sanitize the site since the alleged work stopped more than a decade ago...
The document is labeled "separate arrangement II," indicating there is another confidential agreement between Iran and the IAEA governing the agency's probe of the nuclear weapons allegations... Iranian diplomats in Vienna were unavailable for comment, Wednesday while IAEA spokesman Serge Gas said the agency had no immediate comment...

There are some stunning implications.

The Obama administration has repeatedly claimed that the deal is based on verification, not trust. However, according to the AP report, IAEA inspectors will be barred from physically accessing Parchin, and Iran will be allowed to conduct its own environmental sampling. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest has often stated that the deal “is built on the most intrusive set of inspections that have ever been imposed on a country’s nuclear program.” However, according to the AP, the arrangement “diverges from normal inspection procedures between the IAEA and a member country by essentially ceding the agency's investigative authority to Iran. It allows Tehran to employ its own experts and equipment in the search for evidence for activities that it has consistently denied — trying to develop nuclear weapons.” [Source: TIP]

Meanwhile, the deputy head of the Iranian parliament for International Affairs in a public statement carried on the Nidae Watan website said Tehran had not invited the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas to come visit. Reports to the contrary are, he said, "a lie". But the Iranian regime is happy to host a Hamas delegation. Past difficulties between the Iranians and the Hamas Islamists have been resolved. Ditto for relations between Iran and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And to end on a high note: "We reject any Israeli presence in this world." (Hat tip to to EoZ.). Context is of course everything, and so he may have intended to say the opposite of what's been quoted.

But in truth, there's just no mistaking the triumphant tones emanating from the Iranian regime in the wake of the JCPOA. Nor can the mullah regime be accused of changing messages according to circumstances. They stick to their theme, and must be wondering how it happens that in the West in general, and the US in particular, inappropriately mild motivations keep being attributed to their leadership even as the leaders themselves stick to some constant and ferocious themes. It's something to keep in mind as solicitation letters and certain politicians' sound-bites keep hammering away at how "this agreement is the best/the only peaceful way/ to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons."

An op ed by a leading US lawyer [here] this week reminds us of one of the consistent Iranian key themes. It has to do (surprise) with Israel, and was articulated by Iran's leaders -

in 2004 when its former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, a supposed moderate, boasted that were Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, it would kill as many as five million Jews. He later elaborated that “the dropping of one atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel”. Despite Iran’s participation in negotiations, such rhetoric has continued unabated.

21-Jun-15: State Department's report on terror: Questions, and questions not asked

Ambassador Kaidanow

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Raport Departamentu Stanu o terrorze") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

Tina S. Kaidanow is the United States of America's Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism. This past Friday was one of the big days in her year. It's when she presented the State Department's annual Country Reports on Terrorism report for 2014. The latest report itself is online here. (And the reports for years going back to 2004 are here.)

The short version is that the twelve months since she presented the 2013 report have seen a stunningly dramatic increase in terrorism (but you won't see those words in the government report). We can see that by looking at such metrics as overall number of attacks, by people killed and kidnapped, and by number of "major" attacks in which 100 or more people were killed. It's a depressing litany.

How seriously should they be taken? In her remarks at the media briefing in which the report was launched [here], Ambassador Kaidanow seemed to suggest we ought to pause and think before we jump on top of the results:

While I cite these statistics, which are compiled by the University of Maryland and are not a U.S. ... Government product per se, I do want to stress again that in our view they don’t provide the full context. Aggregate totals or numbers of attacks are not really a particularly useful metric for measuring the aims of the extremist groups or of our progress in preventing or countering those activities. 

But the numbers she cites in a report with the State Department's name on the cover are worth absorbing. So is the slightly odd way she seems to walk away from any responsibility for them ("not a US Government product per se... their emphasis is a little different than ours..."):

• Number of terrorist attacks up by 35% over previous year to 13,463
• Number of deaths from terrorism up by 81% to 32,727. 
• Number of people kidnapped or taken hostage in a terror attack "increased three-fold" from 3,137 in 2013 to 9,428 in 2014
• No fewer than 20 attacks in which 100 or more people were killed. In 2013, there were 2 of them - a ten-fold increase.

If these incredible numbers and the trends they describe do not tell the whole story then, according to the Ambassador's way of seeing things, what is the story? That's not entirely clear from her remarks or the report itself. To us it actually seems that the numbers are sufficiently persuasive and articulate, moving in a clear direction, and describing a mortal threat that just keeps growing and spreading. Is there a fuller contact that would lead intelligent people to a different, less disturbing, view?

Without drilling down on this, one of the media questioners who spoke after the ambassador's presentation asked a couple of questions that seemed to get to the core of the issue. First this:

"Given the sharp rise in attacks, killings, and kidnappings, what does that say about this department and this Administration writ large, its effectiveness in fighting terror in 2014?" 

And then a few minutes later he moved on to this:

"Was the United States effective last year in fighting terrorism?" 

Then a few minutes after that, a pointed exchange from another reporter:

"Considering all of these objective metrics, how do you see a record of competence or success for this President in the area of counterterrorism? ...You keep talking about inputs and I’m asking about the outputs, the outcomes. 

AMBASSADOR KAIDANOW: Right, well, again, I’ve answered the question. If that’s not satisfactory, then we can have a conversation offline about other issues, but that’s what I would say.

And she moved on immediately to someone else's comment. But to us, those seem like precisely the kind of questions a report like this should be answering.

Iran comes in for some special attention. That's not at all surprising given the prominent role the Iranian regime takes in the field as a state sponsor of terrorism (on a vast scale), first designated as such by the State Department on January 19, 1984 and still on the list. (The others are Syria - an Iranian client - and Sudan.) Its impact comes via multiple channels,

mostly through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force. Iran sponsors terrorist groups Hezbollah in Lebanon, several Iraqi Shia militant groups, Hamas and the Palestine Islamic Jihad... Kaidanow said the department's assessment of Iranian terrorist activity doesn't measure whether the country has increased or decreased its support, and the report also does not take into account any activity in 2015. "We continue to be very, very concerned about [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] activity as well as proxies that act on behalf of Iran," Kaidanow said. "[T]hey are continuing their pursuit of these activities … [W]hether it's expanding, not expanding – that's a little harder to judge, but the point is they're still doing it, we're still concerned." ...Reports that the Obama administration and its partners have whitewashed reports of Iranian sanctions violations to prevent derailing [nuclear talks that are supposed to end in two weeks] have also fueled skepticism negotiators can reach a deal without too many concessions, as well as skepticism Iran will comply with any such deal reached. [US News and World Report, June 19, 2015]

At the same time, the State Department report states, with no elaboration, that

Iran remains a state of proliferation concern. Despite multiple UNSCRs requiring Iran to suspend its sensitive nuclear proliferation activities, Iran continued to be in noncompliance with its international obligations regarding its nuclear program. Implementation of the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) between the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, coordinated by the EU), and Iran began on January 20, 2014. Iran has fulfilled the commitments that it made under the JPOA...

Screen shot from the State Department report [On-line here]

How accurate is that? The Obama administration has made repeated claims that Iran has halted progress on its nuclear program. But many analysts see it differently, including a New York Times report ["Iran’s Nuclear Stockpile Grows, Complicating Negotiations"] on June 1, 2015, just three weeks ago:

With only one month left before a deadline to complete a nuclear deal with Iran, international inspectors have reported that Tehran’s stockpile of nuclear fuel increased about 20 percent over the last 18 months of negotiations, partially undercutting the Obama administration’s contention that the Iranian program had been “frozen” during that period. But Western officials and experts cannot quite figure out why. [NYTimes]

How to understand that? Consider the views of an expert published three months earlier:

It is time for the Obama administration to more accurately describe the impact of the JPOA on Iran’s nuclear program... If Iran is in fact in violation of the JPOA, what steps does the administration plan to take to bring Iran into compliance? By continuing to ignore this apparent violation, the administration will be setting a bad precedent. If violations of the JPOA are ignored, what hope do we have that any violations of any follow-on nuclear agreement will be acknowledged and dealt with? Source: “In Iran, Distrust and Verify | Has the Iranian nuclear program violated the Joint Plan of Action?” [Gregory S. Jones, National Review, March 2, 2015]

Iran itself takes a robust view of such things which it has no hesitation trumpeting: 

Iran rejected Saturday US claims that it was a sponsor of global terror attacks, saying instead it is a victim of terrorism. On Friday, the US State Department said the Islamic Republic "continued to sponsor global terror" attacks last year and supplied arms to the Syrian regime even though it was engaged in talks to rein in its nuclear programme. But Iranian foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said those accusations were "worthless." "For three decades, Iran has been the great victim of terrorism and considers international cooperation to combat terrorism a priority," she said, without elaborating. [AFP, June 20, 2015]

So whom are we to believe? Are the Iranians terrorists or victims of terror? Is the US comfortable with Iranian "compliance" with the Joint Plan of Action (and so we can all move forward to a June 30 agreement with Teheran)? Or is the US trying to sound better informed than in reality it is?

Ambassador Kaidanow's ailing boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, has very recently gone to energetic lengths to claim the US knows everything it needs to know about Iran. Michael Gordon from the New York Times asked him whether ongoing concerns about "suspected nuclear design work and testing of nuclear components" by the Iranian regime had to be "fully resolved before sanctions are eased or released or removed or suspended" and whether that was "a core principle" or negotiable:

SECRETARY KERRY: Michael, the possible military dimensions, frankly, gets distorted a little bit in some of the discussion, in that we’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another. 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. It’s critical to us to know that going forward, those activities have been stopped, and that we can account for that in a legitimate way. That clearly is one of the requirements in our judgment for what has to be achieved in order to have a legitimate agreement. And in order to have an agreement to trigger any kind of material significant sanctions relief, we would have to have those answers. [Source: State Department Briefing, June 16, 2015]

If only. 

Here's what the people from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who have been carrying out a frustrating program of site inspections in Iran for years, now say - and it tells a very different story. This is Yukiya Amano, director general of IAEA

[W]hat 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 tell we know all their activities. And that is why we cannot say that all the activities in Iran is in peaceful purposes... And our information indicates that Iran engaged in activities relevant to the development of nuclear explosive devices. We do not draw conclusions. But we are requesting Iran to clarify these issues... I think it is very important that Iran engage with us to clarify these issues. [From a PBS interview with Amano on March 23, 2015]

And here, as the deadline for an agreement rapidly approaches, Amano is again, saying that the IAEA:

is not in a position to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities... [Statement to the IAEA Board of Governors, June 8, 2015]

So the man with the on-the-ground inspectors says he doesn't know. But the State Department says it has "absolute knowledge"?

Smarter people than we have pointed out that what the US and the world don't know about Iran's nuclear activity makes for a serious list. For instance:

• There's persuasive evidence that North Korea helped jump-start Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. How long that partnership been in place, and what is its status today? [Washington Post, March 29, 2015]
• How far has Iran gotten with testing nuclear detonators [note]
• When the Iranians paved over their Parchin complex, which IAEA said was a possible location for testing explosive triggers for a nuclear blast, what did they hide? [Fox, August 22, 2013]

Do we have the full context? And if the Administration keeps saying what it's saying about Iran's compliance, including as a part of this terrorism report, does say something meaningful about the rest of the report? It's not as if these issues don't matter. Being wrong on terrorism has huge consequences.

11-Nov-14: Two weeks before deadline with Iran, Kerry leave talks early and Iranian plan for "annihilating" Israel goes mostly unreported

Kerry in Muscat: Hello, I must be going [Image Source: Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency]

An interim agreement between Iran and the world (in this case, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) is due to expire on November 24, less than two weeks from now. Iran has gained huge benefits from the existence of the agreement - including agreement by the United States to unblock $2.8 billion in frozen funds, in return for Iran converting a quarter of its enriched uranium stocks - which can be used to make a bomb - into fuel. The unblocking happened, to Iran's great pleasure. The converting has not.

David Horovitz, the editor at Times of Israel, offers a plain-spoken assessment [here, under the give-away title "Looming Iran deal spells the empowering of evil"] of where things stand in relation to the global threat from Iran. If you're looking for glimmers of hope, seek them elsewhere. A brief extract:

It’s almost over. It really doesn’t much matter if a triumphant US Secretary of State John Kerry announces in the next few hours or days that a dramatic accord has been reached with Iran to regulate its nuclear program, or if it is decided to extend the negotiations beyond the November 24 deadline to finalize that deal. We know where the negotiations are heading. We know that the conclusion is dire... Ultimately, the failure is rooted in President Barack Obama’s desire to heal relations with America’s enemies in this part of the world. But what the administration would like to have perceived as a new generosity of spirit emanating from Washington, a desire to conquer past animosities, to build new bridges, to play fair, is regarded in this brutal region, by the purveyors of that brutality, as weakness.

Israel's role, caught right in the middle of this depressing international squeeze, was on our minds again yesterday when the central authority in Iran came out with a re-statement of its higher goals. A CNN report quotes Iran's "supreme leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calling in a new and more detailed way for "the elimination of Israel" while explaining that he (naturally) opposes "a massacre of the Jewish people in this region".

The Iranian leader made his call for Israel to be "annihilated" on Twitter over the weekend. Mixed in with tweets insisting that Iran is committed to diplomacy on other issues, Khamenei posted a series of tweets slamming Israel. Among them was a document called "9 key questions about elimination of Israel." While he and other Iranian leaders have spoken similarly of Israel in the past, the one-page document, packed with specific details, was new. It says the "proper way of eliminating Israel" is for "all the original people of Palestine including Muslims, Christians and Jews wherever they are, whether inside Palestine, in refugee camps in other countries or just anywhere else, take part in a public and organized referendum." The "Jewish immigrants who have been persuaded into emigration to Palestine do not have the right to take part"... In the meantime, "armed resistance is the cure," he says, calling for the West Bank to be "armed like Gaza." The call reflects internal Palestinian politics as well. Iran supports Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. Hamas' rival faction, Fatah, controls the West Bank... [CNN, "

David Horovitz explains what this means in the context of the now-ending negotiations with Iran:

Directly endangered by Iran, and rightly reluctant to resort to the military intervention that the United States should have credibly threatened, Israel cannot afford to adopt the Three Wise Monkeys approach. We see the evil all too clearly. While the international community celebrates a Pyrrhic victory, protecting this country, never anything less than immensely challenging, will have become significantly more complex. [Times of Israel]

Here's another not-so-marginal marginal development. This past weekend, The Times of London ran an interview with Olli Heinonen ["Iran nuclear threat bigger than claimed"] who served the the International Atomic Energy Agency for 27 years and was its Deputy Director-General for Safeguards. He says Iran may well have more than five times the number of advanced centrifuges we think they have been assumed to have.

Iran could have up to 5,000 IR-2m centrifuges rather than the 1,008 it has claimed. The IR-2m devices are up to five times more effective in enriching uranium than older IR-1 types. [Times of London]

The IAEA has said for some time that the Iranians keep stone-walling on giving the required access to "secret" facilities.

All the while, the Americans remain optimistic. Or are they? Al Arabiya's television news last night (Monday) announced ["Nuclear talks end in Oman with ‘little progress’", audio report translated from Arabic]

Good evening, I am Taher Baraka greeting you, and presenting to you the Last Hour for tonight brought to you by Al-Arabiya. I will begin with the headlines:.. Two days of talks in Muscat were not enough to bridge the gap between Iran and the West on the differences on the nuclear file,.. A senior Iranian official said that there is no significant progress in the nuclear talks with the United States and the European Union... The US State Department said that the foreign ministers of the US and Iran held direct, difficult, and serious talks...

Israel's i24 TV news report this morning seems to explain what those direct, difficult and serious talks have produced:

US Secretary of State John Kerry left Muscat, Oman, where talks between world powers and Iran on its nuclear program were underway, without him or his colleagues giving any statements to the press. However, a senior Iranian negotiator said the latest talks ended without any progress, "We can no longer talk about progress in the negotiations, but we are optimistic that we can reach an accord" before the final November 24 deadline, Iran's deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said, quoted by ISNA news agency, after two days of talks between Iranian, US and EU officials. Kerry was due to leave Oman to join US President Barack Obama in Beijing for an Asia-Pacific meeting, but apparently left ahead of schedule... A mutual press conference Kerry planned to hold... was also cancelled, casting the planned talks deadline of November 24th... into further doubt. [i24 TV]

What is not left in doubt is the murderous intent of the Iranian leadership. Khamenei's 9-step plan [here] lays it out, which is headed "Why should & how can #Israel be eliminated? Ayatollah Khamenei's answer to 9 key questions":

We do not expect the usurper Zionists to easily surrender... Up until the day when this homicidal and infanticidal regime is eliminated through a referendum, powerful confrontation and resolute and armed resistance is the cure of this ruinous regime. The only means of confronting a regime which commits crimes beyond one's thought and imagination is a resolute and armed confrontation. [From Khamenei's official Twitter account posting, November 9, 2014]

Why should & how can #Israel be eliminated? Ayatollah Khamenei's answer to 9 key questions. #HandsOffAlAqsa pic.twitter.com/IVPOuNfMQH
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) November 9, 2014

We were reminded how "resolute and armed confrontation" looks (here and here) yesterday. It involves knives (at least) and cars, Palestinian Arab attackers and dead Israeli Jews.

If you have difficulty finding the text of the Khamanei manifesto, you're in good company. As far as we can tell, despite the fact that it appears (as a graphic image and not text) in his Tweet, not a single mainstream media news source has published the full text (and if we are wrong on this, please correct us). Does that make it a propaganda failure for the genocidal Iranians, or a victory?

[For a Polish-language vcrsion of this post, click here. Our thanks once again to Malgorzata Koraszewska of the Listy z naszego sadu website for helping us reach a wider audience. Dziękujemy serdecznie.]

09-Oct-14: Iran's optimism-fuelled march towards nuclear bombs continues unhindered

IsraelDefense has the satellite images [Source]

The Iranian stonewalling goes on.

They have been in the news this week for two reasons. First, something massively damaging appears to have happened in the vicinity of their Parchin military weapons complex, the very site about which United Nations inspectors said "It is very clear that Iran doesn't want the agency to go to Parchin because it has something to hide" in 2012 [Reuters] and to which the International Atomic Energy Agency's people have been refused inspection access since 2005 [BBC] up to and including this past month [ISIS]. And secondly, because an IAEA inspection team is in Iran right now, having arrived there according to plans that were announced months earlier, on Monday.

So here is what we know today.

Explosion: As we said on Monday ["06-Oct-14: Iran's nuclear project has experienced an explosion"], two people were officially announced to have been killed but the official Iranian government reports were thin and opaque. Non-government sources said it was so powerful that windows were blown out in a 15 km radius of Parchin, the heavily-secured and vast facility about which the suspicions of everyone paying attention have been focused, and which is universally believed to be where the Iranian nuclear bombs are being brought to readiness. 

Turns out there are now pre- and post-explosion satellite images via the French satellite Pleiades. They confirm significant pieces of the speculation. An IsraelDefense article makes plain that the photographic evidence shows the denials of the Iranian government are lies:

Satellite images of the Parchin area, to the east of Tehran, prove: the explosion reported by the Iranian media had, indeed, occurred inside the military compound in Parchin, where, according to western intelligence agencies, trials are being conducted on nuclear missile fuzes. Satellite images obtained by Israel Defense and analyzed by specialist Ronen Solomon clearly show damage consistent with an attack against bunkers in a central locality within the military research complex at the Parchin military compound... The locality consists of a sizable testing center and what appears to be an area with bunker-shaped structures. "Before and after" images indicate that a complete section of structures was simply eliminated by an unexplained explosion. The explosion wiped several testing units off the face of the earth while inflicting collateral damage on adjacent buildings...

Iran's "disarmament" expert Najafi: Image Source

Talks: According to a Reuters report today, those scheduled talks in Tehran during Tuesday and Wednesday

appear not to have substantively advanced an investigation into suspected atomic bomb research by Tehran, potentially dimming chances for a broader deal between the Iranians and big powers... The IAEA has for years been trying to get to the bottom of Western intelligence reports suggesting that Iran has worked on designing a nuclear warhead. Iran has denounced the intelligence as fabricated, but has promised to work with the IAEA since last year when Hassan Rouhani, seen as a pragmatist, became president on a platform to overcome his country's international isolation...  The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement... that discussions would continue. But it did not announce a date for the next round of talks focused on the Vienna-based IAEA's concerns that Iran had initially been supposed to address by late August. Diplomats in the Austrian capital said it seemed that very little, if any, progress had been achieved... [By contrast] Tehran's envoy to the Vienna-based U.N. agency, Reza Najafi, said the discussions had been "very constructive", according to Iran's ISNA news agency, which did not elaborate.

How constructive? An AP report today, quoting the same Reza Najafi, Iran's "ambassador" to the IAEA, says he

confirmed that an International Atomic Energy Agency staff member was refused a visa. Najafi didn't identify the person, but told Iran's Fars news agency that he had a "particular nationality."

A Washington Post article today makes clear the "particular nationality" was, not exactly surprisingly, of the United States:

Two diplomats from IAEA member nations who spoke to The Associated Press demanded anonymity because their information is confidential. They said the U.S. expert first applied for a visa eight months ago and had been turned down several times since. [Washington Post]

Just six days ago, Najafi accused the IAEA of espionage and leaking classified information on its nuclear program:

"It is unfortunate that, once again, the agency has failed to protect classified information. While Iran and the agency made plans, news of these plans have been published in the middle of the West," Najafi said in remarks reported by the Iranian state news agency IRNA. The diplomat, who did not specify what information or what average meant, felt that this event "reconfirms the Iranian concerns about the existence of espionage activities in the agency." [Source: EFE]

When Najafi was appointed a year ago, a Reuters report fairly gushed about how the new man was a "disarmament expert" and that his appointment extended "a reshuffle of top officials dealing with its disputed atomic program since new President Hassan Rouhani took office vowing to improve Iran's foreign relations.... Rouhani has vowed Iran will be more transparent and less confrontational in talks both with the IAEA and the big powers." A year further along, and this can be filed away in the rapidly overflowing self-delusionally-optimistic drawer.

Meanwhile: In November 2013, the six major powers -- the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia -- said they had reached some kind of temporary agreement with Iran in Geneva, as a result of which all sorts of very substantial benefits immediately became available to the Iranian regime. A long-term understanding about nuclear weapons was supposed to follow by July 2014. Nothing of the sort happened. Now there's vague talk of a November 2014 deadline.

As today's developments demonstrate, there's zero likelihood of that. producing anything useful.

06-Oct-14: Iran's nuclear project has experienced an explosion

Iran's Parchin complex, in a Google Maps 2012 aerial view: 40 square
kilometers of secret military facilities dedicated to explosives,
scattered across the desert and mountains [Image Source] 

Something serious is happening in Iran, and it seems it's connected with the Iranian nuclear program. From the BBC this evening:

A fire and explosion at a military explosives facility near the Iranian capital Tehran has left at least two people dead, reports say. The semi-official Iranian Students News Agency (Isna) said the fire was in an "explosive materials production unit". A pro-opposition website reported a huge blast near the Parchin military site, south-east of the capital, but this was not confirmed. Parchin has been linked to Iran's controversial nuclear programme. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has not been given access to the complex since 2005. Analysts say the IAEA suspects Iran of experimenting with explosives capable of triggering a nuclear weapon at Parchin.

Times of Israel, quoting Iranian sources, says "the blast was so powerful it shattered windows up to 12 kilometers away and the glare from the explosion lit up the night sky." As we said, something serious.

Two and a half years ago, we posted here ["29-Feb-12: Atomic energy agency says today Iran is hiding something "very concerning""] about the rising tone of reports emanating from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, which had

told diplomats today in a three-hour long closed-door briefing in Vienna that they are "very concerned" about what is going on at Iran's Parchin military facility. The IAEA's request to visit the site, which has been flatly refused by the Tehran regime, is now more urgent. Chief inspector Herman Nackaerts said the U.N. agency was monitoring the site, southeast of Tehran, via satellite imaging. A Western diplomat who participated today is quoted saying "It is very clear that Iran doesn't want the agency to go to Parchin because it has something to hide". What might that be?

Our post goes on:

Last November [2011], the agency reported that there was “a large explosives containment vessel” at Parchin for large-scale conventional explosives tests consistent with designing a nuclear warhead for Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. 

Soon afterwards, in March 2012, we wrote about how the IAEA was getting blunter in its messaging, having reached the stage where it was ready to say that on nuclear weapons development "Iran is not providing the necessary cooperation".

And exactly a month ago, while reviewing how the Obama Administration was acting and talking in the face of Iranian stonewalling ["06-Sep-14: Iran, US and opening up a new path toward a more secure world: how well is that going?"], we took a closer look at the Parchin weapons complex, and asked:

Are we closer to achieving supervision and control of Iran's no-longer-so-secret nuclear weapon ambitions? Or further away? ...

We wrote then that

Parchin is key to the whole matter: it's the Iranian military complex 30 kilometres southeast of Tehran covering some 40 square kilometres of desert and mountains with "hundreds of buildings and test sites" that are "dedicated to research, development, and production of ammunition, rockets, and high explosives... The IAEA continues to call on Iran to grant inspectors access to the site, although as of the spring of 2013, Iran had refused IAEA access while continuing to reconstruct the site. " [Source: ISIS] 

The IAEA has a new delegation arriving in Teheran this evening about the time that we write these words, according to an official FARS Newsagency report. (But it has no mention about today's explosion.) Anyone think they're going to get to clarity on these cloudy and increasingly dangerous issues?

07-Sep-14: Viewing Iran's stonewalling from a friendlier, more Danish, angle

Teheran, 2006 [Image Source]

Did we say "depressed"? Evidently there's a very different way to view the events about which we posted here yesterday [see "06-Sep-14: Iran, US and opening up a new path toward a more secure world: how well is that going?"]. A Danish way. 

This comes from today's edition of the English-language Teheran Times:

Danish Foreign Minister Martin Lidegaard has expressed optimism that a comprehensive and lasting nuclear agreement with Iran could be reached by the November 24 deadline if there was a “political will”. In an exclusive interview with IRNA ahead of his visit to Iran, Lidegaard said, “We are very encouraged by the recent IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) report that Iran continues to meet the relevant obligations under the Joint Plan of Action. This gives grounds for optimism that a final and comprehensive deal indeed can be reached by the deadline set for 24 November.”

(IRNA is the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran's official government-funded and -controlled news outlet, an arm of the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The Tehran Times calls itself "Iran's Leading International Daily", and "the voice of the Islamic Revolution and the oppressed people in the world”. Wikipedia calls it "one of the outlets for the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security (Iran)".

Iran unilaterally cut trade ties with Denmark in February 2006 [BBC]. This was part of its very robust protest (including a violent assault on the Danish embassy in Teheran by rioters who chanted "Death to Denmark") at cartoons appearing in a Danish newspaper satirizing the Prophet Muhammad.

But just this past week, shortly after the Lidegaard visit was announced, the semi-government-controlled (that's Wikipedia's term) Iranian FARS news agency focused briefly on Denmark, happily informing readers that

Noted Danish writers and intellectuals... denounced Israel's violations against the Palestinian people and said that its blockade and military attacks on Gaza as well as its occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank are factors preventing the achievement of peace and generating incessant violence. [FARS, September 2, 2014]

In reporting his upcoming visit yesterday, FARS shares the news that

Several European countries have seriously south [sic - we assume they meant "sought"] to expand ties with Iran after Tehran and the six major world powers cut an interim deal over the country’s nuclear program in Geneva on November 24, 2013. [FARS Iranian News, September 6, 2014]

Lidegaard will also be calling in at Saudi Arabia. His optimistic nature is bound to come in handy there too.