Author Archives: Denise Simon

JPOA, Iran Deal Reached, Announcement is a Formality

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Fundamentally: JPOA: Comprehensive nuclear deal would “produce the comprehensive lifting of all UN Security Council sanctions.” That includes arms embargo. As the deal is being broadcasted in coming hours, Tehran has a flag burning. So has the signing bonus been delivered?

Update: 5:45 PM, EST

Associated Press is reporting that putting items on paper with correct language is being worked now and the celebrations are in preparation. Details are here.

Update: 5:00 PM, EST

Terms of the JPOA Iran Deal from FarsNews Agency:

TEHRAN (FNA)- A source privy to the talks between Iran and the six world powers said in case Iran and the six world powers agree on a final deal, the text of the agreement will include the following points.

“In case the opposite side shows political will and the final agreement is signed, the text of the agreement will include the following points,” the source said.

“According to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, all sanctions against Iran are terminated and Iran will no more be recognized as a sanctioned nation,” the source said, and added, “The JCPA only envisages a set of temporary restrictions that will be removed after a limited and logical period of time, as stated earlier by the Iranian Supreme Leader.”

“All economic, financial and banking sanctions against Iran will be terminated for good on day one after the endorsement of the deal, again as the Iranian Supreme Leader has demanded.”

“Iran will no more be under any arms embargo, and according to a UN Security Council resolution that will be issued on the day when the deal is signed by the seven states, all arms embargos against Iran will be terminated, while its annex keeps some temporary restrictions on Iran for a limited period,” the source disclosed.

He said the JCPA is, in fact, a collection of multiple agreements that all fall within the redlines specified by the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, and includes a set of temporary and limited measures that will remain valid for different periods of time.

“The upcoming UN Security Council resolution – that will call all the previous five resolutions against Iran null and void – will be the last resolution to be issued on Iran’s nuclear program and withdraws Iran’s nuclear dossier from under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. This last resolution will remain valid and will be implemented for a specifically limited period of time and will then automatically end at the end of this period,” the source added.

“This is the first time that a nation subject to Chapter 7 of the UN Charter has managed to end its case and stop being subject to this chapter through active diplomacy,” he concluded.

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Iran, powers near to historic deal; U.S. says tough issues remain

By Parisa Hafezi and Arshad Mohammed

VIENNA (Reuters) – After more than two weeks of marathon negotiations, Iran and six world powers were close to nailing down an historic nuclear deal that would bring sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on Tehran’s atomic program, diplomats said on Sunday.

But Iranian and Western officials said it was unlikely they would be able to finalize an agreement on Sunday, saying the earliest an agreement could be ready was more likely Monday.

“We are working hard, but a deal tonight is simply logistically impossible,” Alireza Miryousefi, a spokesman for the Iranian delegation, said on Twitter. “This is a 100-page document, after all.”

A Western official said Tehran and Washington would need time to consult their capitals once an agreement was reached.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry cautioned that some difficult issues remained on the 16th day of ministerial negotiations between Iran, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China.

“I think we’re getting to some real decisions,” Kerry told reporters in the Austrian capital. “So I will say, because we have a few tough things to do, I remain hopeful. Hopeful.”

Several diplomats said an agreement that would end more than a year and a half of negotiations was so close that it could come as early as on Sunday. In a sign that something might be in the works, both Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi were also due to join the talks on Sunday.

However, a senior U.S. official played down speculation that an agreement was in the works on Sunday, and reiterated Kerry’s point that “major issues remain to be resolved in these talks.”

French Foreign Minister Laurent said he hoped the high-stakes negotiations were finally drawing to a close.

“I hope, I hope, that we are finally entering the final phase of this marathon negotiation,” Laurent Fabius told reporters.

“I believe it,” he added. “France’s position has been one of constructive firmness and I hope it will allow is to reach the end now, quickly, for a satisfying result.”

A senior Iranian official also said an agreement was close.

“Some 99 percent of the issues have been resolved and the agreement is ready,” said an Iranian diplomat. “With political will, we can finish the work late tonight and announce it tomorrow. But still there are at least two issues to be resolved.”

IRAN LEADER SETS NO NEW ‘RED LINES’

Iran and the six powers involved in the talks have given themselves until Monday to reach a deal, their third extension in two weeks, as the Iranian delegation accused the West of throwing up new stumbling blocks to an accord.

Among the biggest sticking points this week has been Iran’s insistence that a United Nations Security Council arms embargo and ban on its ballistic missile program dating from 2006 be lifted immediately if an agreement is reached.

Russia, which sells weapons to Iran, has publicly supported Tehran on the issue.

However, a senior Western diplomat said earlier in the week the six powers remained united, despite Moscow’s and Beijing’s well-known dislike of the embargos.

Western powers have long suspected Iran of aiming to build nuclear bombs and using its civilian atomic energy program to cloak its intention – an accusation Iran strongly denies.

The goal of the deal is to increase the time it would take for Iran to produce enough enriched uranium fuel for a single weapon to at least one year from current estimates of 2-3 months – the “breakout” time.

If there is a deal, the limits on Iran’s enrichment program are expected to be in place for at least a decade.

Other problematic issues in the talks are access for inspectors to military sites in Iran, answers from Tehran over past activity and the overall speed of sanctions relief.

Kerry and Zarif have met nearly every day since Kerry arrived in Vienna more than two weeks ago for what was intended to be the final phase in a negotiation process that began with an interim nuclear deal clinched in November 2013.

Experts and senior officials from Iran, the United States and the other powers have been meeting non-stop for months, often working into the early hours of the morning, to finalize an accord that will include five technical annexes.

An agreement would be the biggest step toward rapprochement between Iran and the West since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, although both sides are likely to remain wary of each other even if a deal is concluded.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said Tehran would continue its fight against “global arrogance” – referring to the United States. But Khamenei did not set any new “red lines” for his negotiators as he did in a tough speech two weeks ago.

In Washington, the top Republican in the U.S. Senate cast doubt on whether President Barack Obama will be able to win approval in Congress for any deal.

“I think it’s going to be a very hard sell, if it’s completed, in Congress,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the “Fox News Sunday” broadcast. “We already know it’s going to leave Iran as a threshold nuclear state.”

Pope Transforms Papacy to Political Pulpit

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Pope Francis has applied his authority and the Catholic Church altering Catholic doctrine and message to high stakes politics. He has solicited high stakes policy wonks on the matter of Climate Change and his team is mobilized.

His shepherds, his Bishops, his Cardinals will install United Nations approved language and actions into all sermons, visits and religious message.

What a shame, there was such hope for renaissance of the Vatican yet it was short lived.

Note: Naomi Klein is a social activist who is against corporate capitalism, and has the DNA of peace activism and her grandparents were communists. She admits to being labeled a red-diaper baby where social justice and racial equality is her continued bent. Climate change is her mission. Klein is an acolyte of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky proven by the third book she authored titled The Shock Doctrine.

Hence, she successfully gained the attention of Pope Francis.

From the Guardian:

Pope Francis recruits Naomi Klein in climate change battle

Social activist ‘surprised but delighted’ to join top cardinal in high-level environment conference at the Vatican

She is one of the world’s most high-profile social activists and a ferocious critic of 21st-century capitalism. He is one of the pope’s most senior aides and a professor of climate change economics. But this week the secular radical will join forces with the Catholic cardinal in the latest move by Pope Francis to shift the debate on global warming.

Naomi Klein and Cardinal Peter Turkson are to lead a high-level conference on the environment, bringing together churchmen, scientists and activists to debate climate change action. Klein, who campaigns for an overhaul of the global financial system to tackle climate change, told the Observer she was surprised but delighted to receive the invitation from Turkson’s office.

“The fact that they invited me indicates they’re not backing down from the fight. A lot of people have patted the pope on the head, but said he’s wrong on the economics. I think he’s right on the economics,” she said, referring to Pope Francis’s recent publication of an encyclical on the environment.

Release of the document earlier this month thrust the pontiff to the centre of the global debate on climate change, as he berated politicians for creating a system that serves wealthy countries at the expense of the poorest.

Activists and religious leaders will gather in Rome on Sunday, marching through the Eternal City before the Vatican welcomes campaigners to the conference, which will focus on the UN’s impending climate change summit.

Protesters have chosen the French embassy as their starting point – a Renaissance palace famed for its beautiful frescoes, but more significantly a symbol of the United Nations climate change conference, which will be hosted by Paris this December.

Nearly 500 years since Galileo was found guilty of heresy, the Holy See is leading the rallying cry for the world to wake up and listen to scientists on climate change. Multi-faith leaders will walk alongside scientists and campaigners, hailing from organisations including Greenpeace and Oxfam Italy, marching to the Vatican to celebrate the pope’s tough stance on environmental issues.

The imminent arrival of Klein within the Vatican walls has raised some eyebrows, but the involvement of lay people in church discussions is not without precedent.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, delivered the keynote address at a Vatican summit in April on climate change and poverty. Anticipating the encyclical, he said he was depending on the pope’s “moral voice and moral leadership” to speed up action.

When it came to the presentation of the document itself, the pontiff picked a five-strong panel, including a Rome school teacher and a leading scientist. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who heads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, used the time to give churchmen a lesson in climate science.

The pope has upset some conservatives for drawing people from outside the clergy into the heart of the debate, while critics have also argued the Catholic church should not be involved in an issue that should be left to presidents and policy-makers.

But Klein said the pope’s position as a “moral voice” in the world – and leader of 1.2 billion Catholics – gives him the unique ability to unite campaigners fighting for a common goal. “The holistic view of the encyclical should be a catalyst to bring together the twin economic and climate crises, instead of treating them separately,” she said.

Much of the pope’s discourse focuses on the need to give developing countries a greater voice in climate change negotiations, a view that sits uncomfortably among some in developed nations. “There are a lot of people who are having a lot of trouble in realising there is a voice with such global authority from the global south. That’s why we’re getting this condescending view, of ‘leave the economics to us’,” said Klein.

She views the rise of Francis as an environmental campaigner as marking a welcome shift not only in the international sphere but also at the Holy See: “We’re seeing the power base within the Vatican shift, with a Ghanaian cardinal [Turkson] and an Argentine pope. They’re doing something very brave.”

While the upcoming conference is centred on the pope’s encyclical, delegates will also be looking ahead to decisive international meetings this year. Before the Paris talks comes a UN summit, where states are due to commit to sustainable development goals, which will inevitably affect the environment.

The pope will fly into New York on the first day of the meeting and address the UN general assembly, reinforcing his message and emboldening countries worst affected by climate change.

For Klein, the papal visit will mark a much-needed change in the way negotiators discuss the environment. “There’s a way in which UN discourse sanitises the extent to which this is a moral crisis,” she said. “It cries out for a moral voice.”

WH Visitor Logs Shows the Pro-Iran U.S. Posture

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In 2013, NAIC, National Iranian American Council was ordered to pay almost $200,000 due to failure to disclose and comply with lobby rules.

Trita Parsi, the founder of NAIC has frequent access to the White House and exploits that access for the mission to lift sanctions on Iran of which has been most effective during the talks of the P5+1.

Parsi has been at it a very long time and he drafted this fancy document on the sanctions and in full defense of Iran. “Never Give In, Never Give Up”

Parsi also has an interesting

In part from FreeBeacon:

“Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which has been accused of lobbying on the regime’s behalf, has met a handful of times with the White House between 2013 and 2014, according to visitor logs.

Parsi and NIAC have been key advocates for the administration’s diplomacy with Iran and have been present during various rounds of negotiations.

Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund—a group that has been at the center of attempts to try to sell a deal with Iran—is also listed on White House visitor logs.

Cirincione’s organization has been a key funder of organizations such as NIAC and J Street as they seek to promote a final nuclear deal with Iran and the administration’s efforts.

Ploughshares has been identified in reports as working on a “behind the scenes strategy” with senior White House officials such as Ben Rhodes to help promote the deal.

Plougshares has spent more than $7 million funding organizations and experts that have publicly defended the administration’s concessions to Iran in talks, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The Ploughshares coalition includes a former Iranian government spokesman, the liberal Jewish organization J Street, and a group of former American diplomats who have held private talks with Iranian government officials,” the Journal reported in March.

In the case of Sfard, a White House NSC official declined to provide further details about his meeting or comment when contacted by the Free Beacon. In addition to the PLO, Sfard also has worked with Breaking the Silence, a far-left group that seeks to launch war crimes charges against Israelis and those in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), according to a dossier published by NGO Monitor, which tracks anti-Israel groups and actors.”

The lobby work begins on lawmakers on the missiles

Pro-Tehran Lobby Demands Iran Be Given Ballistic Missiles

Group pushing Iranian arms on Capitol Hill by Adam Kredo

FreeBeacon:

A pro-Tehran advocacy group long accused of concealing illicit ties to the Iranian regime is lobbying Congress in support of a demand that America repeal a United Nations arms embargo limiting the Islamic Republic’s ability to stockpile arms, including ballistic missiles, which could be used to carry nuclear payloads, according to a copy of an email sent by the group to various lawmakers.

The National American Iranian Council (NIAC), which has long been suspected of acting as Tehran’s lobbying shop in Washington, D.C., sent lawmakers an email on Friday asserting that “the Iranian arms embargo will need to be disposed of as part of a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.”

The email comes roughly a week after Iranian diplomats issued a similar demand during ongoing talks in Vienna between world powers and Iran. The new condition has been blamed for grinding negotiations to a halt, as diplomats blew through a third self-imposed deadline this weekend.

The NIAC email on ballistic missiles is in step with Iran’s potentially deal-breaking demands.

“The UN embargo imposed on Iran’s trade in certain conventional arms was specifically imposed by the Security Council to deal with the nuclear dispute,” wrote Tyler Cullis, who is identified in the email as a legal fellow at the council.

Cullis writes: “Starting with [United Nations Security Council resolution] UNSCR 1747 in 2007, the Security Council imposed a ban on Iranian arms exports. The Council followed up this export ban with more comprehensive restrictions on the sale to or from Iran of certain heavy-weapons, including battle tanks, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, and the like in 2010 via UNSCR 1929.”

NIAC maintains that such restrictions should be lifted as part of a nuclear agreement, even though they are not specific restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program.

A range of sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon—including analysts, former intelligence officials, as well as current and former congressional staffers—challenged both the legal analysis and motivation of NIAC’s letter to lawmakers.

Critics remain concerned that such a move could legally allow Iran to funnel arms to terror groups such as Hezbollah and militias in Yemen.

One former congressional staffer involved in the crafting of sanctions legislation over the years dismissed NIAC’s claims as unfounded and flatly misleading.

“NIAC is the same group that lobbies Congress to defund human rights and democracy promotion programs in Iran for fear of undermining the mullahs,” said one former senior Senate aide with intimate knowledge of Iran sanctions. “What the Iran lobby doesn’t want you to know is that UN Security Council sanctions are directly tied to the dismantlement of Iran’s ballistic missile program—a key element being excused from the P5+1 agreement.”

One senior congressional aide familiar with efforts to sanction Iran said NIAC is widely viewed as Tehran’s in-house lobbying shop.

NIAC has absolutely no credibility on Capitol Hill, where that organization is viewed as a de facto lobbyist for the Iranian regime,” said the senior congressional staffer.

“To cite the latest example, for many months NIAC has opposed the inclusion of ballistic missile limitations or anything else non-nuclear in the negotiations with Iran, yet today NIAC sent an email to congressional staff that actually backs up the Iranian regime’s ridiculous, last-second demand that the United Nations drop its non-nuclear arms embargo on Iran,” the source said.

Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser for George W. Bush, said the Iranian arms embargo will become even more critical in future years.

“The arms embargo on Iran is even more critical today than when it was imposed in 2007 in UN Security Council Resolution 1747,” Abrams explained. “Since then Iran has helped kill or maim thousands of Americans in Iraq, has sent more and more arms to Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria, has intervened in Yemen, and now has an expeditionary force of Revolutionary Guard troops fighting in Iraq and Syria.”

“To end the arms embargo now would be throwing gasoline in a fire: the flames would spread. It is dangerous and absolutely against U.S. national security interests to lift the arms embargo on Iran,” Abrams said.

One Western source present in Vienna and apprised of the talks cast doubt on NIAC’s legal analysis concluding that the arms embargo was only aimed at Iran’s nuclear program.

“The Security Council had moved beyond Iran’s nuclear work before the first arms embargo was even imposed,” said the Western source. “UNSCR 1737 sought ‘to constrain Iran’s development of sensitive technologies in support of its nuclear and missile programs.”

“Subsequent resolutions reaffirmed that language, and ultimately UNSCR 1929 demanded an arms embargo ‘until such time as the Security Council determines that the objectives of these resolutions have been met,” the source explained.

NIAC has long been viewed as a pro-Tehran lobbying outfit that tows the regime’s line in the halls of Congress.

In 2012, NIAC was ordered to pay reparations to an Iranian dissident who sued the organization for allegedly concealing its ties to the Iranian regime. NIAC was ordered to pay thousands to the defendant and was upbraided by a federal judge for hindering the discovery process in the case.

In recent years, NIAC has spearheaded lobbying efforts on the Hill to threaten lawmakers into supporting a deal with Iran that fully removes economic sanctions and permits the Islamic Republic to retain key aspects of its nuclear infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry announced late Friday that talks will continue through next week.

“We have a couple of different lines of discussion that are going on right now, but I think it’s safe to say that we have made progress today,” Kerry said in a statement to reporters. “The atmosphere is very constructive.”

 

Meet Vahid Alaghband, a Clinton Donor and Pelosi?

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I’m Iranian

Treasury Designates Iranian Commercial Airline Linked to Iran’s Support for Terrorism (2011)

Bloomberg: After completing the 1.1 billion euro ($1.4 billion) buyout of Germany’s Kloeckner & Co., the world’s largest independent steel distributor, Vahid Alaghband was a perfect candidate to address “cross-border mergers — challenges and pitfalls” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The Iranian-born founder and chairman of London-based steel trading company Balli Group Plc never got the chance. As he traversed the Zurich airport on Jan. 23, 2003, immigration police detained him on a German arrest warrant.

Without Alaghband’s knowledge, WestLB AG, Germany’s third-biggest state-owned bank and his partner in the Kloeckner takeover, had filed a criminal complaint almost a year earlier accusing him of unlawfully removing 120 million euros from Kloeckner.

Instead of starring in Davos, Alaghband, 53, spent the next 11 months in jail, first in Zurich and then in Duisburg, the German city where Kloeckner was based. In February 2003, the same prosecutor’s office that’s investigating Alaghband charged Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann with breach of trust for his role as a Mannesmann AG director in paying bonuses during Dusseldorf-based Mannesmann’s unsuccessful attempt to fend off a takeover by Vodafone Group Plc. In both cases, foreign acquirers bought German icons and suffered as a result.

Excerpt from I’m Iranian: Fifteen months after his release from jail, Alaghband is back to running Balli. Last year, the company increased revenue 50 percent to $2 billion as demand and prices for steel surged.  Alaghband is busy as a member of the international council of the Asia Society, the New York-based organization that John D. Rockefeller founded to promote understanding between Asia and the U.S.

Alaghband says even if the Kloeckner acquisition ran afoul of German laws, he could have resolved the differences.

“In any cross-border merger, there are things that fall between the cracks,” he says. “When you have a plumbing problem, you fix it, not blow up the house.”

As for the circumstances that stripped the Iranian millionaire’s fortune in the 1970s and then allowed him to rebuild, only to have his freedom and his property seized again, Alaghband says: “I had lost my assets in Iran once. I didn’t think it was going to happen again in Germany, in the middle of Europe.”

Now the real read begins

Clinton Foundation Donor Violated Iran Sanctions, Tried to Sell 747s to Tehran

From the DailyBeast:
Vahid Alaghband’s firm did business with an Iranian airline accused of shipping guns and troops to Syria.
An Iranian businessman accused by the U.S. government of violating sanctions on Tehran donated money to the Clinton Foundation, The Daily Beast has confirmed.Vahid Alaghband’s Balli Aviation Ltd., a London-based subsidiary of the commodities trading firm Balli Group PLC, tried to sell 747 airplanes to Iran, despite a federal ban on such sales. The company pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal information in 2010. In its plea agreement with the Department of Justice, Balli Aviation agreed to pay a $2 million criminal fine, serve five years corporate probation, and pay an additional $15 million in civil fines. The hefty sum was “a direct consequence of the level of deception used to mislead investigators,” Thomas Madigan, a top Justice Department official, said at the time.

Alaghband is one of an array of questionable actors who’ve been found in recent months to give to the Clinton Foundation.  The gifts  – from foreign governments with human rights violations like Qatar, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and China as well as  FIFA, soccer’s corrupt governing body – have complicated Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president and raised questions as to whether these entities were trying to curry favor with the former Secretary of State.

But Alaghband stands out from the rest, because the beneficiary of his firm’s deals with Tehran was an Iranian airline accused by the U.S. government of working with the regime’s foreign intelligence operatives and shipping arms and troops to Syria. Plus, if an agreement between Iran and the world’s major powers is concluded in the coming days – as is widely expected – operators like Alaghband could stand to benefit. Hillary Clinton will be put in the awkward position of either defending the act of the Obama administration in which she once served or criticizing the culmination of a U.S.-Iran rapprochement effort, which her State Department began.

One of the two counts against Balli Aviation was that it “conspired to export three Boeing 747 aircraft from the United States to Iran,” according to a Justice Department statement, without first obtaining the necessary export licenses from the U.S. government. The company then used its Armenian airline subsidiary to buy the 747s with financing obtained from Mahan Air, Iran’s largest private airline, which is thought by the State Department to be controlled by former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

In 2011, the Treasury Department sanctioned the airline for “providing financial, material and technological support to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF),” or the expeditionary arm of the Islamic Republic’s praetorian military division, now heavily active in both Syria and Iraq. At the time, the Treasury Department accused the Qods Force of “secretly ferrying operatives, weapons and funds” on Mahan flights.

On the Clinton Foundation website, Alaghband’s company is listed as a donor in the $10,001 to $25,000 bracket. Moreover, on the website for Balli Real Estate, a property investment and development subsidiary also based in the UK, his personal bio describes him as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative.

This affiliation, along with his donation to the Foundation, came as a surprise to Alaghband.

“I am not a member of the Clinton Global Initiative,” he told The Daily Beast from London. “I attended a few meetings. The last meeting was 10 years ago. I don’t recall having ever made a contribution.” Asked why he was listed as a member of the CGI on his own corporate website, he said: “I haven’t seen this website recently. If attending a few meetings makes you a member, I don’t know.”

A source familiar with the Clinton Foundation told The Daily Beast that “Vahid Alaghband was never a member of CGI in a personal capacity.” However, the source added, “In 2007, Balli Group paid a onetime CGI membership fee and they designated him as their delegate to the meeting.”

Alaghband did recall giving money to another influential organization — the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Brookings Institution. The donation he gave was to Brookings’ former Middle East policy shop, the Saban Center, which had been named for its major benefactor, the Israeli billionaire Haim Saban. (Staunchly pro-Israel, Saban is also, coincidentally, an avowed supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions.)

In 2007, Alaghband offered to give a $900,000 donation to run for three years to Brookings via the U.S.-based PARSA Foundation, “the first Persian community foundation in the U.S. and the leading Persian philanthropic institution practicing strategic philanthropy and promoting social entrepreneurship around the globe,” as the foundation’s website describes it.

Keynote Speaker Pelosi

Emails obtained in the discovery process of a separate libel case show that Alaghband, who had already donated at least $50,000 to PARSA, initially intended to make a pass-through donation via the foundation to Brookings.

But Alaghband says that he never ultimately used PARSA as a conduit for his donation; instead made his contribution directly to the Saban Center. He claims that the amount given was “far less” than $900,000 but declined to specify how much. Furthermore, he insisted, the money wasn’t ear-marked for any specific project or research use. “Our donation went to the Saban Center and they had full discretion as to what to do with it,” Alaghband said. “Martin Indyk had discretion over the use of the funds.”

Indyk, who headed the Saban Center from 2002 to 2013, is today the Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy at Brookings. He also served— twice—as U.S. ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration. In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry named Indyk the U.S. envoy to the Middle East.

“When we took the donation nobody knew there were any problems with Alaghband,” David Nassar, the Vice President of Communications for Brookings, told The Daily Beast, speaking on behalf of the think tank. Nassar also specified that the donation came from Balli Group bank accounts, not from Alaghband’s personal accounts. (Full disclosure: Daily Beast executive editor Noah Shachtman previously did work as a non-resident fellow in Brookings’ foreign policy division.)

A former Brookings staffer with direct knowledge of the donation told The Daily Beast said that, on the contrary, Alaghband’s problems with the U.S. government were known to the think tank at the time and that the money helped finance the work of Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department policy advisor and Republican advocate of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement.

Nassar told The Daily Beast that the suggestion that Alaghband’s donation was intended to bolster Maloney’s pro-rapprochement research was false. “The money was general funding for the Persian Gulf Initiative and not directed at any particular issue or any particular scholar,” he said. Nevertheless, the Persian Gulf Initiative was a program run by the Saban Center and Maloney worked on it.

Maloney is married to Ray Takeyh, an Iran scholar who served in the Obama White House in 2009 and who, during that period, was one of the lead advocates of engagement with Tehran.

Since leaving the administration, Takeyh has emerged as a scathing critic of his former employer’s nuclear diplomacy. But in 2008, Maloney and Takeyh jointly published a 34-page white paper with the Saban Center titled, “Pathway to Coexistence: A New U.S. Policy toward Iran.”  Arguing that the longstanding U.S. policy of containment “is actually obsolete because Iran is no longer an expansionist power,” they called not for a mere “policy shift but for a paradigm change” in Washington.

In many ways, the paper essentially forecasted what Obama administration’s approach to dealing with Iran, from the largely hands-off approach to Iran’s bloody 2009 Green Revolution to the present-day compromises on its nuclear program.

Alaghband’s legal troubles did not appear to affect his relationship with Brookings a year after Balli Aviation was hit by the U.S. Commerce Department with a temporary ban on his Iranian export business. In February 2009, he spoke at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, where Brookings has another Middle East center, this one bankrolled by the Qatari government. The forum, in fact, was organized by the Saban Center on behalf of that government.

Alaghband, for his part, insists that he did nothing wrong, despite his company’s guilty plea.

“The settlement [with the Justice Department] was one under which we did not have to accept liability. We just agreed to make a payment and settle out of court,” he told The Daily Beast. “We had to establish a compliance program and do all of those things. The transactions we were engaged in was reviewed by and subject to a legal to a legal opinion both in the UK and U.S. about the compliance of with sanctions. We proceeded on this basis.”

The settlement also represented the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security.

PARSA’s second largest recipient of grants is the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a Washington, D.C.-based lobby group close to the Iranian regime, which advocates an end to all U.S. sanctions on Iran. It received a total received a total of $591,500 from the foundation. Alaghband’s brother, Hassan Alaghband, who is also the CEO of the Balli Group, spoke at a organized conference in Tehran by one of NIAC’s founders in June 2007, at which he spoke about Western companies doing business in Iran and cited Balli’s client, Caterpillar, as a case study.

The Balli Group PLC had once been the world’s second-largest steel trader but it declared bankruptcy in 2013. A major reason for its folding? U.S. sanctions on Iran.

 

 

Illegal Criminal Numbers Obama Goes to Court

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Unpacking The Numbers

From Center for Immigration Studies: In 2013, a sample statistic is ICE is carrying a case load of 1.8 million aliens who are either in removal proceedings or have already been ordered removed. Less than two percent are in detention, which is the only proven way to ensure departure.

Most Wanted

Taking a walk over to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list has 7 foreign national criminals whose rap sheets are so extensive that rewards are offered for their captures.

Illegal Sentencing Statistics

Washington Examiner: Of the more than 2,200 people who received federal sentences for drug possession in fiscal year 2014, almost three-quarters of them were illegal immigrants, according to new data from the United States Sentencing Commission.

Illegal immigrants also made up more than one-third of all federal sentences, that data said.

The commission’s data showed a slight decline in the total number of illegal alien sentences from 2013 to 2014, but still showed that the illegal population is a major contributor to federal crimes in America.

In 2013, illegal immigrants were responsible for 38.6 percent of all federal sentencing, and that dropped to 36.7 percent in 2014.

But the sentencing of illegal immigrants for drug possession jumped significantly. In 2013, 1,123 illegal immigrants were sentenced on convictions of simple possession, and made up 55.8 percent of those cases.

In 2014, 1,681 illegal aliens were sentenced, and they made up 74.1 percent of the total. Illegal immigrants were also 16.9 percent of all federal drug trafficking sentences.

The data became public just as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has pushed for tougher immigration laws, and has cited last week’s shooting death of a California woman at the hands of an illegal immigrant as the latest example of the need for more enforcement.

Illegal immigrants were 20 percent of the kidnapping/hostage taking sentences in 2014, 12 percent of the murder sentences, and 19.4 percent of national-defense related sentences.

As expected, illegal immigrants made up vast majority of sentences for immigration-related crimes — 91.6 percent.

Overall, 27,505 illegal immigrants were sentenced in federal court in 2014, down from 30,144 the prior year.

All the non-citizens are combined — including legal and illegal aliens, extradited aliens and those with unknown status — contributed to 42 percent of all federal sentencing in 2014.

The commission’s statistics only include primary federal offenses, and don’t include local convictions or sentences, which is where most rape and murder cases would appear.

Obama Administration Goes to Court

From The Hill:

The Obama administration faces an uphill battle on Friday when it seeks to convince a panel of federal judges to let the president’s executive actions on immigration take effect.

The same two Republican-appointed judges who denied an earlier administration attempt to lift a hold on Obama’s immigration actions will hear arguments at the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

Court watchers expect an unfavorable ruling for Obama from the three-judge panel, which sits on the most conservative circuit in the country.

“It’s likely to be a similar result,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. “It’s unlikely that [the two judges] will change their views.”

The White House is encountering legal roadblocks on immigration after two recent Supreme Court victories on same-sex marriage and healthcare, which gave the president a jolt of momentum late in his second term.

With just 18 months left in Obama’s presidency, the court battle has put his programs in peril. Experts believe the case will eventually end up before the Supreme Court, which could rule on the case as late as June 2016.

If the White House eventually wins, it could leave just a few months to implement the program. But if it loses, it would strip away a major promise Obama made to Latino groups in the run up to the 2014 midterm elections.

The atmosphere surrounding the hearing is certain to be charged. Reps. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), as well as immigrant-rights advocates, plan to demonstrate outside the courthouse to call on the judges to allow Obama’s programs to go into place.

It will also take place against the backdrop of a recent fatal shooting of a California woman, allegedly by an undocumented immigrant, and amid fallout from incendiary remarks on immigration from Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump — both of which have further roiled the debate nationwide.

After Congress failed to pass a sweeping immigration overhaul last year, Obama issued executive orders in November allowing certain immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizen or legal resident children to apply for deportation reprieves and work permits.

They also expanded a 2012 program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), providing similar relief to immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. The orders, if fully enacted, could affect as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants.

Led by Texas, 26 mostly Republican-led states sued the administration, arguing the moves overstepped Obama’s executive authority.

They also claimed the programs would harm the states by imposing added costs related to drivers licenses for people who receive deportation referrals.

The White House has steadfastly maintained that the president acted within the law by using “prosecutorial discretion” to exempt non-criminal immigrants from deportation. They also say the states ignored economic benefits, such as added tax revenue.

U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen, a George W. Bush appointee, sided with the states in February, handing down an injunction blocking the programs from taking effect while the court considers the lawsuit.

In May, circuit Judges Jennifer Elrod and Jerry Smith rejected an emergency request from the Department of Justice to allow the actions to proceed.

They argued the states made a compelling case they would suffer harm if the program was let to move forward, and that the administration’s appeal was unlikely to succeed on the broader legal issues.

The administration also contended the 26 states that brought the suit don’t have standing, though the two judges appeared skeptical of that argument as well.

On Friday, Smith and Elrod will again hear arguments from Obama administration lawyers and attorneys representing the states — this time focusing on whether the Texas judge’s order was legal.

“The two judges were convinced that Texas was likely to prevail on the merits,” said Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law, who helped file a legal brief backing the lawsuit against Obama’s programs.

Joining them on the panel will be Judge Carolyn King, who was appointed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

King in April ruled in favor of the Obama administration on a separate lawsuit challenging his 2012 immigration action, and advocates hope she will side with the president again.

Obama was set to huddle with Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the White House Thursday afternoon, one day before the arguments.

“The administration continues to have a lot of confidence in the power of [our] legal arguments,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.

Immigrant rights advocates, meanwhile, have expressed frustration at the delay. While they continue to press for the programs to go into effect, some advocates are turning their attention to other efforts as the lawsuit works its way through the courts.

“I think there is a realization the delay is longer than we have hoped for,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center.

Four different advocacy groups are convening a strategy session in New Orleans to raise awareness of other immigration actions not affected by the lawsuit, Hincapié said, including new guidelines that seek to reduce deportations of immigrants who are not deemed to pose a threat to public safety.

Advocates remain confident the orders will eventually go into place. But until then, they intend to punish Republicans for supporting the lawsuit.

The executive actions are popular with Hispanic voters, who will play an influential role in the 2016 elections. Candidates such as Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) want to end Obama’s programs.

House Republicans introduced a bill this week that would cut off funding for the initiatives if they take effect.

“This might be short term victory for the GOP. But a year from now, they are going to be looking at a much bigger lawsuit before the Supreme Court, which will be magnified by the fact it will take place in an election year,” said David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and a backer of Obama’s programs. “In the long term, they are going to be the big losers.”

A victory in court, however, could embolden Republicans who have accused Obama of abusing his executive powers.

“It is inconsistent with the law,” Cruz said during a recent interview with Jorge Ramos. “What Barack Obama is doing is what dictators in other nations have done.”