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IAEA: Iran Nuke Deal Limits Public Reporting on Possible Violations
FreeBeacon: The head of the international community’s nuclear watchdog organization disclosed Monday that certain agreements reached under the Iran nuclear deal limit inspectors from publicly reporting on potential violations by the Islamic Republic.
Yukiya Amano, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, which is responsible for ensuring Iran complies with the agreement, told reporters that his agency is no longer permitted to release details about Iran’s nuclear program and compliance with the deal.
Amano’s remarks come on the heels of a February IAEA oversight report that omitted many details and figures related to Iran’s nuclear program. The report sparked questions from outside nuclear experts and accusations from critics that the IAEA was not being transparent with its findings.
Amano disclosed in response to questions from reporters that the last report was intentionally vague because the nuclear agreement prohibits the IAEA from publishing critical data about Iran’s program that had been disclosed by the agency in the past.
“The misunderstanding is that the basis of reporting is different,” Amano said. “In the previous reports, the bases were the previous [United Nations] Security Council Resolutions and Board of Governors. But now they are terminated. They are gone.”
Most U.N. measures pertaining to Iran—including its military buildup and illicit work on nuclear technology—were removed following the nuclear agreement, which essentially rewrote the organization’s overall approach to the country.
The IAEA, which operates under the U.N. umbrella, must now follow the new resolutions governing the implementation of the nuclear pact, Amano said.
“These two resolutions and the other resolutions of the Security Council and Board are very different,” he said. “And as the basis is different, the consequences are different.”
Amano said that going forward, the agency would only release reports that are consistent with the most recent Security Council resolutions on Iran, meaning that future reports are likely to impact the international community’s ability to determine if Iran is fully complying with its end of the agreement.
Last month’s report was viewed as particularly significant because it allowed the nuclear agreement to proceed to its implementation stage. However, the dearth of information in it has angered some experts.
The latest report “provides insufficient details on important verification and monitoring issues,” Olli Heinonen, the IAEA’s former deputy director general, stated in a policy brief.
“The report does not list inventories of nuclear materials and equipment or the status of key sites and facilities,” Heinonen said in his analysis, which was published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Without detailed reporting, the international community cannot be sure that Iran is upholding its commitments under the nuclear deal.”
The IAEA’s latest report also failed to disclose information about Iran’s stockpiles of low-enriched uranium, which is supposed to be significantly reduced as part of the nuclear deal.
Additional information about Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, the machines responsible for enriching uranium, also was withheld by the IAEA.
Other critics accused the Obama administration of misleading Congress during negotiations over the deal. White House officials maintained at the time that the agreement would provide increased transparency into Iran’s nuclear endeavors.
“When nuclear negotiations began in late 2013, the administration asked Congress to stand down on pressuring the Iranians, and promised to force the Iranians to dismantle significant parts of their nuclear program if Congress gave negotiators space,” Omri Ceren, an official with The Israel Project, which works with Congress on the Iran issue, wrote in an analysis sent to reporters on Monday.
“U.S. negotiators eventually caved on any demands that would have required the destruction of Iran’s uranium infrastructure, and instead went all-in on verification and transparency: Yes, the Iranians would get to keep what they’d built, and yes, their program would eventually be fully legal, but the international community would have full transparency into everything from uranium mining to centrifuge production to enriched stockpiles,” Ceren explained.
However, “now Amano has revealed that the nuclear deal gutted the ability of journalists and the public to have insight into Iran’s nuclear activities,” he said. “In critical areas, it’s not even clear that the IAEA has been granted the promised access.”
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What else does Kerry know about Iran and their history?
Fresh evidence emerging of Iran’s deadly nuclear and terror ties to Argentina
Amb. Noriega: Last week, an Argentine intelligence official testified that Iran sought nuclear technology from that South American country and that a prosecutor investigating suspected Hezbollah bombings in Buenos Aires had been murdered for attempting to expose Tehran’s dangerous plot.
This fresh testimony supports reports I published in July 2011 regarding suspicious nuclear diplomacy in 2007 and a massive cash transfer in 2010 involving then Iranian and Argentine leaders, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Nestor Kirchner, respectively. Despite congressional inquiries and mounting evidence, the State Department has chosen to ignore this blind spot in strategy for containing Iran’s illicit nuclear program.
According to the Argentine daily newspaper, Clarin, a former Argentine senior intelligence official, Antonio Stiuso, confirmed in two days of testimony before a judge that the former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, interceded with Nestor Kirchner to resume nuclear cooperation with Iran, which had been suspended in 1991. Also, according to Stiuso’s testimony, Ahmadinejad was interested in using Argentina’s technology to produce plutonium bombs, which he characterized as more sophisticated than the ones Iran was trying to make with enriched uranium.
Stiuso noted that Venezuela did not possess the technical knowledge to make use of the nuclear technology sought by Chávez from Argentina. Instead, because Iran’s nuclear plans were designed by Argentines in the 1960s, Stiuso’s theory is that Tehran was the ultimate beneficiary of such nuclear cooperation.
Stiuso also testified that the former prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, was murdered for refusing an order from former president Cristina Kirchner to cease investigating Iran’s role in the 1992 and 1994 bombings and its corrupt dealings with Argentine officials. In a draft criminal complaint discovered after the prosecutor was found dead last year in an apparently staged suicide, Nisman accused Cristina Kirchner of covering up the involvement of five Iranians who have been charged with planning the 1994 terrorist attack against the Jewish Community Center in the heart of Argentina’s capital city.
In a separate development, last Thursday, Nisman’s family disclosed a written statement by a prosecutor from Argentina’s federal appeals court saying that scientific tests failed to find evidence that he fired the pistol found near his body. This is the first formal statement by a government official confirming suspicions that Nisman was the victim of a homicide.
From the US side, the Obama State Department has systematically neglected the dangerous liaisons among Venezuela, Argentina, and Iran. As dramatic evidence of Iran’s deadly provocations in our own neighborhood continues to come to light, it is fair to ask whether its cluelessness was by accident or design. … Much more here.
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