VIENNA, Nov 9 (Reuters) – Iran has exceeded a soft limit on sensitive material set under its nuclear deal with major powers, the U.N. atomic watchdog said on Wednesday, hours after Donald Trump – who has strongly criticized the agreement – won the U.S. presidential election.
It is the second time Tehran has surpassed the 130 metric tonne threshold for heavy water, a material used as a moderator in reactors like Iran’s unfinished one at Arak, since the deal was put in place in January. It had 130.1 tonnes of the material on Tuesday, the watchdog said.
The last time Iran overstepped that mark was brief, passing without major criticism from the other countries that signed the nuclear deal last year. But there are questions about whether the incoming Trump administration will react to such incidents the same way.
Riyadh (AFP) – Two missiles fired from rebel-held territory in Yemen fell short of a US warship patrolling the Red Sea off the coast of the war-torn country, the US navy said Monday.
The USS Mason “detected two inbound missiles” within an hour of each other from around 7:00 pm (1600 GMT) on Sunday, said US Naval Forces Central Command spokeswoman Paula Dunn.
The destroyer had been “conducting routine operations in international waters” at the time, she said in a statement.
“Both missiles impacted the water before reaching the ship,” said Dunn, adding that “there were no injuries to our sailors and no damage to the ship”.
“We assess these missiles were launched from Huthi-controlled territory in Yemen,” she said, referring to the Iran-backed rebels fighting Yemen’s internationally recognised government.
At least half a dozen other dual-national Iranians, including at least three other Iranian-Americans, have been arrested on similar charges in the past year.
News of the latest arrest came on the same day that the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy committee met members of the intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guards.
This deal was bad even before we knew of all of the secret provisos. The more we learn about it, the worse it gets.
The report says “most of the conditions” laid out in the agreement “were met by Iran” but it also claims Iran would have not been in compliance by January 16, 2016, the deal’s so-called Implementation Day, without the exemptions to the requirement that Iran limit its stockpile of low enriched uranium to under 300-kilograms. The exemptions supposedly pertained to uranium in “waste form,” according to the report, but the authors noted that that waste was potentially recoverable.
The report’s authors, David Albright and Andrea Stricker, went on to blast President Barack Obama’s administration for keeping these exemptions secret.
“Any rationale for keeping these exemptions secret appears unjustified,” the report said.
Albright told CNN that the additional low enriched uranium could reduce the amount of time needed for Iran to develop a nuclear bomb if it decided to break the accord.
The report said another exemption allowed Iran to operate 19 “hot cells” larger than specified in the accords, larger hot cells could be used to produce plutonium, which can also be used to produce a nuclear weapon.
Obama was so intent on getting this deal done to build his legacy that he has put the U.S. and the world in more danger.
Well, yeah… that’s because past presidents didn’t pay massive ransoms to terrorist-supporting regimes.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A $400 million cash delivery to Iran to repay a decades-old arbitration claim may be unprecedented in recent U.S. history, according to legal experts and diplomatic historians, raising further questions about a payment timed to help free four American prisoners in Iran.
The money was sent to Iran on Jan. 17, the same day Tehran agreed to release the prisoners. The Obama administration claimed for months the events were separate, but recently acknowledged the cash was used as leverage until the Americans were allowed to leave Iran. Only then, did the U.S. allow a plane with euros, Swiss francs and other foreign currency loaded on pallets to take off in the other direction for Tehran.
“There’s actually not anything particularly unusual about the mechanism for this transaction,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said this week of the initial cash payment.
But diplomatic historians and lawyers with expertise in international arbitration struggled to find any similar examples.
Asked to recall a similar payment of the U.S. using cash or hard money to settle an international dispute, the office of the State Department historian couldn’t provide an example.
We have all heard the idiom, “If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” That certainly seems to be the case regarding the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cash the Obama administration sent to Iran before the nation released American prisoners. Despite their vehement protestations, it sure looks like the Obama administration sent a massive ransom to a terrorist-supporting nation to free American hostages in violation of American law and policy.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department says a $400 million cash payment to Iran was contingent on the release of American prisoners.
Spokesman John Kirby says negotiations over the United States’ returning Iranian money from a decades-old account was conducted separately from the prisoner talks. But he says the U.S. withheld delivery of the cash as leverage until the U.S. citizens had left Iran.
Both events occurred Jan. 17.
Yes. That is a ransom. There are very good reasons that American doesn’t pay ransom demands. And in this case, Obama paid a ransom to a regime that hates America and actively funds terrorist organizations all over the world. What a disgrace.
My column for the West Bend Daily News is online. Here you go:
We have all heard the idiom, “If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” That certainly seems to be the case regarding the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cash the Obama administration sent to Iran before the nation released American prisoners. Despite their vehement protestations, it sure looks like the Obama administration sent a massive ransom to a terrorist-supporting nation to free American hostages in violation of American law and policy.
Last week the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the United States sent $400 million in cash to Iran in an unmarked cargo plane Jan. 17. That was the same day Iran released five American hostages. America also released seven Iranians who were in jail or facing charges in America.
According to the Obama administration, the Americans were released by Iran as part of a prisoner exchange and the cash payment to Iran was part of a separate deal running in parallel to both the nuclear negotiations and the prisoner exchange. The payment was part of a settlement that goes back to the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979.
When Iran took Americans hostage that time, President Jimmy Carter severed diplomatic relations with Iran and froze all Iranian assets in America. Once the hostages were finally returned, America returned some of the money and established a tribunal in The Hague to settle the rest of it. One issue to be resolved was a $400 million payment the former Shah of Iran made for military equipment before he was ousted from power. After the uprising, the U.S. banned the delivery of military equipment, but kept the $400 million.
In the 36 years since that happened, the case has wormed its way through The Hague and was reportedly nearing resolution through a binding arbitration process. The Obama administration expected to lose the case and be forced to pay Iran as much as $10 billion, so they reached out to Iran and agreed to settle for $1.7 billion. The $400 million paid to Iran this January was a down payment on the settlement.
Such are the technical details, but they do not tell the whole story. While the negotiations about the nuclear deal, prisoner exchange and financial settlement were being handled by separate parts of the administration, they were all clearly linked, and being handled by the same people in Iran. The Iranian government has told the world as much.
According to the Iranian press and military leaders, they considered the payment a ransom for the American hostages. And according to the Rev. Saeed Abedini, one of the American hostages released, they were held for hours at the airport before being released as guards told them they could not be released until the plane with the cash arrived. Abedini says that the guards told them they would not be released if the other plane failed to arrive. After the plane with the cash arrived, the Americans were released.
Furthermore, it is clear the Obama administration understood the American hostages would not be released if they did not send the cash. First, there is the timing. The $400 million was purportedly part of a settlement for a dispute stretching back to 1979, but they had to send it on the day the prisoners were released. In the more than 12,000 days since the dispute started, why that day if not because the hostage release was contingent on it?
Second, rather than sending the money to Iran as a normal bank transaction, the Obama administration converted hundreds of millions of dollars to Euros, Swiss Francs and other foreign currencies specifically in order to circumvent the law prohibiting U.S. transactions with Iran in dollars. They also structured the deal in a way to avoid briefing Congress on it before Congress voted on the Iran nuclear deal. Despite its claim all of these negotiations were separate, the Obama administration clearly viewed them as unrenderable.
As more facts about the Obama administration’s dealings with Iran come to light, it is clear America’s interests, policies and laws were subverted or subordinated to Barack Obama’s unyielding ambition to notch a foreign policy success after two terms of failed policies.
(CNN)An Iranian nuclear scientist who once claimed he was kidnapped by the CIA has been executed after being accused of spying for the United States.
Shahram Amiri had been in custody in Iran since 2010.
“Shahram Amiri had access to the system’s top secrets and had gotten connected with our number one enemy the Great Satan,” Iranian judicial spokesman Hojjat al-Eslam Mehdi Mohseni-Ejehei told reporters Sunday, according to state news agency IRNA.
Washington (CNN)The Obama administration secretly arranged a plane delivery of $400 million in cash on the same day Iran released four American prisoners and formally implemented the nuclear deal, US officials confirmed Wednesday.
President Barack Obama approved the $400 million transfer, which he had announced in January as part of the Iran nuclear deal. The money was flown into Iran on wooden pallets stacked with Swiss francs, euros and other currencies as the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement resolving claims at an international tribunal at The Hague over a failed arms deal under the time of the Shah.
Call it what you will, but everybody knows what this was.
My column for the West Bend Daily News is online. Here it is:
While political pundits and talking heads posing as serious people passionately debated whether or not Ted Cruz should have endorsed Donald Trump last week, we learned that the deal our current president made with Iran had secret provisions that made a dangerous deal even more perilous.
Given the fact that virtually every foreign policy initiative by President Barack Obama has ended in disaster (Libya, ISIS, Iraq, Russia, Ukraine, Boko Haram, etc.), he set out to solve one of our nation’s most enduring and difficult foreign policy problems: Iran. For years, America has sought to curb the nuclear ambitions of terrorist-supporting Iran by isolating it through sanctions and pressure through international organizations.
Obama told us there was a better way. He engaged Iran in talks and ended up with an agreement he said would protect the world from a nuclear Iran for generations to come. He was wrong at the time and the recent revelations show he might have actually accelerated Iran’s nuclear program.
Up until last year, Iran was on the proverbial ropes. International sanctions drastically limited its ability to sell its primary export, oil, on the world market and the collapse in the price of oil was further hurting its economy. This drastically limited the influx of hard currency into Iran and made it tough for it to fund its nuclear ambitions. Obama changed all of that. In exchange for Iran’s promise to cut back the number of centrifuges to a few older models, ship some of its enriched uranium out of the country and allow international inspectors, Obama lifted the sanctions to allow billions of dollars to flow into Iran and released millions more in Iranian funds that were frozen since Iran tookAmerican hostages.
Obama soothed Americans by promising, “We have now cut off every single path that Iran could have used to build a bomb.” That was a lie before we knew of the secret side deal.
The core problem with the deal is it requires that Iran will live up to its promises despite decades of provocations, funding of terrorists, creating fake companies to get around sanctions, stonewalling inspectors and lying about its nuclear program. Indeed, in the few months since the deal was signed, Iran has stonewalled more inspectors and been implicated in cyber attacks on American infrastructure.
But even if one lives in Obama’s fantasy world where Iran can be trusted, he cut a side deal, giving Iran a faster path to a nuclear weapon. According to a report by the Associated Press, the secret side deal allows Iran to begin replacing its old, less-efficient centrifuges with far more advanced centrifuges after 10 years. While Iran will still have fewer centrifuges than it does now, the newer models will allow it to enrich uranium at more than twice the rate that it can do now. This would reduce its breakout time — the time it would take to create enough enriched uranium to make a bomb — from the current estimate of a year to less than six months.
This means that Obama’s deal with Iran lifts sanctions allowing Iran to bring in billions of dollars to fund its nuclear ambitions for the next decade, and then use the money to buy equipment that can create a nuclear weapon faster than it can now. And that assumes Iran abides by the agreement and does not start installing more-advanced centrifuges even sooner.
Despite Obama’s assurances he has “cut off every single path that Iran could have used to build a bomb,” he has made America and the world less safe by actually allowing Iran access to the money and equipment necessary to enter the nuclear club even sooner.
Details published earlier outline most restraints on Iran’s nuclear program meant to reduce the threat that Tehran will turn nuclear activities it says are peaceful to making weapons.
But although some of the constraints extend for 15 years, documents in the public domain are short on details of what happens with Iran’s most proliferation-prone nuclear activity – its uranium enrichment – beyond the first 10 years of the agreement.
The document obtained by the AP fills in the gap. It says that as of January 2027 – 11 years after the deal was implemented – Iran will start replacing its mainstay centrifuges with thousands of advanced machines.
Centrifuges churn out uranium to levels that can range from use as reactor fuel and for medical and research purposes to much higher levels for the core of a nuclear warhead. From year 11 to 13, says the document, Iran will install centrifuges up to five times as efficient as the 5,060 machines it is now restricted to using.
Those new models will number less than those being used now, ranging between 2,500 and 3,500, depending on their efficiency, according to the document. But because they are more effective, they will allow Iran to enrich at more than twice the rate it is doing now.
Components other than centrifuge numbers and efficiency also go into the mix of how quickly a nation can make a nuclear weapon. They include how much enriched uranium it has to work with, and restrictions on Iran’s stockpile extend until the end of the deal, crimping its full enrichment program.
But a comparison of outputs between the old and newer machines shows the newer ones work at double the enrichment rate. That means they would reduce the time Iran could make enough weapons grade uranium to six months or less from present estimates of one year.
And that time frame could shrink even more. While the document doesn’t say what happens with centrifuge numbers and types past year 13, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told The AP that Iran will be free to install any number of advanced centrifuges beyond that point, even though the nuclear deal extends two additional years..
Whereas Iran was steadily expanding its nuclear program, we have now cut off every single path that Iran could have used to build a bomb. Whereas it would have taken Iran two to three months to break out with enough material to rush to a bomb, we’ve now extended that breakout time to a year
Except there will be a path to a bomb and the breakout time will be much less than a year. But other than that…
President Barack Obama says the benefits of the Iranian nuclear deal are “undeniable” although it may still take time for people to begin enjoying them.
Obama says the deal makes it possible for Iran to rejoin the global economy through increased trade and investment, creating jobs and opportunities for Iranians to sell their goods around the world.
Obama says the U.S. still has “profound differences” with Iran, but he says the fact that the countries are talking regularly for the first time in decades could help solve them.
And yet… we’re still freeing billions of dollars for them to use to build their terror network and nuclear arsenal.
Washington (CNN)The Obama administration is preparing to publicly attribute a 2013 cyber attack against a New York dam to Iranian hackers, according to U.S. officials familiar with the investigation.
The Justice Department has prepared an indictment against people thought to be behind the attack, according to the officials. An announcement could come in the next week.
The intrusion at the Bowman Avenue Dam, around 30 miles north of New York City in suburban Rye, New York, isn’t considered sophisticated — the hackers managed only to get access to some back office systems, not the operational systems of the dam, U.S. officials say. U.S. investigators quickly determined the attack was carried out by hackers working for the Iranian government.
Because, you know… they’re trustworthy and will certainly abide by the terms of the nuclear treaty that just freed up hundreds of billions of dollars for them to spend.
“The Iranians would set up companies to try to do deals and then fold them up. They didn’t stay around for long,” said Kim.
The methods used to evade sanctions mirror those used in other countries that are or have been under international sanctions in recent decades, such as South Africa, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iraq and North Korea.
After the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions on Jan. 16, Iran’s aviation industry is coming out of the shadows.
With an order for 118 Airbus jets witnessed in Paris by President Hassan Rouhani, Iran moved swiftly to exchange a collection of vintage jets held together with smuggled parts for a new fleet capable of taking on rival Gulf carriers.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nader Modanlo was facing five more years in federal prison when he got an extraordinary offer: U.S. President Barack Obama was ready to commute his sentence as part of this month’s historic and then still-secret prisoner swap with Iran. He said no.
To sweeten the deal, the U.S. administration then dropped a claim against the Iran-born aerospace engineer for $10 million that a Maryland jury found he had taken as an illegal payment from Iran, according to interviews with Modanlo, lawyers involved and U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
The surrender of the U.S. claim, which has not previously been reported, could add to scrutiny of how the Obama administration clinched a prisoner deal that has drawn criticism from Republican presidential candidates and lawmakers.
A Washington-based spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment on discussions over the $10 million, which the jury found that Modanlo was paid to help Iran launch its first satellite in 2005. Modanlo says the money was a loan from a Swiss company for a telecoms deal.
So I have to ask… in this deal, Iran got a bunch of prisoners, tens of billions of dollars with the lifting of sanctions, hundreds of millions in cash for their claim from the time of the Shah, a pathway to nuclear arms, the cherry in this story, and more.
Realizing that the Middle East is too important to be left to others — and that neglecting it could run to China’s peril — China is no longer willing to sit on the sidelines and watch the region descend into chaos. China has for several months harbored a suspicion that the United States, entering an election year while drowning in domestic oil and gas supply, is not as interested in the Middle East as it has been for the past half century. (At any rate, Washington’s relations with Riyadh and Tehran are too thorny to enable it to be an honest broker.) More importantly, Russia has laid down the flag of Middle East neutrality that it carried for most of the post-Soviet era. Moscow once enjoyed equally good relations with Tehran and Riyadh. But in plunging into the civil war in Syria, Russia — despite the fact that most of its Muslim population is Sunni — entangled itself with the Shiite camp, and can no longer be trusted by the Sunnis. With the United States and Russia no longer able to hold the balance between Iran and Saudi Arabia, China, which has solid relations with both, is increasingly tempted to fill the vacuum.
The much smaller U.S.-Iranian agreement concerned more than $400 million in Iranian money, dating back to before the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the end of diplomatic ties, which the U.S.-backed shah’s government used to buy American military equipment. The Iranians got that money back last weekend and some $1.3 billion in interest.
The administration said the settlement was decided on its merits, with officials arguing that Iran demanded more than $3 billion and, at some points during the talks, much more for an agreement.
Earlier this week, however, one Iranian military commander painted the payment in a different light. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, head of the Basij paramilitary wing of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, said the wiring of the funds was a payoff for letting the Americans go.
U.S. officials insist that’s not true.
“There was no bribe, there was no ransom, there was nothing paid to secure the return of these Americans who were, by the way, not spies,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner responded, referring to the charges that held each of the Americans in Iranian prison for years.
President Barack Obama on Saturday signed an executive order lifting some of the U.S. economic sanctions on Iran, the White House announced.The move follows the International Atomic Energy Agency saying Iran has completed the necessary steps in a deal to restrict its nuclear program.
[…]
But not all nuclear-related sanctions will be rescinded immediately — that won’t happen for about 10 years, should the deal hold. But this month’s milestone will mean Iran will be able to sell its oil again on world markets and its banks will be able to connect to the global system.
Iran released Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian and three other detained Iranian Americans on Saturday in exchange for the freedom of seven people imprisoned or charged in the United States, U.S. and Iranian officials said, a swap linked to the implementation of a landmark nuclear deal between Tehran and six world powers.
Hours after Iranian officials said Rezaian, 39, was freed from Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison after 18 months of captivity, and after a planned ceremony on the nuclear accord in Vienna was repeatedly postponed, the Post journalist and the other Americans remained in Tehran, waiting to be flown out of the country aboard a Swiss plane.
There was no immediate explanation for the delay.
But the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency then announced the release of a report Saturday “confirming that Iran has completed the necessary preparatory steps to start the implementation” of the nuclear deal, a move that apparently paves the way for the exchange to go ahead.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry promptly headed over to the site of the nuclear negotiations with Iran, the Coburg Palace Hotel in Vienna, and signed numerous documents. The State Department then released a statement from Kerry confirming that the IAEA “has verified that Iran has fully implemented its required commitments” under the nuclear deal and that U.S. sanctions against Iran related to its nuclear program are lifted in accordance with the agreement.
(CNN)A video aired Wednesday by Iranian state television shows an American sailor apologizing for entering Iranian waters, an embarrassing development for a U.S. administration trying to paint the service members’ quick release as a diplomatic victory.
[…]
It is not clear from the video — which shows the lone female sailor wearing a head covering in accordance with Islamic tradition — that the sailor was speaking voluntarily, and U.S. officials have not yet said under what circumstances the apology was delivered. A spokesman for Secretary of State John Kerry has made it clear he has not apologized to Iran.
