France’s biggest bank has reportedly agreed an $8-9 billion settlement with US prosecutors over hiding $30 billion in money transfers to countries on the US sanctions blacklist. The fine against BNP Paribas could be a record for this type of violation.
In the proposed settlement, BNP Paribas will plead guilty to criminal charges in early July, The Wall Street Journalreports, citing a source close to the matter. After admitting violating the International Economic Powers Act, the bank will temporarily be banned from doing deals in US dollars. France has warned this could have a negative effect on the stability of the euro zone.
The US Department of Justice is negotiating with BNP Paribas over the infractions, and the penalty could be the biggest of its kind. French President Francois Hollande said the fines are ‘unfair’ and ‘disproportionate’.
In 2012, the US fined HSBC $1.9 billion over similar US sanctions violations, and Credit Suisse pled guilty to concealing sanctions data and paid $2.6 billion in fines.
After examining over $100 billion of transactions, US authorities found that $30 billion were illegally conducted with Iran, Cuba, and Sudan as they are countries sanctioned by the US.
The infraction will force the company to reshuffle its US-based management, according to several sources. The Wall Street Journal reports 30 bank employees have already left, or will soon exit, the company.
First set at $3 billion, the penalty later was rumored to have reached $16 billion before the latest $8-9 billion figure. The largest fine on record for a bank is the $13 billion JPMorgan Chase & Co paid out for pre-crisis mortgage frauds. BNP Paribas has only set aside over $1 billion to pay out any potential fines, and a fine between $8-9 billion could nearly wipe out the company’s entire pre-tax earnings of $11.2 billion.
For as long as we can remember, Netanyahu has insisted that “time is running out” on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, despite the fact that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.
In July 2013, he declared that Iran is “getting closer and closer to the bomb.” A few months before that, in a speech to the AIPAC, the leading Israel lobby in Washington, he said Iran “is running out the clock” and “has used negotiations, including the most recent ones, to buy time to press ahead with its nuclear program.”
The year before that, in an interview with Fox News’ Greta van Susteren, Netanyahu addressed his decade-and-a-half obsession, stating that a nuclear-armed Iran “was a lot further away 15 years ago when I started talking about it. It was a lot further away 10 years ago. It was a lot further away five years. It was a lot further away five months ago. They are getting there, and they are getting very, very close.”
In a nauseating speech before a Joint Session of Congress on May 24, 2011, Netanyahu said, “When I last stood here, I spoke of the consequences of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Now time is running out, the hinge of history may soon turn, for the greatest danger of all could soon be upon us: a militant Islamic regime armed with nuclear weapons.”
His memory was correct. He did deliver a harrowing warning about Iran to a Joint Session of Congress in 1996. And his rhetoric was nearly identical. Here’s part of it (followed by a transcript):
Netanyahu: The most dangerous of these regimes is Iran, that has wed a cruel despotism to a fanatic militancy. If this regime, or its despotic neighbor Iraq, were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind.
I believe the international community must reinvigorate its efforts to isolate these regimes, and prevent them from acquiring atomic power. The United States and Israel have been at the forefront of this effort, but we can and must do much more. Europe and the countries of Asia must be made to understand that it is folly, nothing short of folly, to pursue short-time material gain while creating a long-term existential danger for all of us.
Only the United States can lead this vital international effort to stop the nuclearization of terrorist states. But the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.
Sound familiar? Yes, naturally. The script has remained the same for the past two decades. So identical are the talking points, in fact, that while Netanyahu said “now, time is running out” in 2011, here’s what he said back in 1996, during his speech to Congress.
Sigh. Despite Netanyahu’s constant visibility and years of repetition on this issue, he should not be credited with introducing it. A year before his 1996 speech to Congress, then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said much the same thing.
TEHRAN – The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi, says the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) should now close its investigation of the issue of Iran’s development of high explosives detonators the IAEA has said may have been part of a covert nuclear weapons programme.
IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano has thus far refused to close the file on the issue, which is the first one Iran and the IAEA had agreed to resolve as part of an agreement on the question of what the Agency calls “possible military dimensions” of the Iranian nuclear programme.
In an interview with IPS in his office in Tehran, Salehi said that the IAEA should have ended the investigation of the detonator issue in keeping with an understanding he claimed had been reached between the two sides on procedures for carrying out the February 2014 “Framework for Cooperation” agreement.
Referring to IAEA officials, Salehi said, “To the best of my knowledge and the best of my information, they have come up with the conclusion that what Iran has said is consistent with their findings.”
The use of the term “consistent with” the IAEA’s information from all other sources would be identical to the formulation used by the IAEA in closing its inquiry into six “unresolved issues” that Iran and the IAEA agreed to resolve in an August 2007 “Work Programme”.
Salehi said the IAEA had agreed to do the same thing in regard to the issues included in the “Framework for Cooperation” agreement.
“We have agreed that once our explanations were enough to bring this to conclusion they would have to close that issue,” Salehi said.
“They should not keep the issue open,” said the U.S.-educated Salehi.
The most recent IAEA report, dated May 23, confirmed that Iran had shown the Agency documents supporting the Iranian contention that it had carried out exploding bridge-wire (EBW) experiments for civilian applications rather than as part of a nuclear weapons programme.
Reuters had reported May 20 that the IAEA had requested that Iran provided “verification documents” to support Iran’s claim that it had a valid reason for developing an EBW detonator programme.
But a “senior official close to the Iran dossier” – meaning a senior IAEA official -s was quoted by The Telegraph on May 23 as claiming it was “still too early “ to say that the information was “credible”.
However, the Agency was obviously capable of reaching an assessment of the credibility of the information within a relatively short time.
However, Amano declared in a Jun. 2 press conference that the IAEA would provide an assessment of its investigation on the EBW issue “in due course, after a good understanding of the whole picture.”
Unlike the August 2007 Work Plan, which resulted in the IAEA closing the files on six different issues that had opened over nearly five years, the February 2014 “Framework” agreement has not been made public. So Salehi’s claim could not be independently confirmed.
But when asked for the IAEA’s response to Salehi’s statements that the Agency had agreed to close the investigation of an issue once Iran had provided the needed information and had accepted the validity of Iran’s explanation, Amano’s spokesperson, Gill Tudor, did not address either of these statements directly.
In an email to IPS Thursday, she said, “As the Director General has made clear, the Agency’s approach is to consider each issue and then provide an assessment after we have a good understanding of the whole picture.”
Amano’s declaration was clearly intended to indicate that he has no intention of clearing Iran of the suspicion on the EBW programme until the larger issue of “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear programme is resolved.
The spokesperson’s refusal to deny Salehi’s assertions implies that they accurately reflect both the unpublished “Framework” agreement and what IAEA officials told the Iranians on May 20.
Amano appears to be holding back on his official acceptance of Iran’s documentation on this and other issues until an agreement is reached between Iran and the P5+1. The “possible military dimensions” issue, which involves the authenticity of the large collection of documents said to have come from an alleged secret Iranian nuclear weapons research programme from 2001 to 2003, is not likely to be resolved any time soon.
Amano had pledged to support the U.S. policy toward Iran in return for U.S. support for his candidacy to replace then IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei in 2009, according to a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks.
Since taking over in November 2009, he has not deviated from the U.S and P5+1 position that Iran has had a nuclear weapons programme in the past.
Iran had denounced the documents as fraudulent from the beginning, and ElBaradei and other senior officials believed they were probably forged by a foreign intelligence service, according to published sources. A former IAEA official who asked not to be identified confirmed ElBaradei’s belief to IPS.
Nevertheless, under pressure from the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009), the IAEA endorsed the documents as “credible”, starting with its May 2008 report.
Until Iran showed the documents to IAEA officials last month, the IAEA had taken the position in reports that Iran remains under suspicion, because it had acknowledged having carried out a programne of EBW research and development for civilian and conventional military applications but had not provided proof of those applications.
In its first reference to the issue, the May 2008 IAEA report said Iran had “acknowledged that it had conducted simultaneous testing with two to three EBW detonators with a time precision of about one microsecond” but that “this was intended for civil and conventional military applications.” The report thus led the reader to infer that Iran had acknowledged the authenticity of parts or all of the documents on the EBW studies they had been asked to explain and had sought to describe them as having non-nuclear applications.
But the report failed to clarify that the experiments outlined in the document under investigation had involved EBW detonators firing at a rate of 130 nanoseconds – eight times faster than the ones Iran had acknowledged, as had been revealed by then Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen in a February 2008 briefing for member states.
Based on the false premise that Iran had admitted to carrying out the experiments shown in the intelligence documents, the IAEA demanded that Iran provide the details of its EBW development programme and allow visits to the site where Iran conducted testing of its EBW experiments.
The objective of that demand appears to have been to provoke a rejection by Iran which could then be cited as evidence of non-cooperation. When Iran refused to provide information on its conventional military applications of EBW technology, which were obviously secret, the Barack Obama administration and its allies used it to justify new international economic sanctions against Iran.
The idea that Iran was obliged to prove that it had a legitímate non-nuclear need for EBW technology was disingenuous. Iran’s development of anti-ship missiles is well documented, as is the fact that such weapons use EBW technology for their firing mechanisms.
Iran apparently resolved the issue by providing documentary evidence of one or more civilian applications of EBW technology in Iran.
Iran’s nuclear talks with the P5+1[1] are taking place in Vienna. A “solid commitment” from Iran is needed, ensuring that its stated peaceful atomic energy programme is not a clandestine attempt to build nuclear weapons. The Iranians have found themselves needing to make a leap towards lifting the crushing international sanctions, notably those imposed by the US. It is the basis of these sanctions that MEMO has re-examined with a group of senior researchers in the field.
When Ellie Geranmayeh, Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) spoke with MEMO, she insisted, “In the same way that any potential military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme needs to be explained to the United Nations, the West also needs to explain the basis of its accusations and suspicions.”
Ever since the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported “sensitive enrichment and reprocessing activity” in Iran in 2003, the country has been under close supervision. The UN Security Council decided to impose economic sanctions for Iran’s non-compliance with its previous request to suspend enrichment activities before extending them in 2007, 2008 and 2010. According to Reuters, Washington was recently pushing for an even more severe attack on the Iranian economy, but this was rejected by the Security Council. Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, argued that the sanctions are “illegal” and imposed by “arrogant leaders”. The sanctions are devastating the Iranian economy and have been imposed despite the fact that Iran’s uranium enrichment is being held below 5 per cent, consistent with developing fuel for a civilian nuclear power plant. US pressure has led several nuclear contracts between Iran and foreign governments to fall through.
The United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC)[2], meanwhile, has used its official website to “call for action” to change the course of its declining share of the global enrichment market, underscoring the need to “limit the spread of enrichment technologies to rogue states”. This controversial Western centric use of the phrase “rogue states” demands a thorough investigation, according to many experts.
Furthermore, the West’s foundation for these claims against Iran has too many fault lines “to begin to even list them,” claims historian and Iran nuclear expert Dr Gareth Porter. The single biggest factor pushing “the elite’s obsession over Iran as a threat and as an enemy,” he says, “is that the basic premise was laid down early at the end of the Cold War.” His ground-breaking work recently received the annual Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism from the London-based journalists’ Frontline Club. MEMO spoke to Porter about the trajectory of the “imminent Iranian nuclear threat” and its construct by a handful of powerful actors with a particular political agenda and documents “with little reliability” that the media over the last decade have had no qualms about accepting and sharing as (unauthenticated) “evidence”.
1) “The laptop documents”
One of the main anomalies in America’s porous trajectory on Iran is the pseudo-crucial “laptop documents”. Presented by the US to the Security Council, these 1,000 pages are alleged to contain research on nuclear weapons-related activities, stolen from the computer of an Iranian scientist or engineer who was, it is claimed, involved in the programme. “This was a trick to cover the truth,” said Porter. He recapped how the documents were passed to Germany’s intelligence agency by a member of the Mujahideen-E-Khalq (MEK) an Iranian terrorist organisation in exile, which has been a client of Israel’s Mossad spy agency for several years. German intelligence and many other government officials, including ex-US Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned that the US and EU should not make the mistake of basing policy on this information.
2) Redesigned Iranian missile
Another central anomaly is the “discovery” that the Iranian missile re-entry vehicle is depicted in the documents as being redesigned to accommodate a nuclear payload. “This was one that had been discarded by Iran at least two years before the drawings were said to have been made,” Porter argues, “not according to Iranian sources, but an authoritative Western source: the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).”
3) Technical errors
“The discovery that the same drawings of an alleged effort to redesign the re-entry vehicle of the Shahab-3 missile contained numerous technical errors,” Gareth Porter contends, “indicated again that they had not been done by those involved in Iran’s missile programme.”
4) Codename (5.15)
This was given to one of the sub-projects in the alleged nuclear weapons research programme that was, in truth, the number assigned to a contract with the civilian atomic energy organisation of Iran or an ore processing facility and was signed two years before the supposed covert research programme was even said to have begun.
Israel’s position
Last week, at the Herzliya Conference, Israel’s platform for the articulation of national policy, Global Jewish News Source reported major Israeli politicians with strong beliefs in this propaganda. “What is at stake is not merely Israel’s position in the Middle East,” argued Likud’s Yuval Steinitz, “what is at stake is the fate of the entire world… Iran is a nuclear threshold state. It just hasn’t created the weapons yet.”
Lina Khatib of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank explained to MEMO how Israel has been trying to push the US to take military action against Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment programme. Further, the government in Tel Aviv has also been engaging in “clandestine intelligence operations to halt Iran’s nuclear developments, for example through cyber-attacks,” she warned. In response, America pushed back against Israel’s request for military strikes against Iran, and is not likely to include Israel as a formal partner in the Vienna negotiations over the nuclear file, “though the US will ensure that Israeli interests are represented during the talks”.
“Overwhelming” evidence exists, according to Dr Gareth Porter, that it was Israel’s Mossad that produced the falsified documents that have propelled the “manufactured crisis” forward, “not just once, but twice”. First came the “laptop documents” that surfaced in 2004 followed in 2008-2009, two years into his research, when a series of intelligence reports and allegedly Iranian documents were given to the IAEA directly by the Israelis, “resulting in more accusations following the November 2011 IAEA report”.
According to Porter, Israeli’s pressure on the Obama administration to make demands of Iran will ensure that the talks fail. “Thus far that Israeli strategy has succeeded, because the Obama administration has demanded a cut in Iranian centrifuges that makes it difficult to envision a final compromise.” Basing any military action on false dossiers would be as irresponsible as the invasion of Iraq in 2003; the world witnessed what consequences that had, when soldiers on the ground had no clue about what was going on.
Current talks
Iran has been talking separately with most of the members of the P5+1 group in advance of the formal meetings week. Although reports have been modestly positive about the potential outcome, the final accord date set as July 20 is already predicted to be given a six-month extension by government officials from most of the countries involved.
Porter remains “very worried” that the talks will fail because of America’s “hard-line” refusal to tolerate any Iranian enrichment of uranium to support even its present nuclear reactor, “much less future reactors”. He recently interviewed Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, who has not given up hope of renewed and extended diplomatic flexibility on behalf of the US. Even so, he indicated that statements had been made in the talks, as well as to the media, that were “posturing”. He implied that this was politically dangerous because it would make later adjustment in the US negotiation stance very difficult.
According to Lina Khatib, we will see the lifting of some sanctions, but a comprehensive deal will take time to be made and implemented. However, as Iran’s nuclear programme is primarily, she says, “aimed at giving Iran political weight in the Middle East and international recognition as a major regional player, rather than at preparing to conduct a nuclear attack,” there might be more “muscle-flexing” involved than seen so far.
The threat of an ISIS take-over of major Iraqi cities near the border with Iran has collided with the current negotiations on the country’s nuclear programme and arguably paved the way for an indirect willingness to reach an agreement with America. The pace of events means that Iran, which in the 1980s fought former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for eight years, may be willing to cooperate with Washington to bolster Iraq’s Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has said that he will consider such cooperation, if the US takes action in Iraq.
However, a US official cautioned against reading too much into the latest talks: “No one should expect that all of a sudden, overnight, even if we resolve the nuclear agreement, that everything will change. It will not. The fundamentals remain exactly as they are. Until we resolve the nuclear issue there cannot be any kind of fundamental change in this relationship.”
Footnotes
[1] Iran has had meetings with China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. These six are known as the P5+1 (the permanent five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) or alternatively as the E3+3, used by European countries. These meetings are intended to resolve concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme.
[2] USEC: the American corporation that contracts with the United States Department of Energy to produce enriched uranium for use in nuclear power plants.
Although the legal debates about Iran are not taking place in an international court – at least not yet – the veracity of the scientific evidence espoused by all sides to support their legal arguments is nevertheless an extremely important matter, particularly in light of the debacle of the 2003 Iraq war having been based, at least in part, on bad technical and scientific analysis of intelligence information on similar questions. – Dan Joyner
This week the P5+1 and Iranian officials meet again to try to narrow differences over a comprehensive nuclear deal, which is to last for an as-yet unknown duration. Reaching an agreement will be a challenging task because Iran and P5+1 seem to disagree – among other things – about the enrichment capacity Iran should be allowed during the (unknown) term of the comprehensive deal.
According to the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) limits on Iran’s enrichment capacity are important because they would lengthen the time needed for Iran to “breakout” and quickly enrich uranium to weapons-grade in any hypothetical race to a uranium-based device.
But Jeffrey Lewis of the Monterey Institute has suggested that such limits are meaningless, saying, “This is completely wrong. Breakout is precisely the wrong measure of whether a deal is successful,” because the Iranians – goes the argument – could use a covert facility to breakout if they wanted to do that.
Instead, intensive verification and intrusive inspections above and beyond what is codified in international law by the so-called “Additional Protocol” have been suggested to try to address this fear.
In a separate report last week, Mr. Porter assesses that David Albright, the founder and executive director of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington, DC, a prominent commentator on nonproliferation and Iran’s nuclear program has embraced an alarmist line on the Iran issue – despite his knowledge that there were serious problems with the evidence on which it was based.
My intention here isn’t to evaluate the specific items of evidence presented in Mr. Porter’s reports but to weigh in with my own expert analysis – some of it done in collaboration with Dr. Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress of the Monterey Institute – of the quality of the evidence against Iran.
By way of context, Iran has never been formally accused of manufacturing nuclear weapons. The IAEA did determine that Iran was in “non-compliance” with its safeguards agreement in 2005. But this had to do with technical nuclear material accountancy matters — “non-compliance” does not mean Iran was making nuclear weapons. For example, South Korea and Egypt both violated their safeguards agreements in 2004 and 2005. But these U.S. allies were never even referred to the UN Security Council — let alone targeted for sanctions. Pierre Goldschmidt, a former deputy director of safeguards at the IAEA, has noted the “danger of setting bad precedents based on arbitrary criteria or judgments informed by political considerations” at the IAEA.
It is not always easy to obtain access to the actual evidence being used against Iran, but occasionally some is leaked to the press and is amenable to scientific scrutiny. Below, I list some of this evidence being used against Iran, as well some historical record of the group(s) making the allegations:
[1]. An indication into the quality – or, rather, lack thereof – of the evidence against Iran comes from my analysis (done with another physicist, Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress of the Monterey Institute) of the graphs published by the Associated Press purporting to show an Iranian interest in modeling a nuclear explosion. Aside from the fact that there is nothing illegal with doing such theoretical modeling, our analysis showed that there was a large numerical error in the graph and that the time-scale of the explosion was wrong.
[2]. In February 2013, the Washington Post published a story that “purchase orders obtained by nuclear researchers show an attempt by Iranian agents to buy 100,000 … ring-shaped magnets” and that such “highly specialized magnets used in centrifuge machines … [are] a sign that the country may be planning a major expansion of its nuclear program.” As evidence, the Post’s Joby Warrick cited a report authored by David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).
The Washington Post’s ombudsman eventually got involved and his report is appended below (the cc field has been x’ed out as it mentions the emails of editors & others):
I’ve read everything that Mr. Butt referred me to, and Joby’s story.
A couple of things trouble me. Language like “place the order” doesn’t seem borne out by the nature of those notes that ISIS included copies of in the PDF. It certainly looks like that Iranian company is looking to buy magnets, but I’m not sure I would say “place the order” or “new orders” based on that evidence. And that there is no evidence that a purchase actually went through, as Joby wrote, correct? And there is no date, other than mentioned in the story “about a year ago.” That’s pretty vague, and Iran since then has made some moves, as Joby reported, such as converting some enriched uranium into metal, that suggest it might be listening to international concerns.
Is Joby persuaded that these magnets could only be used for centrifuges? Could Mr. Butt be correct that they could be used for other things and Iran would have the industrial and economic demand for them as speaker magnets or what have you? And how would these magnets, if they were intended for use in centrifuges, play in to the damage caused by stuxnet, in which many of the first generation Iranian centrifuges were damaged?
Just before nuclear talks get underway I am always suspicious of stories that suddenly surface that seem to reinforce the narrative that Iran is building nuclear weapons.
Last July, Joby had the story on the potential increasing threat of the Iranian Navy against the U.S. Navy. Nowhere in that story was there anything about the economic sanctions that many defense experts say are hurting the Iranian military deeply.
I’ve been on some 60 U.S. Navy ships, including five or six carrier battle groups underway. The planes and helicopters that circle in the air above battle groups have considerable surveillance- and fire power. So do U.S. attack submarines who patrol with the battle groups. The new littoral combat ships have plenty of ability to attack shoreline installations in minutes. That is a formidable array of offensive capability.
Of course we should always be vigilant and pay attention to information that comes to us, and report it out. But neither do we want to overstate any threat from any enemy, real or potential.
Kelley is a true authority on such matters, being a nuclear engineer and a veteran of over 35 years in the US nuclear weapons complex, most recently at Los Alamos. He managed the centrifuge and plutonium metallurgy programs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and was seconded by the US DOE to the IAEA where he served twice as a Director in the nuclear inspections in Iraq, in 1992-1993 and 2002-2003. He is currently an Associate Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Most importantly, the SIPRI report says that the paving work at Parchin would not completely hide any alleged contamination because there is an area west of the building of interest that remains untouched. And, in any case, the important samples in such a test would come from within buildings not outside on the ground.
Let’s also recall that the IAEA has already visited Parchin twice in 2005 and found nothing – although they did not go to the specific area they are now interested in. However, the IAEA could have gone to that area even in 2005 – they simply chose to go to other sites on the military base. As the IAEA report at the time summarized:
“The Agency was given free access to those buildings and their surroundings and was allowed to take environmental samples, the results of which did not indicate the presence of nuclear material, nor did the Agency see any relevant dual use equipment or materials in the locations visited.”
When the IAEA last went to Parchin, Olli Heinonen was head of IAEA safeguards and led the inspections – the methodology for choosing which buildings to inspect is described in an excellentChristian Science Monitorarticle which is worth reading in its entirety, but I quote the relevant bits:
“At the time, it[Parchin] was divided into four geographical sectors by the Iranians. Using satellite and other data, inspectors were allowed by the Iranians to choose any sector, and then to visit any building inside that sector. Those 2005 inspections included more than five buildings each, and soil and environmental sampling. They yielded nothing suspicious, but did not include the building now of interest to the IAEA.
“The selection [of target buildings] did not take place in advance, it took place just when we arrived, so all of Parchin was available,” recalls Heinonen, who led those past inspections. “When we drove there and arrived, we told them which building.”
“Also unusual is how open and specific the IAEA has been about what exactly it wants to see, which could yield doubts about the credibility of any eventual inspection.
“I’m puzzled that the IAEA wants to in this case specify the building in advance, because you end up with this awkward situation,” says Olli Heinonen, the IAEA’s head of safeguards until mid-2010.
“First of all, if it gets delayed it can be sanitized. And it’s not very good for Iran. Let’s assume [inspectors] finally get there and they find nothing. People will say, ‘Oh, it’s because Iran has sanitized it,’” says Mr. Heinonen, who is now at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. “But in reality it may have not been sanitized. Iran is also a loser in that case. I don’t know why [the IAEA] approach it this way, which was not a standard practice…”
Hans Blix, former chief of the IAEA and later of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, has also expressed surprise at the focus on Parchin, as a military base that inspectors had been to before.
“Any country, I think, would be rather reluctant to let international inspectors to go anywhere in a military site,” Mr. Blix told Al Jazeera English… “In a way, the Iranians have been more open than most other countries would be.”
One of the reasons that Mr. Blix says that is because normally the IAEA does not have the legal authority to inspect undeclared non-nuclear-materials related facilities, in a nation – like Iran — that has not ratified the Additional Protocol.
The IAEA can call for “special inspections” but they have not done so. They can also choose arbitration, as specified in the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, but again they have not done that.
So Iran has been more cooperative than they have needed to be in already allowing inspections of Parchin.
“Iran has engaged in large-scale bulldozing operations on about 25 hectares near the Parchin building. This includes the bulldozing of old dirt piles to level a field 500 metres north of the building of interest. However, there has been no such activity in the area west of the building, except for removing some parking pads within about 10 m of it. The fact that the building’s immediate vicinity has been largely untouched on the west side strongly suggests that the purpose of the earth-moving operations was for construction and renovation work and not for ‘sanitizing’ the site by covering up contamination.”
“Some of the experiments described by the IAEA do not and cannot use uranium. The results would be inconclusive if they did. So the basis for the IAEA’s requests continues to be opaque. The timeline for the alleged experiments is also highly suspect, with claims that massive experimental facilities had been fabricated even before they had been designed, according to the available information. The IAEA work to date, including the mischaracterization of satellite images of Parchin, is more consistent with an IAEA agenda to target Iran than of technical analysis.” [Emphasis added]
[4]. The biased analysis of Parchin is, unfortunately, part of a longstanding pattern at ISIS. David Albright co-authored a Sept. 10, 2002, article – entitled “Is the Activity at Al Qaim Related to Nuclear Efforts?” – which declared:
“High-resolution commercial satellite imagery shows an apparently operational facility at the site of Iraq’s al Qaim phosphate plant and uranium extraction facility (Unit-340), located in northwest Iraq near the Syrian border. This site was where Iraq extracted uranium for its nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. …
“This image raises questions about whether Iraq has rebuilt a uranium extraction facility at the site, possibly even underground. … Unless inspectors go to the site and investigate all activities, the international community cannot exclude the possibility that Iraq is secretly producing a stockpile of uranium in violation of its commitments under Security Council resolutions. The uranium could be used in a clandestine nuclear weapons effort.”
Of course the passage is evasive and does not make any definitive claim. But its suggestive and misleading rhetoric implying a possible nuclear weapon program in Iraq turned out to be wrong.
However, ISIS has written almost identical slippery rhetorical statements about various facilities in Iran. There is no end to such “possible facilities” in any country. The point to take home from the erroneous (suggestive) interpretation of the satellite images of facilities in Iraq is that it is very difficult to be sure of what one is seeing in satellite imagery.
[5]. The Exploding Bridgewire Detonators (EBWs) issue is among other pieces of circumstantial evidence publicized by Albright’s ISIS group as possibly implicating Iran. But there are many non-nuclear weapons uses for EBWs, especially for an oil-rich nation like Iran. One manufacturer of EBWs explains that these have “… applications in explosive welding of piping and tubing, seismic studies, oil well perforating & hard rock mining.”
The manufacturer is explicit that EBWs “… have found a wide range of applications within the mining, explosive metal welding and energy exploration field. Many of these uses could not be accomplished using conventional blasting equipment without a compromise of safety.”
Furthermore, Iran was not secretive about its work on EBWs. As the November 2011 IAEA report states: Iran “provided the Agency with a copy of a paper relating to EBW development work presented by two Iranian researchers at a conference held in Iran in 2005. A similar paper was published by the two researchers at an international conference later in 2005.”
The Agency, however, noted, “Iran’s development of such detonators and equipment is a matter of concern…” It really is not given its other civilian (and conventional military) uses, and Iran’s relative openness in pursuing the technology.
The expert Atomic Reporters have weighed in: “While the IAEA reported in 2011 that there are ‘limited civilian and conventional military applications’ for exploding bridge wire detonators, the open source literature shows the technology is widely used in the mining, aerospace and defense industries.”
Again, as long ago as 2011 Robert Kelley, a former IAEA inspector, stated: “The Agency is wrong. There are lots of applications for EBWs… To be wrong on this point, and then to try to misdirect opinion shows a bias towards their desired outcome… That is unprofessional.”
[6]. Other technical experts have also weighed in on Albright’s and ISIS’ track-record. For instance, in a long-running argument with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) over the capability of Iran’s centrifuges at the Fordow facility, ISIS consistently exaggerated their capability. Ivanka Barzashka and Dr. Ivan Oelrich explained how ISIS generated the wrong numbers:
“When given the choice between a higher value attributed to unnamed sources and values he calculates himself, Albright consistently chooses the higher values.This is especially misleading when dealing with weapon production scenarios, which evaluate what Iran can currently achieve.” [emphasis added]
[7]. In a separate long-running argument with a scientist, Dr. Thomas Cochran, at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) over the plutonium production capability of the Khushab II reactor in Pakistan it took David Albright years to admit that he and Paul Brannan over-estimated the capability of the reactor by a factor of 10 to 25. This is not a minor error.
Thus, the pattern that emerges of the “evidence” against Iran (and other nations) is of consistent bias, exaggeration and unprofessionalism by some independent nonproliferation security analysts, as well as by the IAEA itself.
“What about the three indications that the arms project may have been reactivated?
Two of the three are attributed only to two member states, so the sourcing is impossible to evaluate. In addition, their validity is called into question by the agency’s handling of the third piece of evidence.
That evidence, according to the IAEA, tells us Iran embarked on a four-year program, starting around 2006, to validate the design of a device to produce a burst of neutrons that could initiate a fission chain reaction. Though I cannot say for sure what source the agency is relying on, I can say for certain that this project was earlier at the center of what appeared to be a misinformation campaign.
In 2009, the IAEA received a two-page document, purporting to come from Iran, describing this same alleged work. Mohamed ElBaradei, who was then the agency’s director general, rejected the information because there was no chain of custody for the paper, no clear source, document markings, date of issue or anything else that could establish its authenticity. What’s more, the document contained style errors, suggesting the author was not a native Farsi speaker. It appeared to have been typed using an Arabic, rather than a Farsi, word-processing program. When ElBaradei put the document in the trash heap, the U.K.’s Times newspaper published it.
This episode had suspicious similarities to a previous case that proved definitively to be a hoax. In 1995, the IAEA received several documents from the Sunday Times, a sister paper to the Times, purporting to show that Iraq had resumed its nuclear-weapons program in spite of all evidence to the contrary. The IAEA quickly determined that the documents were elaborate forgeries. There were mistakes in formatting the documents’ markings, classification and dates, and many errors in language and style indicated the author’s first language was something other than Arabic or Farsi. Inspections in Iraq later in 1995 confirmed incontrovertibly that there had been no reconstitution of the Iraqi nuclear program.”
The words of well-connected and informed senior ex-IAEA officials are worth heeding: Dr. Hans Blix, former head of the IAEA, has stated: “So far, Iran has not violated the NPT,” adding, “and there is no evidence right now that suggests that Iran is producing nuclear weapons.” And Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who spent more than a decade as the director of the IAEA,said that he had not “seen a shred of evidence” that Iran was pursuing the bomb. “All I see is the hype about the threat posed by Iran,” he concluded.
The maximalist approach to non-proliferation advocated by ISIS and other groups may be seen as useful but it is inconsistent with existing international law, as codified in the safeguards agreements. In fact, IAEA records show that all substantial safeguards issues raised in 2005 had been resolved in Iran’s favor by 2008. So Iran was again in compliance with its safeguards agreement at that date. All UN Security Council sanctions ought to have been dropped at that point. Yet Iran’s nuclear file still remains tied up at the Security Council due mainly to the IAEA and Security Council’s flawed handling of the case.
Out of all the countries it inspects, the IAEA spends the second-highest amount on Iran’s nuclear inspections— only Japan, with a vastly greater nuclear infrastructure, accounts for a bigger chunk.About 12 percent of the IAEA’s $164 million inspections budget is spent just on Iran. This is now increased to about 17% during the period of the interim deal because of the even more intrusive—and thus expensive—inspections being carried out now.
On a “per nuclear facility” basis the IAEA spends – by far – the largest amount of its inspections budget on Iran. Comprehensive deal or not, the IAEA will continue to conduct in Iran one of the most thorough and intrusive inspections it carries out anywhere.
However, achieving a deal is in everyone’s favor. It will be made easier by rejecting any flawed (or exaggerated) evidence or analysis being used against Iran – especially by individuals or groups who have a track-record of bias, exaggeration or erroneous scientific analysis.
Dr. Yousaf Butt, a nuclear physicist, is director of the Emerging Technologies Program at the Cultural Intelligence Institute, a non-profit dedicated to promoting fact-based cultural awareness among individuals, institutions, and governments. The views expressed here are his own.
TEHRAN — Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has revealed for the first time that Iran has made a detailed proposal to the P5+1 group of states aimed at ensuring that no stockpile of low-enriched uranium would be available for “breakout” through enrichment to weapons grade levels.
In an exclusive interview with IPS, Zarif described an Iranian plan, presented at the meetings with the P5+1 last month in Vienna, that would exclude weapons grade enrichment. “The parameters of the proposal would be set to continue Iran’s enrichment but to provide the necessary guarantees that it would not enrich to anything over five percent,” said Zarif.
The proposal, which was later published by the Iranian government, included a series of “technical guarantees” against nuclear weapons proliferation.
The plan would involve the immediate conversion of each batch of low-enriched uranium to an oxide powder that would then be used to make fuel assemblies for Iran’s Bushehr reactor, according to Zarif.
Because Iran does not have the capability to manufacture fuel assemblies for Bushehr, the proposal implies that the oxide power would be sent to Russia, at least for several years, rather than remaining in Iran.
The previously undisclosed Iranian plan is part of a broader negotiating stance that insists on the need for a large increase in the number of centrifuges it would have in the future – a demand that the United States and its negotiating partners have rejected.
Obama administration officials have made it clear that they are insisting on very steep reductions in the number of centrifuges, based on the argument that Iran cannot be allowed to have the capability to enrich enough uranium to weapons grade for a single nuclear bomb in less than six to 12 months.
Zarif said he could not discuss the details of the Iranian proposal, because it is “still being negotiated”.
But he described it as involving a complete cycle “from conversion to yellowcake, to UF6, to enriched uranium, back to oxide powder, and back to fuel rods,” all of which would be “designed specifically to meet the requirements of the Bushehr reactor.”
Zarif revealed that the Iranian plan for guaranteeing that Iran could not have a nuclear weapons capability is very similar to the proposal that Iran made to a meeting with the European three (U.K., France and Germany) in Paris in March 2005.
The proposal, which was later published by the Iranian government, included a series of “technical guarantees” against nuclear weapons proliferation. It describes one of those guarantees as “immediate conversion of all enriched uranium to fuel rods to preclude even the technical possibility of further enrichment.”
The U.S.-educated Zarif said he had developed that 2005 proposal himself when he was Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, after he had consulted with a number of American nuclear scientists on ways to reassure the Europeans and the U.S. that Iran could not enrich enough uranium to weapons grade for a nuclear bomb.
“I asked them what would provide the necessary confidence,” said Zarif. “They gave me a number of elements, which I put in a package and sent to Tehran, and they took it to Paris.”
Frank N. Von Hippel, former assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology and now a professor at Princeton University, confirmed in an e-mail that he had been part of a small group of American scientists and others who had met with Zarif to discuss the problem of how to provide assurances that Iran’s civil nuclear programme would not be used to support a nuclear weapons programme.
Von Hippel said his recollection was that the group had suggested “not building up a stockpile but rather shipping [the low-enriched uranium] to Russia to make fuel for the Bushehr reactor.”
Peter Jenkins, then the U.K. permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, participated in the Mar. 23, 2005 meeting at which the Iranian plan was presented.
“All of us were impressed by the proposal,” he recalled in a 2012 interview. The Europeans did not accept it as the basis for negotiation, however, because the George W. Bush administration had insisted that Iran not be allowed to have any enrichment whatsoever, according to European diplomats involved in that earlier phase of negotiations.
Zarif rejected the Obama administration’s position that Iran should obtain whatever reactor fuel it needs for Bushehr or any future reactors from Russia or other foreign sources rather than relying on its own enrichment capabilities. “People should not tell us you have to rely on us,” he said. “It is 30 years too late.”
He was referring to Iran’s experience with its reliance during the early 1980s on a French-based uranium enrichment consortium called Eurodif in which it had a financial stake acquired during the Shah’s regime that entitled Iran to 10 percent of the enriched uranium produced by the consortium.
After the Islamic Republic resumed the nuclear programme begun by the Shah, however, the French government prevented Eurodif from supplying any enriched uranium for nuclear fuel for the nuclear reactor at Bushehr in the early 1980s.
The U.S. State Department acknowledged in 1984 that it had not only ended its own nuclear cooperation with Iran but had “asked other nuclear suppliers not to engage in nuclear cooperation with Iran, especially while the Iran-Iraq war continues.”
The foreign minister ruled out the acceptance of the P5+1 proposal in the last round of negotiations, which reportedly would limit the number of Iranian centrifuges to a fraction of its present total of 19,000.
“We’re not going to redefine our practical needs,” he said, referring to the language in the Joint Plan of Action agreed to last November calling for agreement on an Iranian enrichment programme whose “parameters” would reflect Iran’s “practical needs”.
But the foreign minister indicated that Iran was “prepared within the scope of those practical needs to work on timing, to work on various technical details….”
Zarif criticised statements by former and present U.S. officials to the news media as well in the negotiations referring to demands that the number of Iranian centrifuges must be geared to the need to extend the time required for “breakout” to 6 to 12 months.
Some of the statements made to the press, including those by former State Department proliferation official Robert Einhorn, as well as some of those made in the negotiations “amount to posturing”, Zarif said, adding that they “amount to creating expectations that can never be met.”
“It will be much more productive if everyone involved refrains from shaping the debate in a way that [it] will be out of control,” said Zarif.
Zarif said the U.S. insistence on Iran’s ending of all enrichment at its Fordow facility, which is located in a tunnel under a mountain, is based on “the argument that you can’t have this facility, because otherwise we can’t bomb it.”
The implied assertion of the right to bomb Iranian facilities “strikes the wrong chord in the Iranian psyche and produces exactly the opposite reaction,” he said.
Zarif challenged the view reflected in Western news coverage that the Rouhani government is under strong political pressure to produce results in the talks that would remove the worst sanctions.
The last round of talks in Vienna, which were unsuccessful “has been the easiest time at home,” he said, and “the toughest time” for him as he had to explain “each positive result to a population that is extremely skeptical of the West’s intentions.” If he rejected a deal, Zarif said, he would receive a “hero’s welcome.”
Iran’s nuclear program has been a subject of obsession for Western governments and media agencies for decades, as far back as the final years of Western-backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s reign. But over the course of the last decade, the subject has reached new hysterical heights, propelled by mainstream media coverage mired with distortion and misinformation. Enter: Gareth Porter.
Porter, 71 years old, is a man of many trades. He is a historian, an author, a policy analyst, and of late, has made a name for himself as a successful investigative journalist.
He began his career in journalism during the US war on Vietnam, serving as the Saigon Bureau Chief for the Dispatch News Service International from 1970-71. He then decided to leave journalism for decades, working in a variety of jobs as an anti-war activist, a university teacher, and sustainable development environment work.
It was after another American war at the dawn of the 21st century, this time against Afghanistan and Iraq, that Porter found himself back into the journalistic fold, mainly writing for the InterPress Service.
“It was only from the year 2000 I started writing this book on Vietnam, how the Americans went to war there. It was such an eye-opener. I realized that the problem of America’s wanton wars was not the problem of a president gone wrong or starting from the wrong values or ideas. It was a systemic problem that the war state was the real problem. That has shaped my political consciousness and my scholarship in journalism ever since then,” Porter told Al-Akhbar.
While working on the book, titled “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, which was eventually published in 2005, Porter started to write investigative journalistic articles, the first of which was on how Iraqi Kurdish groups were stealing and forging parliamentary elections at the time.
“That’s what started me on the road of becoming an investigative journalist. I never imagined it would happen but it just developed really quickly,” he said with a light laugh.
Porter started covering the Iranian nuclear issue in 2006; at first, he said, he had believed the overall narrative produced by various agencies.
One key evidence used in the allegations by the West of Iran’s attempts to militarize its nuclear program is the more than one thousand pages of documents that were supposedly acquired from the laptop of an Iranian nuclear scientist by intelligence agencies. They are known informally as the “Laptop Documents.”
But when Porter decided to examine the evidence presented against Iran, he began to discover certain anomalies.
“I went back to look at the recent history of the Iran nuclear issue, and that is when I came across a Wall Street Journal article quoting a German foreign office official, Karsten Voigt, saying this very intriguing thing: ‘Don’t rely on these documents because they came from an Iranian dissident group’ – meaning Mujihedin-E-Khalq (MEK).”
“It pushed me in the direction of questioning the narrative. As time went by I saw more and more of the pieces that didn’t fit the puzzle, particularly about these Laptop Documents,” he added.
In late 2007, Porter met with a German source in Washington DC, and asked him about the Wall Street Journal article. The German source confirmed Voigt’s statement, and thus cemented Porter’s belief that there was more to the story. He began working full-time examining the various evidence and raging debates over Iran’s nuclear program.
Many of his articles, however, have never garnered the attention of the mainstream press and traditional policy institutions within the US.
“The feedback was very weak. The biggest problem, of course, is that the news media and political elite in the US are very powerful, don’t need to respond to information and analysis that contradicts their narratives,” Porter said in regards to the reasons behind this general disinterest in his reports.
Nevertheless, his work in uncovering propaganda and unveiling uncomfortable truths about the problematic narratives regarding Iran’s nuclear program earned him the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, an annual award given by the London-based Frontline Club that celebrates courageous and ground-breaking journalism.
“The single biggest factor driving the elite’s obsession over Iran as a threat and as an enemy is that the basic premise was laid down early at the end of the Cold War,” Porter explained in terms of the reasons behind the American and European honing in on the Islamic republic.
“That the US must take a hand in constraining and preventing Iran from extending its power. It became a fundamental premise of post-Cold War US policy. It fit the interests of the national security state and the Israeli lobby together. Once that happened, and pretty quickly during the Clinton Administration, successive governments naturally followed the general lines set down.”
“Even Obama, just in the early days of office, had the NSA and Israelis come in and tell him about their plans for a cyberwar against Iran. Here he is, a guy who is allegedly planning to enter serious diplomatic engagement with Iran, was essentially conspiring with the Israelis to carry out cyberwarfare. He was going to be the first president to wage cyberwar against another country. That’s very serious,” Porter further remarked.
Overall, Porter mused, the biggest obstacles to any attempt to work out a deal with Iran and end a consideration of military action comes down to Israel.
“Even if there was a settlement of the issue that led to détente between the US and Iran, both of which I’m skeptical about, that would not change the Israeli point of view – which is they have to possess nuclear weapons to maintain superiority over every other country in the Middle East,” he said.
Porter has authored a new book entitled “Manufactured Crisis: The Secret History of the Iranian Nuclear Scare,” which recounts his journalistic work on the allegations about Iran’s nuclear program by the Americans and Israelis since 2006, and discusses in greater detail the numerous evidences and counter-evidences at play.
He recently presented a round table discussion on the topic and his book at the Issam Fares Institute (IFI) building within the American University of Beirut campus on June 9.
Below is the video of the entire talk, and subsequent discussion between Porter and the audience, posted on YouTube by IFI:
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has once again poisoned international efforts to settle the nuclear dispute, with his latest effort to sabotage talks between Iran and the P5+1.
Negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 group – US, Britain, France Russia and China plus Germany – are due to reconvene next week in Austria with the tentative prospect of a comprehensive settlement to the long-running nuclear dispute.
A successful outcome would see Western-imposed trade sanctions on Iran being lifted. The onerous impact of these legally questionable Western sanctions on the Iranian people make that outcome long overdue.
However, this week – just days before sensitive talks re-open in Vienna – France’s top diplomat raised a new obstacle to finding a possible final agreement. Fabius is now telling French media that Iran must reduce the number of its nuclear-enrichment centrifuges, by a 10-fold factor, from a few thousand to a few hundred instruments.
Iran has already agreed to significant guarantees that its nuclear program is for peaceful civilian purposes – and not for weaponization, as the US, Britain and France have long been claiming – by agreeing to cap uranium enrichment at levels far below that required to make atomic bombs.
Fabius’ latest demand that Iran must now also drastically scale back on the number of its centrifuges used in uranium enrichment represents a new pre-condition for settling the nuclear impasse. The number of centrifuges is irrelevant given that Iran has already agreed to impose a limit on uranium enrichment – a generous concession by Iran given that it is not mandated to do so by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That self-imposed restriction led to the interim agreement being signed between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers last November.
That initial groundbreaking nuclear deal at the end of last year was also nearly scuppered back then by Laurent Fabius, when days before he suddenly raised the issue of “guarantees for Israeli security”. That was also seen as a mischievous intervention from Fabius, even by other Western diplomats, which in the event did not prevent the interim deal being signed on November 26.
Days before the next round of crucial talks, Fabius is up to his toxic diplomacy yet again.
Without exaggeration, no other contemporary Western diplomat has as much bad blood in his political veins than the French foreign minister.
He is currently overseeing French state-sponsored terrorism in Syria to illegally overthrow the elected government of President Bashar al Assad. Fabius is also currently overseeing the illegal French invasion of two African countries – Mali and Central Africa Republic – which has sparked the death of thousands of people from internecine violence. And yet this politician has the temerity and arrogance to hold the Iranian nation to ransom over trumped-up nuclear concerns.
But there is much more to this politician’s contaminated career. Fabius’ sinister political history has previously seen him involved in other acts of state terrorism, nuclear destruction of the environment on a massive scale, and the manslaughter of thousands of people around the world through the criminal selling of poisoned blood products.
Let’s start with the latter point first. During the 1980s when Fabius was then French prime minister, his government knowingly supplied blood transfusion products to its own citizens and those of many other countries around the world – to safeguard French commercial profits. It became known as the “blood transfusion scandal” – the biggest health controversy ever to hit France. More than 4,000 French citizens were infected by blood contaminated with HIV and Hepatitis C – of which at least 40 per cent were to die. Among several countries affected by importing blood products from France was Iran. An unknown number of sick Iranian patients would also later die from these toxic
French imports.
As head of the French government between 1984-86, Fabius was subsequently charged with manslaughter relating to the scandal. He was later acquitted by a French court in 1999, along with another minister, while his former Health Minister Edmond Herve was found guilty. At least two other government officials were sent to jail for their part in the systematic crime. Angry campaigners denounced Fabius’ acquittal as an example of the French political elite being “untouchable”.
At the same time that Fabius’ government was overseeing the mass poisoning of blood patients to protect the commercial interests of French pharmaceutical companies, this same government committed one of the most audacious acts of state terrorism in recent decades.
In July 1985, French military agents carried out the bombing of a civilian ship, The Rainbow Warrior. The ship belonged to Greenpeace, the environmental campaign group, and was moored in the New Zealand port of Auckland at the time of the deadly attack, which resulted in the death of one Greenpeace activist and several others injured. French divers had mined the vessel with two explosives.
The incident brought an outpouring of international condemnation, and initially Fabius’ government denied any involvement. However, New Zealand police later arrested two French agents belonging to the foreign intelligence service, the DGSE. The pair were convicted and jailed. Fabius was then forced to come clean, in September 1985, when he made the shocking admission to world media that the French government had indeed ordered the murderous attack on a civilian vessel in a sovereign foreign territory. He famously said at the time: “The truth is cruel.”
But the background to this French act of state terrorism on the Rainbow Warrior is even more criminal. The Greenpeace ship was in New Zealand at that time to lead international protests against rampant French testing of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. Ever since 1962, France unilaterally declared its colonial territories of Polynesia and surrounding seas to be nuclear test sites. Between 1966 and 1996, successive French governments, including that of Laurent Fabius, carried out nearly 200 test explosions on the Pacific coral reef islands of Mururoa and Fangataufa.
The nuclear explosions were carried out with air, sea and underground devices and have been responsible for radioactive pollution spreading to New Zealand, Australia and even as far away as Peru in South America. The French weapons of mass destruction have also destroyed countless natural habitats in the South Pacific.
A year before the Rainbow Warrior terror attack, the New Zealand government introduced a law designating its territorial waters a nuclear-free zone. But that legal restriction did not stop Fabius’ government from committing an act of murder against civilians – civilians who were protesting against French acts of mass extermination in the South Pacific.
This is the criminal quality of former French Prime Minister and now Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius – who has the audacity to lecture the people of Iran about their legally entitled use of peaceful nuclear technology.
Officials from Iran and the US will meet in Geneva next week ahead of the next round of talks between the Islamic Republic and the six world powers over Tehran’s nuclear energy program.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry says the meeting between the Iranian and US delegations will be held in Geneva on the 9th and 10th of June. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi will be heading the Iranian delegation in the talks. Other reports say the US delegation will be headed by US Under-Secretary for State Wendy Sherman.
The talks will come ahead of the next round of negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear energy program scheduled for June 16-20 in the Austrian city of Vienna, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.
Iranian officials will later sit down with Russian diplomats in the Italian capital, Rome, on June 11-12.
Representatives from Iran will probably hold further meetings with other delegations from the six powers – the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany.
On Saturday, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Iran has already held bilateral deputy-level meetings with some delegations from the six world powers.
Iran and the six countries have been holding talks to iron out their differences and reach a final deal to end the standoff over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear energy program.
The two sides held the latest round of nuclear negotiations in Vienna in May.
Iran has rejected as unfounded a report by The Wall Street Journal on its nuclear energy program.
On Tuesday, the US newspaper cited a report by the terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) as saying that Iran “has kept active and intact its core team of weaponization researchers.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Iran’s diplomatic mission at the United Nations condemned the report as a fabrication.
It said The Wall Street Journal is repeating the claims of a terrorist group whose previous allegations proved untrue.
The MKO is listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community and is notorious for committing numerous terrorist acts against Iranians and Iraqis.
The statement also said that Tehran has lived up to its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It added that Tehran expects the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the United States, China, Russia, France and Britain — plus Germany to abide by their commitments concerning Iran’s nuclear rights, regardless of the “uproar” by anti-Iran lobby groups.
Iran and the six world powers have been discussing ways to iron out differences and start drafting a final nuclear deal that would end the West’s dispute with Iran over the country’s nuclear energy program.
Iran and the world powers reached an interim accord in the Swiss city of Geneva on November 24 last year that took effect on January 20 this year.
Under the deal, the six countries undertook to provide Iran with some sanctions relief in exchange for Iran agreeing to limit certain aspects of its nuclear activities during a six-month period. It was also agreed that no nuclear-related sanctions will be imposed on Iran within the same time-frame.
Iranian Defense Minister hit back at his US counterpart Chuck Hagel’s demand that Iran’s missile program should come under negotiation in talks between Tehran and the world powers, stressing that the Islamic Republic’s missile program is not for negotiations.
“Iran’s missile capability is defensive, conventional and deterrent and not negotiable,” Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said.
He noted that if any issue is due to be discussed after the nuclear talks, it should be the full annihilation of the Zionist regime’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons to create a Middle-East free from the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) followed by the destruction of the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of the United States as the first country which has used these “dreadful weapons”.
“We ask our nuclear negotiators to focus their utmost efforts on the complete annihilation of the Zionist regime’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as the biggest danger posed to the region and world security as well as the US nuclear disarmament based on paragraph 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) alongside their negotiations with the Group 5+1 (the US, Russia, China, Britain and France plus Germany),” Dehqan said, according to Fars news agency.
Moreover, the Iranian DM expressed pleasure that the Zionist regime is concerned about Iran’s deterrent power, and said if such deterrence didn’t exist, the usurper regime would seize control of the Middle-East through war and bloodshed.
Dehqan underlined that it is a shame for the US which claims to be a superpower that its defense secretary announces “Israelis have allowed us to find a way to exit from (the deadlock over) Iran’s nuclear issue”.
Earlier, Hagel said that the negotiations between Iran and the world powers should focus on the country’s missile program after the settlement of the disputes over Tehran’s nuclear program.
Iran confirms its program is for peaceful ends only insisting that is its right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) while Israel, which is believed to be the sole nuclear power in the Middle East with more than 200 nuclear heads, is not a signatory for this treaty.
There is a widespread Western fallacy that “sanctions brought Iran to the table,” which serves to legitimize the unjust regime of sanctions imposed by the Western governments, who rationalize their action by claiming to be the “injured parties” under international law, with respect to Iran’s alleged “non-compliance” with its international obligations.
The problem with this perspective that has acquired the status of a self-evident truth in the Western media is that it adopts the rhetoric of Western governments at face value, without the slightest inquiry on what caused the US and other Western governments involved in the nuclear negotiations with Iran to also ‘come to the table,’ that is, make reciprocal concessions?
The answer to the above question is three-fold. First, the idea that the Iran sanctions have caused little or no pressure on the Western countries is, of course, suspect and can be easily debunked. On the contrary, it can be shown that the whole edifice of sanctions regime was experiencing growing pressures and the Geneva agreement reflected a break not only for Iran but also the very sanctioning regimes, above all the US and European Union (EU).
To elaborate, given the fact that Iran’s nuclear progress had continued unabated despite the escalation of sanctions since 2006, the US was poised to pass new sanction laws targeting Iran’s oil sector, which if passed would have adversely affected US’s relations with some of its own trade partners such as India and China. In the absence of a deal in Geneva last November, the US lawmakers would have for sure enacted the new legislation, which would have instantly introduced new distortions in global trade, further violating the WTO norms on free trade. In other words, the Geneva agreement was a timely rescuer for the Western sanctioning states, avoiding a deterioration of their relations with Iran’s energy partners.
Second, by the time of Geneva agreement the unilateral European sanctions had come under increasing scrutiny by various courts in Europe, which had struck down a growing number of banks, trading companies, and individuals from the sanctions list. The significance of these adverse rulings, dreaded by the US officials who lobbied unsuccessfully to prevent them, was that it questioned the legality of some aspects of the EU sanctions that went far beyond the scope of UN sanctions on Iran, thus reflecting the irrefutable legal gap between UN and unilateral sanctions.
Third, in addition to the pressure of ‘market-distorting’ Western sanctions on the sanctioning powers, who deprived their own corporations from conducting profitable business with Iran, much to the delight of their Asian competitors, another important factor that ‘brought the West to the table’ was indeed the impressive pace of Iran’s nuclear progress. As a result of this steady progress, reflected in Iran’s ability to manufacture fuel rods for its medical reactor by enriching uranium up to 19.75%, i.e., the upper limit of low-enrichment, the West was suddenly jolted into the realization that Iran had reached a new nuclear milestone warranting serious negotiation.
Connected to this at the same time was the lessening value of the “military card” in West’s hands, in light of Iran’s construction of the underground facility known as Fordo, which is relatively immune from aerial bombardment, compared to the above-ground Natanz facility. This instantly jettisoned the “Osirak option,” that is the Israeli scenario of knocking down Iran’s facilities the way they did with ease against Iraq in 1981, thus adding to the futility of military threats against Iran. Needless to say, Iran’s counter-threat of closing the Hormuz and retaliating against any attacks throughout the region and beyond, i.e., the doctrine of extended deterrence, was an effective response that raised the potential cost of any military adventures against Iran. A good deal of this successful Iranian counter-strategy hinged on Iran’s extensive preparations for “asymmetrical warfare” and reliance on missile defense, given the impressive Iranian advances in missile technology.
Notwithstanding the above-said, it is hardly surprising that faced with Iran’s steady nuclear progress despite the sanctions that had harmful effects on the Western economy and entailed exorbitant monitoring costs, the West agreed to climb down its maximalist demands on “zero centrifuges” and to tacitly recognize Iran’s right to a civilian fuel cycle.
Of course, this explanation does not preclude the argument that the escalation of sanctions adversely affected Iran’s economy and spurred the new government of Hassan Rouhani to prioritize the lifting of sanctions through good-faith and principled negotiations. As an “injured party” whose inalienable nuclear rights have been abridged by Western discrimination and punitive actions, Iran’s anti-sanctions quest is in line with the nation’s national interests. But, while so much attention has been paid to Iran’s motivation to ‘make a deal’ unfortunately so far little attention has been paid to the underlying reasons for the West to reciprocate Iran’s action and thus explore the feasibility of a “win-win” scenario.
In terms of the regional and global geostrategic context, there are undeniably a host of relevant factors such as the withdrawal of US and NATO forces from the region after a decade of costly intervention and the related concerns for stability ‘the day after’ their planned departure, i.e., issues of direct link to Iran’s role in regional stability. Altogether, the net of Western interest to deal with Iran and search for ‘common grounds’ has been expanding and, naturally, one must probe the various economic, political, and geostrategic interests and concerns of the Western governments led by the US in determining why these powers consented to an interim deal with Iran, which has triggered the current negotiations for a long-term agreement? Suffice to say that the Western media’s failure to pay attention to this side of equation fuels a Western misperception that focuses on Iran’s purported weaknesses due to the sanctions, without bothering to present a comprehensive picture that, as outlined above, presents a vastly different, and more complex, picture before us, with clear policy connotations.
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 29, 2022
With an investigation continuing into the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline that provided energy supplies to Europe from Russia, there appears to be just one prime suspect, and that should surprise nobody.
Following the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski already seemed to know the identity of the perpetrator when he tweeted out: “Thank you, USA.”
At first glance, it seemed that Sikorski was speaking sarcastically, berating Washington for carrying out an attack that will have severe repercussions for the people of Europe. After all, how could anyone see any good coming from the termination of Europe’s primary source of gas reserves with winter just around the corner? It was Sikorski’s homeland of Poland, after all, that urged its citizens to collect firewood in the face of dwindling gas reserves.
In fact, the Polish diplomat was speaking one-hundred percent literally… continue
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