President Trump says he has decided whether or not he will pull the US out of the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the P5+1 deal, and officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). While I have no knowledge of the President’s decision I do know that the Iran deal you were told about by Obama and his cronies is not the real Iran deal (BTW if the President had asked me for my advice, I would have had major problems with his decision-making).
Parts of the Iran deal was hidden from the public, and the Obama administration lied to America about other parts. Even the administration admitted it, in a New York Times Magazine piece Ben Rhodes explained how he led the administration’s efforts to misrepresent the truth in order “to sell” the “Iran deal”
To help the reader decide whether the JCPOA deal makes sense for America below are elements of the deal the Obama administration lied about or kept secret.
- The P5+1 deal gives Iran the capacity to enrich for bombs but NOT for power plants. The deal says that Iran can enrich fuel for peaceful purposes. However, under the agreement, Iran is allowed to keep 5,060 centrifuges, which according to former deputy director of the CIA Mike Morell is enough enrichment to produce bombs but not enough for a power program.
- The JCPOA lifted the ban on the Iranian ballistic missile program. Before the deal UN Security Council Resolution (UNSC) 1929, the council used mandatory language about ballistic missiles, it said, “It decides that Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.” The P5+1 resolution passed by the UNSC changes the language. The On page 119 of the UNSC approved P5+1 does not prohibit from carrying out ballistic missile work but asks them not to carry out ballistic missile development. The resolution merely says, quote, “Iran is called upon not to undertake such activity.” Some reports say that John Kerry begged Iran not to talk about the changes.
- The deal allows Iran to go nuclear after ten years. Do you remember when John Kerry insisted the Iran Nuclear deal was a “forever deal?” That was a lie some of the provisions expire after year 10, and the rest of them after year 15. Based on the agreement, by the end of year 15, Iran could have in place a nuclear infrastructure that could produce the significant quantities of weapon-grade needed to create a few nuclear weapons within months.
- The promised sanction “snap-backs” don’t really exist. President Obama gave Europe, China, and Russia a written promise that the US will guarantee their companies who make deals with Iran, would not have to stop working with Iran should sanction need to be re-imposed should Iran get caught violating the P5+1 deal.
- According to the framework deal, Iran was supposed to reveal the details of their nuclear program. We were told that as part of the agreement Iran would have to “fess up” to the U.N. inspectors about their previous nuclear activity. The reason for the historical inquiry isn’t to find out whether or not Iran had a nuclear weapon’s program so they could be reprimanded for being bad children. By understanding the Iranian nuclear program before the agreement, the IAEA will know how, when, and where to inspect their program in the future. Iran refused to let this happen. so the U.S. stopped asking.
- The deal gives Tehran with the leverage to blackmail the West since the Iranians can threaten (and have threatened) to walk away from the JCPOA with a 35-day notice. Under Paragraph 36, Iran can claim that any of the P5+1 is “not meeting its commitments” under the agreement. That triggers a 35-day set of meetings. Once that clock runs, Iran can claim the issue “has not been resolved to [its] satisfaction” and that it “deems” that the issue “constitutes significant non-performance.” Iran can then “cease performing its commitments under this JCPOA in whole or in part.”
- Iran gets to “self-inspect” at the Parchin military site. Before the agreement, the IAEA sought access to Parchin which has long been suspected of being the location where Iran was developing it’s detonation systems for nuclear weapons. Iran even admitted to using Parchin to test exploding bridge wires, which are used as nuclear detonators, but they claimed the test explosions were not for weapons development.The Obama administration had promised lawmakers that IAEA inspectors would be able to inspect Parchin and resolve all PMD issues before any final deal was inked. But that didn’t happen; instead, they allowed Iran to sign a secret side deal with the IAEA permitting the Iranians to self-inspect the facility rather than grant IAEA inspector robust access. An Iranian statement in Sept. 2015 confirmed that the Iranians collected their own samples, “Iranian experts took samples from specific locations in Parchin facilities this week without IAEA inspectors being present.” Why is self-inspecting bad? A Catholic friend told me that the nuns always told him that self-inspections will make Iranians eyesight go blurry and make them grow hair on their palms,
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, explained at a panel hosted by the Hudson Institute that self-sampling even under surveillance is inadequate. Inspectors need to be on the ground to identify dusty nooks and corners where violators forgot to dust; the mutually agreed upon areas are by definition the ones that violators know have been sanitized:
“What you have is, is the situation where there’ll be videotaping of the potential locations where sampling would take place. Then the IAEA would direct the Iranians to take the samples. And that’s not the normal way to do things.
If I could give the example in Iran of Kalaya Electric, a secret centrifuge research and development facility that Iran denied was such a thing. The IAEA got access and it brought in a very top-level centrifuge expert with that access, who looked around. And when they did the sampling finally they didn’t find any trace of enriched uranium in the areas that had been heavily modified. But in another, a secondary building they found in a ventilation duct – which had not been modified – they found traces of enriched uranium…
You need the eyes and the brain to look where to sample.
I brought up an example of sampling in North Korea… they sampled in the Yongbyon reprocessing plant in the early 90s… you can see in the sampling they’re looking behind this box… Look for where it’s dusty. The idea is that it’s not been disturbed. In the case of Parchin, it would be looking for where the paint doesn’t look solid. And so, that’s very hard to do with a video camera. So I think the video camera opens up additional methods of deceiving the IAEA. And it’s not the normal way they’ve been doing it. And so I think that’s a problem…
- Iran broke the terms of the heavy water provisions of the deal twice in 2016 but Obama let them “off the hook.”
- A secret side deal discovered by the Associated Press allows to upgrade and modernize its centrifuges and increase its enriching capacity, all before the deal officially expires in 15 years. The projection is this will reduce the time for Iran to build a bomb to 6 months instead of the year time frame that was promised. but that six months was reduced even further by….
- Another secret side deal reported by the Institute for Science and International Security (and never given to Congress) reveals that Iran’s breakout time to a bomb is not a year as claimed by the Obama Administration but less than five months.
“As part of the concessions that allowed Iran to exceed uranium limits, the joint commission agreed to exempt unknown quantities of 3.5 percent LEU contained in liquid, solid and sludge wastes stored at Iranian nuclear facilities, according to the report. The agreement restricts Iran to stockpiling only 300 kg of 3.5 percent LEU [low-enriched uranium].”
“The commission approved a second exemption for an unknown quantity of near 20 percent LEU in ‘lab contaminant’ that was determined to be unrecoverable, the report said. The nuclear agreement requires Iran to fabricate all such LEU into research reactor fuel.”
“If the total amount of excess LEU Iran possesses is unknown, it is impossible to know how much weapons-grade uranium it could yield, experts said.”
- The Iran nuclear deal significantly reduces the reporting requirements about Iran’s nuclear program that existed before. That is according to IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano, the head of the international inspection group International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran threatened Mr. Amano with harm if he reveals anything about the side deals.
- There are two secret side deals to the nuclear agreement with Iran that will not be shared with other nations, with Congress, or with the U.S. public. Those side deals may be the ones revealed above…or maybe not..and perhaps there are more. In late 2016 the Daily Beast revealed there were private files outlining hidden agreements made as part of the Iran nuke never released by President Obama because he might find them embarrassing. Earlier Bloomberg View described other potentially embarrassing documents that the administration classified to save face, including an intelligence assessment written to excuse the U.S. collapse on Iran disclosing past nuclear work, which began by imagining a world in which Iran will fully cooperate with the deal for the next 20 years, and then went from there.But there are dozens of other Iran nuke deal-related documents which are not even classified secret, but which the Obama administration has nonetheless refused to release. There are broad suspicions those documents contain embarrassing concessions to Iran: both additional U.S. obligations and exemptions for Iranian obligations. As a technical matter, it would be straightforward to release those documents. As a political matter, the Obama administration has consistently had trouble explaining why the public shouldn’t see them.
Additionally, the Iran resistance group the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which was the first to reveal other elements of the Iran nuclear program to the world, claimed in April 2017 that the rogue regime has not stopped its nuclear weapons program despite the P5+1 nuclear deal negotiated by former secretary of state Kerry, and former President Obama.
IMHO the information above gives President Trump enough reason to pull out of the deal, but then again it is his decision and he has much more information than me.
