Eye on Iran: US Withholding Details of Iran Nuke Talks from Israel

Join UANI           Top Stories AP: "The Obama administration said Wednesday it is withholding from Israel some sensitive details of its nuclear negotiations with Iran because it is worried that Israeli government officials have leaked information to try to scuttle the talks - and will continue to do so. In extraordinary admissions that reflect increasingly strained ties between the U.S. and Israel, the White House and State Department said they were not sharing everything from the negotiations with the Israelis and complained that Israeli officials had misrepresented what they had been told in the past. Meanwhile, senior U.S. officials privately blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself for 'changing the dynamic' of previously robust information-sharing by politicizing it... White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that sharing all details of the negotiations with governments that are not at the table would complicate efforts to get a deal that would prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon in exchange for sanctions relief... 'The United States is not going to be in a position of negotiating this agreement in public, particularly when we see that there is a continued practice of cherry-picking specific pieces of information and using them out of context to distort the negotiating position of the United States,' Earnest said when asked whether the U.S. was limiting the amount of information it shared with Israel about the talks." http://t.uani.com/1DvilL1 AFP: "Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and top US diplomat John Kerry will meet in Geneva this week for talks on Tehran's nuclear programme, an Iranian official said Thursday... Zarif and Kerry will hold two days of discussions from Sunday after their diplomats begin bilateral talks on Friday, Iran's deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said. 'After four days of bilateral discussions between the Iranian and US nuclear delegations, they could continue with the participation of all members of the P5+1,' Araghchi was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency." http://t.uani.com/17uYBZF Bloomberg: "The commander of the foreign wing of Iran's Revolutionary Guards was upbeat as he addressed a rally marking the 36th anniversary of the uprising that ushered in theocratic rule. 'We are witnessing the export of the Islamic revolution throughout the region,' Qassem Suleimani, the increasingly public head of the elite Quds Force, said last week. 'From Bahrain and Iraq to Syria, Yemen and North Africa.' While grand declarations regularly feature in speeches commemorating the 1979 revolution that ousted the Shah, this year Suleimani's words carry more meaning. As it attempts to negotiate a nuclear deal that would free its economy from sanctions, Shiite Iran's influence is increasingly visible from the Gulf of Aden to the Mediterranean. Sunni states, especially those like Saudi Arabia that have waged proxy wars with Iran in a fight for regional supremacy, are uneasy." http://t.uani.com/1LeAfRe     Nuclear Program & Negotiations AP: "Diplomats say that the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency is set to report little progress in its attempts to probe allegations that Iran worked on nuclear arms. Two diplomats say the agency's restricted report will likely be released to the U.N. Security Council and the IAEA's 35 board member nations Thursday... Iran agreed a year ago to work with the IAEA. But -like previous probes - the investigation quickly stalled over Tehran insistence that it never wanted or worked on such weapons." http://t.uani.com/1zqbmg3 Human Rights NYT: "The Iranian judge overseeing the case of Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter imprisoned in Iran for nearly seven months, has frustrated his family's effort to hire a lawyer for him, Mr. Rezaian's brother and the newspaper said Wednesday. The brother, Ali Rezaian, said the family had asked Masoud Shafiei, an Iranian lawyer experienced in handling foreign and dual-national clients, to represent Mr. Rezaian. In what amounts to a Catch-22, Mr. Shafiei must first meet with Mr. Rezaian and obtain his signed consent. But under Iranian law, prisoners can meet only with immediate relatives or lawyers who have signed consent. The judge, Abolghassem Salavati of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, must give his permission for Mr. Shafiei to visit Mr. Rezaian in prison to get the signed consent. But so far he has not done so, Ali Rezaian said." http://t.uani.com/19CcyXw IHR: "Three men were hanged in Rajaishahr prison of Karaj (West of Tehran) early Wednesday morning 18 February... One man was hanged publicly in Shiraz (Southern Iran) yesterday 17. February reported the state run Mehr news agency... An unidentified 66 year old man was hanged in the prison of Mashhad (Northeastern Iran) yesterday 17 February, reported the Khorasan daily newspaper... Two men were hanged in the prison of Rasht (Northern Iran) on Saturday 14 February reported the official website of the Iranian Judiciary in Gilan Province." http://t.uani.com/1Lhd0I9 Foreign Affairs AP: "Hundreds of Iranian students protested Wednesday in Tehran against the murder of three Muslim American students in the United States by a white neighbour last week. Shouting 'Death to America' 200-300 students linked to the bassiji Islamist militia demonstrated outside the Swiss embassy, which represents US interests in Iran, an AFP correspondent said. Heavy security was deployed around the building in north Tehran and police kept the demonstrators at bay." http://t.uani.com/1Esshlq Opinion & Analysis Simon Chin & Valerie Lincy in IranWatch: "In the ongoing nuclear talks with Iran, the P5+1 appear to have coalesced around one main objective: ensuring that Iran would need at least one year to produce enough fuel for a nuclear weapon using its declared facilities and material in a 'breakout' scenario. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 21, Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that the Obama administration's 'entire focus is on ensuring that as a practical matter [Iran] is not able to produce enough material for a bomb in less than one year.'  And on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference last month, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond declared a 'one-year minimum breakout period' to be the P5+1's 'key red line' in the negotiations. The assumption is that one year would allow the international community sufficient time to detect any violation; impose a new round of sanctions; and if sanctions fail, to take military action before Iran succeeds in making a bomb's worth of fuel.  But when did this objective become the P5+1's 'key red line'?  What does a one year warning really achieve? ... Yet any agreement that restricts Iran's breakout capability to one year necessarily would rely upon the threat of military force for enforcement. One year is not enough time for new sanctions to take hold.  Robert J. Goldston, a physics professor at Princeton University, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on February 10, argued that it is 'illusory' to believe that any new round of international sanctions would 'change the leadership's decision to build a nuclear weapon' in one year. He continued: 'If Iran felt that extreme circumstances [...] required it to visibly break a new international agreement at a declared, safeguarded facility [...] then no financial sanctions of any kind would change its course.'  Military action becomes 'the best bad option' in such a scenario, according to Dr. Goldston. However, some supporting the administration's negotiating position may not see that the logic of a one-year breakout benchmark requires the threat of military action on the back end.  In a February 12 column in the New York Times, Roger Cohen equated the 'dismantlement camp' - those who say 'every Iranian centrifuge much go' - with 'a war camp.'  On the other side stands the 'curtailment camp': those seeking a deal that combines 'intensive verification [...] an extended period of much-reduced enrichment [...] and assuring that Iran is kept at least one year from any potential 'breakout' to bomb manufacture.'  Yet Mr. Cohen left unanswered how the international community should respond to a theoretical Iranian violation of a 'curtailment' agreement. Beyond the specific case of Iran, the P5+1's position also has implications for the nuclear non-proliferation regime. An agreement allowing Iran to maintain enrichment activities would represent a concession to a country that has repeatedly violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, failed to come clean about the history of its nuclear program, and has been subject to U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for the suspension of enrichment.  Such an agreement would give ground on non-proliferation standards for the sake of reaching an accord.  Allies, in the region and elsewhere, could seek similar deals allowing some enrichment or reprocessing capability, as long as that capability kept them at least one year from a breakout. The rationale for the P5+1's one-year benchmark is not clear.  Dr. Samore, in his Bloomberg interview, stated that the Obama's administration's strategy throughout the negotiations has been 'to buy time.'  This one-year benchmark may be an effort to do so.  But that objective may not deliver the stable resolution to the Iranian nuclear problem that the world is hoping for." http://t.uani.com/1zQPLMA          Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please email Press@UnitedAgainstNuclearIran.com United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons.  UANI is an issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of nuclear weapons.