Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Eye on Iran: American Marine Veteran Held in Iran Assails 'Serial Hostage-Taking'






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NYT: "Relatives of a Marine veteran incarcerated in Iran for more than three and a half years sent a letter to congressional leaders on Tuesday, dictated by him over the phone from prison, denouncing what he called Iran's 'serial hostage-taking and mistreatment' and demanding tougher pressure on the Iranian authorities to release him and two other American prisoners as part of the nuclear negotiations. The letter from the veteran, Amir Hekmati, of Flint, Mich., was one of the boldest steps he has risked from Evin Prison in Tehran to help call attention to his own plight and that of other American prisoners in Iran, who like Mr. Hekmati are of Iranian descent and are considered Iranian citizens by the Tehran authorities... 'While I am thankful that the State Department and the Obama administration has called for my release and that of my fellow Americans, there has been no serious response to this blatant and ongoing mistreatment of Americans by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and they continue on with impunity,' Mr. Hekmati said." http://t.uani.com/1Jbs6R1

Reuters: "The timing of sanctions relief is the sticking point in nuclear talks between Iran and the six major world powers this week in Vienna, where negotiations kicked off on Wednesday with a meeting between delegates from Tehran and the European Union... After a tentative deal between Iran and the P5+1 - China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States, plus Germany - was reached in Switzerland on April 2, differences have emerged over what was agreed. Arriving in Vienna, deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, reiterated Iran's position: 'All the economic sanctions should be lifted on the day that the deal is implemented,' according to a report from Iranian news agency Tasnim. But the United States has made it clear that sanctions on Iran would have to be phased out gradually under the final pact." http://t.uani.com/1DNhpiR

NYT: "When diplomats at the Iran talks in Switzerland pummeled Department of Energy scientists with difficult technical questions - like how to keep Iran's nuclear plants open but ensure that the country was still a year away from building a bomb - the scientists at times turned to a secret replica of Iran's nuclear facilities built deep in the forests of Tennessee. There inside a gleaming plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation were giant centrifuges - some surrendered more than a decade ago by Libya, others built since - that helped the scientists come up with what they told President Obama were the 'best reasonable' estimates of Iran's real-life ability to race for a weapon under different scenarios. 'We know a lot more about Iranian centrifuges than we would otherwise,' said a senior nuclear specialist familiar with the forested site and its covert operations. The classified replica is but one part of an extensive crash program within the nation's nine atomic laboratories - Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Livermore among them - to block Iran's nuclear progress." http://t.uani.com/1DAsTDo

   
Nuclear Program & Negotiations

AP: "Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, says all sanctions must be 'lifted completely, on the very first day of the deal' and has declared that military sites are off limits 'to foreigners ... under the pretext of inspections.' Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami of the Revolutionary Guards warns that anyone setting foot into an Iranian military facility will be met with 'hot lead' - a hail of bullets. In fact, Iran must know that both positions are untenable, suggesting it is again pushing the envelope as a negotiating tactic... All of which leaves Tehran with two options - tone down expectations or walk away from the table." http://t.uani.com/1DNgH5i

AP: "North Korea should learn from the emerging nuclear deal with Iran that Washington is willing to engage its adversaries if it has a 'credible' partner to negotiate with, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday. Sydney Seiler, U.S. envoy to long-stalled six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program, also cited Cuba and Myanmar as having 'responded to our offer to reach out a hand to those who would unclench their fist.'" http://t.uani.com/1K4PkG4

Congressional Action

Reuters: "The U.S. Senate could plunge into a heated debate on legislation giving Congress the power to review a nuclear deal with Iran as soon as Wednesday, as some Republicans sought to change the bill to take a harder line on any agreement. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 19-0 last week for a compromise version of the bill, in a rare display of bipartisan unity in the deeply divided Congress. Lawmakers said on Tuesday the full Senate could begin debate on Wednesday or Thursday, after Senate leaders reached an agreement ending an impasse over a human trafficking bill and President Barack Obama's nominee to be attorney general." http://t.uani.com/1bursjO

Yemen Crisis

Reuters: "President Barack Obama said on Tuesday the U.S. government had sent 'very direct messages' to Iran warning it not to send weapons to Yemen that could be used to threaten shipping traffic in the region. The Pentagon said on Tuesday the presence of a large convoy of Iranian cargo ships in the Arabian Sea was one factor in the U.S. decision to deploy additional warships in the waters off war-torn Yemen. But Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, dismissed reports the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and cruiser USS Normandy had been sent to the region to intercept Iranian ships carrying arms to Iranian-backed Houthi rebels fighting forces loyal to the U.S.-backed Yemeni president. In a televised interview on Tuesday on MSNBC's 'Hardball,' Obama said Washington had been 'very straightforward' with Tehran about the issue." http://t.uani.com/1Fe5sVW

Reuters: "Saudi Arabia's military intervention in neighboring Yemen shows that the Sunni monarchy will stand up to Iran and that Arab states can protect their interests without U.S. leadership, the kingdom's ambassador to Britain said... The traditionally cautious kingdom says it launched the air strikes because its regional rival Iran had been training, arming and financing the Houthis, extending Tehran's influence in the Arab world to Saudi Arabia's southern border... 'Iran should not have any say in Yemeni affairs. They are not part of the Arab world,' Prince Mohammed told Reuters in an interview in the Saudi embassy in London. 'Their interference has ignited instability, they have created havoc in our part of the world and we've seen the events that took place because of their malignant policies.'" http://t.uani.com/1QiXK0W

Dawn: "Earlier today, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani had said a Saudi-led offensive in Yemen was prompted by the kingdom's failures elsewhere, causing what he called a 'mental imbalance'. Speaking to reporters Tuesday before heading to Indonesia, Rouhani mocked Saudi Arabia by calling it a country with dashed dreams in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. 'All the failures have accumulated and caused mental and emotional imbalance for that country,' Rouhani said." http://t.uani.com/1ySnhZv

Human Rights

RFE/RL: "The secretary-general of Iran's Teachers' Organization was arrested on April 20 and transferred to Tehran's Evin prison to serve a five-year sentence, Iran's semi-official ILNA news agency reported. Alireza Hashemi was sentenced to prison in 2010 for 'pursuing union demands' and 'meeting with relatives of jailed teachers,' his deputy, Tahereh Naghiyi, told ILNA. Naghiyi said Hashemi had been convicted of charges that included 'acting against national security.' The organization said the move was an attempt to radicalize the teachers' movement, which it said has been following a rational path. The organization also called on the government of Iranian President Hassan Rohani to listen to the voices of the teachers calling for greater rights and to prevent the creation of a 'security [state] atmosphere' in the country." http://t.uani.com/1DhLBQP

AP: "Tajigul Haidary had overstayed her residents' visa in Iran and was expecting just a hefty fine when she went to renew it, she said. Instead, she was arrested as an illegal immigrant, imprisoned, held in a transit center with hundreds of other Afghans and, early this week, deported at a dusty border point back to Afghanistan. It's a homeland that she hardly knows. Her family took her to Iran when she was nine years old. Now 26 years old, she is married to another Afghan in Iran, has a 4-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter and is five months pregnant. When she was deported, she was wrested away from them. 'My husband tried his best to get me out but they wouldn't listen to him. My children cried, but it made no difference. I don't know what to do. I have to get back,' she said, tugging at the voluminous black chador warn by many Iranian women, as she sat on a plastic chair in a shed at the Islam Qala border crossing." http://t.uani.com/1DNeG96

Opinion & Analysis

Michael Doran in Mosaic: "If past behavior is anything to go by, Obama will give Khamenei what he wants. Indeed, American concessions have propelled the negotiations forward at every stage. A good example of the established pattern is the fate of Fordow, the bunker under the mountain near Qom. At the beginning of the negotiations, Obama publicly stated that the existence of the facility was inconsistent with a peaceful nuclear program. But after Khamenei announced his refusal to dismantle Iran's nuclear infrastructure, Obama agreed that Fordow would not close. In the latest round of negotiations, his position softened further. The bunker would not only remain open; it would also contain operational centrifuges. Thanks to retreats like this one, it is Khamenei's red lines, not Obama's, that have determined the shape of the emerging deal-a fact that prompts the president's critics to accuse him of fecklessness and/or naïveté. But these descriptions miss the mark. The president is not wedded to any set of specific demands. For him, the specific terms of the nuclear agreement are far less important than its mere existence. One of Obama's greatest diplomatic successes is to have persuaded much of the world, including many of his critics, that the primary goal of his Iran diplomacy is to negotiate a nuclear arms-control agreement. In fact, the primary goal is détente with Iran. In the president's thinking, détente will restrain Iranian behavior more effectively than any formal agreement. In addition, it will also open the way to greater cooperation with Iran on regional security. Détente will permit the United States to pull back from the Middle East and focus more on its domestic priorities. Finally, it will vindicate Obama's ethos of 'engagement,' which he sees as a superior alternative to the military-driven concepts of American leadership championed by his Republican opponents. In short, détente will secure Obama's legacy. By contrast, Khamenei is pursuing highly specific goals. Three stand out above all others. He is seeking, first, to preserve Iran's entire nuclear infrastructure; second, to repeal the sanctions on the Iranian economy; and third, to abolish the international legal regime that brands Iran a rogue state. In all three areas, Obama has already satisfied his core demands... Détente may sound like a minor shift in American policy, but in truth it is nothing less than tectonic. Obama has put an end to containment of Iran as a guiding principle of American Middle East policy. To be sure, he continues to pay lip service to the idea of countering Iran's influence, but his actions do not match his rhetoric. In Syria and Iraq, especially, Obama has long been respectful of Iranian interests while treating Tehran as a silent partner against Islamic State (IS). Détente requires Obama to demote all of those allies who perceive a rising Iran as their primary security threat." http://t.uani.com/1FefbeG

Matthew Kroenig in The Weekly Standard: "If there is one thing on which Democrats and Republicans can agree, it is that it is undesirable for countries other than the United States to possess nuclear weapons. For this reason, America's nonproliferation policy has traditionally been characterized by strong bipartisanship. It is notable, therefore, that support for the recently negotiated Iran deal splits along party lines. But on closer inspection, what is truly puzzling is that anyone supports the agreement at all. In striking this deal, the Obama administration abandoned a decades-old mainstay of U.S. nonproliferation policy, and opponents are right to reject it. The United States has always opposed the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies-uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing-to all states, including its own allies, and it is a mistake to make an exception for Iran... In an agreement with Libya in 2003, a textbook example of successful nuclear diplomacy, U.S. military aircraft transferred over 55,000 pounds of nuclear equipment out of the country, including its stockpile of centrifuges and centrifuge parts, within weeks of concluding the deal. Washington's unbending position on sensitive technologies always sat in uneasy tension with the 'inalienable right' to peaceful nuclear technology granted in Article IV of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but when a superpower is willing to enforce its interpretation of international law, it can, and in this instance did, have a profound effect. This history helps explain why, when the existence of Iran's covert nuclear program came to light in 2003, the United States immediately and reflexively declared that Iran would not be permitted to enrich uranium. It was not an unreasonable or unexpected demand; it was simply a restatement of U.S. nonproliferation policy over the past half-century.  The international community understood America's position and slowly climbed on board, demanding that Iran suspend enrichment in six separate U.N. Security Council resolutions. The P5+1 resolutely held this line for nearly a decade as the pressure began to mount on Iran, but then, suddenly, the Obama administration abandoned this cornerstone of American foreign policy. In the interim agreement struck in November 2013, Washington granted Iran the right to enrich, and over the past 18 months it has engaged in the unprecedented act of bargaining over the scale-not the existence-of an aspiring proliferator's enrichment program. This decision will prove disastrous. A deal that allows enrichment in Iran will not solve the problem it is intended to solve. It was with good reason that Washington prohibited sensitive nuclear technologies in the past; permitting the possession of a large nuclear program, complete with sensitive fuel-making capabilities, will make it much harder to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons if and when it decides to do so. Moreover, verifying compliance with such a deal will be challenging. When enrichment or reprocessing is prohibited altogether, detecting a violation is relatively easy. Enforcing an agreement that permits 6,104 centrifuges but not 6,105 (as this deal does) is a fool's errand. Perhaps more important, the Iran deal sets a dangerous precedent. The United States is making this exception to its nonproliferation policy not for just any country, but for Iran, a longstanding U.S. enemy, a leading state-sponsor of terrorism, a country that has violated its nonproliferation commitments in the past, and a country that at present stonewalls the International Atomic Energy Agency's questions about the military dimensions of its nuclear program. In the wake of the Iran deal, it will be difficult for Washington to explain that it trusts Tehran with sensitive nuclear technologies, but not other countries, including its allies and partners. Other countries will inevitably demand a similar right to enrich, further weakening the global nonproliferation standard and inviting a possible cascade of nuclear weapons proliferation. This is not a theoretical concern. Officials in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already demanded the exact same nuclear rights and capabilities granted to Iran in a final deal, and South Korea is expressing an interest in reprocessing for peaceful purposes. This is only the beginning. Expect additional bids for enrichment and reprocessing programs as countries follow Iran's example and assemble the components of a nuclear weapons capability under the guise of 'peaceful' nuclear power." http://t.uani.com/1cZPXWG

Con Coughlin in WSJ: "Iran is the leading Shiite protagonist in the increasingly bitter conflict against rival Sunni Muslims in the Arab world, but lately that hasn't prevented Tehran from rekindling one Sunni alliance. The ayatollahs are rebuilding relations with the military wing of Hamas, the Sunni Islamist group that controls Gaza. According to a senior Western intelligence official, Iran's Revolutionary Guards during the past few months have transferred tens of millions of dollars to Hamas's Izz al-Din al-Qassam brigades. Intelligence reports show that the funds have been transferred on the direct orders of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards' elite Quds Force, who also dedicated an annual budget to finance Hamas's military operations. The funds, according to the intelligence reports, are being used primarily to help Hamas rebuild the network of tunnels that were destroyed during the Israeli Defense Force's response to rocket attacks launched by Hamas militants from Gaza last summer. Apart from using Iranian aid to rebuild the tunnel network in anticipation of future confrontations with the Israeli military, the Palestinian brigades are also replenishing their depleted stocks of medium-range missiles, according to the official familiar with the intelligence reports. The restoration of relations between the Revolutionary Guards and the al-Qassam brigades in Gaza is the latest example of Iran's deepening military involvement in the Middle East, which so far this year has seen Quds Force officers supporting military operations in Iraq, Syria and, most recently, Yemen. In each instance, the Iranians are basically supporting their Shiite allies, such as the Badr brigades in Iraq and Houthi militiamen in Yemen, against Tehran's Sunni enemies. But when it comes to dealing with Hamas, the Iranians are clearly prepared to set aside their antipathy for militant Sunni groups." http://t.uani.com/1IHNwC0

Shahrzad Elghanayan in WashPost: "Until Iran's leaders decide to get their facts straight about Jews, they should stay quiet on the subject. No, I'm not talking about former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust-denying antics. These days, as Iran's leaders try to soften their image to seal a deal to limit the country's nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions, they're peddling a revised and rosy version of Iran's own 2,600-year Jewish history. Asked by NBC's Ann Curry during recent talks in Switzerland whether Iranian leaders understand why Jews have been wary of their rhetoric, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said, 'We have a history of tolerance and cooperation and living together in coexistence with our own Jewish people, and with - Jews everywhere in the world.' That's not quite right. Iran's Jews did have something of a golden age relatively recently, but Zarif, in his role as representative of a regime that eschews pre-revolutionary Iran, can't take credit for it. That era was a brief period when the conservative Shiite clergy were stripped of their power - after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 gave Iranians of all religions and ethnicity equal rights, and before  Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979... It was during that window of relative Jewish affluence that my grandfather Habib Elghanian, born in 1912, became one of Iran's most famous industrialists, after he and his brothers introduced the plastics industry to the country in the late 1940s. In 1959, he was elected the chairman of the country's Jewish association... When Khomeini returned from exile in February 1979 as the head of the Islamic revolution, my grandfather was among the first civilians he went after. On May 9, 1979, my grandfather was executed after a 20-minute trial on trumped-up charges that included being a 'Zionist spy.' The Revolutionary Court did not allow my grandfather to have a lawyer. After a firing squad killed him, the new regime stole what he had spent his lifetime building... In his rosy tableau, Zarif points to what he says are Iran's 20,000 Jews, which he says constitutes the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel. (Iran's latest census counted only 8,756 of them, and Turkey claims to have 20,000, as well.) What he omits is that while Iran's population rose from over 37 million in 1979 to over 77 million today, the Jewish population has plummeted from an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 in 1979. As Khomeini's popularity was growing before his return to Iran from exile, some Jews left Iran with their assets; many fled after my grandfather was executed, and others followed in the early '80s... The relatively few Jews who remain in Iran tell foreign journalists they have no complaints about daily life. As Zarif points out, they are free to attend synagogues. They also conduct their businesses and continue to have a representative in parliament, as they did before the revolution. But like all Iranians who are not government cronies, they know the rules and boundaries of coexistence. For the past three decades, they have uttered monolithically anti-Israel opinions. They can't hold high office or teach in universities. Listening to the foreign minister's version of Iranian-Jewish history makes me wonder what the nation's youth is learning about its past. Maybe now that Iran is working to earn the international community's trust, it's finally time for its leaders to acknowledge past injustices." http://t.uani.com/1FedFJw

Aaron David Miller in CNN: "If I had to describe the U.S.-Iranian relationship in one word it would be 'overmatched.' We're playing checkers on the Middle East game board and Tehran's playing three-dimensional chess. Iran has no problem reconciling its bad and contradictory behavior while we twist ourselves into knots over our tough choices, all the while convincing ourselves that America's policy on the nuclear issue is on the right track. Iran isn't 10 feet tall in this region, but by making the nuclear issue the be-all and end-all that is supposed to reduce Iran's power, the United States is only making Tehran taller. Consider the following." http://t.uani.com/1zLZvcp

Aaron David Miller in WSJ: "The last thing the United States needs is 535 legislators micromanaging its Iran policy. But having worked at the State Department for more than two decades, I know I don't want Foggy Bottom controlling a 10- to 15-year deal with Iran. Here are four ways Congress could play a credible role on the Iran deal." http://t.uani.com/1aS5Uwg
        

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.

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