By: Jeff Dunetz
This article originally appeared on The Lid and is republished here with permission.
Joe Biden and his foreign policy team are negotiating with Iran, trying to get the U.S. back into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (“JCPOA”) Iran nuclear deal. Many on the liberal side of the aisle support this objective, not realizing that the JCPOA allows Iran to build nuclear weapons in the near future and place the United States, the Sunni Gulf States, and Israel in grave danger.
The support for returning to the JCPOA stems from naivete. Much of the naivete stems from the fact that a considerable amount of what Obama and Kerry told America about the JCPOA was not true. Because of their reverence toward Obama, the MSM covered up the lies back then. Because of their Trump derangement syndrome and the happiness that Biden is POTUS, the media still not reporting the truth about the deal. Below are what I believe are the fourteen most troubling facts about the JCPOA, along with the lies that former President Obama and former Secretary of State John Kerry told about those facts in their efforts to sell Americans on the JCPOA:
The JCPOA allows Iran to go nuclear between 2025 and 2030. We were told that the agreement’s goal is to ensure that Iran will be prevented from building nuclear weapons for the deal’s life. According to an op-ed that John Kerry and Ernest Moniz published in 2015, the deal’s life is “forever.” Some of the provisions expire after year 10 (2025), and the rest expire after year 15 (2030). 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 JCPOA gives Iran the capacity to enrich for bombs but NOT for power plants. The deal says that Iran can enrich fuel for peaceful purposes. Under the agreement, Iran may keep 5,060 centrifuges. Which per the former deputy director of the CIA, Mike Morell, is enough enrichment to produce bombs but not enough for a power program.
Iran never reported its nuclear history to the IAEA: Iran had been non-compliant with its obligation to reveal its nuclear history. Per the JCPOA, the rogue nation was supposed to disclose its pre-deal nuclear program as a condition for implementing the agreement. Historical knowledge is necessary so the IAEA will know how, when, and where to inspect Iran’s program in the future. When it came time to ‘fess up, Iran told the IAEA that it never had a nuclear program. The IAEA reported what it was told instead of pushing back against a blatant lie. This is another example of a breach of the accord that was published as compliance. In other words, the entire agreement was based on a lie and should never have been implemented.
Using information that a Mossad operation secretly gathered in Iran and that the United States verified, in April 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu exposed a significant lie in the information Iran supplied to the IAEA in its 2015 report. The documents proved that Iran not only had a nuclear weapons program (called Amad,) but after it was supposedly canceled in 2013, the nuclear weapons program continued. Eventually, the IAEA visited one of the sites Netanyahu identified and found traces of Uranium.
There are no “anytime, anywhere” inspections: Because of a secret side deal the Associated Press revealed long before Obama signed onto the JCPOA, Iran gets to self-inspect the Parchin military base with no IAEA inspectors present (more on that below). The agreement specifically “requests the Director-General of the IAEA to undertake the necessary verification and monitoring of Iran’s nuclear-related commitments for the full duration of those commitments under the JCPOA.” But after making the deal, the Iranian authorities claimed military sites are off-limits to the IAEA. Sadly, the IAEA and countries that stayed in the deal refuse to push the point because they don’t want Iran to seem non-compliant.
One of the problems with this refusal involves the deal’s “Section T.” In Aug. 2017, the IAEA announced that it could not verify a vital part of the JCPOA, “Section T.” That part of the deal outlines “Activities which could contribute to the design and development of a nuclear explosive device.” That inability doesn’t mean Iran violated “Section T.” It means your guess is as good as mine because nobody knows — but the JCPOA says the IAEA is supposed to inspect these elements.
Ben Rhodes admitted there were falsehoods. 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 JCPOA to the press.
The JCPOA lifted the ban on the Iranian ballistic missile program. Before the deal, in UN Security Council Resolution (UNSC) 1929, the council used mandatory language about ballistic missiles, stating, “It decides that Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.” The P5+1 resolution the UNSC later passed changes the language. On page 119 of the UNSC-approved JCPOA deal, the language changed from Iran “shall not” carry out ballistic missile work to merely asking Iran not to carry out ballistic missile development. To quote, “Iran is called upon not to undertake such activity.” Not only did John Kerry lie to the senate about the meaning of the language change, but there are also reports say that John Kerry begged Iran not to talk about the changes.
The promised sanction “snap-backs” don’t really exist. President Obama gave Europe, China, and Russia a written promise that the US will guarantee that those of their companies that make deals with Iran would not have to stop working with Iran if Iran was caught violating the P5+1 dealing, which would mandate re-imposing sanctions.
The deal gives Tehran the leverage to blackmail the West because 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 country agreeing to the JCPOA 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.”
