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 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 Obama and Kerry told America about the JCPOA was not true. Most of the MSM covered up the lies back then and are 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 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.” That was a lie. 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, which 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, it continued working on it. 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 deal says the IAEA is supposed to inspect.
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.” Some 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.”
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 its nuclear weapon detonation systems. 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 Americans that IAEA inspectors would inspect Parchin and resolve all PMD issues before any final deal was inked. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the administration allowed Iran to sign a secret side deal with the IAEA permitting the Iranians to self-inspect the facility rather than grant the IAEA inspectors 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 that the Hudson Institute hosted 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.”
Before the JCPOA, there was the case of Kalaya Electric, centrifuge research, and development facility that Iran denied had anything to do with its nuclear program. 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.
Iran broke the terms of the heavy water provisions of the deal twice in 2016, but Obama let them “off the hook.” In 2019 the IAEA found Iran had violated 14 other agreement obligations.
The Associated Press discovered a secret side deal that allows Iran to upgrade and modernize its centrifuges and increase its enriching capacity all before the deal officially expires in 15 years. The projection is that this will reduce Iran’s time to build a bomb to 6 months instead of the year time frame that Obama promised.
Yet another secret side deal that the Institute for Science and International Security reported (which was never given to Congress) reveals that Iran’s breakout time to a bomb is not the year 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 preexisting reporting requirements about Iran’s nuclear program. Former IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano, the head of the international inspection group International Atomic Energy Agency, reported that nugget. 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, Congress, or 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 that Obama never released because they might embarrass his administration. 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.
There are dozens of other Iran nuke deal-related documents that are not even classified secret but that the Obama administration 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, Barack Obama and John Kerry hid them to continue their lies to America.
Jeff Dunetz is a rare politically conservative Jew living in the "People's Republic of New York." He's the publisher of the conservative website, Lidblog, which features 3-4 new posts every Sunday through Friday, and he is an at-large national board member of the Herut Zionist movement.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/the_fourteen_most_troubling_obama_and_kerry_lies_about_the_jcpoa_iran_nuke_deal.html
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/sneaky_little_media_tricks_finding_a_way_to_present_joe_bidens_taxandspend_speech_as_a_hit_with_the_public.html
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/if_you_dig_down_permanent_masks_make_sense_for_a_lot_of_people.html
