Politics to go

New report boosts view that Iran’s been violating JCPOA

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As the pressure continues to build between the US and Iran, many liberals are blaming the tensions on President Trump and his decision to leave the Iran nuclear deal (the JCPOA). Some even claim that Iran had complied with the agreement when the president pulled America out.

An announcement last Thursday should have changed those opinions. From an exclusive report by Israel’s Channel 13 news, we learned that the UN’s nuclear inspection group, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), found evidence of radioactive activity in the Tehran warehouse identified by Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu during his UN speech last September. In other words, there had been nuclear-related activity at that site. Channel 13’s source was “four senior Israeli officials involved in the matter.”

In his September, Netanyahu documented with pictures that in August 2018 the Iranians cleared from the warehouse 15 kg of enriched uranium they had kept secret from the IAEA, and they had another 300 tons of nuclear-related equipment and material. The Iranians then denied the allegations and claimed that the factory was a carpet cleaning factory and denied that any nuclear activity was happening at the site.

Based on pictures of the site published by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) there is a carpet business across the street.

After Netanyahu identified the site to the UN General assembly, “Israel gave the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) information about the suspected warehouse, and UN inspectors visited the site several times, in March, taking samples of soil at the site to discover traces of radioactive materials and preparing a report on their findings.”

“According to senior Israeli officials, inspections by UN inspectors have been found to be positive, and in the last few weeks it has been confirmed, and senior officials have noted that there has been considerable evidence of radioactive contamination, indicating that nuclear materials not reported by Iran have been.”

The storage of nuclear materials and equipment at a secret site without reporting to the IAEA is a significant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signed by Iran. 

The IAEA was supposed to release its report detailing Iran compliance with JCPOA in June, but it hasn’t been released yet. An official statement by the IAEA about the atomic warehouse may have far-reaching international political implications for Iran. The United States and Israel hope that in the next few days, the IAES will publish its report, and it will include the damning findings.

The day before the news broke, Netanyahu spoke with Trump regarding the Iranian issue for the second time in a week. The IAEA discovery was probably the primary topic.

The radioactivity news was foreshadowed back in April. Reuters reported that the IAEA inspected the warehouse site more than once in a month— an indication that something was up: Netanyahu argued the warehouse showed Tehran still sought to obtain nuclear weapons, despite the flimsy JCPOA agreed to in 2015 pact with world powers to curb its nuclear program in return for a loosening of sanctions.

“At the time [after Netanyahu’s speech] the IAEA bristled at being told what to do, saying it does not take information presented to it at face value and sends inspectors ‘only when needed.’ They’ve visited the site,” one of the three diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly and details of inspections are confidential.

“One of the diplomats said the IAEA had been to the site more than once last month. The others said the agency had been there, without specifying when. The IAEA declined to comment.”

Even without this latest revelation, it would be impossible for someone to say Iran was following the JCPOA (or not following the JCPOA) because those “anywhere, anytime” inspections Obama and Kerry promised are as real as unicorns and the tooth fairy).

Because of a secret side deal revealed by the Associated Press long before the deal was finalized, Iran gets to self-inspect the Parchin military base with no IAEA inspectors present. Parchin is the site where Iran was working on nuclear triggers for its bomb program.

Supposedly, other military base inspections are allowed under the JCPOA. 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.”

Despite what JCPOA states, Iranian authorities claim military sites are off-limits to the IAEA. Sadly, the IAEA and the countries that stayed in the deal refuse to push the point because they don’t want Iran to seem non-compliant.

 When and if the IAEA releases its report, including the inspections at the atomic warehouse, the political claims that Trump was wrong to pull out of the JCPOA will die down. Liberals will continue to claim that Iran was meeting all its obligations under the JCPOA but because “anywhere, anytime” inspections is one of the many lies former President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry told America about the deal, there is no backup to that claim.

The report of radioactive materials at the atomic warehouse and the lack of inspections at Iran’s military bases where they did much of their nuclear development is more proof that President Trump did the right thing by pulling out of the JCPOA.

If it weren’t for Israel and the Mossad, the world wouldn’t have known about this dangerous development at the warehouse and if it weren’t for Netanyahu taking the revelation public at the IAEA would probably have ignored the evidence.