Two items reported in the news today provide evidence of the vast chasm separating those who champion the nuclear deal with Iran and those who see the deal as clearing the path for Iran’s ascendance to the status of nuclear weapons power and regional hegemon.

The first item is the release of a letter signed by 340 American rabbis urging support for the Iranian nuclear deal. The signators include more than a smattering of fringe radicals. The letter was organized by Ameinu, an organization that bills itself as representing liberal values and a progressive Israel.

Among signators is a strong presence of those whose ideological orientation would be at home at a J Street conclave. There are those who have shown no hesitation cavorting with fringe extremists of Jewish Voice for Peace [JVP], a cultish group that routinely shows up at the most virulent anti-Israel demonstrations and has been described by the ADL as propounding the “complete rejection of Israel.”

While among the signators were many rabbis who do not espouse radical agendas, they need to consider the impact of signing a statement that contradicts the overwhelming opinion of Israelis who feel most immediately threatened by Iran and lends respectibility to groups like J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace whose political agenda is hostile to Israel.

There is, for example, Arthur Waskow, who welcomed JVP as part of the “spectrum” of acceptable Jewish groups, telling a friendly interviewer from Tikkun magazine “I sort of feel attracted to its tone and method.” Unsurprisingly, the founder of Tikkun magazine, former 60s radical turned rabbi, Michael Lerner, is also a signator.

Some signators have received support from the New Israel Fund [NIF], a controversial organization that has come under severe criticism in Israel for funding the “lawfare” campaign to isolate Israel and criminalize its leaders. NIF funds anti-Zionist groups like Breaking the Silence that travel the world spreading harmful lies about the Jewish State.

The signators also can be found in droves on petitions that come down hard on Israel but are mostly silent on Palestinian hatred and the horrific violence it engenders. For example, many of the names on a petition called “Jewish Solidarity with the People of Gaza,” are also found on the Iran Deal letter. The Gaza petition called for unconditional negotiations with Hamas. It says nothing about terrorism or Hamas’s responsibility for the plight of Gaza, but remonstrates, “As Jews and people of conscience, we can no longer stand idly by Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza.”

Undoubtedly, further scrutiny of the 340 signators would reveal much more troubling activity and beliefs out of step with the majority of American Jews.

The second item, provided by Adam Kredo, correspondent for the Washington Free Beacon, reports on a threat issued by the spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization [AEOI] to harm International Atomic Energy Agency Director Yukiya Amano if he reveals the contents of secret side deals between Iran and the agency. It will be interesting to see how, or even if, this explicit threat from an Iranian official is covered by the mainstream media, especially by those organizations supporting the proposed nuclear agreement.

While it’s uncertain how long Iran’s current leadership will remain in power, it is certain that this leadership is fanatically determined to eliminate the Jews in Israel. Among evidence supporting this view is one item generally overlooked: The very name of the regime’s elite “Quds Force.”

Iran’s venerated Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of its Islamic revolution, is credited with naming the organization. Khomeini’s “founding vision [was] the eradication of Zionism [as] an inevitable precondition for redeeming contemporary Islam” (The Nuclear Deal: No Pause in Iran’s Vow to Destroy Israel, by Michael Segall, Aug. 16, 2015, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs). According to Segall , Khomeini’s obsession “keeps guiding the current generation of Iran’s religious, political and military establishment. To him the destruction of Zionism was an axiom never to be questioned or strayed from and an objective to be perpetually and actively pursued. According to this vision, Israel should be fought as part of a protracted global struggle between Islam and the West, which ‘planted intentionally the Zionist Entity in the heart of Islamic World.’ ”

In the Islamic world, Jerusalem, Israel’s ancient and modern capital, is most commonly known by a word transliterated as “Al-Quds” meaning “The Holy” or “the holy Sanctuary.” Al-Quds is an Arabic phrase that may reflect the earlier Hebrew beit ha-Mikdash, or “the holy house”— the First and Second Temples.

The Quds Force operates as Iran’s military special forces arm. Any of countless other names could have been applied to the unit if not for Tehran’s central obsession, elimination of the Jewish state of Israel — Allah’s Force, Allah’s Commandos, perhaps the Warriors of Ali (Shiite Islam’s original martyr) or something similar.

Jerusalem (or any variation of the word) is not mentioned anywhere in Islam’s holy book (attributed to Islam’s prophet, Mohammed or Muhammad), the Quran (Koran). The phrase transliterated as “Al-Quds,” mentioned several times in the Quran, is taken in the Islamic world to refer specifically to the Al-Aqsa mosque located on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Temple Mount is the site of the ancient Jewish Holy Temples of Israel mentioned prominently in the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament. Al-Aqsa was constructed in 711 C.E. after the Islamic conquest, on the remains of the Byzantine Church of St. Mary of Justinian.

How important is the Quds Force? A news item currently reports the defiance of an international travel ban by the head of the organization, Qassem Souleimani, in traveling to Russia to discuss the delivery to Iran of surface-to-air missiles and other weapons. Such missiles could help protect Iran’s presumed nuclear armaments facilities.

Quds Force reports directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei, Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s ultimate boss, who recently published a book called Palestine on the destruction of Israel.

Commentary presented as fact in The Washington Post by Professors Todd Gitlin and Steven M. Cohen misleads readers through omissions, distortions, and a lack of context (“The Jewish leaders who don’t speak for American Jews,” Aug. 16, 2015). The authors use a dated poll from The Los Angeles Jewish Journal to claim that a majority of American Jews support the Iran nuclear deal reached July 14 between the United States, Russia, France, China, United Kingdom, Germany and the Islamic Republic over the latter’s purported nuclear program.

A closer examination reveals significant problems with their presentation.

Gitlin and Cohen assert that a majority of American Jews support the Iran nuclear deal in its current form. They make this assertion based on a July 16-20 Jewish Journal survey, conducted mere days after the agreement was reached, purporting to show 63 percent of American Jews favoring the deal. However, other more recent polls indicate that as the particulars of the agreement have become more well-known, American Jews increasingly oppose it. This is similar to the rest of the American public.

A week after The Jewish Journal poll, The Israel Project—referred to only briefly by the professors—conducted a poll showing 51 percent of respondents opposed the deal. Further indication of this trend can be seen in a July 30-August 4 Quinnipiac University opinion survey showing 53 percent of New York Jewish voters opposed the deal.

Dismissing or ignoring more recent polls while citing as proof of Jewish majority support a poll conducted in the first week after the deal was announced—before controversial details were more widely reported—is misleading at best and disingenuous at worst.

The authors correctly noted that most major Jewish organizations oppose the deal. They explain away this contradiction to their claim of majority backing within the Jewish community by making the unsubstantiated claim that these organizations are not truly representative of American Jews. They point to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations denial of membership to J Street. But J Street seems to be the sole Jewish organization, self-described as pro-Israel but whose lobbying has been mostly pro-Palestinian, supporting the deal in its current form.

Yet, Gitlin and Cohen fail to mention that the reason for J Street’s exclusion may be the not-so thinly veiled anti-Israel character of some of the group’s alliances and backers. The latter includes a member of J Street’s board who has argued that Israel should not exist, the former partnership with the National Iranian American Council, an anti-Iran sanctions outfit whose researcher, Beheshteh Farsheshani, has falsely asserted “Israel spends our money on terrorism, war, fear, racism.”

The professors also omit that affiliated members of Jewish organizations—akin to “likely voter” categories in other politically oriented polls versus the general public—tend to be more involved and better informed regarding subjects of concern to the organized Jewish community, such as the Iran nuclear deal, than those with no affiliation or, in the specific case of the Jewish Journal poll, do not identify as religiously Jewish. Instead, they assert that differences in support can be explained by affluence of those affluent contributors polled. This overlooks that pro-deal organizations like J Street have received much of their funding from affluent contributors. Billionaire anti-Israel investor George Soros was a primary source of funding for J Street, a fact founder Jeremy Ben Ami initially denied.

By flogging a poll already overtaken by events—and explaining away its inconsistencies through omissions and canards, Gitlin and Cohen mislead Post readers both on the opinions of American Jews more likely to be informed and active on the Iran nuclear deal and on the representative nature of major Jewish organizations.

Are most black Americans members of the NAACP or the Urban League? No. Does The Post consider those organizations representative of African-Americans? Yes. Please drop the double standard when it comes to American Jews.—Sean Durns

USA Today correspondent Shira Rubin falsely equated anti-Israeli violence with anti-Palestinian violence in her article “Israel cracks down on Jewish extremists in West Bank.” (Aug. 6, 2015). Immediately, on Aug. 6 CAMERA requested a correction that would more accurately reflect the disparity in the amount of attacks by Palestinians in the West Bank and those of Israeli settlers. The unpublished letter to the editor listed below was sent following the newspaper’s refusal to issue a correction.

“Dear Editor:

Shira Rubin’s article ‘Israel cracks down on Jewish extremists in West Bank’ (Aug. 6) claims that ‘Jewish settlers and Palestinians have long engaged in tit-for-tat violence [emphasis added].’ However, suggesting that violence between the two groups is comparable is not borne out by figures from the pro-Palestinian advocacy group B’Tselem showing that from 2000-2011, Israeli civilians were murdered by Palestinians nine times more than the other way around. Twenty-three Palestinian Arabs were killed by Jewish settlers in circumstances that were not independently confirmed whereas in that same period 215 Jewish civilians were murdered by Arabs in the West Bank. If violent but not fatal attacks by Palestinian Arabs against Israeli Jews and planned or attempted strikes against Jews aborted by Israeli security forces were also included, the fallacy of the ‘tit-for-tat’ comparison would be even clearer.

Sean Durns
Media Assistant, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
Washington D.C.”
—Sean Durns

Photograph of Iranian protester killed by the Iranian regime’s Basij thugs.

The New York Times published a piece on August 13, 2015 conveying the report by a journalist from an “American Jewish pro-Israel publication” that “found little evidence to suggest that Iran wanted to destroy Israel, as widely asserted by critics of the Iranian nuclear agreement.”

The journalist, Larry Cohler-Esses, is the assistant managing editor for news at The Forward, a Jewish newspaper that trends left and has been known to feature the views of anti-Zionist Jews. Cohler-Esses paints a relatively benign picture of Iran. In an interview with the Times’ Rick Gladstone he stated, “Far from the stereotype of a fascist Islamic state, I found a dynamic push-and-pull between a theocratic government and its often reluctant and resisting people.” Although he found “no one had anything warm to say about the Jewish state” when “pressed as to whether it was Israel’s policies or its very existence to which they objected, several were adamant: It’s Israel’s policies.”

What is missing here is factual context and intellectual integrity. It is as if Cohler-Esses and the New York Times operate in a vacuum, devoid of historical awareness or even common sense.

Concerning the metaphor of “push-and-pull” between the Iranian government and its people, there seems to be a lot of pushing, not much pulling. Here is some context from the last “free” elections Iran had:

Human rights campaigners say anecdotal evidence suggests the number of demonstrators killed in clashes with government forces after last month’s poll was far higher than the official death toll of 20 and may amount to a “massacre”. (July 16, 2009 by the Guardian, a leftist, anti-Israel newspaper)

The United States Institute of Peace published a report on the Green Movement that opposed the theocratic regime that recounts the widespread torture and killing of political activists.

Radio Free Europe published accounts of the regime murdering hundreds of Iranians demonstrating for political freedom.

But it is the contention that it is Israel’s policies not its existence that the Iranian leadership objects to that is most dishonest. The evidence of the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime is vast and overwhelming. One tweet from the Ayatollah Khamenei will suffice. On July 23, 2014, the Supreme Leader tweeted, “This barbaric, wolflike & infanticidal regime of #Israel which spares no crime has no cure but to be annihilated.” The Ayatollah’s prescription suggests that his objections to Israel run deeper than just policy complaints.

Gladstone’s piece on Cohler-Esses recalls the epithet “useful idiots” often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, but more likely coined during the terror regime of Joseph Stalin.

In a piece recounting a BBC interview with Doris Lessing, herself a self-admitted youthful “useful idiot,” Professor Donald Rayfield author of Stalin and his Hangmen, provides a working definition of the term:

The phrase (useful idiots) seems to have been around for about 70 years. It’s someone who doesn’t think they’re an idiot, who thinks they’re highly intelligent but is so easily persuaded by flattery from people in power that they’re prepared to sacrifice their principles and allow themselves to be duped, or even just to lie, for the sake of advantage.

The term was used in the context of western intellectuals and journalists who served as apologists for the brutal Soviet regime and helped conceal its enormous crimes.

The Times puff piece on Iran is part of this long and unsavory tradition. Among the most famous examples comes from New York Times itself. As famine engulfed the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, the Times star reporter, William Duranty posted dispatches, dutifully published by the Times, with titles like “Russians, Hungry But Not Starving” and “Soviet Industry Shows Big Gains.” Although he admitted food was scarce and disease due to hunger had taken a toll, he saw no one starving and impressed upon readers that such claims were exaggerations.

Duranty received a Pulitzer prize for his reporting. Maybe Gladstone and Cohler-Esses have similar aspirations. Or maybe they’re just clueless.

Duranty claims to have not seen those who died from starvation, although it is suspected by many that he did know and intentionally concealed this information. But a conservatively estimated 3 million perished in what most credible historians regard as a man-made famine imposed on the Ukrainian peasants and others in order to break their will to resist the Communist regime’s absolute control.

Similarly, Cohler-Esses may not have seen the terror imposed on Iranian citizens or the psychopathic hatred of Israel, but it is irresponsible of him – and the Times – to present such a naive and deceptive piece, especially since its timing indicates that it was intended to sway the political debate over the nuclear agreement that is vehemently opposed by Israel and its supporters.

The times have changed, but apparently the Times has not.

In an Op-Ed in the Miami Herald, Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expresses his opposition to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the proposed “Iran deal” negotiated between the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and Iran.

Gen. Shelton writes:

The main opposition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and its many supporters in Western countries — myself included —understand that a regime that can’t be trusted with the lives of its own people can’t be trusted with a weak nuclear deal. The deadly consequences of such an agreement will not come 10 years from now when Iran has the acknowledged ability to launch a nuclear weapon; they will come as soon as the current regime is granted legitimacy on the international stage and gains economic or political leverage over democratic nations, which will happen as soon as their coffers are filled with unfrozen assets and the oil flows unfettered.

If the administration can’t be bothered with the voice of the over 75 million Iranians, there is no shortage of American former officials, military officers, and academics who can attest to the power and legitimacy of the Iranian people and opposition working towards democracy. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and retired General George Casey are among them. All are men of unimpeachable integrity.

President Obama would do well to heed the serious, thoughtful and constructive criticisms about the nuclear deal.

USA Today featured reporting by Peabody award-winning reporter and GlobalPost special correspondent Reese Erlich (“Iran’s Jewish community gets behind nuclear deal with U.S.,” August 7, 2015) that omitted key details on the treatment of Jews in the Islamic Republic of Iran. By uncritically relaying comments of a people under surveillance and failing to fully note the threats they face, the article misleads readers.

Interviewing Jews in Tehran, Erlich asserts that “most Iranian Jews strongly disagree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” over his objections to the agreement between the United States, Germany, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom and Iran over the latter’s purported nuclear program. The reporter bases his claims on responses from individuals in the “city’s small Jewish community” he interviewed.

But, why is Iran’s Jewish community now so “small”?

Erlich briefly mentions that “over 100,000 Jews lived in Iran prior to the 1979 revolution, but many left right afterward”—leaving a population of only 12,000 to 30,000. Not only does he fail to account for the discrepant estimates of the current Jewish population, he fails to elaborate why so many Jews fled—in some instances perilously over mountains and desert—and why those who remain might be reluctant to publicly identify themselves as “Zionists.”

After taking power in 1979 and ushering in the Islamic Revolution, some wealthy Iranian-Jews found themselves put on show trials. The first private citizen to be executed by tribunal was Habib Elghanian, an Iranian Jew who stood accused of “economic imperialism” and contacts “with Israel and Zionism.” As Moment Magazine noted, “his real crime was that he had failed to follow established custom for Jews and maintain a low profile.” (“How Jew-Friendly Persia Became Anti-Semetic Iran,” Nov. 2006)

This relevant background may have something to do with why Iranian Jews stressed to Erlich that they “consider themselves Jews but not Zionists.” Not only does Erlich fail to provide context, he also uncritically notes the comments of an Iranian Jew who tells him, “There (is) no need for guards in front of our synagogues.” This omits that one possible reason is the iron fist of the regime, which suppresses all sectors of society and uses controlled violence for its own ends. The brutal suppression of peaceful protests in 2009 over the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is perhaps the most conspicuous example of Iran’s enforced police state conformity.

In other words, a reporter was granted access to the dwindling members of a Jewish community suppressed since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought the mullahs to power and—not surprisingly—they stated publically that they support the nuclear deal and that conditions in their community are just fine. One can imagine—in a country that persecuted other minorities, the baha’i’s for example—what would have happened to Jews quoted by Global Post/USA Today if they expressed anything but support for the theocratic government.

The annals of journalism record other instances of reporters failing to appreciate the nature of the leaders and regimes they covered. Dispatches from The Nation journalist Lincoln Steffens in 1919 infamously lauded the “imagination” of dictator Vladimir Lenin and were filled with testimonies from people throughout Russia supporting the newly-created Soviet Union and what was a rapidly decreasing crime rate —while failing to note the brutal means used to stabilize and support the regime

Outlet—i.e. Kansas City Star journalist Edgar Snow—whose exclusive access during China’s civil war in the 1930’s to Chinese Communists and their leader Mao Zedong, but not the opposing Chinese Nationalists whom he privately disdained—led the reporter to look past despotic tendencies already in evidence. Instead he wrote approvingly of future mass murderer Mao and his Communists as “agrarian reformers” who sought peace.

Similarly, New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews—labeled by biographer Anthony DePalma as “the man who invented Fidel”—was granted access to rebel and future Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Matthews claimed in 1959 that the future Communist leader was “not only not a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist.”

Perhaps most infamously, exclusive access to another of the twentieth centuries largest mass murderers—Soviet dictator Josef Stalin—led to New York Times reporter Walter Duranty becoming an apologist both for Stalin’s show trials against regime opponents and his forced starvation of Ukrainian peasants.

Erlich—who previously wrote an article with actor and counterculture iconoclast Peter Coyote referring to the terrorist-supporting regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad as a possible “ally”—would have better served Global Post and USA Today readers by disclosing in greater detail the history of Iranian Jews under the mullahs. Had he provided more context—instead of transcribing statements uncritically—readers would have been much better informed.—Sean Durns

Author Kai Bird’s review in The Washington Post of former National Public Radio (NPR) correspondent Sandy Tolan’s book The Lemon Tree (“The Middle East: A Land of Two Peoples,” June 25, 2006) failed to note the false Israeli-Palestinian equivalence that drove the narrative of Tolan’s book. In a July 9, 2006 letter published by The Post, CAMERA observed:

“Kai Bird’s review of Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Book World, June 25), refers to two people. One is a Palestinian who ‘cannot relinquish U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194’, which resolves that ‘the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so.’ The other is an Israeli who ‘cannot accept that measure, which she believes means bartering with the Jewish character of the Israeli state.’

Resolution 194 (adopted in 1948) recommended ‘at the earliest practicable date’ the return of refugees who intended to live in peace with their neighbors in what became Israel in 1948, or their resettlement in Arab countries and compensation for damages or loss of property. The Palestine Conciliation Commission was instructed ‘to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees.’ But the ‘earliest practicable date’ never arrived. The Arab states, expecting to win the war they had begun by violating U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 (which called in 1947 for the partition of British-ruled Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one), voted against Resolution 194. The refugees and their hosts rejected resettlement and compensation. Later, having lost, the Arabs began claiming that Resolution 194 had established a ‘right of return’ to homes inside Israel proper. The central figures in Tolan’s book remain symbolic, but in fact the Palestinian holds nothing to ‘relinquish’ and the Israeli is not obligated to ‘accept’ or ‘barter.’

ERIC ROZENMAN
Washington Director, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
Washington, D.C.”

CAMERA has previously documented biased reporting by Tolan (“NPR Bias Triggers New CAMERA Action,” Sep. 1998). The former correspondent, now an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, seems to have continued to take the Palestinian narrative. His most recent book, Children of the Stone, focuses on Palestinian participants in the First Intifada who became musicians.

An April 28, 2015 talk by Tolan at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California to promote his new book was co-sponsored by supporters of the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement Jewish Voice for Peace and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). AMP was created in 2005 from the Islamic Association of Palestine—a propaganda arm of United States listed terror group Hamas. The Anti-Defamation League has noted AMP “seeks to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state.”—Eric Rozenman

In an Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal, a law professor and former lead State Department attorney for nuclear affairs outlines the many precedents for congressional revisions to international agreements.

Orde Kittrie writes:

Congress has flatly rejected international agreements signed by the executive branch at least 130 times in U.S. history. Twenty-two treaties were voted down. According to 1987 and 2001 Congressional Research Service reports, the Senate has permanently blocked at least 108 other treaties by refusing to vote on them.

Moreover, the 1987 CRS report and an earlier study in the American Journal of International Law note that more than 200 treaties agreed by the executive branch were subsequently modified with Senate-required changes before receiving Senate consent and finally entering into force

[…]

The historical precedents for Congress rejecting, or requiring changes to, agreements involve treaties or other legally binding international agreements. The Iran deal, formally titled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, is unsigned and not legally binding. Mr. Kerry has repeatedly referred to it as a “political agreement.” Nonbinding, unsigned political agreements receive less deference and are considered more flexible than treaties or other legally binding international agreements. Congress should be comfortable sending one back for renegotiation.

David Albright is both founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). Albright first came to the public’s attention as a nuclear expert who questioned whether Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 and for his work in identifying attempts to build nuclear weapons by the al-Qaeda terror group. In a Washington Post commentary (“What Iran’s hostile reaction to the Parchin issue means for the nuclear deal,” Aug. 11 2015), the scientist and former weapons inspector called attention to satellite imagery suggesting that Iranian officials are attempting to erase evidence of nuclear activity at Parchin.

Albright notes that Parchin is a “site…linked by Western intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to past work on nuclear weapons.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif responded to the publication by the institute of evidence that “Iran could be again sanitizing the site to thwart environmental sampling that could reveal past nuclear weapons activities there.” Zarif called the images lies.

The nuclear expert observes that “instead of acknowledging the concern, the Iranians chose to deny the visible evidence in commercial satellite imagery.” Albright said that his organization has taken a neutral position on implementation of the deal negotiated by the United States and five other countries with Iran. He added that information about renewed Iranian activity at Parchin doesn’t come from opponents of the July 14 agreement reached between America, Germany, France, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and Iran over the latter’s purported nuclear program—but rather a neutral observer.

“Iran’s reaction,” Albright notes, “shows that it may be drawing a line at Parchin.” This development troubles the veteran weapons inspector who notes “concern” about the site have “become more urgent now that there is a debate raging over whether the IAEA will have adequate access to this site under the terms of its deal with Iran….concern is further heightened because Iran demanded to do sampling itself instead of letting the IAEA do it.”

The nuclear expert called that Iranian proposal “risky and unprecedented.” He noted that in previous instances of nuclear detection at the Iranian Kalaye site and the North Korean plutonium separation plant at Yongbyon, “the success of sampling that showed undeclared activities depended on samples being taken at non-obvious locations identified during previous IAEA visits.” Yet, if the Iranian’s demands are met and possible evidence of previous military-related nuclear activity is destroyed it will be “doubtful” that inspectors can convincingly verify that Iranian nuclear weapons work has ceased.

Albright calls on the Obama administration and Congress to not lift sanctions unless Iran addresses IAEA concerns about past military dimensions of Tehran’s purported program. “To do otherwise,” he states, “is to make a mockery of the nuclear deal.”

David Albright’s article in The Washington Post can be found here. —Sean Durns