President Ebrahim Raisi (Iran) - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

Iran’s Raisi says nation will not back down ‘an iota’ from its nuclear rights

TOI STAFF and AGENCIES — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 17:43:36 +0000

President hails Tehran’s atomic achievements on Nuclear Technology Day, as negotiations in Vienna to revive 2015 deal drag on.

As negotiations between Iran and world powers continue in Vienna over potentially reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi said Saturday that Tehran would not back down “an iota” from its nuclear rights.

Speaking on Iran’s Nuclear Technology Day, Raisi said, “For more than the one-hundredth time, our message from Tehran to Vienna is that we will not back off from the Iranian people’s nuclear rights… not even an iota,” according to a Reuters translation of a state media report.

“Our knowledge and technology in the nuclear field is not reversible. Iran’s [continuation of] research in peaceful nuclear fields will not depend on others’ demands or viewpoints,” said Raisi, who came to power in August.

Raisi repeated Iran’s insistence that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are only peaceful — a claim doubted by Israel and the West.

The president attended an exhibit of the National Atomic Energy Organization, to see the latest achievements of nuclear scientists, according to state media, which did not give details on those achievements. Raisi described them as symbolic of self-reliance and self-confidence.

He also said Iran’s work on its nuclear program had accelerated.

The United States and Iran blamed each other this week for a weeks-long impasse that has held up a return to the 2015 deal that sought to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said that the country’s negotiators would not return to Vienna, the site of the year-long talks to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), until Washington settles outstanding issues.

“We will not be going to Vienna for new negotiations but to finalize the nuclear agreement,” Khatibzadeh told reporters in Tehran. “If Washington answers the outstanding questions, we can go to Vienna as soon as possible,” he said, without explaining the specific questions that remained.

“At the moment, we do not yet have a definitive answer from Washington,” he said.

But in Washington, Khatibzadeh’s State Department counterpart Ned Price pushed back, suggesting it was Tehran that was not giving way to make a deal possible.

And Price warned that time was running out, as Iran gets closer and closer to the nuclear “breakout” point when it has achieved the capacity to construct a nuclear weapon.

“Anyone involved in the talks knows precisely who has made constructive proposals, who has introduced demands that are unrelated to the JCPOA, and how we reached this current moment,” Price said.

“We still believe there is an opportunity to overcome our remaining differences,” Price said.

He said Iran’s continuing nuclear development has put it within “weeks” of breakout, which would nullify the benefits of a new agreement.

“Iran has been able to shrink that breakout time from where it started to a point where we can measure it in weeks rather than months. To us that is unacceptable as a long-term proposition,” Price said.

Tehran has been engaged in long-running negotiations in the Austrian capital to revive the JCPOA, with Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia directly, and the US indirectly.

The JCPOA gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program to guarantee that Tehran could not develop or acquire an atomic bomb.

But the US unilaterally withdrew from the accord in 2018 under then-US president Donald Trump, who reimposed biting economic sanctions that prompted Iran to begin rolling back its own commitments.

Last year, newly elected US President Joe Biden pledged to attempt to revive the JCPOA, blaming Trump for allowing Iran to drop its commitments to the agreement.

In the past month, the negotiations — in which the US communicated with Iran indirectly through other participants and the European Union — have brought the parties close to an agreement.

But the talks halted last month.

Among the key sticking points is Tehran’s demand that Washington remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the ideological arm of Iran’s military, from the official US list of terror groups.

But the US insisted Friday on keeping the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps on its designated list of terror groups.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, had told a congressional hearing on Thursday that in his “personal opinion” the Quds Force should not be dropped from the terror list, which has been one of Tehran’s conditions to renew the deal.

Asked Friday whether that opinion reflected the position of the administration of US President Joe Biden, State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter seemed to agree.

“The president shares the chairman’s view that IRGC Quds forces are terrorists,” she told reporters.

Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/irans-raisi-says-nation-will-not-back-down-an-iota-from-its-nuclear-rights/

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Iran ‘society set to explode’ while Biden unfreezes $29 billion for regime

Benjamin Weinthal — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 11:57:13 +0000

Social discontent in Iran has risen by 300 percent in the past year according to an IRGC document obtained from Edalat-e Ali.

A hacktivist organization has revealed a highly sensitive Iran Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps document that asserts Iranian “society is in a state of explosion” because of the crippling sanctions imposed on the nation due to its illicit nuclear program.

The US government news organization Radio Farda obtained the document from Edalat-e Ali (Ali’s Justice), the whistleblower entity that has also secured confidential documents and video footage about the torture of Iranian prisoners, wrote Farda.

According to Radio Farda’s Golnaz Esfandiari, who authored the exclusive article, “the document covers a meeting with IRGC’s intelligence wing and quotes an official named “Mohammadi” saying that Iran’s “society is in a state of explosion.”

Mohammadi added that “social discontent has risen by 300% in the past year.”

Radio Farda said it could not verify the authenticity of the document beyond the sourcing of Ali’s Justice.

The official noted that “several shocks” in recent months have “shaken public trust” in the regime of President Ebrahim Raisi, who is listed as a US-sanctioned person for his role in several mass murders, including the massacre of at least 5,000 Iranian political prisoners in 1988.

Radio Farda reported that “Mohammadi referred to soaring inflation, including hikes in the price of food items, energy, and cars. He also noted the sharp declines in stock prices.”

“The leaked document includes notes from a November 2021 task-force meeting chaired by Brig.-Gen. Hossein Nejat, a senior IRGC commander and deputy head of Sarallah, a key IRGC base that oversees security in Tehran,” the station said.

Omri Ceren, the national security adviser for US Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, tweeted on Saturday: “The Biden administration is giving Iran a nuclear weapons arsenal,” with a link to a Daily Mail article that declares: “Biden REMOVES some Iran sanctions imposed by Trump, including unfreezing $29 billion in bank accounts overseas, in bid to return to Obama-era deal that three negotiators have resigned over.”

In addition to officials at the meeting from the IRGC, a US-classified terrorist organization the IRGC document noted that the meeting of the Working Group On the Prevention Of A Livelihood-Based Security Crisis was attended by the Basij militia, intelligence bodies, and the Tehran Prosecutor’s Office.

The Basij militia is a volunteer force frequently used to crush demonstrations against political and economic corruption of the theocratic state.

The Jerusalem Post reported last month that Iran’s deputy interior minister, Taghi Rostamvandi, outlined factors during a speech that could shake the foundations of the theocratic state.

The Islamic Republic News Agency, the regime-controlled news agency of the Islamic Republic of Iran, reported that Rostamvandi warned that Iranians are seeking with greater frequency “fundamental changes in the country,” and a secular government and way of life.

Revolts against the clerical state have erupted in Iranian society since the 1979 Islamic revolution, including the widespread Green movement protests in 2009 and massive unrest in 2019.

Source: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-695612

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U.S. and Allies Close to Reviving Nuclear Deal With Iran, Officials Say

Today News Network — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 17:19:45 +0000

WASHINGTON — The United States and its European allies appear on the cusp of restoring the deal that limited Iran’s nuclear program, Biden administration officials said on Monday, but cautioned that it is now up to the new government in Tehran to decide whether, after months of negotiations, it is willing to dismantle much of its nuclear production equipment in return for sanctions relief.

Speaking to reporters in Washington, a senior State Department official signaled that negotiators were prepared to accept the broad outlines of an agreement after discussions last week in Vienna. It would essentially return to the 2015 deal that President Donald J. Trump discarded four years ago, over the objections of many of his key advisers. Ultimately, that freed Iran to resume its nuclear production, in some cases enriching nuclear fuel to levels far closer to what is needed to make nuclear weapons.

Administration officials cautioned that it was not clear whether a final agreement would be struck, and in Iran that decision is bound to go to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the State Department official said that “we can see a path to a deal if those decisions are made and if they are made quickly.”

“Now is the time for Iran to decide whether it’s prepared to make those decisions,” the official said. A second senior administration official also said the talks had reached the decision-making stage. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

For President Biden, restoring the deal — and with it, limits on Iran’s production capability — would fulfill a major campaign promise and seal a breach Mr. Trump created with Britain, France, Germany and the European Union, which participated in the original agreement along with Russia and China. But it also comes with significant political risks.

No Republican voted for the deal in 2015, and its restoration would almost certainly become a campaign issue in the midterm elections. Like the original deal, the new one would not limit Iran’s missile development, the senior official said. It also would not halt Tehran’s support for terrorist groups or its proxy forces, which have stirred unrest across the Middle East, as some Democrats and nearly all Republicans have demanded.

Despite those shortcomings, Mr. Biden is prepared to return to the 2015 agreement and “to make the political decisions necessary to achieve that goal,” the senior State Department official said.

And while American officials offered no details, a clean restoration of the old accord would mean all limits on Iran’s production of nuclear material would still expire in 2030. Last year, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken vowed that after restoring the old accord, the United States would seek one that was “longer and stronger.” But Iranian officials rejected that idea.

The State Department official said that the negotiations to restore the 2015 agreement were “in a final stretch” and that “all sides” needed to commit to returning to full compliance. In fact, the United States violated the original accord first, when it withdrew and reimposed sanctions against Iran. Mr. Trump then added hundreds of additional sanctions, and it is unclear how the negotiation now underway would deal with those.

In Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, the former head of the country’s Atomic Energy Organization and a key player in the original negotiations, told an energy conference that “it appears that the nuclear negotiations will reach the end result that we have in mind,’’ according to Iranian news reports.

After nearly two years of trying to persuade European leaders to counter the American sanctions, Iran began violating the agreement, denying inspectors access to key facilities and ramping up its nuclear enrichment.

While it has not amassed the same volume of enriched uranium as it held before the 2015 agreement, it has purified some of its new stockpile to a level of 60 percent — closer to the 90 percent enrichment used to produce nuclear weapons. Previously, Iran had capped its enrichment at 20 percent.

“A country enriching at 60 percent is a very serious thing,” Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body that inspects Iran’s production facilities and verifies compliance with agreements. “Only countries making bombs are reaching this level.”

Iran had been resistant to eliminating that 60 percent-enriched fuel. It is unclear how it would be disposed of, or whether it would just be moved to another country, perhaps Russia, which took Iran’s previous stockpile.

When Mr. Trump exited the original agreement in 2018 — which he called “the worst deal ever” — he promised to force Tehran into new negotiations, saying he would get better terms and also halt the country’s support for the Syrian regime, its funding of terrorist groups and its missile tests. But he never got them back to the negotiating table.

Instead, Iran doubled down on its nuclear and military activities in the region, and evaded sanctions by smuggling oil to key buyers — including China — to keep its economy afloat as it waited for the Trump administration to leave office.

The new government of President Ebrahim Raisi was dismissive of its predecessors, charging that they had failed to get sanctions lifted even after Iran shipped 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country. And for months it left American negotiators — whom it has refused to meet directly — dangling, uncertain whether the new leadership would even attempt to reconstitute the old arrangement. Over time, though, economic pressures on Iran built.

Still, returning to the accord is sure to anger hard-liners in Iran who have warned that the United States could renege again when Mr. Biden is no longer president. They sought a written assurance that the United States would never leave the arrangement, something Mr. Biden said he could not provide.

Mr. Biden’s biggest political vulnerability now may be that in restoring the old arrangement, he buys an eight-year reprieve at best.

“You arrest the advance of the of the program; you buy time to deal with what is a problem that is being deferred,” said Dennis B. Ross, a longtime Middle East negotiator who oversaw Iran policy at the White House during the Obama administration. “It’s not going away — it’s being deferred.”

However, Mr. Ross said, the deal helps stave off a nuclear arms race in the region.

One key issue is how Israel will respond. It has continued its sabotage campaign against Iran’s facilities, blowing up some of them and, at the end of the Trump administration, assassinating the scientist who led what American and Israeli intelligence believe was Iran’s bomb-design project. But no intelligence agency has provided public evidence that the project has resumed in a significant way since it was suspended in 2003.

On Monday, ardent critics of the 2015 deal — and by extension the return to it — vowed to overturn it when a Republican president returns to the White House.

“Any nuclear deal will allow Iran to take patient pathways to nuclear weapons as key restrictions expire and tens of billions of dollars flow into the coffers of the regime to finance its destructive activities,” said Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, who worked with several administrations on Iran policy.

“When power shifts in Washington, Republicans again will reimpose all the sanctions and take America out of what they see as a fatally flawed agreement,” he said.

Source: https://todaynewsnetwork.in/u-s-and-allies-close-to-reviving-nuclear-deal-with-iran-officials-say/

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The post U.S. and Allies Close to Reviving Nuclear Deal With Iran, Officials Say first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

President Ebrahim Raisi (Iran) - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

Iran’s Raisi says nation will not back down ‘an iota’ from its nuclear rights

Iran ‘society set to explode’ while Biden unfreezes $29 billion for regime

U.S. and Allies Close to Reviving Nuclear Deal With Iran, Officials Say

Understand the Iran Nuclear Deal