Free Republic

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.Obama has practiced deceit for a long time and His "deal" with Iran demonstrates His consummate mastery of the techniques. Earlier, He announced that the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action would eliminate Iran's nuke weaponization and that there would be no deal otherwise. As I contended here in January of 2014, He lied. The November 2013 "joint plan of action" contemplated no inspection of any Iranian military or missile site. Quoting from my post linked immediately above, The text of the English language version of the P5+1 “deal” is available here...

<p>With some lawmakers chanting "Death to the America," Iran's parliament voted to ban access to military sites, documents and scientists as part of a future deal with world powers over its contested nuclear program.</p> <p>The bill, if ratified, could complicate the ongoing talks in Vienna between Iran and the six-nation group — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany — as they face a self-imposed June 30 deadline. The talks are focused on reaching a final accord that curbs Iran's nuclear program in return for the lifting of economic sanctions.</p>

Amid accelerated international efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran, the UN atomic agency on Friday reported that work on an assessment of allegations that Tehran worked on atomic arms remains essentially stalled, according to The Associated Press (AP). The report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also reiterated that more cooperation is needed by Iran for full clarity on its present activities. Without it, the IAEA said, it cannot “conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.” Iran and the IAEA agreed in November of 2013 on a new attempt to probe the accusations....

Iran will not grant the International Atomic Energy Agency a second entry to the Parchin military base, the spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organization said on Monday. "Parchin is a military base," Behrouz Kamalvandi said at a news conference in Tehran. "They [the IAEA] have been raising the issue for years. It is important for their propaganda. They know we will not allow them to visit the Parchin base again, but they think raising the issue benefits the propaganda." Kamalvandi said that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, while serving as Iran's chief negotiator years ago, had allowed the IAEA to enter...

Those who would even question the merits of this deal are dismissed by administration aides as “warmongers”, ... Unfortunately, there are plenty of worrying signs that is not what is happening in Lausanne, where it now seems Iran will be allowed to keep 6,000 of its centrifuges, considerably more than the 500-1,500 the US originally wanted, or the 4,000 “compromise” offer Washington made a year ago. Even more worryingly, the US is reportedly considering allowing Iran to keep some centrifuges at Fordow, the impenetrably hardened underground facility that Iran built in secret, and only admitted to having in 2009 ......

Iraq has notified the United Nations that Sunni militants seized nuclear material from a university in the northern city of Mosul last month as they advanced toward Baghdad, the nuclear regulatory body of the United Nations said on Thursday. Gill Tudor, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is based in Vienna, said in a statement that the organization’s experts believed that the material — thought to be uranium — was “low grade and would not present a significant safety, security or nuclear proliferation risk.” Word of the seizure first emerged in a letter to the United Nations...

Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran has censured the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for its failure to abide by its previous agreements with Tehran. In a Thursday interview with Inter Press Service, Ali Akbar Salehi said pursuant to the February 2014 “Framework for Cooperation” agreement between Tehran and the IAEA, the UN nuclear supervisory body should have ended the investigation into Iran’s “exploding bridge-wire (EBW) experiments.” IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano has so far refused to finalize the issues regarding the fast-functioning detonators, despite the fact that the EBW was the first issue that the two sides...

PARIS -- A Cold War is purely an intelligence war. If you go on a Ukrainian geopolitical bender in front of a former KGB chief like Russian President Vladimir Putin without having a firm grasp of the opposition's mind-set, you risk launching yourself into a wall like some kind of drunken frat bro on a Slip 'n Slide. Here are a few handy tips for understanding the Russian intelligence modus operandi and how it differs from America's. HUMINT vs. OSINT: Russia has higher standards and capacity for espionage and intelligence operations than the West, placing a greater value on reliable...

Released on January 16th, the White House Summary fails -- again -- to deal with Iran's continuing development of nuclear weaponry.  Iran has blasted the summary as "one sided;" what does that mean? According to the White House Summary, What Iran Has Committed To DoOn January 20th, the IAEA will report on the current status of Iran's nuclear program, and particularly on its uranium enrichment program and the Arak reactor.  The IAEA will also report on several specific steps that Iran has committed to take by or on the first day of implementation, including: Halting production of near-20% enriched uranium and disabling the...

Iran is continuinh to make slow but steady progress on its nuclear program according to the August 2013 quarterly repory [URL at link] by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Tehran continues to install more centrifuges including its second generation model. Iran's accumulated its stockpiles of uranium to 3.5 percent hashas increased modestly while the quantity of uranium hexaflouride enrichef to 20 percent remains roughly the same as teported in May. Iran is also moving forward on construction of its heavy water reactor at Stak, which could potentially provide it with a second path to producing material for nuclear weapons,...

As the civil war in Syria enters its third year, there is much discussion of the regimeÂ’s chemical weapons and whether SyriaÂ’s Bashar al-Assad will unleash them against Syrian rebels, or whether a power vacuum after AssadÂ’s fall might make those horrific tools available to the highest bidder. The conversation centers on SyriaÂ’s chemical weaponry, not on something vastly more serious: its nuclear weaponry. It well might have. This is the inside story of why it does not. Relations between the United States and Israel had grown rocky after IsraelÂ’s incursion into Lebanon in 2006, for Secretary of State Condoleezza...

The United States effectively set a March deadline on Thursday for Iran to start cooperating in substance with a U.N. nuclear agency investigation, saying it would otherwise urge reporting the issue to the U.N. Security Council. The comments by U.S. diplomat Robert Wood to the 35-nation governing board of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency signalled Washington's growing frustration at the lack of results in the IAEA's inquiry into possible military dimensions to Tehran's nuclear programme. Iran denies the charge. "If by March Iran has not begun substantive cooperation with the IAEA, the United States ... would urge the board...

[Head of IAEA said he was "confident" no sensitive information had been stolen during hacking incident.] The head of the U.N. atomic agency said Thursday that while the details of a hacking incident involving one of its servers have yet to be elucidated, he was "confident" that no sensitive information related to Iran"s nuclear activities had been stolen. "We are continuing to analyze this event and I don't claim that I have all the knowledge of what happened. We are continuing to analyze the case," said Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukiya Amano. "We don't know...

A diagram obtained by The Associated Press shows that Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran is set to sharply expand its uranium enrichment in an underground plant after installing all the centrifuges it was built for, a U.N. report said, a move likely to increase Western alarm about Tehran's nuclear course. It also showed that Iran's stockpile of its most sensitive nuclear material - which could relatively quickly be processed further to bomb-grade uranium - had grown and was getting closer to an amount that could be sufficient for a nuclear weapon. The latest quarterly International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran came 10 days after the re-election of U.S....

The International Atomic Energy Agency announced that its director Yukiya Amano will not be visiting Iran. Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's Foreign Minister was previously quoted as having said that he would visit the country to discuss...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered Libya more help on Monday as it seeks to rein in militias, stressing that Washington will remain a firm partner despite this month's deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. ...snip... A senior U.S. official said Clinton reviewed U.S. assistance to Libya as it works to secure chemical weapons and other dangerous armaments and to crack down on armed militia groups that have sprung up since the ouster of longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi. "The secretary offered to intensify our support and help for the Libyan government in all...

VIENNA - Iran has effectively shut down a probe of a site suspected of being used for work on nuclear weapons development while doubling the number of machines it could use to make the core of nuclear warheads at an underground bunker safe from airborne attack, the U.N. nuclear agency said in a report Thursday.

Lack of progress in talks between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency is disappointing and it shows Tehran's continued failure to abide by its commitment to the U.N. nuclear watchdog, a U.S. envoy said on Saturday. The IAEA and Iran failed at talks on Friday to unblock an investigation into suspected atom bomb research by the Islamic state, a setback dimming any chances for success in higher-level negotiations between Tehran and major powers later this month. The IAEA, a Vienna-based U.N. agency, said no progress had been made in the meeting aimed at sealing a framework deal on resuming...

Iran accused the United Nations nuclear watchdog of spying and vowed never to suspend uranium enrichment on Monday, Bloomberg reported. The move cast doubt on whether a deal between Tehran and the P5+1 allowing wider atomic inspections is possible. Tehran's IAEA envoy Ali Asghar Soltanieh in Vienna said “Iran will resist to the end” and “will not permit our national security to be jeopardized” by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors working for Western intelligence agencies. Soltanieh added, “Iran will never suspend its enrichment activities." His comments came as the agency’s 35-member board of governors concluded its quarterly review of the...