With the Iran deal -- the JCPOC (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) -- now being reviewed by Congress, many of us worry that Obama and team will prove to be even worse negotiators than was Neville Chamberlain, the man whose contribution to the 1938 Munich Pact with Hitler’s Nazi Germany guaranteed World War II. All Americans must worry that Obama’s desperate quest for a legacy may well embolden Iran and its rogue-state allies, Syria, North Korea, and Russia, to begin the march toward the next World War.
News from Iran is ominous. Ali Akar Velayati, a top advisor to the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, on July 31 was interviewed on Al-Jazeera television and stated, “Regardless of how the P5+1 countries interpret the agreement, their entry into our military sites is absolutely forbidden.” And it was recently discovered that the Supreme Leader has published his own Mein Kampf, Palestine, a 416 page guide to ridding Israel of the Jews.
Secondly, Obama’s own State Department’s newly released Country Report on Terrorism found that Iran, even during its final negotiations on this “historic” agreement had stepped up its aid to Shiite militias in Iraq, to Hezbollah in Lebanon (in direct violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 which has been in place for over a decade), and increased its aid to the Palestinian terrorist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and to the Syrian government which has killed over 200,000 of its own people and which continues to use chemical weapons to do so.
Thirdly, Iran is one of the worst violators of human rights on the planet. As Jared Genser of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (hardly a right-wing group) reports, more than 1,500 politically-based executions have been carried out in Iran since the supposedly “moderate” Mr. Rouhani was elected president in 2013. There are another 900 political prisoners, including one American journalist languishing in the notorious Evin prison where torture is one of the primary tools of state.
Fourth, Kerry’s State Department has failed to deliver timely reports, every six months, to Congress on the nuclear proliferation activities of Iran, North Korea, and Syria, as required by law, with delays ranging from 22 months to three years. And in the tradition of Neville Chamberlain, Kerry has proven himself to be a serial cave machine. One of his latest caves was when it was disclosed that the Administration is ready to lift sanctions without a full accounting of Iran’s past secretive, military-related nuclear work as required under the interim 2013 deal.
Make the Politicians Defend the Indefensible – A New Form of Journalism
In an effort to craft a new form of activist journalism, I decided to contact a number of my elected representatives here in California to see if any were on board with saving the country from entering into the neo Munich pact. And I have a specific report regarding my contacts with the senior senator from California, Dianne Feinstein. I first logged into her website and wrote her a brief email explaining that I had deep concerns about the terms of the agreement and wished to speak with her.
Ten days later, on July 7, I got a two-page, cut-and-paste letter from her explaining why she was supporting the JCPOC which Obama and team don’t call a treaty so that they can bypass Congress, if the necessary two-thirds vote from the Senate is unavailable. She wrote that she was supporting the agreement not yet signed by the P5+1 countries, U.S., China, Russia, the U.K., France and Germany and listed a few bullet points as to why I should be secure in her judgement. For example, she contended that the agreement provides for:
“unprecedented International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to all nuclear facilities, which is unparalleled in its invasiveness”
To which I respectfully wrote back,
“Senator, how can that be true when the Iranian parliament recently voted 199 to 14 to prohibit U.N. and IAEA inspectors access to military, security, and their defined non-nuclear sites as well as access to related scientists and documents?”
Another erroneous bullet point stated,
“(the agreement provides for) the preservation of all UN sanctions related to conventional weapons, terrorism, human rights and ballistic missiles.”
To which I asked,
"How can that be true? Obama and Kerry have themselves admitted that the agreement has no correlation to Iran’s euphemistically termed “‘bad behavior” or their sponsorship of terrorism or their development of ICBMs capable of hitting the U.S. mainland.”
(Moreover, the Iranian regime has been killing American soldiers beginning with the 1983 attacks on our embassy and Marine Barracks to the present, with over a thousand soldiers killed by Iranian IED attacks in the Iraq war. Arguably, the U.S. should be at war with Iran, not appeasing it.)
As I was instructed by Feinstein’s office, I submitted by email the above questions and a few others to the Senator’s press secretary, Dean Lieberman, asking if he would deliver them to her and if he could arrange for me to speak with her regarding my grave concerns. Not receiving even a one-word response to my email, I followed a few days later with a phone call and was able to speak with Mr. Lieberman. But he made it abundantly clear that not only was I not going to speak with the senator regarding my fears but that no one else in the office was going to speak with me either. He kept repeating, “I’m not in a position to respond to that at this time. But I’m happy to pass your questions on.”
In addition to my questions, or more accurately put, counters to her false assertions, I wanted to ask Mr. Lieberman or anyone else in the senator’s inner circle how she could be in favor of this agreement where, for the first time in its history, the U.S. is potentially entering into a pact with a country committed to the annihilation of another people–a pact that doesn’t even require that the Iranians repudiate their genocidal aims? But I figured it was pointless. He was in full “deflect-and-evade” mode and was “not in a position to respond.” So is the sorry state of our current representative republic.