US Congress to begin hearings on Iran nuclear agreement
MICHAEL WILNER/07/23/2015 /The US Congress begins its review of a nuclear agreement reached between world powers and Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, on Thursday. Hearings start in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where three principals of the Obama administration tasked with crafting the deal – US Secretary of State John Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew – plan to testify. They will also appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee next week. Their review begins amid a multi-million dollar effort, from both opponents and advocates of the agreement, to influence the outcome of the congressional vote. The lawmakers now have the opportunity to vote to approve or disapprove of the deal within 56 days.
For a vote of disapproval to have any practical impact on the JCPOA, more than twothirds of both houses of the US legislature will have to vote against the agreement. That coalition of Democrats and Republicans would be necessary to overcome a veto from President Barack Obama, who has vowed to protect his signature foreign policy achievement. The chairmen of the Senate and House committees – both Republicans – have voiced strong disapproval of the deal. And their Democratic ranking members expressed disappointment as the Obama administration submitted the agreement to the United Nations Security Council for adoption before Congress had begun the review process. Republican lawmakers are universally opposed to the deal in its current form; Democrats have remained largely silent on how they plan to vote. Some have expressed concerns, and fewer have issued endorsements; the majority say they plan on carefully reviewing the agreement over the coming weeks. The White House, alongside the governments of Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany, assert that the JCPOA will verifiably prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Critics of the deal say it emboldens a violent Islamic Republic; fails to secure a sound inspections regime into Iran’s nuclear work; and legitimizes the Iranian government as a nuclear-threshold state. Israel’s ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, held meetings on Capitol Hill on Wednesday with Republican lawmakers. Along with the entirety of Israel’s political leadership, Dermer has been vocal in his criticism of the agreement and has publicly declared his intention to kill it using all tools at his disposal. Obama has been engaging his critics by questioning their track records on foreign affairs, their smarts and their motives. Earlier in the week, he said the Iran deal his team brokered was the “smarter” approach to solving the decades-long conflict, and suggested that its critics were the same people whose polices led to the second Iraq War. “I f you had brought [former US vice president] Dick Cheney to the negotiations, everything would be fine ,” Obama quipped on Tuesday night, appearing on The Daily Show with John Stewart for the seventh time. Stewart seemed to question the president’s general approach to Iran in the interview, asking him, “Whose side are we on?” “This is an adversary,” Obama said.
“They are anti-American, anti-Semitic, they sponsor terrorist organizations like Hezbollah.”“Sounds like a good partner for peace,” Stewart interjected. The president responded that one did not need to make peace with friends. Also on Wednesday, the House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee’s Task Force on Terrorism Financing held a hearing related to the nuclear deal. One expert, Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the agreement is set to cancel certain sanctions on Iran that were intended to target its overall behavior. Sanctions were put on entities such as the Central Bank of Iran for conduct-based activities not limited to nuclear activities but also including money laundering and terrorism, Dubowitz said. “The JCPOA requires the lifting of financial sanctions – including the SWIFT [Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication] sanctions – prior to a demonstrable change in Iran’s illicit conduct. “The big winner from the unraveling of European and American sanctions,” Dubowitz continued, “will be the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps].”
Several major American Jewish organizations have called on Congress to reject the deal in a binding manner. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Orthodox Union are campaigning against it, while the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee are calling on Congress to demand answers to several unanswered questions surrounding the watershed agreement.
After German minister’s Iran visit heavily criticized, EU’s Mogherini heads to Tehran JPOST.COM STAFF, REUTERS/07/23/2015/he European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini will travel to Tehran on Tuesday following the West’s historic nuclear deal with Iran, also going to Saudi Arabia in her first official visit to the two regional powers.
Mogherini’s first stop will be Saudi Arabia on Monday, where she will meet officials including the country’s new foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir, with whom she is expected to discuss regional issues following the July 14 nuclear accord with Iran.
Mogherini will then go on to Iran, where she will meet Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif and other senior officials. The European Union formally approved this week the deal it struck with Iran and other world powers, a step towards lifting its economic sanctions against Tehran, which the bloc hopes will send a signal for the US Congress to follow. Mogherini follows on from German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel’s visit to Iran at the start of this week, the first senior figure from a large Western government to visit the country since the deal. Gabriel’s three-day business trip to Iran over the weekend sparked a wave of intense criticism from members of his social democratic party and NGOs.
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, accused him of putting business interests before morals and called his approach to Tehran naive. “It is somewhat irritating that Germany’s vice chancellor and economics minister waited only five days before flying to Tehran with a delegation of German business leaders.”Lauder said Gabriel’s offer to function as a bridge builder between Iran and Israel was naive given what he described as ongoing agitation from Tehran against Israel and the United States.
“It would have been much better to make new commercial relations with Iran dependent on a change in the regime’s stance toward Israel,” Lauder said.France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and other European foreign ministers are due to travel there soon.
Iran has completed negotiations with some European companies wanting to invest in projects in the country following the nuclear agreement, an Iranian deputy minister said on Thursday. “We are recently witnessing the return of European investors to the country. Some of these negotiations have concluded, and we have approved and granted them the foreign investment licenses and protections,” Mohammad Khazaei told a conference promoting trade between the EU and Iran. “Even in the past couple of weeks we have approved more than $2 billion of projects in Iran by European companies,” he said, without naming any of the firms or providing further details on the deals.
Amnesty: Iran falsifying execution numbers, more than 1,000 expected killed by year’s end JPOST.COM STAFF/07/23/2015/A UN investigation found that Iran had executed 753 people in 2014, which is expected to be far exceeded this year if trends continue to hold. Human rights watchdog Amnesty International Thursday released a report claiming that the Islamic Republic had executed over 690 people from January 1 to July 15 2015, far exceeding the 246 executions declared by authorities in Iran. Amnesty said it had compiled “credible reports” on executions carried out by Tehran and arrived at the number of 694 as of mid-July, noting that the number approached the total amount of executions performed in the Shi’ite stronghold in all of 2014.
A report published in March by UN special rapporteur on Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, said at least 753 people were executed in 2014, the highest toll recorded in over a decade. But Amnesty International fears that the number will be far surpassed if trends continue to hold. “If Iran’s authorities maintain this horrifying execution rate we are likely to see more than 1,000 state-sanctioned deaths by the year’s end,” Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa mission Said Boumedouha said in the report. “The use of the death penalty is always abhorrent, but it raises additional concerns in a country like Iran, where trials are blatantly unfair,” he added. Amnesty also noted that even during the holy month of Ramadan, which usually sees a stoppage in executions performed in the Islamic Republic, four executions had taken place. Amnesty International said that Iranian executions do not meet international legal standards for which the death penalty is appropriate, citing that many of the executions were mostly for drug-related crimes, along with adultery, sodomy and “vaguely worded national security offenses.”According to Amnesty International, Iran executes more people per capita than any other country, which the organization believes has thousands more on death-row.
