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WSJ:
"U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday questioned Tehran's ability to adhere to
the terms of a nuclear agreement so long as four Americans continue to be
held in detention in Iran. Several lawmakers said they wouldn't support
an international nuclear deal with Iran if the Americans remained there.
Their comments came at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
on Tuesday in which relatives testified about four Americans held or
missing in Iran. 'Any deal with Iran is dead on arrival that doesn't
include the release of these prisoners-that's what we should say,' said
Rep. Matt Salmon (R., Ariz.). Mr. Salmon and Rep. Randy Weber (R., Texas)
said lawmakers should press President Barack Obama, Secretary of State
John Kerry and others to tie a nuclear agreement to the fate of the
Americans who remain in Iran. 'I think Congress should get real
serious-no agreement, period, until Iran releases the hostages,' Mr.
Weber said. 'I just hope that John Kerry, President Obama and everybody
on their team that's in the negotiation phase would quite frankly come to
their senses.' Three Americans, Jason Rezaian, Amir Hekmati and Saeed
Abedini are imprisoned in Iran. Mr. Rezaian, a Washington Post reporter,
was arrested last summer and later charged with espionage... A fourth
American, Robert Levinson, disappeared on Iran's Kish Island in 2007. The
State Department says negotiators raise their cases in every round of
nuclear negotiations, but relatives said those discussions aren't
working... Rep. Dan Kildee (D., Mich.) said the U.S. should look to Iran
to release the hostages as a show of good faith as the negotiations near
a final deadline." http://t.uani.com/1ePxjl1
Times of Israel:
"Obama made the comments during an in-depth interview with Channel 2
reporter Ilana Dayan at the White House that was broadcast on Israeli
television Tuesday... 'I can, I think, demonstrate, not based on any hope
but on facts and evidence and analysis, that the best way to prevent Iran
from having a nuclear weapon is a verifiable, tough agreement,' he said.
'A military solution will not fix it. Even if the United States
participates, it would temporarily slow down an Iranian nuclear program
but it will not eliminate it,' he added. 'Sanctions won't do it, a
military solution is temporary, the deal we are negotiating will take a
nuclear bomb off the table for the next 20 years.'" http://t.uani.com/1Gkmm7f
Daily Mail:
"Obama contended in his interview with Channel 2 today that 'we
shouldn't assume that we can perpetuate the sanctions forever anyway'
even if Netanyahu and other detractors of the proposed deal end up being
right. 'There's a shelf life on the sanctions, because the reason the
international community agreed was to get to the table to deal with the
nuclear issue, not to deal with all of these other issues,' he said. 'So
we will get a diminishing return just on maintaining sanctions.' The
president further proclaimed that there's 'enormous political pressure'
on the government of Iran to broker a deal in order to boost the
country's ailing economy. 'And they've also shown themselves, regardless
of sanctions, to be willing to finance Hezbollah with rockets and others
even in the face of sanctions,' he added. 'So the question then becomes
are they going to suddenly be able to finance 10 times the number of
Hezbollah fighters? Probably not.'" http://t.uani.com/1EVSRRW
Nuclear Program & Negotiations
JPost:
"Hours before US President Barack Obama will tell the Israeli public
in an interview on Channel 2 that the emerging deal with Iran is in the
best interests of its security, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed
the deal and said Israel must 'first and foremost' rely on itself.
Netanyahu, speaking at the Home Command headquarters in the midst of a
nationwide drill simulating conflict on multiple fronts, said the
challenges facing Israel, including the threat of rocket and missile
fire, are 'piling up.' Most of the missiles and rockets aimed at Israel
have been supplied by Iran, he said... Not only will that deal 'pave the
way for Iran to atom bombs,' he said, but it will also give it an
injection of billions of dollars. 'With that money it can continue to arm
our enemies with high trajectory weapons and other arms, and also arm its
war and terror machine, which is acting against us and the Middle East,
and which is much more dangerous than Islamic State's terror machine,
which is also dangerous,' Netanyahu said." http://t.uani.com/1SVWLoN
Human Rights
Reuters:
"An Iranian court will hold a second hearing next week for
Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, an American-Iranian on trial on
espionage charges, Iran's Students News Agency ISNA reported on
Wednesday. The trial of Rezaian, the newspaper's Iran bureau chief, began
behind closed doors on May 26 at a Revolutionary Court in Tehran.
'Jason's second hearing will be on Monday at branch 15 of the
Revolutionary court,' his lawyer Leila Ahsan told ISNA. Rezaian, a
California native, was arrested last July in Tehran at his home. His
wife, Yeganeh Salehi, and a woman described as a photojournalist also
went on trial, the official IRNA news agency said. Both women, also
American-Iranians, were detained with him but later released. Salehi has
been banned from leaving Iran, the Post reported. The first trial session
was adjourned after two hours, the official IRNA news agency
reported." http://t.uani.com/1Gkk6gu
ICHRI:
"A Revolutionary Court in Tehran has sentenced artist and civil
rights activist Atena Faraghdani to a total of 12.5 years in prison for
drawings and content critical of the government that the young activist
posted on her Facebook page. Faraghdani's lawyer, Mohammad Moghimi,
stated in an interview with the International Campaign for Human Rights
in Iran that under Article 134 of Iran's New Islamic Penal Code, the
sentence should be reduced to 7.5 years imprisonment. This article
stipulates that in the case of multiple charges, sentencing will be
limited to the maximum punishment for the crime with the heaviest
sentence... 'The peaceful expression of dissent remains a red line in
Iran,' said Hadi Ghaemi, Executive Director of the Campaign, 'Cross it
and you risk prison time.' Ghaemi added that the authorities particularly
fear social media networks, which have become hugely popular in Iran,
especially among the young, and have clamped down especially hard on any
content deemed even remotely critical of state policies expressed on
them... The activist's charges are 'assembly and collusion against
national security,' 'propaganda against the state,' and 'insulting the
Supreme Leader, the President, Members of the Parliament, and the IRGC
[Revolutionary Guards] Ward 2-A agents' who interrogated her." http://t.uani.com/1IgSEAD
Amnesty:
"The sentencing of Iranian artist and activist Atena Farghadani to
more than 12 years in prison - far in excess of the statutory maximum
punishment for the charges she faced - is a terrible injustice, and a
violation her rights to free expression and association, Amnesty
International said. This case follows the sentencing last month of Atena
Daemi, another Iranian woman, to more than a decade in prison - also on
charges stemming from her peaceful activism. Both are prisoners of
conscience and must be freed immediately. 'Atena Farghadani has
effectively been punished for her cartoons with a sentence that is itself
a gross caricature of justice. No one should be in jail for their art or
peaceful activism,' said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International's
Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa. 'Such harsh and
unjust sentences seem to be part of a disturbing trend in Iran, where the
cost of voicing peaceful dissent is escalating, with punishments even
worse than those issued in the post-2009 election crackdown.'" http://t.uani.com/1M4JVz7
Newsweek:
"Iran executed four people a day last month. The figures, released
by Iran Human Rights (IHR), a not-for-profit, human rights organisation
based in Oslo, has been confirmed by several independent sources within
Iran, according to the group. IHR now fears that several hundred
prisoners are due to be put to death as part of a mass execution at
Ghezelhesar prison where more than 2,000 death row prisoners are held,
mostly for drugs charges. Since the beginning of May, 56 prisoners from
Ghezelhesar prison have been executed, and 34 of the executions took
place after the prisoners gathered peacefully in the prison yard carrying
handwritten banners asking the Iranian Supreme leader for forgiveness...
According to reports collected by IHR, at least 450 people have been
executed in the first five months of 2015 in Iran. Amiry-Moghaddam says
this year the average is higher than what it was last year, when an
average of two per day were executed." http://t.uani.com/1RJw3y9
Extremism
AFP:
"Caricatures of Arab and Western leaders appeared beside those of
top jihadis at an Iranian cartoon contest on ISIS crimes that drew
entries from artists around the world... The competition called on
cartoonists to submit drawings that reveal the 'true nature' of ISIS as
'no human being can turn a blind eye to the crimes' of the Sunni
extremists. Launched last week, the International Daesh Cartoon and
Caricature Contest attracted 300 entries from more than 40 countries -
including Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia and Morocco. 'We
want to show the true heinous nature of Daesh,' said Masoud
Shojai-Tabatabai, the chairman of the organizing committee, using the
Arabic acronym for ISIS. 'ISIS bears the name of Islam but has no
relationship with this religion, aiming to create [a] divide between
Muslims, between Sunnis and Shiites,' he told AFP on the sidelines of the
awards ceremony Sunday night. 'We also want to denounce its supporters,
the Westerners, the Zionists [Israel], and the United States.' ...
Tabatabai is also the organizer of a competition of cartoons on the
Holocaust, launched in late January in response to the publication by
Charlie Hebdo of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad." http://t.uani.com/1Fu5eWX
Opinion &
Analysis
Eli Lake in Bloomberg:
"When the family of Amir Hekmati, an Iranian-American Marine,
learned he was taken prisoner in 2011, the State Department told them to
keep quiet. Family members were told Amir would be in greater danger if
they went to the media than if they remained discreet. That silence now
looks like a mistake. In testimony Tuesday before Congress, Sarah
Hekmati, Amir's sister, said, 'Our family learned later that our silence
allowed Amir to suffer the worst torture imaginable.' A National Security
Council spokeswoman declined to discuss the specifics of the government's
conversation with the Hekmati family. The Marine's torture was both
physical and psychological. Amir's feet were beaten with cables. His
kidneys were shocked with a Taser. He was drugged by his interrogators,
who then forced him to suffer through withdrawal. Amir was also kept in
solitary confinement for months on end and held in a cell so small for
the first year of his imprisonment that he could not fully extend his
legs. He was allowed to walk outside his cell once a week. Amir was also
kept incommunicado for years. His jailers took advantage of this and
falsely told him his mother had been killed in a car accident. Amir's
sister said she learned these details from family members who visited her
brother in prison, from other prisoners and, starting in the last year,
from five-minute phone calls with Amir that are monitored by his jailers.
Other prisoners have not had even this much contact. Robert Levinson, a
former FBI agent, has not been heard from since he was captured in 2007,
according to testimony Tuesday from his son, Daniel Levinson. Ali
Rezaian, the brother of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, said he
last spoke to his brother in July, before Jason was arrested. Naghmeh
Abedini has not been able to talk to her husband, the Christian pastor
Saeed Abedini, but relatives have been allowed to visit him in jail.
Sarah Hekmati and other relatives of four Americans currently held in
Iran spoke to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday; the timing
and venue are significant. As historian Michael Ledeen has written,
hostage negotiations are at least one element of the nuclear talks coming
to a close now in Switzerland." http://t.uani.com/1MkZCCZ
David Albright
& Serena Kelleher-Vergantini in ISIS: "From
January 20, 2014 and into May 2015 Iran produced about 4,000 kilograms of
3.5 percent low enriched uranium (LEU) hexafluoride. Under the Joint Plan
of Action (JPA), Iran has committed to convert all newly produced 3.5
percent LEU hexafluoride into oxide form. As of May 2015, it has fed a
total of 2,720 kilograms of this type of LEU into the conversion process
at the Enriched UO2 Powder Plant (EUPP) and produced only about 150
kilograms of LEU dioxide. It has not fed any LEU hexafluoride into
the plant since November 2014. Thus, Iran has fallen behind in its pledge
to convert its newly produced LEU hexafluoride into oxide form. There are
legitimate questions about whether Iran can produce all the requisite LEU
oxide." http://t.uani.com/1GZWHiX
UANI Outreach
Coordinator Bob Feferman & UANI Florida Director Tara Laxer in Palm
Beach Post: "As the P5 + 1 nations - which includes
the United States - enters into a crucial stage in negotiations with Iran
that may lift domestic and international sanctions in exchange for
restrictions on Iran's nuclear program, many in Congress oppose the
emerging nuclear deal. They simply do not believe that Iran is prepared
to end its quest for nuclear weapons and that the developing deal is
robust enough to stop such an outcome. With only a month left before the
deadline of talks, the scope of inspections on Iran's nuclear sites will
then be one of the key issues in the negotiating process. By passing the
Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, co-authored by Sens. Robert Corker,
R-Tenn., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., members of Congress have ensured
that they will have a say on any final accord. If Congress disapproves of
a deal, they can effectively kill it by blocking President Barack Obama
from lifting congressional sanctions. Despite the president's threats to
veto this legislation, the House and Senate showed that they were
determined to exercise their rightful policymaking role and underscored
their deep bipartisan skepticism of the emerging deal... Now that Congress
has established its right to review and oversee any deal signed with
Iran, members must ensure its oversight role is consequential. That means
outlining the conditions for a satisfactory deal, in particular that the
IAEA be given the authority for 'anywhere, anytime' inspections in Iran.
Absent that understanding, the Iranian regime will be able to continue to
deceive the international community and continue its pursuit of nuclear
weapons. We must demand that members of Congress insist that any deal with
Iran allows the IAEA to verify that the Iranians are keeping their end of
the bargain. The administration has already caved by allowing Iran to
continue to enrich uranium. In order to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran,
Congress must ensure that the Obama administration and the P5 + 1 not
continue its string of concessions to Tehran by now caving on the
critical matter of inspections. The bottom line: If IAEA inspectors are
not able to go anywhere, anytime, then Congress must use the authority
granted to it in the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act to block the
deal." http://t.uani.com/1G5Nntc
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Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against
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email Press@UnitedAgainstNuclearIran.com
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