U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, speaks with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, left, before a bilateral meeting for a new round of Nuclear Talks with Iran at the Intercontinental Hotel, in Geneva, Switzerland. (Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP)
The leaders of the Islamic Republic are frightened. They face an American national security team that knows a lot about them, and, unlike the Obama administration, strongly dislikes them.
General Michael Flynn’s book was an underground hit in Farsi, and the quadrumvirate of Pompeo, Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly show no signs of wanting to pursue the shameful strategic alliance that Obama forged with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. On the contrary, all four stress Iran’s role as chief sponsor of international terror. All four know the ayatollahs are deadly serious when they lead chants of “Death to America.”
The Iranian leaders knew that they could get away with murder as long as Obama was in charge, and that Obama’s administration would protect large parts of the agreements between the two countries. Yet of late, we have heard Iranian officials warning us not to make public the secret elements of the nuclear “deal.” Listen to the words of Adam Kredo:
Senior Iranian officials are warning the Trump administration about disclosing secret agreements related to the nuclear deal that have long been hidden from the public by the Obama administration, according to recent comments that prompted pushback from senior sources on Capitol Hill.
Iran's warning comes on the heels of Kredo’s Washington Free Beacon reportdisclosing that former national security adviser Flynn had been pushed out of office partly due to his intention to release these sensitive documents to the American public.
I dare say you didn’t know there were many secret parts to the “deal,” did you?
It appears we’ve keeping Iranian secrets for them. I’m told that there are no less than seventeen of them (note to FBI: I don’t have clearances). And the more we learn about them, the more bizarre the story becomes: it turns out that the documents in question are secret, but not classified. And why would that be?
Here’s more light in this darkness from Kredo:
Secret side deals related to the nuclear agreement remain unclassified but have been stashed in a secure location on Capitol Hill, making it difficult for staffers and lawmakers to view them. Individuals seeking to view these documents must have security clearance and are barred from taking notes or speaking about what they see.
Those secrecy rules and regs don’t parse too well, in my opinion. It seems like an arrangement for material that, back when I worked at the White House on national security matters, we used to call “really secret,” since classified information so often leaked. Yes, the leaking is an old story, as are the messenger boys (WaPo, NYT) for the leakers (high concentration of intel people).
We are entitled to ask for the release of the secret arrangements with Iran. If the citizens don’t know what Obama/Kerry/Rhodes/Jarrett agreed to, then the whole “debate” over what Trump should do with regard to Iran is essentially meaningless.
The Iranians don’t want us to know what’s in the secret-but-unclassified documents, and the Obama crowd’s apparent agreement -- as usual -- with Iran on this issue underlines the importance of making them public.
I keep hearing that Trump’s National Security Council wants to release many important documents about which we have an urgent right to know, like the captured bin Laden stash. I hope my sources are right. We also need to know a lot more about Obama’s secret diplomacy with the ayatollahs -- particularly the role played by Valerie Jarrett, the ex-president’s new housemate.
While we’re on the subject of Iranian nukes, have a look at a terrific articlepublished in Israel about the joint Iranian-North Korean nuclear weapons project. You’ll get a very valuable timeline and a careful analysis, which the authors summarize this way:
Iran is steadily making progress towards a nuclear weapon and is doing so via North Korea. Iran is unwilling to submit to a years-long freeze of its military nuclear program as stipulated by the July 2015 Vienna Nuclear Deal. North Korea is ready and able to provide a clandestine means of circumventing the deal, which would allow the Iranians to covertly advance that nuclear program. At the same time, Iran is likely assisting in the upgrading of certain North Korean strategic capacities.
I wonder if there are clues to the Iranian covert program, with or without the North Koreans, in those documents stashed away in the Capitol Building. By now, the excellent people that Mike Flynn put in charge of Middle Eastern and intelligence issues probably know a lot about that stash, and my guess is they’d be very happy to make it all public.
With all the excitement about Russian secrets, it’s time to look carefully at Iranian schemes.
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