{"id":182642,"date":"2015-07-15T18:13:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-15T23:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/07\/15\/an-interesting-perspective-on-no-notice-inspections-and-iran\/"},"modified":"2015-07-15T18:13:00","modified_gmt":"2015-07-15T23:13:00","slug":"an-interesting-perspective-on-no-notice-inspections-and-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/07\/15\/an-interesting-perspective-on-no-notice-inspections-and-iran\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interesting Perspective on No-Notice Inspections and Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at The Intercept<\/i>, they notice the oft ignored (at least on this side of the pond) fact that the United States used the Iraqi inspection regime in as a way to insert spies into the country<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Americans and Israelis who hate the new nuclear agreement with Iran are already<\/a> focusing<\/a> on one part in particular: It doesn\u2019t authorize snap, no-notice inspections of all locations. Israel\u2019s hard-right<\/a> Education Minister Naftali Bennett <\/b>claims<\/a> the accord is a \u201cfarce\u201d because \u201cin order to go and make an inspection, you have to notify the Iranians<\/span> 24 days in advance.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> This is not exactly right, but close enough. (Iran\u2019s declared nuclear sites will be under continuous monitoring. If the International Atomic Energy Agency wants to inspect a non-declared site and Iran refuses, Iran has 14 days to convince the IAEA it\u2019s doing nothing wrong without providing access. If it can\u2019t, the commission governing the agreement has seven days to vote on whether to force Iran to provide access, and if it does Iran has three more days to comply. The exact procedure is established in paragraphs 74-78 of the agreement text<\/a>.)<\/span>

<\/span> For people unfamiliar with the history of arms control generally and in the Middle East in particular, this might seem like a bad deal. If Iran doesn\u2019t have anything to hide, why wouldn\u2019t it allow the IAEA to go anywhere at anytime?<\/span>

<\/span> The answer is twofold:<\/span>

<\/span> First, all countries have things they legitimately<\/i> want to hide, such as conventional military secrets and the security procedures of their leaders.<\/span>

<\/span> Second, during the 1990s the U.S. demonstrated with Iraq that it would routinely abuse the weapons inspections process in order to uncover such legitimate secrets \u2014 and use them to target the Iraqi military and try to overthrow the Iraqi government.<\/span>

<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> By the mid-1990s, Iraq claimed that the U.S. was using UNSCOM as cover for espionage aimed at things that had nothing to do with WMD, such as Saddam Hussein\u2019s location. While the U.S. strenuously denied this for years, it turned out to be true<\/a>. Moreover, former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter contends<\/a> that the U.S. attempted to manipulate UNSCOM so that it could be used as a tool in an attempted coup against Saddam Hussein organized by the U.S. in 1996.<\/span>

<\/span> Iraq acted at the time just as the U.S. would if the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had been infiltrated with \u201cinspectors\u201d who wanted to assassinate Bill Clinton and then showed up at the White House. For instance, when Clinton bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox in 1998, one of the justifications he gave<\/a> was that Iraq had \u201cshut off [UNSCOM] access to the headquarters of its ruling party.\u201d The CIA later discovered<\/a> that Saddam had in fact been at the party headquarters when UNSCOM arrived, and had stopped UNSCOM from entering \u201cto prevent the inspectors from knowing his whereabouts, not because he had something to hide.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> Moreover, the U.S. made extensive use of UNSCOM to target Iraq for bombing campaigns. According to Ritter, toward the beginning of the UNSCOM process CIA agents who were part of the inspection team used GPS to record the precise location of sites used for Iraqi military manufacturing \u2014 sites that soon afterwards were struck by U.S. cruise missiles. And as the Washington Post<\/i> reported<\/a> and the U.S. Air Force later confirmed<\/a>, the U.S. used UNSCOM\u2019s data to choose targets for Operation Desert Fox, including many that had nothing to do with Iraq\u2019s purported WMD programs. \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> So while Iran\u2019s recalcitrance may make the U.S. and Israel unhappy, it\u2019s largely the fruit of our own poisoned tree. They will never accept the conditions we imposed on Iraq, and any neutral observer would agree they\u2019d be fools to do so. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Shades of the alleged “vaccination” program that allegedly identified bin Laden’s hiding place, which has discredited vaccination programs throughout the Islamic world, leading to widespread assassinations of public health workers, particularly in Pakistan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at The Intercept, they notice the oft ignored (at least on this side of the pond) fact that the United States used the Iraqi inspection regime in as a way to insert spies into the country: Americans and Israelis who hate the new nuclear agreement with Iran are already focusing on one part in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1062,964,1034,1044],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-espionage","category-foreign-relations","category-iran","category-nuclear-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182642"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}