Iran Lobby

Exposing the Activities of the lobbies and appeasers of the Mullah's Dictatorship ruling Iran

Iran Lobby’s Failed Attempt to Stop Sanctions on Iranian Regime

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Iran Lobby Cannot Stop Sanctions on Iranian Regime

Iran Lobby Cannot Stop Sanctions on Iranian Regime

The House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017 which included several provisions aimed at monitoring and curbing some of the excesses of the Iranian regime and while these do not go far enough to actually halt some of the worst atrocities committed by the regime, they do serve as a reminder that the mullahs are under even more scrutiny.

The House-passed bill includes provisions to restrict the use of commercial aircraft by Iran for military or illicit purposes, as well as reporting requirements for the Obama administration to notify Congress within 48 hours of any new ballistic missile launch and detail what steps would be taken in response.

The bill also called for closer cooperation with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the group of nations in the Persian Gulf threatened by the regime, in developing an integrated ballistic missile defense system.

Additional amendments were incorporated authorizing assistance and training to countries in the Gulf to deter and counter illicit Iranian smuggling activity, such as the regime’s shipments to Yemen, as well as various reporting requirements on Iran-Russian cooperation and activity at Iranian seaports and foreign airports, including the importation of new weapons and coordination of military activities.

The measures fall short of what Iranian dissident groups and human rights activists have called for in confronting the worst excesses of the regime, but even these modest steps help keep the ball moving in the right direction in holding the regime accountable.

Predictably the Iran lobby decried these efforts and characterized them as attempts to “kill the nuclear agreement.” Unfortunately, they fail to say that the deal is dead already since Iranian regime has consistently violated the letter and spirit of the deal in every way imaginable.

Ryan Costello of the National Iranian American Council penned his own editorial that did little to discuss in any meaningful way the fact the American public consistently puts terrorism and extremism overseas at the top of their concerns and how this has been fueling Congress to act and presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump articulate policies in how they would curb the Iranian regime.

Costello tries to put the best face on the House action, hoping for better results in the Senate’s version.

“While many of the Iran provisions may become law, they also may be stripped out as the Senate and House must agree on a final text before it is sent to the President. The Senate will take up its own version of the NDAA next week,” Costello writes.

Given the even stronger stance against the Iranian regime taken by Senators such as Tom Cotton (R-AK), Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Bob Corker (R-TN), Costello’s hopes seem to be a bit fanciful.

The provisions placed in the House bill were not flight so fancy though. They are grounded in the facts coming out of the Iranian regime.

Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has documented numerous Mahan Air flights over the past several months using global flight trackers which show the Iranian regime-owned airline making stops in Syrian cities like Damascus and Latakia and also flying to Baghdad from the Iranian cities Tehran and Abadan, a Revolutionary Guard Corps logistical hub.

The regime is using these commercial airliners to ferry fighters and weapons to Syria, but this is nothing new for Mahan Air, which has been sanctioned by the U.S. for support of terrorism. Mahan Air operates regular flights from Tehran to Dusseldorf and Munich. But now German politicians are seeking to ban the airline for its alleged ties to Iran’s regime.

With a fleet of over 50 aircraft, Mahan Air has been making secret trips to Syria since August 2015 and has been delivering weapons and fighters from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon to support and reinforce Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s forces, Germany’s Bild newspaper reported.

This explains why the House included the provisions aimed at preventing new aircraft purchased from Boeing to be used by the regime for military or illicit purposes.

The escalation of the Iranian regime’s involvement in the Syrian war, the mounting casualties it is taking amongst its forces there and the widening use of Afghan refugees as cannon fodder have forced these moves to hold the regime more accountable.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, a leading Iranian dissident group, reported that steep losses suffered by one province in Iran, Mazandaran, in the Syrian war prompted calls to stop sending its young men to fight and die in what is increasingly an unpopular war among Iranians.

The NCRI issued a statement saying, “The ever-increasing presence and unprecedented casualties of the Iranian regime’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and mercenary militias in Syria demonstrate well that the main issue and the source of the crisis in Syria are the criminal ruling mullahs in Iran who have tied the fate of their regime to that of Syria and despite consecutive losses and coffins arriving in various cities of Iran dispatch even more IRGC and mercenaries to Syria, which for them has become such a lethal quagmire.”

In another sign of deep discontent in Iran, Afghan refugees who have left Iran are reporting of terrible human rights violations being perpetrated against the three million Afghan refugees living in Iran; of which only an estimated 950,000 are United Nations-registered, as Iranian authorities have not provided all Afghan refugees with an opportunity to legally claim asylum.

Those born in the country are afforded UN-recognized refugee status, but they hold only a fraction of the rights granted to Iranian citizens. Many live without residency documents and are forced to exist off the grid, making their living from the black market.

These refugees are easy prey to the mullahs who seek to exploit them by sending them to fight in Syria, often times threatening their families with expulsion if they do not fight.

“For Afghans, there is no chance for a future in Iran,” said Jawad Jafari, an Afghan who fled Iran to Germany with his wife in an interview with Al-Jazeera. “For the Iranian government, it wasn’t enough that we are Muslims like them. I had to pay bribes to work, and the police were always harassing me.”

“We were both born in Iran, but neither of us has documents,” his wife Masoomi explains. “We don’t want our children to face the same problems and racist treatment.”

Even though Costello tries to spin a positive, the House bill reflects the mounting interest in putting a halt to the Iranian regime.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Scrambles to Save Nuclear Deal

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Iran Lobby Scrambles to Save Nuclear Deal

Iran Lobby Scrambles to Save Nuclear Deal

The Iran lobby is in full damage control mode as it seeks to defuse the time bomb left by the New York Times Magazine article on national security staffer Ben Rhodes who detailed how the campaign to push through the Iran nuclear deal was built on essentially lies to the American public and Congress in concert with Iranian regime supporters.

The fallout from the damaging disclosures has the Iran lobby scrambling to develop a credible retort for accusations now being leveled at the nuclear deal and its lead advocate, the National Iranian American Council, has been in the forefront of throwing anything against the proverbial wall hoping something sticks or at least distracts.

The latest effort at damage control was offered by Ryan Costello from NIAC who offered up an editorial decrying the latest revelations as nothing more than partisan bickering in a contentious election year.

“Republican lawmakers focused much of their arguments on the claim that the White House only won the bruising battle over the deal because of spin from Rhodes, suggesting, for instance, that Rhodes and other White House officials had actually invented the notion that there are factional divides between moderates and hardliners in Iran. (Former George W. Bush official Michael) Doran cited NIAC as one of the administration’s allies in this effort,” Costello writes.

It’s a woeful response and short on one incredibly important fact: any denunciation that the Times piece was in error in any way.

It’s remarkable that in Costello piece he never once called what Rhodes did as wrong, nor did he say anything said by Rhodes in the article was incorrect or in error. The lack of any defense of the actual facts in the article contrasts sharply with Costello’s defense which is basically to say this is a rhetorical pie fight between Democrats and Republicans.

The article also skips over the inconvenient truth of that debate which includes the mobilization of the NIAC and other Iran lobby supporters mentioned in the article such as the hearty cooperation of so-called journalists such as Laura Rozen who served as a RSS feed for Rhodes and his team.

What is revealing in the article appearing at Huffington post about Rhodes participation in selling the deal where he “played an important role as well, answering sophisticated questions from skeptical House members in the White House situation room — detailed questions about types of centrifuges, duration of each part of the agreement, facilities at Parchin and Arak, ‘snap-back’ provisions for reinstating sanctions of Iran cheated, and every aspect of the inspection regime.”

This includes Rhodes infamous interviews in which he promised the agreement contained provisions for “anytime, anywhere” inspections of all facilities, which turned out to be untrue and which Secretary of State John Kerry had to walk back the next day.

We now know the agreement does not allow for inspections of military facilities, seals off the Parchin facility from international inspectors, only stores centrifuges instead of destroying them and permits Iranian regime to develop ballistic missile systems to deliver nuclear warheads.

This episode frames the basic problem with the Iran nuclear deal and the promises made by the Iran lobby about the regime’s future behavior: None of it turned out to be true. The facts on the ground have irrevocably refuted everything the Iran lobby promised.

The embarrassing truth of Rhodes statements in the Times article have made him radioactive for any public appearances as he declined to appear before House Oversight and Government Reform Committee; a refusal the White House characterized as being part of its “executive privilege,” but in reality is a face-saving move to prevent a scene where Rhodes is confronted with the truth of his false claims about the nuclear deal.

Rhodes himself echoed the message of the NIAC when, responding to a question Tuesday at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security, he described the backlash to his comments as “part of what happens in Washington;” caulking it up to partisan politics.

Now that we have had one year to assess the effects of the nuclear deal, we see plainly that is a complete failure, not only for the Middle East and the world, but for the Iranian people too.

Another article in The American Enterprise Institute blog, correctly pointed out that “if there’s any silver lining to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal, it is that it raised the Iranian people’s expectations that financial benefits would trickle down to them.”

“This was never going to happen, however, because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) dominates the Iranian economy and monopolizes the sectors which benefit most from both assets unfrozen and new investment. Simply put, little if any of the $50 billion or more which the JCPOA enables Iran to collect will ever reach the Iranian people,” The article writes.

The mullahs in Tehran have sought to blame the U.S. and existing sanctions on Iran stemming from human rights violations and sponsorship of terrorism – separate from the nuclear deal agreement – as being the reason why the Iranian economy continues to be at a standstill in spite of the flurry of much-publicized deals Hassan Rouhani proclaimed in the wake of the deal.

The truth is that the mullahs’ inept leadership and devout support of three ongoing proxy wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq make any turnaround for the Iranian people impossible. This also explains why Rouhani has kept cash reserves abroad to be used as collateral to buy Russian weapons and not brought back home to stimulate the domestic consumer economy.

A fact that Costello and the rest of the Iran lobby have not mentioned in their diatribes.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran, Its Missiles and the Failure of the Nuclear Deal

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Iran, Its Missiles and the Failure of the Nuclear Deal

Iran, Its Missiles and the Failure of the Nuclear Deal

Ballistic missiles by definition are any kind of missile that achieves powered launch, an arching trajectory and then comes down on a target some distance away. Intercontinental ballistic missiles are ones with the extended range to reach targets outside of the launch area, often traversing into another continental mass or even hemisphere.

They are the most destabilizing and devastating weapons in any nation’s military and have been at the heart of nuclear arsenals since the dawn of the atomic age. Ballistic missiles were at the center of the Cuban missile crisis. The mere threat of ballistic missiles placed in Europe by the U.S. was enough to force landmark reduction treaties with the Soviet Union.

The development of nuclear missiles in North Korea poses one of the most significant threats in the Pacific today and sit at the center of the current crisis with the Iranian regime.

Because ballistic missiles are the primary launch platform for any nuclear, chemical or biological warhead, their development is often part and parcel of any nuclear agreement.

The SALT treaties between the U.S. and Soviet Union dealt not only with warheads, but most importantly launch vehicles. Both sides knew if you did not address the launch systems, simply reducing nuclear warheads would do nothing. Either nation could simply build new warheads and attach them.

Ironically, the nuclear agreement with the Iranian regime and the P5+1 group of nations pointedly excluded launch systems from the agreement. The silence of the agreement on missile development was a key component of efforts by the Iran lobby to push through a deal.

Groups such as the National Iranian American Council and Ploughshares Fund made the argument to the Obama administration that including launch systems would unnecessarily complicate talks and drive a deeper wedge in the “moderate” factions in Iran fighting for normalization with the West.

We know now through revelations in the New York Times that that argument was false. The leadership of the Iranian regime has no moderates within it. It’s a strict religious theocracy that demands absolute dedication and devotion to the Islamic revolution it spawned and has worked hard imprisoning, torturing and executing any dissenters to that vision.

It also fought hard to keep missiles out of the agreement because of its close and ongoing ties to the North Korean regime which has provided Iran with missile designs, launch motors, guidance systems, engineers and expertise in manufacturing under license. For Iran’s mullahs, losing this valuable chain of military supplies – one of the only few available to it illicitly for sophisticated weapons – would be a strategic loss.

For top Ali Khamenei and his handpicked team of Hassan Rouhani and Javad Zarif, preservation of missile technology was critical in maintaining the regime’s ability to project force outside of its borders. For the past three decades, Iran has had to rely on proxy terror groups such as Hezbollah, foreign fighters such as Iraqi Shiite militia and Houthis to project its power.

This is why the Iranian regime has ignored United Nations Security Council sanctions against missile development and fights against any restrictions on this technology. It serves the mullahs’ propaganda purposes to show off videos of missile test launches and underground bunkers filled with missiles; given them the appearance of a formidable military.

All of which explains why the Iranian regime continues to push messages through the Iran lobby to sow confusion in the West about the regime’s missile program.

Iran’s military recently publicized a third underground missile facility and showed the launch of a new ballistic missile through the top of a mountain.

U.S. intelligence agencies said in a recent internal report on the launch that the new underground missile facility was disclosed by Iran in March.

It was the third time since October that Tehran showed off an extensive network of underground missile facilities. The new video, however, for the first time shows a missile launch from one of the country’s underground launch facilities.

Even more startling were comments made by Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Aerospace and Missile Force, in recent remarks that the Obama administration does not want Iran to publicize its ongoing missile tests, which have raised questions about the regime’s commitment to the nuclear agreement.

“At this time, the Americans are telling [us]: ‘Don’t talk about missile affairs, and if you conduct a test or maneuver, don’t mention it,’” Hajizadeh was quoted as saying during a recent Persian-language speech that was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

Ali Safavi of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a leading Iranian dissident group, warned against continuing to appease the Iranian regime.

“The United States and its European allies must abandon their policy of appeasement. What is needed is quite simply a policy that recognizes the facts: there are no moderates in the Tehran regime; it need not include direct military action against Iran, but it does need to be based on action, not simply harsh words, much less willful ignorance,” he said.

That fact was even more important when compared to news that Russian S-300 mobile anti-aircraft missile systems purchased by the Iranian regime have been installed at the Khatam al-Anbia base, which contains Iran’s entire air-defense system. This represents a serious commitment by the regime’s military to safeguard its missile force with its most valuable new military purchase.

This follows previous announcements that the Iranian regime was finalizing deals for another $8 billion in Russian military hardware, including the high-end Su-30 warplane, Yak-30 training aircraft, military helicopters such as the Mi-8 and Mi-17 and K-300 Bastion coastal defense systems.

Now comes news that the regime is in the midst of new negotiations with Russia to acquire advanced naval weapons and ships to improve its ability to project force into the Persian Gulf and the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, which the regime has repeatedly threatened to close the past few months.

The nuclear deal has been a failure. The world should not compound it by allowing the Iranian regime to fully deploy its missile force.

By Michael Tomlinson

US Struggles Against Helping Iranian Regime

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Human Rights Worsen in Iran and so Does Accountability

Human Rights Worsen in Iran and so Does Accountability

For anyone who has been involved in an intervention with a loved one who has battled alcoholism or some other addiction, the first thing you need to do is get them to admit they have a problem in the first place.

Only when you admit your behavior is self-destructive and puts everything you hold dear at risk can you take the first steps toward recovery. In the case of the incorrect and bad bets the Obama administration has made in making efforts to appease the Iranian regime, admitting it has a problem seems to be difficult if not impossible.

Within weeks of completing its nuclear deal with the Iranian regime, the U.S. recanted on earlier claims of “anytime, anywhere” inspections; giving the regime what amounted to a free pass in bypassing suspected military sites from international inspections.

When Iranian regime leaders such as Hassan Rouhani begged Russia to intervene in Syria and save Assad and its forces from collapse, the Obama administration demurred and hoped for a political solution even as Russian warplanes attacked Syrian rebel factions backed by the West and failed to target ISIS and other extremist targets.

As Iran began launching ballistic missiles in violation of international sanctions and bipartisan members of Congress offered legislation to punish Iran for it, the administration threatened to veto any of those bills in the belief that the entire deal would collapse.

It is debatable as to whether or not the administration pursued this policy based on the pervasive influence of the Iran lobby and its efforts to pollute the storyline or the misguided belief that a collapse of the deal would cause even worse harm.

In Syria, Iran was flailing and Assad was on the brink of being toppled until the infamous red line in the sand was crossed with chemical weapons and Assad was allowed to stay in power resulting in the deaths of a stunning 400,000 Syrians and half of the country’s population turned into refugees.

In the implementation of the nuclear deal, the U.S. had all the leverage to hold the regime accountable since it needed the deal badly to open access to foreign markets, hard cash and allow it sell oil back on the open market, but the ability to finally crack open Iran’s military facilities was lost, as was an effort to rein in its support for terrorism and halt the rise in human rights violations.

Now Secretary of State John Kerry has met with a consortium of European banks in the awkward position of trying to “sell” them on making new investments in Iran and putting potentially billions of dollars and euros at risk in the regime.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the meeting, which followed repeated complaints by Iranian officials that they aren’t getting the benefit of the bargain under the nuclear deal, was an effort by the State Department to persuade major non-U.S. banks that doing Iran-related business is not only permitted following the relaxation of Iran sanctions, but is actually encouraged.

The irony will not be lost on these financial institutions. Most of them were similarly gathered almost 10 years ago by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to discuss Iranian banking matters, but that discussion focused on protecting the integrity of the global financial system against the risk posed by Iran.

No one has claimed that Iran has ceased to engage in much of the same conduct for which it was sanctioned, including actively supporting terrorism and building and testing ballistic missiles. But the fact that Washington is pushing non-U.S. banks to do what it is still illegal for American banks to do only demonstrate the desperation of the Iran lobby as it seeks to sway the story that Iran is still acting “moderately.”

Even though Washington has warned repeatedly that the Revolutionary Guard Corps controls broad swaths of the Iranian economy and it remains sanctioned by both the U.S. and the EU because of the central role it plays in Iran’s illicit conduct, the U.S., EU, and U.N. removed sanctions from several hundred Iranian banks and companies even though there were no assurances that the conduct of those banks and companies had changed.

The fact that the vast majority of these financial institutions are still reluctant to do business in Iran is less an indictment of Secretary Kerry’s sales skills, as much as these banks are fearful the mullahs cannot be trusted not to continue engaging in activities that will force the world to re-impose aggressive sanctions since empowering “moderates” has proven to be useless. Not to mention the risks involved in investing in to a bankrupt economy.

Last week, more than 100 Iranian members of the parliament urged Iran’s Hassan Rouhani to abandon the nuclear agreement and resume past nuclear activities if the U.S. goes ahead w ith its plan to distribute the court-approved terror funds, according to Iran’s Press TV.

Iran’s top mullah, Ali Khamenei, last month accused the United States of “deception” to obstruct international trade with Iran. The U.S. agrees “on paper” to allow foreign banks to do business in Iran, “but in practice they create Iranophobia so no one does business with Iran,” Khamenei said, according to the Tehran Times.

Sen. Ben Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last Thursday the Iranian reaction is no surprise.

Under the nuclear agreement, “we are fully permitted to take independent actions with respect to” ballistic missiles, terrorism and human rights — “and we will,” Cardin told USA TODAY. “Congress is prepared to support the administration, and if it’s needed we will strengthen those tools.”

All of which goes to prove that European banks are correct in being reticent about re-entering the Iranian market and should refrain from doing business with the regime no matter what Kerry says.

It also is a clear signal of the Iran lobby’s desperation to keep the finger in the dike as pressure mounts in hold the Iranian regime accountable for the growing number of militant acts it undertakes.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Struggles to Keep Message off Bad News

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Iran Lobby Struggles to Keep Message off Bad News

Iran Lobby Struggles to Keep Message off Bad News

The week could not go much worse for the Iran lobby. Revelations about the outright fabrications concocted by national security staffer Ben Rhodes in pressing for passage of the Iran nuclear deal blew battleship-sized holes in the idea that the deal was a good one.

Political pressure ratcheted up quickly as Republicans denounced the alleged lying, while Democrats that supported the deal scrambled to distance themselves and urged tougher accountability of the Iranian regime.

The situation worsened as the State Department admitted to a “glitch” that erased over six minutes of video in which an answer to a question posed by Fox News reporter James Rosen as to whether or not the Obama administration had engaged in secret negotiations with the Iranian regime a full year before it said it did mysteriously disappeared only to reappear after scrutiny.

The Iran lobby has furiously tried to hold the line on the false narrative. Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund offered an editorial in Politico that was absurd as it was desperate in trying to denounce the New York Times piece that Rhodes interview was published in.

Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council was left to offering weak opinions as to why most European and Asian financial institutions have halted efforts to open up transactions with the Iranian regime.

Those same institutions were scheduled to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry this week in an apparent attempt to “save” the nuclear deal by convincing banks to do business with Iran even though they are reluctant given the tangled web of Iranian human rights violations, support for the war in Syria and violations of international sanctions against developing ballistic missiles.

Financial institutions are in the business of assessing risk. They make lending decisions solely on the basis on the risk versus the reward. For many of the world’s banks, doing business with the Iranian regime is a bad bet.

Bankers doubt Kerry will be able to change their cautious approach to Iran. They fear that even if they receive assurances from the Treasury Department, U.S. prosecutors and independent regulators might adopt a different and stricter interpretation of the rules.

They add that Iran presents multiple challenges for banks other than the prospect of breaching U.S. sanctions, including the risk of inadvertently aiding money laundering, financing terrorism and financial crime in a country that almost all the economy is run by the IRGC, and has for many years been in the financial wilderness and remains “off the grid” for most compliance systems. Also

Not helping has been a near-constant stream of dubious arrests of dual citizenship nationals by the regime which has only heightened tensions and raised even more red flags about the regime and the leadership of Hassan Rouhani.

Is the Iranian regime committed to opening up to the rest of the world or is it the same regime relying on Islamic extremism and militants? The answer so far since the nuclear deal was signed seems unequivocally the latter.

The Obama administration argues that the real issues are Iran’s poor business environment and policies that undermine investor confidence — including ballistic missile tests, arms shipments to rebels in Yemen and the imprisonment of businessmen accused of espionage.

Iranian regime officials complain that the United States has warned bankers away from deals that could run afoul of U.S. sanctions that still target the country.

The United States says that those sanctions were imposed because of Iran’s continuing human rights violations and ties to terrorist groups.

And U.S. officials said Iran needs to look to its own practices. The country routinely scores low on a number of indexes ranking countries’ business climates, including those by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Transparency International.

“The most pressing concern about doing business in Iran does not have to do with sanctions but with really grave and long-standing concerns about the risks of doing business there,” said Elizabeth Rosenberg, a fellow with the Center for a New American Security. “Inadequate transparency, potential money laundering and garden-variety corruption have nothing to do with nuclear proliferation.”

Adding to the ever increasing levels of tension were statements made by Revolutionary Guards commanders to sink American ships if they approached Iranian waters.

The senior naval officer making the threat referenced a “secret arsenal” of weapons Iran has developed or acquired that would be effective against American naval vessels.

Most likely the Iranian regime officials are referencing anti-ship missiles acquired from China or Russia according to the Washington Times, whose navies have long pursued a “carrier killer” missile capability to deter Western power projection capabilities.

“We have informed Americans that their presence in the Persian Gulf is an absolute evil,” Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi stated to state media. “Americans are aware that Iran would destroy their warships if they take a wrong measure in the region.”

His statements follow an incident in which Iranian forces captured and detained 10 U.S. sailors before parading them for propaganda purposes on state-run media.

Obviously none of this reassures anxious bankers who prize stability more than anything else. The mullahs in Tehran have demonstrated they are far from being stable.

By Michael Tomlinson

The Truth About Working With the Iran Lobby

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The Truth About Working With the Iran Lobby

The Truth About Working With the Iran Lobby

The New York Times magazine published an in-depth examination by David Samuels of Ben Rhodes, the 38-year-old deputy national security advisor for strategic communications in the Obama administration, who detailed his strategy for passing the Iranian nuclear agreement and close coordination between the administration and various members of the Iran lobby, including several people and organizations closely tied with the regime.

The piece is a stunning admission of how the Obama administration’s policy of appeasing the mullahs in Iran was closely coordinated with the Iran lobby and how their efforts were designed to build a PR campaign designed to project a false image of the regime and cover the most extreme actions by Iran including severe human rights violations and its sponsorship of terrorism.

Since the nuclear agreement was completed, Rhodes has worked overtime to continually keep bad news about the Iranian regime from obstructing the president’s goals of fostering new relations with the regime no matter how provocative the acts.

One example was the unlawful detaining of 10 U.S. sailors by the Iranian regime and how Rhodes worked to keep the news from breaking before President Obama’s final State of the Union speech.

As the Times recounts, Rhodes found out about the Iranian action earlier that morning but was trying to keep it out of the news until after the president’s speech. “They can’t keep a secret for two hours,” Rhodes says, with a tone of mild exasperation at the break in message discipline.

Rhodes commanded a large and sophisticated network described by the Times of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.”

The defense of the Iranian regime goes out to “the three big briefing podiums — the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate.”

These messages were also conveyed in cooperation with regime supportive groups such as the Ploughshares Fund, which helped fund the notorious National Iranian American Council which similarly carried the administration’s messages, as well as fed them through ex-staffers who were now working with Rhodes.

The story goes on to describe how the administration had been eager to do a deal with the Iranian regime going as far back as 2012 irrespective of the regime’s countless violations and aggressive acts.

The narrative Rhodes developed centered around the perception that “moderates” led by Hassan Rouhani beat “hardliners” and provided the opening to do a deal with Iran and empower these “moderates.” It was a well-worn lure the mullahs had tossed out time and time again, and in Rhodes, they found a receptive and willing audience for their lies.

“The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making,” the Times wrote.

An aggressive digital outreach campaign was launched in support of the nuclear deal that included using the Twitter handle @TheIranDeal to ensure no negative tweet about the deal passed without a rebuttal, as well as enlisting journalists who supported the Iranian regime such as Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor, who essentially served as an automatic retweeter for the administration and Iran lobby on the subject.

The White House point person during the later stage of the negotiations was Rob Malley, a favored troubleshooter who is currently running negotiations that could keep the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in power, another high priority item for the Iranian regime.

At one point Rhodes even acknowledges that regime leader Hassan Rouhani and Javad Zarif, the regime foreign minister, are in fact not “real reformers,” which makes his work to sell the deal to the American public one of the greatest deceptions ever played on them.

The condemnation and reaction was swift and unequivocal as John Podhoretz took the administration to task in the New York Post:

The Iran deal, you may recall, was wildly unpopular with the American people. To ensure senators didn’t cast a two-thirds vote against it and kill it, the White House set up a digital response “war room” whose purpose was relentlessly to make the case that a vote against the deal was a vote for war, he writes.

It could only work if water-carriers did the White House’s job for it, and nonprofit water-carriers did their faithful duty. “We created an echo chamber,” Rhodes tells Samuels about the journalists and think-tankers who were discussing the Iran deal based almost entirely on information given to them by the White House. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” Podhoretz adds.

The reality of the Times piece is to shine a bright light on how disingenuous the entire debate was around the Iran nuclear deal; a deal that has empowered a weakened, unstable Iranian regime and allowed it to continue during a time following the Arab Spring and protests over the 2009 uprisings in which it teetered on the brink of collapse.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran, Torture, Prison and a Small Baby

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In Iran, a 22-month old baby girl waits. She waits to see her mother who languishes in an Iranian prison. She waits to see her father who sits in the United Kingdom, unable to see his wife or baby girl. She waits in a kind of limbo with her grandmother caring for her because she cannot leave Iran. She is a helpless pawn of the mullahs in Tehran who exercise with cruel indifference their whims to seize dual-citizen Iranians who take a risk to come back to Iran to visit friends and relatives or do work.

The mother being held in prison is Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian mother who has been held in solitary confinement for more than five weeks.

According to the Guardian newspaper, Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation as a project manager, was arrested at Tehran’s international airport by members of the regime’s Revolutionary Guard on April 3rd. She and her baby daughter, Gabriella, were about to return to the UK from a family visit in her home country.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe has since been taken to an unknown location in Kerman, 600 miles south of the Iranian capital, but officials have not yet commented on the reasons behind her arrest. She has not yet been charged even after five weeks in prison.

According to her family, she is not allowed access to a lawyer and is under pressure to confess to unspecified crimes.

“Nazanin’s parents have been told that they will be allowed a family visit tomorrow in Kerman,” her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said on Tuesday. Ratcliffe took the decision to make his wife’s ordeal public on Monday against what he said was the advice of the British Foreign Office.

Gabriella, who is solely British-nationality, has been placed in the care of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s family. The authorities have confiscated the girl’s British passport. Although Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a British citizen, she is not allowed access to diplomats from the British embassy in Tehran because Iran does not recognize dual nationality, thus treating her solely as Iranian.

“She is waking up in the middle of the night screaming and looking for mummy,” her husband Richard told the Sun newspaper.

The policy by the regime has been used time and time again to arrest other citizens, the most notable being Americans such as Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post reporter, Saeed Abedini, a Christian pastor, and Amir Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine. All had been imprisoned by the Iranian regime, even though they are U.S. citizens and were only released after a controversial prisoner swap after the nuclear deal was completed, including granting clemency to seven Iranians and withdrawing arrest warrants for 14 others.

The chief executive of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Monique Villa, has urged Iran to release her immediately. “At the Thomson Reuters Foundation she has no professional dealings with Iran whatsoever,” Reuters quoted her as saying. “In fact, the Thomson Reuters Foundation has no dealings with Iran and does not operate in the country.”

An online petition posted on Change.org calls on David Cameron to intervene and use his position to press Iran for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release. It has garnered more than 64,000 signatures in less than two days.

Villa’s statements eerily echo those made by the publisher of the Washington Post over Rezaian’s imprisonment and demonstrate the callous disregard the Iranian regime has for international law. Arrest of dual nationals and failure to recognize their legal status also mimics the policy followed by North Korea which often arrests foreigners on the same basis and denies them any access to legal representation or contact with the outside world.

In the case of Hekmati, he has decided to do something about the mistreatment he received at the hands of his Iranian regime jailers deciding to sue Iran for what he says was the brutal torture he endured during more than four years as a hostage, according to reports.

Hekmati filed a lawsuit in D.C. federal court on Monday.

Iranian authorities kept Hekmati in solitary confinement in a small cell for 17 months, whipped the bottoms of his feet, tased his kidney area, put him in stress positions for hours, hit him with batons, and severely deprived him of sleep, according to the lawsuit, reported by the Marine Corps Times.

In addition, Hekmati was forced to take lithium and other addictive pills, then stop taking them to induce withdrawal symptoms, the lawsuit said. He was also denied proper medical care and suffered severe malnutrition, it said.

Hekmati’s captors also told him his sister had been in a serious car crash, while his mother had been killed, but that he could not call his family unless he confessed being a spy for the CIA, the lawsuit claims. He was also moved to another prison where his cell was infested with rats, lice, fleas and bed bugs, it said.

The torture Hekmati and other prisoners receive often goes unreported as regime officials threaten prisoners with reprisals against family members should word get out about a prisoner’s mistreatment. The abuse is compounded by the tacit agreement by nations negotiating the nuclear deal not to link human rights abuses to the deal, thereby giving the regime what amounts to a free hand to abuse prisoners.

That broad appeasement of the Iranian regime was confirmed by news reports detailing how the Obama administration began negotiations with the Iranian regime’s most hardline leadership years before the election of Hassan Rouhani and how national security staff Ben Rhodes orchestrated a campaign of deception in securing a deal while pushing false messages about Iranian moderation.

The obscuring of the administration’s campaign over the details of the nuclear deal underwent even more scrutiny as Fox News reporter James Rosen revealed that video from a State Department press briefing two years ago showing possible deception by the administration had been deleted for unknown reasons.

So while baby Gabriella sits and waits, separated from her mother and father, the controversy escalates over the deception used to pass the Iran nuclear deal.

By Michael Tomlinson

So Many Things Going Wrong for Iranian Regime

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So Many Things Going Wrong for Iranian Regime

So Many Things Going Wrong for Iranian Regime

This past weekend The New York Times Magazine published an in-depth look at Ben Rhodes, the national security advisor staffer who spearheaded the communications effort to pass the Iranian nuclear deal.

The fallout from that article has been dramatic as critics of the deal claim validation of the falsehoods perpetuated by Rhodes and his close working relationship with the Iran lobby and regime supporters, including the very leadership in Iran that was characterized as “hardline.”

Meanwhile the Iran lobby has been working furiously to change the narrative and denounce the New Times piece and condemn Samuels, even though the piece appeared to be written as a glorified puff piece in which Rhodes took a boastful pride in his accomplishments in pulling the collective wool over everyone’s eyes.

Actor Kevin Spacey who plays President Frank Underwood in the Netflix series “House of Cards” has a memorable line about hubris: “We’re all victims of our own hubris at times.”

Rhodes seems to be living that truth right now as he frantically back peddles from his statements.

“Every press corps that I interacted with vetted that deal as extensively as any other foreign policy initiative of the presidency,” Rhodes wrote on Medium.

“A review of the press from that period will find plenty of tough journalism and scrutiny. We had to answer countless questions about every element of the deal and our broader Iran policy from reporters.”

Rhodes’ Medium post was a far cry from his gleeful, football-spiking words about vanquishing the press.

The defense of Rhodes and the nuclear deal was on display with a hastily placed editorial by Joe Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, in Politico, in which he sought to validate the nuclear deal with the same “echo chamber” of false experts Rhodes described in the Times article.

The fact that Cirincione led the defense should come as no surprise since Ploughshares Fund was a heavy participant in the Iran lobby and even gave money to the National Iranian American Council, the central lobbying group for the Iranian regime’s policies.

Like the proverbial kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Rhodes is out there now trying to walk back his comments, but the damage has already been done. The truth is out. The Iran nuclear deal was a fraud and for the critics of the deal who warned of empowering the mullahs in Tehran, the past few months have been of that concern.

Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, warned in a recent Persian-language interview that the Islamic state would not hesitate to block U.S. entry to the Strait of Hormuz, which is the only passage from the Persian Gulf to the open seas.

Salami claimed that the U.S. military fears Iran’s navy, which recently has bolstered forces to directly combat American forces in the region.

“The [Americans] believe that our navy is dangerous. Indeed, that is true,” Salami was quoted as saying in a Farsi-language interview with Iranian state-controlled television that was subsequently translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors regional reports.

Additionally, the regime to cover up yet another missile test of an illegal ballistic missile in violation of United Nations sanctions. Brigadier General Ali Abdollahi, the Iranian military’s deputy chief of staff, told Iran’s Tasnim news agency that Iran fired the test missile two weeks ago and that it was accurate to within 25 feet, which he described as zero error.

“We can guide this ballistic missile,” he told Tasnim. Iran has previously asserted it has such missile capability. Its 1,250 mile range puts most of the Middle East and parts of southern Europe within its sights.

Obama administration critics blamed the White House for what one, Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), called “Iran’s growing belligerence in the aftermath of the reckless Iran nuclear deal.”

Mr. McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also said the Obama administration has overlooked other acts of Iranian aggression, including previous launches and the detention of U.S. sailors by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps earlier this year. The U.S. said later that its sailors had crossed into Iranian waters by mistake.

In Syria, the Iranian regime continued to face mounting losses of soldiers as Syrian rebels make gains against Iranian backed forces, including the reported capture of half a dozen Iranian soldiers.

According to the latest numbers, 13 defenders of the shrine were killed, 18 were wounded and five to six were captured,” Esmail Kosari, chairman of the Iranian parliament’s defense committee, was quoted as saying by the Mizan Online news agency.

The reversals on the battlefield, the admission of the untruths around the nuclear deal and the stalled Iranian economy have eaten away at the support for mullahs such as the top leader Ali Khamenei who finds it necessary to crackdown harder on internal dissent in order to snuff out resistance to his rule.

That toughened approach was echoed by Sayyed Yousef Tabatabaeinejad, who claimed in an interview with AhlulBayt News Agency that Muslims the world over should be emulating the events that brought about Iran’s own revolution in 1979 and called for more violence in pursuit of a revolutionary form of Islam.

Tabatabaeinejad currently serves as Khamenei’s representative in a province of Iran called Esfahan. He lashed out at the false idea that Muslims should accept oppression as a survival strategy without using violence in response.

For Tabatabaeinejad, this extremist view on Islam is baked into the Iranian constitution and is  not just about praying and fasting. The warrior spirit also mandates fighting against “Islam”’s enemies.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iranian Regime Losses Mount in Syria

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Iranian Regime Losses Mount in Syria

Iranian Regime Losses Mount in Syria

The Iranian regime’s involvement in the Syrian civil war has been well documented, including the regime’s history of supplying badly needed cash, weapons and fighters to prop up the Assad regime as it teetered on the brink of collapse.

Even though Iranian officials have long denied it, evidence is mounting of the regime’s deepening involvement in what may prove to be the Achilles heel of the mullahs in Tehran as they draw a red line in the sand to keep Bashar al-Assad in power even if it means suffering significant losses.

Already the regime has had several commanders of its Quds Forces and Revolutionary Guard Corps killed while leading troops in Syria and now news comes of even more casualties for the regime.

Thirteen military advisers with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been killed in Syria in recent days and 21 others wounded, Iranian media reported on Saturday.

It was the regime’s biggest loss of forces within such a short time, based on official figures. The names of those killed and when their remains will be repatriated will be announced later, the Guards said.

Among the killed included 15 Afghan mercenaries the Iranian regime had recruited from the ranks of Afghan refugees living in Iran said the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Critics of the regime have claimed that many Afghans were coerced to fight for the Assad regime under threat their families would be deported back to Afghanistan.

Estimates of the number of recruited Afghan fighters in Syria from Iran range from between 10,000 to 12,000, largely drawn from the illegal immigrant population in Iran where their options are limited for employment and their hopes of remaining often hang on the whims of the mullahs in Tehran who often regard the Afghans as cannon fodder.

Reports also added that Iran has promised citizenship to these fighters and improving the living conditions of their families in addition to these fighters being paid from $400 to $600 in monthly wages to fight in Syria.

The monitor also said at least six of the dead came from Lebanon’s Hezbollah Shi’ite movement, an Iranian proxy which has supplied the bulk of fighters to Syria and has been led by Iranian regime officers on the battlefield.

The Iranian dead were from Iran’s northern province of Mazandaran, Hossein Ali Rezayi, a Guards spokesman in the region, told the ISNA and Fars news agencies.

The deaths and injuries occurred in Khan Tuman village some six miles southwest of the battleground city of Aleppo, the official IRNA news agency reported a Guards statement as saying.

Dozens of Iranian “advisers” have been killed in Syria since late 2015, including Revolutionary Guard commanders.

Saturday’s news came as Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to top mullah Ali Khamenei, met Assad in Damascus and reassured him of Tehran’s support.

“Since the Syrian nation chose Bashar al-Assad as president two years ago, he will remain in the post until the Syrian people change him,” Velayati said in an interview with the Lebanese al-Mayadeen television channel.

Velayati rejected the idea of imposing a president on Syria who would serve the interests of Saudi Arabia or any other party.

While Tehran previously said its support was limited to advisers, it has been more open about the extent of its role since Russia intervened on Assad’s side last year.

Iran has been particularly involved in campaigns around Aleppo in northwest Syria, which was the country’s commercial and industrial center before the war and is now divided between government and rebel forces.

With the Iranian regime’s intervention, the war in Syria has only escalated resulting in more than 250,000 people killed, with tens of thousands unaccounted for, some say the death toll may be as high as 400,000, as well as the displacement of nearly half of the country’s entire population.

Syria is a classic example of the impotence of the arguments made by Iran lobby groups such as the National Iranian American Council which claimed that passage of the nuclear agreement with Iran would force moderation within the government and move it to be a more willing ally in seeking peaceful political change in Syria.

Instead Iran has dramatically escalated the violence in Syria and widened the war with the recruitment of Russia into the conflict, proving once again that arguments made by NIAC have proven meaningless.

Struan Stevenson, a former Conservative Euro MP representing Scotland and currently President of the European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA), summed up Iran’s responsibility for Syrian bloodshed in an editorial in The Hill:

“The Iranian regime has reached a deadly impasse in Syria with mounting casualties and little sign of progress. The original objective of defeating the Free Syrian Army and occupying its strongholds like Aleppo, with the help of Russian air strikes, has failed. Russia has begun to pull out and Khamenei is panicking. Recently, the commander of the Qods Force – General Qasem Soleimani, was sent to Moscow to plead with Putin for more Russian intervention,” Stevenson writes.

“Western appeasement of the clerical fascist regime in Iran has contributed directly to the Syrian nightmare and to the creation of ISIS. The Iranian regime’s outright support for Bashar al-Assad and his bloody reprisals against innocent civilians paved the way for the rise of ISIS. Iran’s puppet regime in neighboring Iraq, under the genocidal control of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, opened the door for ISIS to seize great swathes of Iraqi territory. As a result, Europe now faces its biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War, as the civil conflict in Syria spirals out of control,” he adds.

Stevenson is right that the only true pathway for peace in Syria lies with Assad’s ouster and the expulsion of Iranian influence. Only then can the people of Syria make their own futures.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iranian Regime Increases US Tensions Despite Promises by Iran Lobby

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Iranian Regime Increases US Tensions Despite Promises by Iran Lobby

Iranian Regime Increases US Tensions Despite Promises by Iran Lobby

The Strait of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world and through it flows about 20 percent of the world’s petroleum supplies making it one of the most important trading routes in the world.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an average of 14 tankers per day transit the Strait carrying 17 million barrels of crude oil, representing a hefty 35 percent of the world’s seaborne shipments of oil. The vast majority of that oil, over 85 percent, goes to Asian markets such as Japan, China, India and South Korea.

It is a chokepoint that the Iranian regime has used as a threat to the rest of the world repeatedly since 1988 when it first laid mines in the Strait contrary to all international agreements. Iranian regime has been involved in a series of confrontations there, including:

  • 2008 with a series of stand-offs with the U.S. Navy and threats to close the Strait;
  • 2011-12 Iranian regime again threatened to close the gulf forcing a coalition of navies to send ships to confront regime vessels;
  • 2015 Iran seized the Maersk Tigris container ship; and
  • Earlier this year, Iranian vessels seized a U.S. Navy patrol boat with its 10 sailors and detained them.

The Iranian regime has used the threat of war and violence in the Strait as a form of diplomacy and regards such aggression as a tool of statecraft.

According to the New York Times, tensions between Iran and the United States, never far from the surface, showed signs of worsening on Wednesday, with the Iranians threatening to block a vital Persian Gulf access route and protesting what they called the American “meddling approach and tone.”

The Iranian regime messages, conveyed in statements by a commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corps and by the Foreign Ministry, came a few days after top mullah Ali Khamenei expressed exasperation with the U.S., questioning the longstanding deployment of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

“It is Americans who should explain why they have come here from the other side of the world and stage war games,” Khamenei said in remarks widely reported in Iran’s state news media.

Together, the messages appeared to reflect a steady buildup of anti-American sentiment in Iran recently despite the nuclear agreement that took effect in January, which, on paper at least, eased the country’s economic isolation and was hailed by the Iran lobby as a force for moderation, which seems to have been a false promise so far.

The warning from the Revolutionary Guards about blocking American access to the Persian Gulf waterway appeared to be partly a response to a congressional resolution introduced April 28 by Representative J. Randy Forbes, Republican of Virginia.

The resolution condemned what it called Iran’s illegal detention of American sailors patrolling near Iran in January and said Iran had “undermined stability in the Arabian Gulf.”

On Wednesday, Iran’s Fars News Agency, which has links to the Revolutionary Guards, said Lt. Cmdr. Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami had issued a warning to the United States to avoid escalation.

“Iran will decisively confront any menacing passage through the Strait of Hormuz,” Fars quoted him as saying. “We warn the Americans not to repeat their past mistakes, and they should learn from historical realities.”

The aggressive statements made by regime officials underscore the de facto methodology employed by the mullahs in Tehran to state their case which is always by way of threat and coercion. The siren song promises made by Iran lobby supporters

By Michael Tomlinson