NIAC Action – Page 12

Parsi vs Daioleslam: Correcting the Record

August 24, 2016 by admin

Hassan Daioleslam (left) beat back and won $183,000 from Trita Parsi and NIAC

Al-Monitor’s congressional correspondent, Julian Pecquet, wrote an article in Al-Monitor about the divided Iranian community in the United States, showing the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MeK or NCRI) against the regime in Tehran on one side, and the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) with the regime.

In the course of the article, he paraphrases the head of NIAC, Trita Parsi:

Today’s critics, Parsi said, are the same Iran hawks – and their allies in the NCRI – who urged a tougher stance against Tehran at the time.

In particular, Parsi points to the fact that the legal defense of Seyyed Hassan Daioleslam, the man NIAC sued for defamation, was organized by Daniel Pipes, a hawkish critic of radical Islam. The firm chosen to represent Daioleslam? Legal giant Sidley Austin, which just so happens to have been the US lawyer for arch-Iran foe Israel since 1992. NIAC failed to prove Daioleslam was acting out of malice and lost the case, even though the veracity of his claims was not established.

This passage contains multiple errors that could have been avoided had Mr. Pecquet done what a journalist should do and check with both sides of a dispute (rather than just with NIAC). As he did not, I’ll help him by presenting a few facts:

1) I did not “organize” the defense of Daioleslam. This was done entirely independently by Brooke Goldstein, the head of the Legal Project (the Middle East Forum initiative protecting the free discussion of Islam and related topics) at the time. I only learned about Parsi vs Daioleslam and Sidley Austin’s willingness to defend Mr. Daioleslam after she had arranged it.

2) Parsi states that Sidley Austin “just so happens to have been the US lawyer” for Israel since 1992. I looked into this and I see no evidence that Sidley Austin represents the Government of Israel, let alone since 1992. I challenge him to document this. As a large international law firm, Sidley Austin has “represented numerous Israeli clients in connection with transactional activity, as well as litigation, throughout the U.S. since the late 1980s,” but that’s not what Parsi said.

3) In characterizing Sidley Austin, Parsi ignores two important facts: that Sidley Austin was the law firm where both Michelle and Barack Obama started their legal careers; and FEC records show the firm’s lawyers collectively to be one of the very largest donors to the Obama campaigns of both 2008 and 2012.

4) Once we’re talking about who hired whom, let’s note that NIAC hired the PR firm Brown Lloyd James to help its case against Daioleslam and BLJ just happened also to work on behalf of Middle East dictators like Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya.

5) Yes, NIAC lost the case concerning Daioleslam’s malice, but that’s not the whole story. After dismissing the lawsuit against Daioleslam, the court issued a second ruling in which it sanctioned NIAC and Trita Parsi for discovery abuses (including false declarations to the court) and ordered them to pay $183,000 to Daioleslam for his legal expenses.

6) The veracity of Daioleslam’s claims were indeed “established,” as the court obliged NIAC to release internal documents revealing the organization’s extensive ties to Tehran, including a lobby effort coordinated with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations and collaboration with two individuals named in a Congressional report as agents of Iranian intelligence.

Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum.

by Daniel Pipes • Aug 23, 2016
Cross-posted from Danielpipes.org

The Disconnect Between Iran Lobby Priorities and Reality

August 9, 2016 by admin

The Disconnect Between Iran Lobby Priorities and Reality

Money makes the world go around

The world go around

Money makes the world go around

It makes the world go ’round.

A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound

A buck or a pound

Is all that makes the world go around,

That clinking clanking sound

Can make the world go ’round.

These are lyrics from the 1972 Academy Award-winning movie “Cabaret” which depicted the last final days of freedom in the Weimar Republic of Germany in 1931 during the rise of the Nazi Party.

The tune entitled “Money, Money” is sung by the cabaret’s emcee as a narrative about the pervasive influence of money and the desperate pursuit of it.

The movie was also noteworthy because of its depiction of issues such as homosexuality and hedonistic club life, as well as the virulence of anti-Semitism and even abortion. It was a movie widely considered to be one of the best 100 movies of all time.

The show tune is appropriate though for our world today and is still powerfully relevant as we consider the current priorities of the Iran lobby and its most conspicuous leaders such as the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

It also helps illustrate the wide disparity between the priorities of the Iran lobby and the most pressing issues surrounding the Iranian regime today. If we examine the public statements and recent policy memos issued by the NIAC especially this week, we would assume that the most pressing issues confronting the U.S. and Iranian regime is how to get the mullahs more money.

At the top of NIAC’s legislative priorities is to prevent renewal of the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 (ISA) which is up for consideration by Congress before the end of this year and along with it, the tacit lifting of all remaining restrictions and sanctions against the Iranian regime.

The impetus for the legislative push by NIAC and other Iran lobby allies is recognition that the upcoming presidential election is likely to bring significant changes in the U.S. foreign policy approach to the Iranian regime no matter who wins, be it Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, because an incoming administration is likely to gain political capital by taking an aggressive stand against Iran, especially in light of the global deterioration of stability with terrorism and proxy wars on the rise.

To that end, the NIAC has been busy churning out policy papers arguing not only against renewing the ISA, but also the lifting of all remaining sanctions, especially prohibitions against the regime’s access to U.S. currency exchanges and the reluctance of foreign banks to handle Iranian regime transactions for fear of running afoul sanctions still in place pertaining to Iran’s human rights abuses and support for terrorism.

Interestingly, one policy paper authored by Ryan Costello of NIAC, argued that expiration of the ISA would still allow the president the ability to re-impose the same sanctions, but he neglects to mention the real reason the mullahs wish to shift authority away from Congressional legislation and onto the president: President Obama has demonstrated with his policies of appeasement the value to the mullahs of a president willing to accommodate their wishes and avoid the messy spectacle of a Congressional hearing and floor debate which would almost certainly go against them on almost any issue given the current climate.

More importantly, by trying to sell the idea that a new president could re-impose sanctions at will, ignores the most obvious flip side of that proposition, which is that the same president could choose to ignore Iran’s conduct and not impose sanctions that might otherwise be forced by a renewed ISA.

The NIAC and its allies in the Iran lobby are counting on their ability to duplicate last year’s “echo chamber” to apply political pressure on a new administration to keep the Iranian regime off the sanctions hit list.

Another policy memo authored by Tyler Cullis of NIAC, goes even further to make the explicit link between the need to lift all sanctions and the potential for the nuclear agreement with Iran—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—to fail.

What Cullis and the NIAC fail to admit is that the limits of the JCPOA stop at the issue of human rights violations and support for terrorism; issues that the regime stridently wanted to be de-linked from the nuclear negotiations for fear that they would bring down any hope of a deal and the lifting of economic sanctions that had succeeded in crippling the Iranian economy and weakened the mullahs grip on power.

Cullis’ conclusion reveals the true goals of the Iran lobby when he writes:

“Despite the formal lifting of U.S. nuclear-related sanctions, implementation of U.S. obligations under the JCPOA has not proceeded altogether smoothly. In order to safeguard the decades-long restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. must faithfully observe its JCPOA sanctions-related obligations in full. To do so, though, there must be a common understanding as to the full scope of those U.S. sanctions-related commitments.”

It is a bizarre statement to make since it places the burden solely on U.S. actions and speaks of nothing in regards to growing Iranian regime’s recalcitrance and militant stances; nor takes into account the abysmal state of human rights in Iran.

That situation has grown appallingly worse as the regime has moved aggressively to execute citizens at a fast and monstrous clip, including the mass execution of 25 Sunni Muslims it accuses of “enmity against God,” which earned the regime a blistering condemnation from Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups.

“Iran’s mass execution of prisoners on August 2 at Rajai Shahr prison is a shameful low point in its human rights record,” said Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “With at least 230 executions since January 1, Iran is yet again the regional leader in executions but a laggard in implementing the so far illusory penal code reforms meant to bridge the gap with international standards.”

Two lawyers who represented some of the men told Human Rights Watch that their clients did not get a fair trial and that their due process rights had been violated.

Ultimately, while the Iran lobby fights to fill the Iranian regime’s coffers, we have to ask why it doesn’t also fight to save Iranian lives.

Indeed, money does make the world go round.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Tries to Hold Off Iran Sanctions

August 2, 2016 by admin

Iran Lobby Tries to Hold Off Iran Sanctions

The Iran lobby, led by the National Iranian American Council, has consistently raised the idea that Iran has not been rewarded with the full lifting of economic sanctions per the nuclear agreement reached last year.

It makes this case based on the continued shaky nature of the Iranian economy, and by the threatening statements of various regime officials such as top mullah Ali Khamenei and foreign minister Javad Zarif who maintain the U.S. is deliberately trying to sabotage the deal.

It is a profoundly ludicrous ideal given the fact that the Obama administration has broken with past U.S. policy over the past three decades in maneuvering to get this deal done in the first place. The Obama administration has set new standards for political gymnastics in trying to secure this policy win, including treating the agreement as a political framework and not a formal treaty in order to avoid an uncertain Senate vote.

It even de-linked Iranian regime’s notoriously bad human rights record and sponsorship of terrorism as conditions for doing the deal; an unheard of step in modern diplomacy.

It also ignored blatant tampering by the Iranian regime in sanitizing military sites where prior uranium enrichment had been ongoing and ignored copious mountains of evidence that Iran was still pursuing dual-use nuclear technology from Germany and ballistic missile designs from North Korea.

Even after all that, the Iran lobby and regime still blame the U.S. for not following through on its commitments.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

A key goal for the regime remains the lifting of the remaining sanctions put in place by the U.S. in response to Iran’s abysmal human rights record and terror support. These items were ostensibly left out from the nuclear deal since—by the Iranians argument—they had nothing to do with nuclear production, but now the mullahs want these sanctions lifted even though Iranian regime has done nothing to improve its conduct in either area.

The fact that the Iran lobby and regime are now trying to link these sanctions—previously off the table—now back on the table and have threatened to walk away from a deal they have already walked away from, demonstrates how completely useless the nuclear exercise has become.

In a posting on its website, the NIAC, argued that the pending renewal of the Iran Sanctions Act could bring disastrous consequences if it was amended with so-called “poison pills” to impose new restrictions, sanctions or even lengthen its term.

“There is a danger that passage of new sanctions legislation, even if it is to renew sanctions already on the books, could exacerbate tensions over JCPOA sanctions relief. The prospect of Congress renewing ISA, especially extending them beyond the 2023 deadline for lifting sanctions, could send troubling signals regarding the U.S. commitment to the JCPOA at a time of ongoing political uncertainty. Iranian officials and many in the broader Iranian public say the sanctions relief promised under the deal has not been delivered,” the NIAC statement said.

It’s a perverse position to take since the gross mismanagement of the regime’s economy and the decision to support three ongoing wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen have badly hobbled an economy already rife with public corruption and battered by plummeting oil prices that have nothing to do with the sanctions; especially since Iranian regime is now free to sell the country’s oil back on the open market.

The Iranian people are rightly angry and upset at the stagnant economy, but Tehran’s streets and the channels of social media are not being filled with vocal denunciations of the U.S., instead it is filled with harsh protests of inflated paychecks for regime officials and the pouring of thousands of young Iranian lives to die on the battlefields far from Iran’s borders.

The effort to misdirect attention away from the real failings of the regime and try to blame it on the U.S.—even after the U.S. has tried to do everything it can to appease the Iranian regime short of baking cookies—is a time-worn tactic of the mullahs and we should not fall for it.

Robert Spencer, noted author and director of Jihad Watch, wrote an editorial in the New York Post warning that the Iranian regime is the greatest threat the U.S. and West face right now and dwarfs ISIS in its threat.

“Iran is not as flashy as ISIS but is actively working now on numerous anti-American initiatives that could turn out to be even more lethal than anything ISIS has yet perpetrated,” he said. “The nation is a breeding ground for terrorist activity: funding and controlling a global network of jihad terror organizations with a truly global reach, ready to do Iran’s bidding up to and including the killing of its perceived enemies.”

“Iran’s Hezbollah doesn’t just operate in Lebanon. It continues to target the United States through Mexico, where it has teamed with drug cartels along the US border. This partnership is mutually beneficial: Hezbollah gets massive amounts of cash to finance its jihad operations, and the drug cartels receive extensive training in ways to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies. That is one principal reason why the Mexican drug cartels have adopted what up until recently had been two trademarks of jihad groups: kidnapping and beheading,” he added.

Bob Blackman, a member of the British Parliament, similarly warned of trusting the Iranian regime in a piece in The Hill after the United Nations released a report assessing the regime’s compliance with the nuclear agreement, which found it had failed to meet the higher standards for compliance.

“The critical report by the UN is only the latest in a long series of marks against the Rouhani administration’s supposedly moderate credentials. In order to believe in that moderation in the first place, Western policy-makers had to ignore Rouhani’s long history in the security apparatus of Iran’s clerical regime, including his former role as lead nuclear negotiator, about which he boasted of raising Tehran’s nuclear profile while keeping international scrutiny at bay. And in order to keep the moderation narrative alive to the current date, those same policy-makers have had to ignore various statistical indicators and warnings from the Iranian opposition,” he said.

“The U.S. gave up important leverage in hope of improved relations, but it remained the main object of Tehran’s wrath. The UN closed the file on Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and Iran has continued to accuse it of political bias. And the six major powers involved in the JCPOA, having given in to even last-minute demands by the Islamic Republic, received nothing in return but the most cursory and minimal compliance with the deal. As the Associated Press reported last week, secret side-agreements already outline the expanded nuclear activities that Iran plans to pursue at its earliest possible opportunity,” Blackman added in a warning we should all heed.

By Michael Tomlinson

World Will be Paying for Flawed Iran Nuclear Deal for Years

July 21, 2016 by admin

World Will be Paying for Flawed Iran Nuclear Deal for Years

The Iran nuclear deal has moved front and center in the attention of the media and among policymakers since it has been a year now since the agreement was hailed as a ground breaking exercise in diplomacy.

The Iran lobby has predictably cheered its perceived successes in keeping the Iranian regime in check, with regime apologists such as the National Iranian American Council in the vanguard of that cheerleading squad.

For the mullahs in Tehran, the past year has yielded some fruit as a result of the deal; namely the release of badly needed cash reserves they have been able to tap for a massive shopping expedition to Russia to replenish arms used up in fighting three proxy wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

The deal has also helped the regime upgrade the technical sophistication of its military with the purchase of state-of-the-art anti-aircraft missile batteries from Russia, alongside new fighter jets, battle tanks and anti-ship missiles.

Most importantly for the regime is the political cover the deal has provided in allowing Iran to continue its brutal crackdown on human rights at home while receiving a free pass from the U.S. and other nations since linking the deal to improvements in human rights was left out.

The most recent revelation of the deal in hindsight has been the disclosure by the Associated Press of a secret side deal that grants Iran an accelerated pathway to enriching uranium back to full capacity well before the 15-year time frame outlined in the deal.

The damning disclosure has wrecked the Iran lobby’s carefully laid arguments and brought on a wave of negative media coverage pointing out the irregularity in the promise of nuclear containment. The disclosure also undercuts the central conceit of the nuclear deal, which was that it could buy time to push Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon back over a decade and half.

The reality is that Iranian regime has been freed of adequate international inspection and monitoring and can legally accelerate its enrichment program to produce enough nuclear material to produce several warheads in short order.

When you tie in that fact with the accelerated development of Iran’s ballistic missile program, you can see the blueprint laid out by North Korea a decade earlier that enabled it to join the ranks of nuclear weaponized nations.

James Phillips, a senior research fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Heritage Foundation, outlined this key failing in the nuclear deal in a piece in the Daily Signal.

“The published text of the nuclear agreement was vague on the exact timing of what happens to Iran’s uranium enrichment program after ten years,” he writes. ““But the new document indicates that after ten years, Iran plans to start replacing its current centrifuges with thousands of more advanced models that would be up to five times more efficient than the 5,060 centrifuges that it is allowed to operate currently under the agreement.”

“This concession could allow Tehran to enrich at more than twice the rate that it is now doing, even if the total number of operating centrifuges are reduced. This is a major concern because if the enrichment rate doubles, the time Tehran would need to stage a nuclear breakout would be reduced from the 12 months promised by the Obama administration to six months or less, much earlier than the administration had advertised when it was trying to sell the nuclear deal,” he added.

The fact that the side deal was part of an add-on document prepared and submitted by the Iranian regime to the United Nations as part of its report on Iran’s compliance essentially codifies the regime’s ability to accelerate its enrichment program.

This poses a monumental problem for the future of the world in any new nuclear negotiations—not just with Iran, but any rogue nation—since a country such as Saudi Arabia or even Egypt might be tempted to develop a nuclear capability in response to the Iranian regime and point out, correctly, it is deserving of the same concessions.

A Non-Resident Iran Research Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, pointed out this dangerous pathway for the future of nuclear agreements in a piece in the National Interest.

FDD report points out that by appeasing the Iranian regime, the U.S. has set the precedents that “intransigence can lead the international community to accept domestic enrichment” and “that being a Western ally does not guarantee more flexible treatment when accessing nuclear technology.”

“Key American allies that have previously limited their nuclear activities—like South Korea or the United Arab Emirates—have already noted that Iran, which has been repeatedly sanctioned for its nuclear noncompliance, has been permitted to sign a deal allowing it to develop industrial-scale nuclear capacity,” he writes.

The report also correctly points that creating an artificial divide between fissile material and development of warhead delivery systems is useless since Iran has already moved quickly to possess the ability to lob a nuclear warhead across continents. This “de-linking” process sets the precedent for any other nation to demand similar concessions.

The final lesson he writes about is that just because an agreement is lengthy (159 pages) does not mean it is always specific. The JCPOA contains a vague condition called “significant non-performance” under which parties can walk away from the deal. Such legalese incentivizes a devious negotiator like the Islamic State to define violations on its own terms.

Jed Babbin, former deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration and a senior fellow of the London Center for Policy Research, also noted in a piece in the Washington Times how the nuclear deal has actually prevented international monitoring of Iran’s nuclear activities.

“Parts of the side deals evidently bar Americans from participating in the inspection of Iranian nuclear sites. The side deals also allow Iran to inspect some of its own sites, preventing U.N. inspectors any access. To no one’s surprise, the Iranians have reported they are complying with the deal even in the uninspected sites,” he said.

“In 2003 Iraq, mistaken intelligence led to war. In 2016 Iran, the lack of intelligence is leading to a false peace” he adds.

The warning is explicit here. Because of the failures of the Iran nuclear deal, the world will have to suffer the consequences of a militant, extremist Iranian regime armed with nuclear weapons in the very near future and that prospect is one that the next incoming U.S. president must prevent.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Working Hard to Preserve Flawed Nuclear Deal

July 19, 2016 by admin

Iran Lobby Working Hard to Preserve Flawed Nuclear Deal

It has been one year since the Iran nuclear deal was agreed approved and freed the Iranian regime from a host of economic sanctions, as well as gave itself truckloads of political and diplomatic capital it has spread around the world in support of three proxy wars it is now waging.

By any objective standard, the Iranian nuclear deal has been a failure because it never was tied to modifying the behavior of the mullahs in Tehran. If the mullahs suffer no consequences for actions to support terror, commit cruel human rights violations and continue to build the infrastructure necessary to deliver a nuclear warhead to a target, then they are going to continue with that abhorrent behavior.

Nowhere was that point made more clear than in revelations by the Associated Press that in a secret side deal with the Iranian regime granted by the Obama administration, key restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program will start to ease years before the publicly-stated 15 year accord’s expiration, thus allowing the regime to pursue full development of a nuclear bomb well before the end of the pact.

The confidential document is the only text linked to last year’s deal between Iran and six foreign powers that hasn’t been made public, although U.S. officials say members of Congress who expressed interest were briefed on its substance. It was given to the AP by a diplomat whose work has focused on Iran’s nuclear program for more than a decade, and its authenticity was confirmed by another diplomat who possesses the same document.

although some of the constraints extend for 15 years, documents in the public domain are short on details of what happens with Iran’s most proliferation-prone nuclear activity — its uranium enrichment — beyond the first 10 years of the agreement.

The document obtained by the AP fills in the gap. It says that as of January 2027 — 11 years after the deal was implemented — Iran will start replacing its mainstay centrifuges with thousands of advanced machines.

Continue reading the main story

Centrifuges churn out uranium to levels that can range from use as reactor fuel and for medical and research purposes to much higher levels for the core of a nuclear warhead. From year 11 to 13, says the document, Iran will install centrifuges up to five times as efficient as the 5,060 machines it is now restricted to using.

Those new models will number less than those being used now, ranging between 2,500 and 3,500, depending on their efficiency, according to the document. But because they are more effective, they will allow Iran to enrich at more than twice the rate it is doing now, according to the New York Times.

The blockbuster revelations mean that Iran can massively expand its uranium enrichment capacity to produce several nuclear warheads within a time frame as little as 10 years, which contradicts virtually every public reassurance uttered by Iran lobby proponents such as the National Iranian American Council and Ploughshares Fund.

The NIAC’s deliberate misleading of the public continued during a briefing on Capitol Hill in which the NIAC was represented by noted regime apologists Reza Marashi and Tyler Cullis. Also attending were Suzanne DiMaggio of New America and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress.

DiMaggio was especially adept at turning verbal gymnastics in trying to pound home the idea that the nuclear agreement should not be tied to other issues such as Iran’s consistent support for the Assad regime as it busily wipes out virtually the entire civilian population of Syria.

It is funny DiMaggio also mentioned the heightened state of crisis in the Strait of Hormuz and thought it would be a good idea for the U.S. and the regime to negotiate an agreement government interactions at sea. That would be nice since Iran has been busy continually threatening U.S. and foreign vessels, capturing and parading U.S. sailors and threatening to blow up commercial shipping repeatedly, as well as use its own vessels to smuggle illicit weapons and arms to Houthi rebels in Yemen, threatening Saudi Arabia and opening a new war front.

Yeah, that would be a nice idea. So would hitting the lottery three times in a row, but you shouldn’t count on it.

Most remarkable of all was the complete absence of any discussions about human rights in the presentations. Only during questioning did Marashi mention human rights in the context of having a dialogue, which is cold comfort to the thousands of Iranians and dual-nationality citizens currently being held in Evin prison.

The fact that the Iran lobby never discusses human rights reveals the Achilles heel of its position in trying to defend the nuclear deal. Regime apologists such as Trita Parsi of NIAC understand the threat that discussing human rights poses to the nuclear deal since the topic is deadly radioactive to them. They have no defense for the barbaric actions of the regime and no deflection of the human misery being suffered by Iranians at the hands of their own leaders.

In a lengthy piece in Politico, Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, a Boston Globe columnist, wrote extensively about efforts to derail the nuclear deal, taking special effort to go after Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and staunch opponent of the nuclear deal.

She also ironically only mentions human rights once in her piece and only in terms of what Dubowitz is focusing on in working against the flawed deal. She quotes Parsi in his efforts to portray the potential consequences of the nuclear deal failing and blaming it on the U.S. exclusively, even though the Iranian regime has moved aggressively to exceed the limits of the agreement with a huge increase in testing of ballistic missiles outlawed by United Nations sanctions.

Iran is barred from conducting ballistic missile tests for eight years under UN Resolution 2231, which went effect July 20, 2015, days after the nuclear accord was signed.

Iran is “called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology,” according to the text of the resolution.

Yet, only two days before the anniversary of the agreement, Iran conducted its fourth missile test since the deal was signed in clear violation of the sanction and has boldly proclaimed it would accelerate its missile program; choosing the same path that pariah state North Korea has taken in missile development.

With the looming end of the Obama administration and the very real possibility of a Trump or Clinton administration seeking to redo the deal to address these concerns, the Iran lobby is working feverishly to buy the mullahs more time to accelerate its nuclear infrastructure work before the start of 2017.

By Michael Tomlinson

Why the Iran Lobby Avoids Discussing Human Rights and Terrorism

June 8, 2016 by admin

Why the Iran Lobby Avoids Discussing Human Rights and Terrorism

In a world where it is common place knowledge that the Iranian regime is a state sponsor of terrorism, with a long and bloody history, it always seems that the Iran lobby operates in a different plane of existence.

For regime supporters such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council and Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund, issues such as human rights violations and terrorism are less than inconvenient truths about Iran; they are things never meant to be spoken of in public or on social media.

The Iran lobby consistently seems to operate on the premise that if you never mention either of these topics, then they must not be real.

This is obvious by simply perusing the blogs and social media feeds for these Iran support groups periodically. Reading them within the context of what is happening in real time in the Middle East and Iran provides a surreal view that is totally disconnected from reality.

It’s also pretty darn funny to read.

Take for example Trita Parsi’s Twitter feed (@tparsi) which can’t help but be viewed as comedy material or pure ignorance. More likely it resonates as part of the famed “echo chamber” that national security staffer Ben Rhodes boasted about in a recent New York Times Magazine article.

Take for example this nugget in which Parsi derides the U.S. State Department’s annual terrorism report in which it identifies Iran as a leading state sponsor of terrorism:

“Still a mystery to me why State doesnt release this on April 1,” he tweets, implying that the report is a joke better left for an April Fools prank.

Unfortunately for Parsi and the rest of the Iran lobby, mockery and ridicule can’t hide the facts laid out in the report in which the State Department spells out the Iranian regime’s longstanding support for Hezbollah, a key cog in the regime’s long-running involvement in the Syrian civil war, and its support for Shiite militias in Iraq that have roamed throughout Sunni areas as death squads and Houthi rebels in Yemen that have displaced nearly half of the country’s population as part of a civil war.

Parsi’s Twitter feed is absent any mentions of those Iran-backed wars and the role the mullahs and the regime’s Quds Forces and Revolutionary Guard Corps play in them. He does make mention of the plight of Syrian refugees fleeing the war and the high price they pay in trying to cross the Mediterranean, but never urges Iran to seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict or even open its borders to those refugees it is forcing out.

Parsi does however spend considerable social media time attacking Saudi Arabia, the Iranian regime’s biggest rival, accusing it of “terrorism” and acts more readily identified with the mullahs in Tehran.

He even goes to the absurd level of defending top mullah Ali Khamenei’s incendiary speech over the weekend in which he denounced the U.S. and called Great Britain “evil” and blamed his country’s continued economic woes on existing U.S. sanctions on Iran’s access to U.S. currency markets tied to human rights violations and not the nuclear deal from last year.

“Khamenei said today what Iran’s been signaling the US for a while: Anti-ISIS cooperation on hold due to sanctions relief problems,” Parsi tweets.

The implication Parsi tries to make is that continued sanctions against Iran for the mass executions of over 2,500 Iranian men, women and children, as well as its sponsorship of three major wars is somehow halting the war against ISIS.

He conveniently ignores the bulk of Khamenei speech which is filled with vitriol and hate and the usual threats to wipe Iran’s enemies off the face of the Earth.

The more appropriate evaluation to make of Parsi social media postings and those his colleagues at NIAC is that they spend more time posting about Donald Trump than they do about the misery being suffered by Iranians at the hands of their own government.

They spend more time posting about the Cannes Film Festival than they do about the threats being made by the creation of a new morality police force designed to enforce strict Islamic codes against Iranian women.

They spend more time discussing the plight of Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American arrested and imprisoned in Iran who is a long-time supporter of the NIAC, than the thousands of Iranian dissidents, journalists, artists, bloggers and activists that were rounded up, imprisoned and tortured leading up to parliamentary elections.

The priorities of the Iran lobby are always on display to anyone who wishes to scan through the social feeds of supporters such as Parsi. What is telling is what is NOT in those feeds, such as any criticism of the mullahs, any calls for a Syrian cease fire, any demands for a release of all Iranian journalists or dissidents, any urging for the end of the barbaric practice of public hangings of prisoners, or any hopes for a cessation of the practice of beating women who do not wear hijabs.

Parsi and his cohorts do not do any of these things because they are – above all else – committed to supporting the Iranian regime and keeping it safe from any threats.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Paying Price for Echo Chamber of Lies

May 26, 2016 by admin

Iran Lobby Paying Price for Echo Chamber of Lies

The much-discussed article in the New York Times Magazine describing the Iran Lobby orchestrating of the push for the Iran nuclear deal has set off a chain of events throughout American politics and news media have begun digging deeper into the Iran lobby’s role in the effort to portray the Iranian regime as a moderate government.

Revelations have rippled out like so many stones dropped into a still pond, intersecting and converging as more news reports have come out detailing the flow of cash throughout the Iran lobby and into news organizations to help promote the nuclear deal.

Other stories have gone on to examine in great detail the organization and structure of the Iran lobby’s plans years before actual negotiations began with the Iranian regime, all of which goes to demonstrate the long view the mullahs have in achieving their goals.

Now Congress has stepped up its scrutiny, including demands for greater accountability from the Obama administration, as well as the Iranian regime’s compliance of a nuclear deal that is now suspected of being badly and deeply flawed.

This all came to the forefront as Treasury and State Department officials appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in an effort to reassure skeptical Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

“We need to make sure it’s implemented to the letter,” said New York Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel, “and hold Iran’s feet to the fire with respect to” what he called its troublemaking in the region.

Engel and other lawmakers cited Iran’s support for the militant groups like Hezbollah, as well as Shiia militants in Iraq, Houthi rebels in Yemen and the regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. They also raised Iran’s ballistic missile tests in March, in particular two test-fired rockets inscribed with the Hebrew phrase “Israel must be wiped off the Earth,” according to the regime’s semi-official Fars News Agency.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D., Calif.) heaped criticism on the Iranian nuclear deal at the hearing, calling for more sanctions on Iran to punish its military involvement in Syria.

“People in this country want us to get along with everyone around the world. We long for peace. And there are those who say that sanctions contradict that,” Sherman said. “But when you look at what Iran has done in Syria, hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million people killed by Assad, with funds provided, weapons provided, thugs provided by the Iranian government, when you see people killed by barrel bombs and sarin gas, we realize that the right response to the Iranian regime cannot be ‘kumbaya.’”

Sherman and Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), the committee chairman, raised the potential for the reauthorization of the Iran Sanctions Act to keep the bulk of financial restrictions in place, especially in light of the regime’s actions following the completion of the nuclear deal.

Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, gave blistering testimony explaining how the Iranian regime is taking advantage of a weak nuclear deal and the Obama administration’s persistent efforts to assist the regime.

“Iran is engaged in a robust effort to legitimize its financial sector despite a decades-long rap sheet of financial crimes and illicit financial activities that it shows no sign of curbing. Since the conclusion of the JPCOA, the Obama administration has missed numerous opportunities to push back against Iran’s legitimization campaign,” Dubowitz said.

“Instead of insisting on an end to Iran’s continuing malign activities (terrorism, human rights violations, and other destabilizing activities in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and other countries across the Middle East), and using non-nuclear sanctions to deter and punish these activities, the administration is now effectively acting as Iran’s trade promotion and business development authority. Indeed, the administration may be departing from its original JCPOA negotiating position that it would only suspend or lift so-called U.S. “nuclear sanctions” under its executive authority. Rather, the administration is allowing Iran to hold the U.S. responsible for delivering financial and economic outcomes,” Dubowitz added.

Dubowitz’s testimony also highlighted the awkwardness of Secretary of State John Kerry’s trips around the world recently as he found himself in the odd position of negotiating on behalf of promoting investment in the Iranian regime.

It is a situation that Rep. Royce highlighted at the hearing that Kerry was taking “the odd step” of reassuring foreign firms that Iran is open for business, Royce said, while “other administration officials go so far as to say that Iran economic growth is in our national security interest.”

It’s now a fact that the reassurances by the Iran lobby have less impact now that the full scope of their efforts have come to light. Coupled with the regime’s own actions over the past year, the entire basis of the Iran nuclear agreement – that the mullahs could be trusted to adhere to any international agreement – was built on an “echo chamber” of lies.

By Michael Tomlinson

The Echo Chamber of Iran Rings with Hardliners

May 25, 2016 by admin

The Echo Chamber of Iran Rings with Hardliners

In the now-infamous article by the New York Times Magazine on how a network of Iranian regime lobbyists, activists and journalists was created to feed a false narrative about the Iran nuclear deal. National security staffer Ben Rhodes called it an “echo chamber” where so-called independent experts were in actuality actively working at the direction of the White House media operation.

The key messages, social media postings and parade of so-called “experts” was designed to put forward the story that the nuclear deal would put a stop to Iran’s nuclear development, empower moderate elements within the Iranian government and stabilize the Middle East.

Alternatively, this same echo chamber fought against any effort to link human rights, sponsorship of terrorism or strict guidelines on inspections of Iran military facilities as being destabilizing the prospects of an agreement.

Since the deal was struck last year, the world has discovered how completely wrong all those assumptions were, but worse, how the Iran lobby, directly funded with cash from groups aligned with Iran, was essentially lying.

The avalanche of disclosures now come fast and furious as we begin to see the scope, size and sophistication of the Iran lobby’s efforts, especially in swaying favorable media coverage by paying news outlets such as National Public Radio hundreds of thousands of dollars for positive coverage of the deal.

Bloomberg in a report examined the full scale of the Iran lobby’s network and operations in supporting the Iran nuclear deal based a series of leaked emails he received.

It discovered that the actual campaign for the nuclear deal did not start in 2015 with negotiations as Iran regime supporters claim, but rather launched a full four years earlier with Ploughshares Fund leading the initial organization long before Rhodes began meeting with progressive groups on shaping the Iran narrative, which may indicate that the administration itself may have been played for fools by the mullahs in Tehran all along.

Beginning in August 2011, Ploughshares and its grantees formed the Iran Strategy Group. Over time this group created a sophisticated campaign to reshape the national narrative on Iran. That campaign sought to portray skeptics of diplomacy as “pro-war,” and to play down the dangers of the Iranian nuclear program before formal negotiations started in 2013 only to emphasize those dangers after there was an agreement in 2015, Bloomberg writes.

The strategy group, which included representatives of the Arms Control Association, the National Security Network, the National Iranian American Council, the Federation of American Scientists, the Atlantic Council and others, sought to “develop process and mechanism to implement Iran campaign strategies, tactics and narrative,” according to an agenda for the first meeting of the group on Aug. 17, 2011, Lake adds.

The fact that Ploughshares funds the NIAC, the chief lobbyist for the Iran regime, and convened these strategy sessions back in 2011 clearly shows the planning by the Iran lobby to create a false narrative and then sell it to the White House. That sales job was undoubtedly helped in no small part by the inclusion of former NIAC staffers hired into the National Security Council, with one former Iran lobby staffer now heading up the NSC’s Iran desk.

The centerpiece of those early strategy meetings was that the Iran lobby needed to change the “message” narrative, even though facts on the ground in Iran proved otherwise. While Iran was developing links to Al-Qaeda and exporting terrorism via Hezbollah and Houthi proxies, the Iran lobby needed to kill those stories in the media and substitute a more favorable one.

According to Bloomberg, in an Aug. 20, 2013, e-mail to the Iran Strategy Group, Joseph Cirincione, president of Ploughshares, encouraged the Ploughshares grantees to “create a social media, web, expert push that carries our main points into the media and policy discussions in the first 12-24 hours.”

The rest is – as they say – history, as the Iran lobby, led by Ploughshares money and NIAC staff, began pushing alternative messages into the media and spread around cash to news media, as well as recruiting supportive journalists such as Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor to serve as mouthpieces.

The group relied on their own network of “experts” such as Paul Pillar to serve as “impartial” third-party analysts to discuss the nuclear deal on news outlets such as NPR which was receiving funding from Ploughshares.

The sad truth is that the Middle East is by far more chaotic and dangerous than at any other time in recent memory. The international community essentially has no idea what Iranian regime’s military is doing in developing ballistic missiles or nuclear warheads in fortified bunkers that no one even knew existed until the regime showed them off in videos.

Human rights in Iran are abysmal and thousands of innocent Iranian men, women and children have been hanged, had limbs amputated, acid thrown into their faces and eyes gouged out as part of the normal Iranian justice system.

And yet, the Iran lobby utters not one word of protest. Makes no harsh remark and takes no blame for essentially creating the world we have today.

Even their most basic claim of empowering moderate elements in Iran’s government was slapped hard in the face by the announcement of the appointment of Ahmad Jannati to head up the powerful Assembly of Experts.

The 89-year old hardliner is well known for being a religious radical devoutly committed to exporting the Islamic extremism and protecting the mullahs and their ill-gotten gains.

In addition to his new post, Jannati leads the influential Guardian Council, a vetting body that disqualified over 3,000 less loyal candidates for the February elections, which were held in parallel with the vote for the Assembly of Experts.

All of which just goes to show how there are really no moderates within Iranian politics and government and to make any such distinction is to play into the narrative the Iran lobby has so studiously cultivated over the last five years.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Damaged by Revelations of Funding for Nuclear Deal Campaign

May 24, 2016 by admin

Iran Lobby Damaged by Revelations of Funding for Nuclear Deal Campaign

The expose of national security staffer Ben Rhodes admission in the New York Times Magazine concocting a string of false messages to sell the Iran nuclear deal sent shock-waves through American politics and around the world as the revelations began to sink in that the entire basis of the agreement with the Iranian regime may have been built on lies.

Even more disturbing news reports has come out now that one of the principal advocates for the deal and a central pillar of the Iran lobbying effort had paid cash directly to news organizations in a brash effort to influence favorable coverage of the agreement.

The Associated Press reported that the Ploughshares Fund gave National Public Radio $100,000 last year to help it report on the nuclear deal according to the group’s own annual report, while also funding reporters and partnerships with a wide array of other news outlets.

In the Times article, Rhodes explained how he worked with nongovernmental organizations, proliferation experts and even friendly reporters to build support for the seven-nation accord that curtailed Iran’s nuclear activity and softened international financial penalties on Tehran.

“We created an echo chamber,” said Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, adding that “outside groups like Ploughshares” helped carry out the administration’s message effectively.

Most news organizations, including The Associated Press, have strict rules governing whom they can accept money from and how to protect journalistic independence.

Ploughshares’ backing is more unusual, given its prominent role in the rancorous, partisan debate over the Iran deal.

The Ploughshares grant to NPR supported “national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and budgets, Iran’s nuclear program, international nuclear security topics and U.S. policy toward nuclear security,” according to Ploughshares’ 2015 annual report, recently published online.

Ploughshares Fund provided over 90 grants to various organizations in 2015 in order to engage in reporting, research and analysis on Iranian nuclear issues. The over 90 grants given out in 2015 nearly doubles those the organization provided in 2014, and triples the amount given in 2013. Ploughshares’ increases in grant funding directly coincides with the time period during which the Iran nuclear deal was being finalized and presented to Congress.

Also receiving grants were think tanks such as the RAND Institute which was given $40,000 to write “a series of articles that analyze specific elements of the diplomatic agreement with Iran on its nuclear program.”

Ploughshares Fund President Joseph Cirincione spoke about the Iran deal on NPR twice last year. He was identified as a donor to the radio station on only one of the two occasions.

Ploughshares also provided over $280,000 to the Iran lobby leader National Iranian American Council (NIAC) for its work supporting the Iran deal, some of which went directly towards sending NIAC staff to the nuclear negotiations in Vienna. NIAC was accused of engaging in lobbying efforts on behalf of the Iranian regime around 2007, which led to the organization’s president Trita Parsi bringing suit against journalist Hassan Daioleslam for defamation. Parsi eventually lost the protracted legal battle.

The New York Post joined in the mounting criticism of the massive lobbying and PR effort with an editorial casting doubt on Ploughshares’ claims:

“And though Ploughshares claims to be working against nuclear proliferation, it backed a soft line toward Iran and worked to enable a deal that at best will only delay Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” the Post said.

Meanwhile the Washington Free Beacon examined claims by NPR that it did not deliberately deny airtime for anti-Iran deal advocates such as Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) who claimed to have scheduled interviews with NPR cancelled at the last time and spots given instead to Iran deal support Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

While NPR executives claimed to have no records of such bookings, emails reviewed by the Free Beacon between NPR and Pompeo’s office show otherwise, casting more doubt on the validity of NPR’s claims of journalistic integrity on the Iran nuclear deal while it was being funded by the Ploughshares Fund.

These revelations expose the tangled connections between the Iranian lobby, its financial backers and its efforts to manipulate news media and manage directly the so-called “hundreds of often-clueless reporters” as characterized by Robert Malley, senior director at the National Security Council, as quoted in the Times article.

As to where Ploughshares gets its money? Ploughshares is financed by billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Buffett Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others including several notable Hollywood celebrities such as actor Michael Douglas and entertainer Barbra Streisand.

Joseph Cirincione, the president of Ploughshares, went on the offensive in an effort to blunt the growing embarrassment of these revelations with an editorial on Huffington Post in which he blamed all the attacks on a right-wing, neo-con conspiracy.

While Cirincione took aim at the writers of the Times and AP stories, he neglected to mention the central characters in this entire episode and it wasn’t Ploughshares.

It was the mullahs in Tehran for which Ploughshares and others of the Iran lobby do their bidding.

The core issue is not about donations, coverage and lobbying. It is very much about how a despotic, extremist, religiously fanatical regime is escaping notice as it executes a record 2,500 people, brutalizes the women of Iran and fights three wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq which has turned much of the Middle East and Europe into the largest refugee center in history since World War II.

Nowhere does Cirincione defend the recent conduct of the mullahs. Nowhere does he mention the rapid development and launching of illegal ballistic missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads. Nowhere does he mention the blatant violations of even the flimsiest provisions of the Iran nuclear deal such as the inability to inspect Iranian military facilities.

The money Ploughshares has spread around like so much horse manure was never intended to expose the Iranian regime, but only to cover it up.

By Michael Tomlinson

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

May 20, 2016 by admin

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