High Political Stakes For Hillary Clinton On Iran Nuclear Agreement
.. good to see Ritter alive and well, and still telling it as he sees it, with more honest insight than we get in too many other positions ..
AP | By By KEN THOMAS and JULIE PACE
Posted: 04/04/2015 9:18 am EDT Updated: 04/04/2015 6:59 pm EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton can claim a piece of the victory if the U.S. and other world powers ultimately complete a final nuclear deal with Iran.
She will own a piece of the failure if the negotiations collapse or produce a weak deal.
Her statement after Thursday's tentative agreement suggests the soon-to-be Democratic candidate for president knows those are her stakes.
She called the framework "an important step," while cautioning that "the devil is always in the details."
"The onus is on Iran and the bar must be set high," said Clinton, who helped lay the groundwork for the diplomacy with Iran as President Barack Obama's first secretary of state. "There is much to do and much more to say in the months ahead, but for now diplomacy deserves a chance to succeed."
The issue will figure prominently in the foreign policy debate of the 2016 presidential campaign. Nearly all the expected GOP candidates said the outline agreement was dangerous to U.S. interests.
"This attempt to spin diplomatic failure as a success is just the latest example of this administration's farcical approach to Iran," said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. He is likely to make foreign policy a centerpiece of his candidacy.
But Clinton occupies a unique space on the nuclear issue because of her role in Obama's Cabinet. She sent a close adviser, Jake Sullivan, to participate in the secret talks with Iran that led to the start of the international negotiations over the country's nuclear ambitions.
Clinton is also navigating delicate ties with Israel and the American Jewish community, an influential group of voters and donors. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a fierce critic of the Obama administration's outreach to Iran, described the framework deal as a threat to "the very survival" of his nation.
"I don't know how you can maneuver all aspects of this politically," said Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "You can be supportive and skeptical. I suspect that's the direction."
The tentative agreement announced Thursday by the U.S. and its negotiating partners — Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia — is aimed at keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Negotiators have until June 30 to settle the technical details.
The deal would remove economic penalties against Iran once the U.N. nuclear agency verifies Tehran's compliance.
At times, Clinton has tried to play up her connection to the historic diplomacy. The U.S. and Iran severed diplomatic relations in 1979 after the Islamic revolution and the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, where 52 Americans were held hostage for more than a year.
When Obama was getting credit for the clandestine negotiations, Clinton's aides made sure reporters knew that the approach had started during her tenure at the State Department.
Clinton wrote in her memoir of how she set the negotiations in motion by facilitating back-channel discussions with Iran through the sultan of Oman, who suggested the talks after he helped free an American hiker held by Iran. Clinton tapped Sullivan to establish contact with the Iranians in 2012, an important step in the path to Thursday's preliminary agreement.
Sullivan has closely consulted with Clinton on policy as she prepares to announce her presidential campaign this month. The 38-year-old Sullivan is seen as her likely pick, if she wins the presidency, as national security adviser.
Yet Clinton also expressed doubt as the talks dragged on and she neared a return to politics.
Last year, Clinton told an American Jewish organization that while Obama had given 50-50 odds of an agreement, she was "skeptical the Iranians will follow through and deliver." She said she had "seen many false hopes dashed through the years."
Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress who focuses on national security policy in the Middle East and South Asia, said if a full deal is reached by the summer, Clinton would be "part of something historic" because of her initial role.
If it failed, he predicted she still would be "in a strong position at the center of the debate, because Iran would be widely viewed as the spoiler."
With public polling showing a majority of Americans favor a diplomatic resolution to Iran's nuclear ambitions, Katulis said, "any effort by Republicans to criticize Clinton's support for diplomacy might ultimately push them to the margins of today's national security debate and away from the center."
Clinton appears set to go on offense against the Republicans in the race on Iran. After dozens of Republican senators sent a letter to Iran's leaders warning that Congress could upend a deal, Clinton said the lawmakers were "out of step with the best traditions of American leadership."
"Either these senators were trying to be helpful to the Iranians or harmful to the commander in chief in the midst of high-stakes international diplomacy," she said. "Either answer does discredit" to the letter-signers.
Post reporter jailed in Iran faces 4 charges including espionage
Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian has been charged with espionage and three other serious crimes, according to his lawyer. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)
By Carol Morello April 20 at 11:40 AM
Iranian authorities are charging The Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief, Jason Rezaian, with espionage and three other serious crimes, including “collaborating with hostile governments” and “propaganda against the establishment,” according to his attorney in Tehran.
Providing the first description of the precise charges against Rezaian since his arrest nine months ago, the lawyer said that an indictment alleges that Rezaian gathered information “about internal and foreign policy” and provided it to “individuals with hostile intent.”
The statement, issued from Tehran by Rezaian’s attorney, Leila Ahsan, was provided to The Post by the family of the imprisoned reporter.
Rezaian also is accused of collecting classified information, said Ahsan, who is believed to be the only person outside the judiciary to have read the indictment. The indictment says he wrote to President Obama, in an example of his alleged contact with a “hostile government.”
The charges carry a maximum sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison.
VIDEO: An up-close look at Jason Rezaian, the Post reporter now in an Iranian jail(4:25) Jason Rezaian’s journey has taken him from a childhood in San Francisco to his father’s native Iran. At 37, he became the Washington Post correspondent in Tehran. In July 2014, he was thrown into Iran’s Evin Prison, where he remains. This is his story. (This video has been updated to reflect recent developments in the Rezaian case.) (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)
The Revolutionary Court, which handles national security cases, has not officially divulged the charges against Rezaian. They are known only by the brief description given by Ahsan after she met Rezaian on Monday for 90 minutes in the presence of an official interpreter.
It was the first time Rezaian has been allowed to consult with a lawyer since his arrest on July 22. He has been incarcerated in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, where political prisoners are held and interrogated.
“All of the items and accusations are the ones that I mentioned and I cannot divulge details because the trial has not yet begun,” Ahsan said in her statement, citing the secret nature of the investigation.
Ahsan said that the case file presents no evidence to justify the accusations against Rezaian and that the charges are related to his journalistic pursuit of stories about Iran.
She added that her client “has never had any direct or indirect access to classified information to share with anyone.”
The White House and the State Department criticized Iran’s handling of the case.
VIDEO: White House won't make Jason Rezaian's freedom condition of Iran deal(3:06) When asked why the White House had not required Iran to release The Washington Post's Jason Rezaian as a condition of a nuclear agreement with Iran, press secretary Josh Earnest said efforts to build support for a deal are "extremely complicated." (AP)
“If the reports are true, these charges are absurd, should be immediately dismissed and Jason should be freed immediately, so that he can return home to his family,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
When asked why the administration has not required the release of Rezaian and two other Americans held in Iranian prisons as a condition for a nuclear agreement with Iran, Earnest replied that efforts to build support for a deal are “extremely complicated.”
Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor, described the charges against Rezaian as “scurrilous.”
“It is absurd and despicable to assert, as Iran’s judiciary is now claiming, that Jason’s work first as a freelance reporter and then as The Post’s Tehran correspondent amounted to espionage or otherwise posed any threat to Iranian national security,” Baron said in a statement.
Baron made an open plea for the Iranian judiciary and the judge in the case to exonerate Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, a journalist who was arrested with her husband and eventually released on bail.
“The manufactured charges against Jason and Yegi that Iran’s courts are now putting forth represent propaganda, not justice,” Baron said. “The world will be watching; any just outcome to this tragic charade can result only in Jason and Yegi’s exoneration and immediate release.”
The judge in the case, Abolghassem Salavati, has previously drawn international condemnation for his harsh sentences. The Revolutionary Court has not set a trial date for Rezaian’s case. His family has said they believe it may be soon.
“A Revolutionary Court branch reviewing the case is dealing with many other cases, and will deal with this case when its turn comes,” Gholam Hossein Esmaili, the head of Tehran province’s justice department and a former chief of Evin Prison, told reporters, according to Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency. “It will then issue an appropriate verdict at a proper time.”
Ali Rezaian expressed confidence in his brother’s innocence.
“The more I hear about the evidence they are basing their charges on, the less I can believe that they have held Jason for nine months, or that he was detained at all,” he said Monday. “There’s no evidence that he had or tried to gain access to confidential or classified information. There’s no evidence that he did anything to injure the Iranian government in any way. I guess in a word it would be that it’s tragic that his and Yegi’s lives have been turned upside down.”
Several Iranian news organizations have published lengthy articles in the past week about the charges against Rezaian, who is 39 and holds both Iranian and U.S. passports. Last weekend, the semiofficial Fars News Agency said he is suspected of passing on economic and industrial information, which it characterized as an act of espionage at a time when international sanctions have caused prices to rise for Iranian consumers.
His access to legal counsel has been limited. Several lawyers contacted by Rezaian’s family declined to take the case. Ahsan was hired only recently, and until Monday she had had only an introductory meeting with him in a judge’s chambers. She told Rezaian’s family that their meeting Monday is the only one that will be permitted before his trial.
In her statement, Ahsan said the court has rejected her arguments that he should be released on bail to prepare for his trial.
“Considering that the investigation has ended, I believe there is no legal precedent for extending Jason’s detention,” she said.
Baron noted that the judge assigned to hear and render a verdict in Rezaian’s case has been accused of violating human rights.
“It is important to note that the judge, Abolghassem Salavati, did not permit Jason to choose his own counsel, rejecting several initial choices,” Baron said. “We continue to believe that Jason’s defense team should be permitted to grow to include additional lawyers of his choosing.
“We call on Judge Salavati and the Iranian judiciary to depart from past practice and instead demonstrate to the world that they can indeed render a fair and impartial judgment in the Iranian system.”
In a hint of the defense strategy, Ahsan said that Iran and the United States, despite their deep differences dating to American support for the shah before the Iranian revolution that deposed him, have never attacked one another, so under international law they are not considered “hostile” nations. That undercuts the charges of “collaborating” with hostile governments and writing to Obama, she said.
During nuclear talks with Iran, Secretary of State John F. Kerry has repeatedly mentioned Rezaian, along with two other Americans of Iranian descent imprisoned there — Amir Hekmati, a Marine veteran from Flint, Mich., sentenced to 10 years for aiding a “hostile country” — a reference to the United States — and Saeed Abedini, a pastor from Boise, Idaho, sentenced to eight years on national security charges for establishing churches in Iran.
Kerry also has asked for help locating Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who disappeared during a trip to Iran in 2007. The United States has never formally linked any of their cases to the negotiations, however.
Ahsan made a passing reference to the ongoing talks resuming this week.
“Even though legal affairs are outside the bounds of politics, I hope the nuclear talks and its developments will have a positive effect on a speedy release of my client,” she said.
.. interesting insights into Iran .. meet the man with the little bird in the first one .. one deals with a very different legal system in part, blood money and forgiveness for murder .. oh, and one which was great to see, a shopkeeper said the sanctions had no effect at all on his business .. he said 'we have more western goods on the shelves than ever before' .. i remember seeing ketchup .. :)
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