Face the Nation‘s John Dickerson grilling cabinet members Ernest Moniz and John Kerry about a nonexistent promise to get Iran to agree to inspections “anytime, anywhere.”
When Face the Nation‘s John Dickerson (7/19/15) interviewed Secretary of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz about the Iran deal, his second question—after “when [Americans] see Iranians dancing in the street with this deal, why shouldn’t they be suspicious about it?”—was about the fact that it doesn’t give the United States the ability to inspect anyplace in Iran with no notice. Dickerson cited the Israeli prime minister:
One of the real opponents of this deal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said of the 24-day waiting period on inspections, he said, you wouldn’t tell a drug dealer, give them 24-day notice. They would just flush the drugs down the toilet.
Does he have a point?
Moniz made the obvious point that you can’t actually flush a secret nuclear program “down the toilet”:
I don’t think that’s really an option here with nuclear materials…. We feel very confident in the capability of IAEA with environmental sampling to detect any nuclear activity very, very long after it has occurred.
But Dickerson persisted, turning to Kerry: “What happened, Mr. Secretary, with anytime, anywhere?” To which the secretary of State responded: “There’s no such thing in arms control as anytime, anywhere. There isn’t any nation in the world, none, that has an anytime, anywhere.”
But, persisted Dickerson, “Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, said in April you will have anywhere, anytime, 24/7 access.”
That’s not actually what Rhodes said; when asked about “anywhere, anytime” by CNN‘s Jake Tapper (4/6/15), he responded, “Well, Jake, first of all, under this deal, you will have anywhere, anytime 24/7 access as it relates to the nuclear facilities that Iran has.” In other words, anywhere that’s a nuclear facility—not anywhere in the country that the US happens to be curious about. (Rhodes clarified this the same day in an interview with Israeli TV—see Politifact, 7/19/15.) Kerry and Moniz said pretty much the same thing to Dickerson.
This obviously left Dickerson unsatisfied: “We will have to move on there,” he said, before going on to ask a question about how the deal will not prevent the “terrorist nation” of Iran from having a conventional military.
Perhaps the discussion would have been more satisfying—if not for Dickerson, then for viewers—if anyone had acknowledged the reality that it would be foolish for Iran to accept unlimited inspections at any location on its territory, because the United States has in the past used inspections as a cover for espionage that facilitated military attacks. As Jon Schwarz put it in a piece in The Intercept (7/15/15):
All countries have things they legitimately want to hide, such as conventional military secrets and the security procedures of their leaders…. During the 1990s the US demonstrated with Iraq that it would routinely abuse the weapons inspections process in order to uncover such legitimate secrets—and use them to target the Iraqi military and try to overthrow the Iraqi government.
These efforts are not exactly a secret to US corporate media; the Washington Post and Boston Globe jointly broke the news that the UN’s UNSCOM inspection program in Iraq had been used for US military espionage on January 6, 1999 (written up by Seth Ackerman in FAIR’s Extra!, 3–4/99, 11–12/02). In the Globe‘s words, UNSCOM concealed “an ambitious spying operation designed to penetrate Iraq’s intelligence apparatus and track the movement of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.”
The Post (1/17/99) later revealed that intelligence garnered through the UNSCOM spying was used to bomb military targets in Iraq, with military analyst William Arkin writing:
National security insiders, blessed with their unprecedented intelligence bonanza from UNSCOM, convinced themselves that bombing Saddam Hussein’s internal apparatus would drive the Iraqi leader around the bend.
Rather than apologizing for this misuse of the inspections process, Washington insiders defended it. USA Today (3/3/99) reported:
Experts say it is naive to believe that the United States and other governments would not have used the opportunity presented by the UN commission to spy on a country that provoked the Persian Gulf War.
So it wasn’t considered debatable at the time—though a few years later, when the US was gearing up for an invasion of Iraq, US media started treating it as an allegation made by Iraq rather than an actual operation that had been exposed by leading US papers (as Ackerman documented—Extra!, 11–12/02).
And now that the US is trying to get inspectors into another Mideast country, no one in a position to either ask or answer questions on elite news shows like Face the Nation even recalls the scandal—or, if they do, they’re too polite to mention it.
But you can be certain that Iran remembers it.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
Messages to Face the Nation can be send to facethenation@cbsnews.com (or via Twitter @FaceTheNation). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
The paranoia of the USAmerican Empire(tm) is boundless…
Last night I dreamt that I was talking baseball with Mordechai Vanunu, and he was curious what questions John Dickerson asked regarding the stockpile of nuclear weapons that Israel has developed and whether the US is planning on insisting on “anytime, anywhere” with that “democracy.” Who can doubt that our great friend, ally and democrat, Netanyahu would readily agree to such a reasonable request?
I wonder what these people tell themselves, at night, so that they sleep.
Why, by absolutely any criterion, would it be against Iran’s interest to allow any inspection regime that the US or the West or whatever wants to impose?
The only reason I can think of is that those who make these arguments are speaking in favor of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons – PERIOD.
What we have let happen on the Left, as Liberals, is that we have allowed the Liberal voice to be insinuated with foreign agents who use situations and terms we are familiar with such as racism, imperialism and other problems we have here at home to justify attacking the country as a whole and our foreign policy.
There are plenty of great arguments and interesting discussions waiting to be had on lots of ways to improve America, but this game of bash America by FAIR and others is not useful, funny, or relevant.
Iran must learn to trust US inspectors to spy on them. Be more like us. We learned in public schools to trust in America. We trust the National Security Administration to spy on us. Granted, Iran is a sovereign state but they could easily become a client state in the greatest empire ever. Just do a regime change and instruct your maidens to throw flowers whenever Americans march down the streets of Tehran. And oh yes, give us plenty of oil.
The blind use of arguments when they push an agenda is what FAIR and its readers are about. Talking about nuclear weapons as if Israel and Iran were the same in all respects.
Israel has already been attacked many times, is still basically being warred on by Paletstinians, supplied and trained by surrounding hostile countries. Israel has a right and need for nuclear weapons and has said and proven over time that it has those weapons for deterrent.
Iran and other Islamic states just use whatever argument they can muster whether it makes sense of not … like a spoiled child. Israel has nuclear weapons, why can’t we.
Daddy has a gun, why can’t baby?
Wow Brux, did you just actually write that? :) Really?
Wow. Your posts actually make me feel ashamed to be a human being.
It would take several afternoons to unpack the pile of utter nonsense you wrote (presumably with a straight face, which makes me worried about your sanity) For starters, though, it seems that you’re worried that FAIR’s deviation from the undeviating narrative in the mainstream media of Iran as a “threat”, Israel as the “good guy”, and Islam as “the problem” is somehow something to be feared.
Your apologetics for Israeli state terrorism are vile and gruesome, but that’s to be expected. What’s surprising is how brazenly and shamelessly you airbrush history, flaunt your indifference to reality, and then insult other people’s intelligence by presuming that you can hoodwink them with cry-baby antics and chauvinist whining about FAIR’s lack of commitment to bombing more people in the Middle East.
Here are some examples of the meagre gruel you offer, followed by rational responses founded on facts and actual events, not the nonsense that floats around in your head:
“The blind use of arguments when they push an agenda is what FAIR and its readers are about. Talking about nuclear weapons as if Israel and Iran were the same in all respects.”
This insinuates that Iran is “the baddy”, but of course anyone even remotely familiar with the Middle East and its history knows that Israel is far, far ahead in terms of promoting terrorism, attacking its neighbors, and imposing apartheid (the latter category is an Israeli specialty). Israel’s vicious bombing of Gaza can muster no more from you than an anguished whine about the victims defending themselves (Israel “being warred on”. Presumably the Palestinians should ENJOY it when they are murdered by snipers, have their homes demolished, their bones broken, their limbs torn off by bullets, and a hundred other crimes). This is of course disgraceful and pathetic, and it’s not fooling anyone. Sorry about that.
“supplied and trained by surrounding hostile countries”
This is true – and to the credit of these hostile countries. The US arms and equips Israel to carry out its colonialist program in Gaza and the West Bank, and to murder with near impunity, so by your own criteria, it is right and proper that Palestinians should seek and receive means of resistance against those who are “warring against” them. Thanks for shooting yourself so blindly in the foot.
“Israel has a right and need for nuclear weapons and has said and proven over time that it has those weapons for deterrent.”
This is a nice bedtime story for children, but getting back to the real world, it is Israel and its American sponsor that have repeatedly rejected and blocked peace overtures by Iran. Iran has even proposed that the Middle East be a nuclear weapons free zone. This is unacceptable to the US or Israel, who are dedicated to maintaining their own nuclear hegemony in the region against.
“Supporting Israel is like supporting England, or Australia, or any other Western nation against the horde of barbarians that cannot even maintain peaces, human rights and rule of law in their countries.”
This is pretty much as disgusting as it gets. Civilians fleeing US-backed humanitarian catastrophes, caused by US-backed jihadis in Syria and airstrikes by the theocratic-fascist regime in Saudi Arabia against the already desperately poor country of Yemen are reduced to “barbarians” who somehow (gee, I wonder why?) can’t “even fix their own countries”. I have to wonder at this point if you’re just incredibly limited, or if you’re just incredibly venal.
Brux, it’s clear, at the very least, that you suffer from the disease of rabid Islamophobia and national chauvinism, which prevent you from piecing together a structural analysis of the situation, which means you are also a mere plaything of the political establishment and the “truths” (lies) it disseminates (with the help of the media that you don’t want FAIR to deviate from, no less). Your chauvinist mindset will be capable only of interpreting events through the narrow and worthless lens of “Islam is the problem” until you purge yourself of these debilitating illnesses. Please note: these ailment are not useful, funny or relevant to serious people who want to know the truth. But they’re VERY useful to thugs, bullies and liars who view Syrian children as sub-humans and Yemenis as disposable garbage that can be bombed and terrorized at will.
I ask: is there any reaching you? I suspect not, but I live in hope.
Face the nation (a/k/a “fool the nation”) is, coincidentally hosted by son of the business partner of person involved in 1970’s Koreagate Scandal (as well as being son of a former 1960’s White House tv correspondence during 1960’s). And given the amount of personal wealth he apparently inherited from his father, the Face The Nation host would seem to have a vested special economic interest of using his corporate media show gatekeeping position to manipulate u.s. public opinion on behalf of the u.s. power elite/national security establishment and/or “the Lobby”, perhaps?