Iran’s leader: Obama wrong to say nuclear site hidden
Congress ready to act if diplomacy fails
Washington — Congress is poised to act swiftly on new penalties against Iran if international talks on Tehran’s nuclear program show signs of faltering. And this time lawmakers are talking about trying to block gas and refined petroleum exports to Iran, possibly causing serious disruptions in the lives of ordinary Iranians.
“If we want to get their attention, we have to do something real: sanction Iran’s gasoline imports,” said Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, in a speech on the House floor. “That’s where Ahmadinejad is vulnerable,” he said, referring to Iran’s president.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, is one of several lawmakers working on plans to expand current penalties.
“Congress must equip President (Barack) Obama with a full range of tools to deal with the threats posed by Iran,” said Dodd, D-Conn., who said his bill would include extending current restrictions on Iran’s financial institutions, imposing new trade bans and exacting penalties for entities exporting certain refined petroleum products to Iran. His committee plans a hearing on the subject Tuesday.
Tehran, Iran ? Iran’s president hit back Saturday at President Barack Obama’s accusation that his country had sought to hide its construction of a new nuclear site, arguing that Tehran reported the facility to the U.N. even earlier than required.
The Iranian president defended his government’s actions as the head of the U.N.’s nuclear monitoring agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, arrived Saturday to arrange an inspection of the uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom.
The revelation that Iran has been building a new nuclear plant has heightened the concern of the U.S. and many of its allies, which suspect Tehran is using a civilian nuclear program as a cover for developing a weapons-making capability. Iran denies such an aim, saying it only wants to generate energy.
Obama and the leaders of France and Britain accused Iran of keeping the construction hidden from the world for years. The U.S. president said last month that Iran’s actions “raised grave doubts” about its promise to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes only.
ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has also said Tehran was “on the wrong side of the law” over the new plant and should have revealed its plans as soon as it decided to build the facility.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad challenged that view in a speech Saturday, saying that Iran voluntarily revealed the facility to the IAEA in a letter on Sept. 21. He said that was one year earlier than necessary under the agency’s rules.
“The U.S. president made a big and historic mistake,” Iranian state TV quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. “Later it became clear that (his) information was wrong and that we had no secrecy.”
Iran agreed to allow U.N. inspectors into the facility at a landmark meeting with six world powers near Geneva on Thursday that put nuclear talks back on track and included the highest-level bilateral contact with the U.S. in three decades.
Iranian officials argue that under IAEA safeguard rules, a member nation is required to inform the U.N. agency about the existence of a nuclear facility six months before introducing nuclear material into the machines. Iran says the new facility won’t be operational for 18 months, and so it has not violated any IAEA requirements.
The IAEA has said that Iran is obliged under the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to notify the organization when it begins to design a new nuclear facility.
Iran says it voluntarily implemented the Additional Protocol for 2 1/2 years as a confidence-building gesture, but its parliament passed legislation in 2007 forcing the government to end such cooperation after the country was referred to the U.N. Security Council for sanctions over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment.
The IAEA has countered by saying that a government cannot unilaterally abandon such an agreement.