Quote:Top Senate Democrats told the president Monday that to earn their support, any deal with North Korea must prioritize complete, verifiable denuclearization, include a tough inspections regime, and ensure the elimination of Pyongyang’s ballistic missile program.

Minority leader Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez, and other lawmakers laid out those demands in a letter to President Donald Trump ahead of his planned summit with Kim Jong-un next week in Singapore. If a future potential deal does not meet their conditions, the Democrats warned, Congress “must act as a check” and leverage its sanctions and oversight power.

“Any agreement with North Korea must build on the current nuclear test suspension and ultimately include the dismantlement and removal of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons from North Korea,” the lawmakers wrote.

A Democrat-supported agreement must feature “full, complete, and verifiable denuclearization” as its end goal. That includes the permanent dismantlement of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, such as test sites and research and development facilities.

Sanctions relief must be contingent on the dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, they added. “Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal.”

The lawmakers said an agreement must also involve the suspension of ballistic missile testing, “including any space launch,” and the elimination of that program.

(06-05-2018 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  STILL ignorant of the actual Iran deal I see.

Not to mention, it's apples and oranges. Iran does not have nuclear weapons. North Korea does.

P.S.: It wasn't really OUR cash anyway.

(06-05-2018 08:37 AM)TechRocks Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  STILL ignorant of the actual Iran deal I see.

Not to mention, it's apples and oranges. Iran does not have nuclear weapons. North Korea does.

P.S.: It wasn't really OUR cash anyway.

Not apples and oranges at all. It was dims and the Clinton administration who negotiated a similar stinking treaty with N. Korea that allowed them to develop nuclear weapons while we eased sanctions on the country. See the pattern?

(06-05-2018 08:52 AM)Marc Mensa Wrote:  We didn't send them truckloads of our cash... we unfroze their assets.

(06-05-2018 08:37 AM)TechRocks Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  STILL ignorant of the actual Iran deal I see.

Not to mention, it's apples and oranges. Iran does not have nuclear weapons. North Korea does.

P.S.: It wasn't really OUR cash anyway.

Not apples and oranges at all. It was dims and the Clinton administration who negotiated a similar stinking treaty with N. Korea that allowed them to develop nuclear weapons while we eased sanctions on the country. See the pattern?

Quote:The U.S. has been in a similar spot before: In 1994, the Clinton administration signed the U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework, under which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear program. The Bush administration withdrew from the deal after accusing North Korea of cheating on its obligations. After that, North Korea restarted a nuclear-weapons program that, according to various estimates, has now yielded between 20 and 60 bombs; the country is close to fitting a miniaturized nuclear warhead onto an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the contiguous United States.

Quote:On the face of it, the two agreements have much in common. Each focused exclusively on the nuclear activities of a country whose other problematic behavior was not part of the deal. They froze the programs in exchange for economic and other incentives. And, says William Perry, the Clinton-era defense secretary who is now an advocate for nuclear disarmament and who helped negotiate the Agreed Framework, both agreements were “designed to head off a future nuclear catastrophe.”

“They both were agreements designed to head off [North Korea and Iran] … from building a nuclear weapon, which we believed would cause enormous difficulties for the United States,” Perry told me, adding: “If we keep them from doing that, this is a way of heading off that difficulty.”

But there are significant differences as well. For one, the Agreed Framework was a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and North Korea. The JCPOA is a multilateral agreement that also involves China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the European Union. (The other signatories, including Iran, say they will remain in the deal and are urging the U.S. to stay.) Second, as Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, and Newell Highsmith, a former State Department official, wrote in April for the Brookings Institution, Iran is not North Korea. It doesn’t have nuclear weapons. At the time the Agreed Framework was concluded, North Korea was believed to possess enough plutonium for at least one bomb. Tehran, Nephew and Highsmith argued, has greater incentive to cooperate with the JCPOA because it “is not the isolated ... country that North Korea is. Iran’s economy needs markets for oil exports, and depends on imports of commercial and industrial goods.”

The JCPOA is also a much more comprehensive deal than the Agreed Framework, with more intense monitoring mechanisms to ensure compliance, and clear consequences, in the form of renewed sanctions, for cheating. Additionally, under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to indefinite compliance with the additional protocol of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a move that opens up even its military facilities for international inspection. The Agreed Framework did not have such safeguards in place, which can partly explain why its critics call it a failure (though nonproliferation experts such as Jeffrey Lewis make a strong argument for why that’s not the case).

(06-05-2018 08:50 AM)usmbacker Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:37 AM)TechRocks Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  STILL ignorant of the actual Iran deal I see.

Not to mention, it's apples and oranges. Iran does not have nuclear weapons. North Korea does.

P.S.: It wasn't really OUR cash anyway.

Not apples and oranges at all. It was dims and the Clinton administration who negotiated a similar stinking treaty with N. Korea that allowed them to develop nuclear weapons while we eased sanctions on the country. See the pattern?

Might as well go debate a tree in your yard. Of course, the tree would be smarter.

(06-05-2018 09:13 AM)usmbacker Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 09:04 AM)UofMstateU Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:52 AM)Marc Mensa Wrote:  We didn't send them truckloads of our cash... we unfroze their assets.

awwwww, it sounds like you really believe that too.

Of course Marc Menstrual will claim the LA Times is a right wing media site.

Quote:The Obama administration is acknowledging its transfer of $1.7 billion to Iran earlier this year was made entirely in cash, using non-U.S. currency, as Republican critics of the transaction continued to denounce the payments.

Treasury Department spokeswoman Dawn Selak said in a statement late Tuesday that the cash payments were necessary because of the "effectiveness of U.S. and international sanctions," which isolated Iran from the international finance system.

The $1.7 billion was the settlement of a decades-old arbitration claim between the U.S. and Iran. An initial $400 million of euros, Swiss francs and other foreign currency was delivered on pallets Jan. 17, the same day Tehran agreed to release four American prisoners.

The Obama administration had claimed the events were separate, but recently acknowledged the cash was used as leverage until the Americans were allowed to leave Iran. The remaining $1.3 billion represented estimated interest on the Iranian cash the U.S. had held since the 1970s. The administration had previously declined to say if the interest was delivered to Iran in physical cash, as with the principal, or via a more regular banking mechanism.

$1.7-billion payment to Iran was all in cash due to effectiveness of sanctions, White House says

(06-05-2018 09:35 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:37 AM)TechRocks Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  STILL ignorant of the actual Iran deal I see.

Not to mention, it's apples and oranges. Iran does not have nuclear weapons. North Korea does.

P.S.: It wasn't really OUR cash anyway.

Not apples and oranges at all. It was dims and the Clinton administration who negotiated a similar stinking treaty with N. Korea that allowed them to develop nuclear weapons while we eased sanctions on the country. See the pattern?

Utterly ridiculous.

Quote:The U.S. has been in a similar spot before: In 1994, the Clinton administration signed the U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework, under which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear program. The Bush administration withdrew from the deal after accusing North Korea of cheating on its obligations. After that, North Korea restarted a nuclear-weapons program that, according to various estimates, has now yielded between 20 and 60 bombs; the country is close to fitting a miniaturized nuclear warhead onto an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the contiguous United States.

Two Nuclear Deals, Two Countries, Three Decades Apart

Do YOU see a pattern?

Further:

Quote:On the face of it, the two agreements have much in common. Each focused exclusively on the nuclear activities of a country whose other problematic behavior was not part of the deal. They froze the programs in exchange for economic and other incentives. And, says William Perry, the Clinton-era defense secretary who is now an advocate for nuclear disarmament and who helped negotiate the Agreed Framework, both agreements were “designed to head off a future nuclear catastrophe.”

“They both were agreements designed to head off [North Korea and Iran] … from building a nuclear weapon, which we believed would cause enormous difficulties for the United States,” Perry told me, adding: “If we keep them from doing that, this is a way of heading off that difficulty.”

But there are significant differences as well. For one, the Agreed Framework was a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and North Korea. The JCPOA is a multilateral agreement that also involves China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the European Union. (The other signatories, including Iran, say they will remain in the deal and are urging the U.S. to stay.) Second, as Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, and Newell Highsmith, a former State Department official, wrote in April for the Brookings Institution, Iran is not North Korea. It doesn’t have nuclear weapons. At the time the Agreed Framework was concluded, North Korea was believed to possess enough plutonium for at least one bomb. Tehran, Nephew and Highsmith argued, has greater incentive to cooperate with the JCPOA because it “is not the isolated ... country that North Korea is. Iran’s economy needs markets for oil exports, and depends on imports of commercial and industrial goods.”

The JCPOA is also a much more comprehensive deal than the Agreed Framework, with more intense monitoring mechanisms to ensure compliance, and clear consequences, in the form of renewed sanctions, for cheating. Additionally, under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to indefinite compliance with the additional protocol of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a move that opens up even its military facilities for international inspection. The Agreed Framework did not have such safeguards in place, which can partly explain why its critics call it a failure (though nonproliferation experts such as Jeffrey Lewis make a strong argument for why that’s not the case).

Quote:The Bush administration withdrew from the deal after accusing North Korea of cheating on its obligations. After that, North Korea restarted a nuclear-weapons program that, blah blah blah blah blah blah

Quote:History now shows that the chief policy goals served by the Agreed Framework were those of Pyongyang, which racked up a highly successful exercise in nuclear extortion, and carried on, first secretly, then overtly, with its nuclear weapons program. As South Korea’s president had predicted, the Agreed Framework helped fortify Pyongyang’s totalitarian regime, rather than transforming it.

Some of the negotiators involved in that 1994 deal have since argued that while the North Korean agreement eventually collapsed, it did at least delay Pyongyang’s progress toward nuclear weapons. What they tend to omit from that select slice of history is that the Agreed Framework helped rescue a North Korean regime which in 1994 was on the ropes. Just three years earlier, North Korea’s chief patron of decades past, the Soviet Union, had collapsed. The longtime Soviet subsidies to Pyongyang had vanished. China did not yet have the wealth to easily step in. And just three months before the nuclear deal was struck, North Korea’s founding tyrant, Kim Il Sung, died. His son and heir, Kim Jong Il, faced the challenge of consolidating power during a period of famine at home and American superpower ascendancy abroad.

By the late 1990s, just a few years into the deal, North Korea had become the largest recipient of U.S. aid in East Asia. That did not curb Kim Jong Il’s hostile ways. The Pyongyang regime put the interests of its military and its weapons programs before the needs of its starving population. In 1998, North Korea launched a long-range missile over Japan, a test for which it was hard to discern any purpose other than developing a vehicle to carry nuclear weapons. By that time, as a number of former Clinton administration officials have since confirmed, the U.S. was seeing signs that North Korea was cheating on the nuclear deal by pursuing a secret program for uranium enrichment.

North Korea continued raking in U.S. largesse until late 2002, when the Bush administration finally confronted Pyongyang over its nuclear cheating. North Korea then walked away from the 1994 deal (on which it had by then been cheating for years), withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (on which it had also been cheating) and began reprocessing plutonium from the spent fuel rods which despite the 1994 deal had never been removed from its Yongbyon nuclear complex.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/claudiarosett/2015/08/31/nuclear-fiascoes-from-diplomatic-failure-with-north-korea-to-debacle-with-iran/2/#bc1466a6bd49

Quote:In 1994, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Robert Gallucci served as the chief U.S. negotiator of the Agreed Framework between President Bill Clinton's administration and Kim Jong Un's father and predecessor, Kim Jong Il.

Under the terms, Pyongyang committed to freezing its illicit plutonium weapons program in exchange for light-water nuclear reactors, heavy fuel and normalized relations with the United States.

"With respect to plutonium, they stuck to the deal," Gallucci, who is now chairman at the U.S.-Korea Institute and a professor at Georgetown University, told CNBC. "The hitch came when we discovered that they were secretly engaged in receiving transfers from Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan in uranium enrichment, the other technology used to produce the raw materials for nuclear weapons."

Gallucci said the Clinton administration continued to talk with the North Koreans and didn't inform them that they were aware of the cheating.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/09/diplomat-who-made-deal-with-north-korea-warns-trump-they-will-cheat.html

(06-05-2018 08:37 AM)TechRocks Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  STILL ignorant of the actual Iran deal I see.

Not to mention, it's apples and oranges. Iran does not have nuclear weapons. North Korea does.

P.S.: It wasn't really OUR cash anyway.

Not apples and oranges at all. It was dims and the Clinton administration who negotiated a similar stinking treaty with N. Korea that allowed them to develop nuclear weapons while we eased sanctions on the country. See the pattern?

(06-05-2018 09:41 AM)Marc Mensa Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 09:13 AM)usmbacker Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 09:04 AM)UofMstateU Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:52 AM)Marc Mensa Wrote:  We didn't send them truckloads of our cash... we unfroze their assets.

awwwww, it sounds like you really believe that too.

Of course Marc Menstrual will claim the LA Times is a right wing media site.

Quote:The Obama administration is acknowledging its transfer of $1.7 billion to Iran earlier this year was made entirely in cash, using non-U.S. currency, as Republican critics of the transaction continued to denounce the payments.

Treasury Department spokeswoman Dawn Selak said in a statement late Tuesday that the cash payments were necessary because of the "effectiveness of U.S. and international sanctions," which isolated Iran from the international finance system.

The $1.7 billion was the settlement of a decades-old arbitration claim between the U.S. and Iran. An initial $400 million of euros, Swiss francs and other foreign currency was delivered on pallets Jan. 17, the same day Tehran agreed to release four American prisoners.

The Obama administration had claimed the events were separate, but recently acknowledged the cash was used as leverage until the Americans were allowed to leave Iran. The remaining $1.3 billion represented estimated interest on the Iranian cash the U.S. had held since the 1970s. The administration had previously declined to say if the interest was delivered to Iran in physical cash, as with the principal, or via a more regular banking mechanism.

$1.7-billion payment to Iran was all in cash due to effectiveness of sanctions, White House says

The Iranians paid for arms they never received and wanted their money back.

(06-05-2018 10:43 AM)TechRocks Wrote:  

Quote:In 1994, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Robert Gallucci served as the chief U.S. negotiator of the Agreed Framework between President Bill Clinton's administration and Kim Jong Un's father and predecessor, Kim Jong Il.

Under the terms, Pyongyang committed to freezing its illicit plutonium weapons program in exchange for light-water nuclear reactors, heavy fuel and normalized relations with the United States.

"With respect to plutonium, they stuck to the deal," Gallucci, who is now chairman at the U.S.-Korea Institute and a professor at Georgetown University, told CNBC. "The hitch came when we discovered that they were secretly engaged in receiving transfers from Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan in uranium enrichment, the other technology used to produce the raw materials for nuclear weapons."

Gallucci said the Clinton administration continued to talk with the North Koreans and didn't inform them that they were aware of the cheating.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/09/diplomat-who-made-deal-with-north-korea-warns-trump-they-will-cheat.html

So who to believe? Redwingtom and an opinion piece from the Atlantic, or the chief negotiator of the Agreed Framework who admits that the N. Koreans were cheating? Decisions decisions.

(06-05-2018 09:41 AM)Marc Mensa Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 09:13 AM)usmbacker Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 09:04 AM)UofMstateU Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:52 AM)Marc Mensa Wrote:  We didn't send them truckloads of our cash... we unfroze their assets.

awwwww, it sounds like you really believe that too.

Of course Marc Menstrual will claim the LA Times is a right wing media site.

Quote:The Obama administration is acknowledging its transfer of $1.7 billion to Iran earlier this year was made entirely in cash, using non-U.S. currency, as Republican critics of the transaction continued to denounce the payments.
Treasury Department spokeswoman Dawn Selak said in a statement late Tuesday that the cash payments were necessary because of the "effectiveness of U.S. and international sanctions," which isolated Iran from the international finance system.
The $1.7 billion was the settlement of a decades-old arbitration claim between the U.S. and Iran. An initial $400 million of euros, Swiss francs and other foreign currency was delivered on pallets Jan. 17, the same day Tehran agreed to release four American prisoners.
The Obama administration had claimed the events were separate, but recently acknowledged the cash was used as leverage until the Americans were allowed to leave Iran. The remaining $1.3 billion represented estimated interest on the Iranian cash the U.S. had held since the 1970s. The administration had previously declined to say if the interest was delivered to Iran in physical cash, as with the principal, or via a more regular banking mechanism.

$1.7-billion payment to Iran was all in cash due to effectiveness of sanctions, White House says

The Iranians paid for arms they never received and wanted their money back.

(06-05-2018 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  STILL ignorant of the actual Iran deal I see.

Not to mention, it's apples and oranges. Iran does not have nuclear weapons. North Korea does.

P.S.: It wasn't really OUR cash anyway.

(06-05-2018 10:23 AM)TechRocks Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 09:35 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:37 AM)TechRocks Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  STILL ignorant of the actual Iran deal I see.

Not to mention, it's apples and oranges. Iran does not have nuclear weapons. North Korea does.

P.S.: It wasn't really OUR cash anyway.

Not apples and oranges at all. It was dims and the Clinton administration who negotiated a similar stinking treaty with N. Korea that allowed them to develop nuclear weapons while we eased sanctions on the country. See the pattern?

Utterly ridiculous.

Quote:The U.S. has been in a similar spot before: In 1994, the Clinton administration signed the U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework, under which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear program. The Bush administration withdrew from the deal after accusing North Korea of cheating on its obligations. After that, North Korea restarted a nuclear-weapons program that, according to various estimates, has now yielded between 20 and 60 bombs; the country is close to fitting a miniaturized nuclear warhead onto an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the contiguous United States.

Two Nuclear Deals, Two Countries, Three Decades Apart

Do YOU see a pattern?

Further:

Quote:On the face of it, the two agreements have much in common. Each focused exclusively on the nuclear activities of a country whose other problematic behavior was not part of the deal. They froze the programs in exchange for economic and other incentives. And, says William Perry, the Clinton-era defense secretary who is now an advocate for nuclear disarmament and who helped negotiate the Agreed Framework, both agreements were “designed to head off a future nuclear catastrophe.”

“They both were agreements designed to head off [North Korea and Iran] … from building a nuclear weapon, which we believed would cause enormous difficulties for the United States,” Perry told me, adding: “If we keep them from doing that, this is a way of heading off that difficulty.”

But there are significant differences as well. For one, the Agreed Framework was a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and North Korea. The JCPOA is a multilateral agreement that also involves China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the European Union. (The other signatories, including Iran, say they will remain in the deal and are urging the U.S. to stay.) Second, as Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, and Newell Highsmith, a former State Department official, wrote in April for the Brookings Institution, Iran is not North Korea. It doesn’t have nuclear weapons. At the time the Agreed Framework was concluded, North Korea was believed to possess enough plutonium for at least one bomb. Tehran, Nephew and Highsmith argued, has greater incentive to cooperate with the JCPOA because it “is not the isolated ... country that North Korea is. Iran’s economy needs markets for oil exports, and depends on imports of commercial and industrial goods.”

The JCPOA is also a much more comprehensive deal than the Agreed Framework, with more intense monitoring mechanisms to ensure compliance, and clear consequences, in the form of renewed sanctions, for cheating. Additionally, under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to indefinite compliance with the additional protocol of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a move that opens up even its military facilities for international inspection. The Agreed Framework did not have such safeguards in place, which can partly explain why its critics call it a failure (though nonproliferation experts such as Jeffrey Lewis make a strong argument for why that’s not the case).

Revisionist history. The deal was flawed, the N. Koreans were cheating and EVERYONE knew it. Same shyte, different country with Iran.