U.S. negotiators have capitulated to Iranian demands to continue nuclear enrichment efforts, a senior Iranian official has said.
“Today, America has accepted that Iran has the right to enrichment, and a simple analysis of this fact is that America has surrendered to the will of the Islamic Republic,” said Alaeddin Boroujerdi, chairman of the foreign policy and national security committee of the Iranian parliament.
“The Islamic regime will never abide by the politics of America or any other country and has paid the price (through sanctions) to stick with its own policies,” he said Sunday.
Boujerdi was quoted by the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA), a Farsi-language media outlet controlled by the Iranian government. His comments
were reported in a Daily Caller column column written by Reza Kahlili, a pseudonym for a former CIA operative who infiltrated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
Iran has been negotiating over its nuclear program with the United States and other international powers for more than a decade. During this period, it has increased the number of centrifuges enriching uranium from 150 to more than 19,000 today, according to Khalili.
It currently possesses more than 10 tons of low-enriched uranium — enough for several bombs — and has over a thousand ballistic missiles, he added. It is also working with North Korea in building a nuclear bomb and developing intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Since reaching a nuclear accord in November in Geneva with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, senior Iranian government officials have repeatedly said that the West has acquiesced to the reality that enrichment will continue and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program cannot be stopped.
In November,
Kahlili reported that Fars News Agency, the Revolutionary Guard media outlet, quoted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, thanking President Hassan Rouhani and the Iranian negotiating team for their success in Geneva.
The Iranian negotiators “were able to legitimize the Iranian nation’s nuclear program on the international stage and take the initial step in a way that the nuclear rights and the enrichment rights of the Iranian nation are acknowledged by world powers where before they had tried to deny them,” Khamenei said.
Speaking at a ceremony for “martyred” Iranian nuclear scientists shortly after the Geneva accord was reached, Rouhani vowed that Tehran’s nuclear progress could not be stopped.
“No matter whether the world wants it or not, this path will, God willingly, continue to the peak that has been considered by the martyred nuclear scientists owing to the blood of the martyrs and backing of the Iranian nation,”
Fars News Agency quoted him as stating.
In January, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif
told CNN that U.S. officials’ statements that Iran had agreed to dismantle its nuclear program were false, and that the White House had been exaggerating how much Iran gave up in the Geneva deal.
Iranian officials rejected suggestions that the International Atomic Energy Agency be permitted to open an office in Iran.
Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Khamenei, scoffed at comments by Secretary of State John Kerry that Washington retained a military option if Iran cheated.
“Obviously, the Americans have no such power. If they did, they would not have been expelled from Iraq and Afghanistan in such a totally weakened state,” Velayati said, according to Iranian media reports
cited in the Jerusalem Post.
At the start of a new round of nuclear talks in Geneva on Tuesday, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said his government would not scrap any of its nuclear facilities.
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