White House ‘Confident’ in Watchdog’s Controversial Iran Inspection Plan
Image by Getty Images
A White House spokesman said the administration was “confident” in an agreement between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran that would reportedly let Iran’s hand-picked inspectors examine a suspected weapons site.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday on an agreement signed between the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran that would let experts and equipment chosen by Iran inspect the site on behalf of the IAEA. Iran has been suspected of nuclear weapons research at the site, called Parchin. The Iranian inspectors would then report their findings to the IAEA.
On Wednesday, White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said the Obama administration supported the arrangement.
The administration is “confident in the agency’s technical plans for investigating the possible military dimensions of Iran’s former program,” Price said, according to AP. “The IAEA has separately developed the most robust inspection regime ever peacefully negotiated.”
The report’s reveation has met harsh criticism from Israeli and American opponents of the recently signed agreement over Iran’s nuclear program. On Wednesday, Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, the government’s point man on Iran, released a bitingly sarcastic response to the report.
“”One must welcome this global innovation and outside-the-box thinking,” he said. “One can only wonder if the Iranian inspectors will also have to wait 24 days before being able to visit the site and look for incriminating evidence?”
Steinitz was referring to a provision in the original agreement that allows for a 24-day waiting period before international inspections of undeclared sites with suspected nuclear activity.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
