Diplomacy

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Iranian Defense Minister Rejects Inspections of Military Sites, Defying U.S. on Nuke Deal

by TheTower.org Staff |

Iran’s Defense Minister, Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, ruled out any international inspection of Iran’s military sites, the semi-official Fars News Agency reported yesterday.

“No such agreement has been made; principally speaking, visit to military centers is among our redlines and no such visit will be accepted,” Gen. Dehqan stressed on Wednesday, rejecting “the report by foreign media outlets, such as the Guardian” as “untruthful allegations”.

The Iranian defense minister reiterated that the Supreme Leader’s guidelines, government’s strategy and the negotiating team’s resolve have placed the Iranian diplomacy on a path that it would never allow the opposite parties to the talks impose their will on the Iranian nation.

The agency also reported that the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Gen. Ali Jafari, stated that Iran has accepted no limitations on its enrichment activities and expected all sanctions imposed on Iran for its violations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to be lifted.

“In addition to the right of possessing the nuclear enrichment cycle and Research and Development (R&D), termination of all the relevant sanctions which are the centerpiece of the Iranian nation’s demands are our redline,” Jafari said, addressing the IRGC commanders in Tehran on Tuesday.

Dehghan’s comments follow similarly defiant statements from Iran’s foreign minister and chief nuclear negotiator, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who insisted Tuesday that no cameras will be allowed in Iran’s nuclear facilities and that Iran would begin using advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium as soon as the nuclear deal goes into effect. The parameters of the deal published by the U.S. State Department says that “the most up-to-date, modern monitoring technologies” will be used to monitor Iran’s nuclear sites, and that Iran will not use advanced centrifuges to enrich for ten years.

Dehghan has been implicated in planning the bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983, which killed 305 people, 220 of them American Marines.

[Photo: AussieNews1 / YouTube ]

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