European powers drop bid to push resolution against Iran

The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

VIENNA: Facing objections by Russia, China and developing nations, European powers abandoned on Tuesday an attempt to introduce a resolution on Iran's nuclear defiance at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Western diplomats said.

Opponents felt a resolution against Iran would be superfluous a day after the UN Security Council toughened sanctions on Iran and could provoke a Tehran to reduce, not increase, cooperation with UN inspectors, they said.

"The board doesn't need to compete with the Security Council," said an Asian diplomat on the 35-nation governing board of the IAEA. Almost half the governors are from developing nations.

Britain, France and Germany scrapped the resolution after concluding that their goals had been achieved by the Security Council and there was no point risking a schism among UN nuclear policy makers that Iran might exploit, Western diplomats added.

"Iran thought it could manipulate the IAEA to avoid a Security Council resolution while moving forward to develop its uranium enrichment capability," Gregory Schulte, U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, told reporters.

"As the resolution adopted yesterday in New York shows, Iran clearly failed. In fact what the resolution does from a Vienna perspective is to underscore that Iran's file remains open and to fully support the IAEA in its continuing investigation of outstanding issues, particularly with respect to weaponization."

In Tehran, the government rejected the resolution imposing new sanctions as "worthless" and vowed to move ahead with its uranium enrichment program.

"This resolution is contrary to the spirit and articles of the International Atomic Energy Agency," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Muhammad Ali Hosseini, according to the official press agency IRNA.

"It has been issued based on political motivations and a biased approach. It is worthless and unacceptable."

He said the sanctions would "have no impact on the resolve and determination of the Iranian nation and government to fulfill its legitimate rights in continuing its peaceful nuclear activities within the framework of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."

Iran has pursued a uranium-enrichment program it says is meant only to generate electricity. But its history of nuclear secrecy and continued curbs on IAEA inspections stoke fears it could turn enrichment technology to yielding nuclear arms.

In imposing more far-reaching sanctions by a 14-to-0 vote, the Security Council cited Iran's defiance of demands to suspend enrichment, failure to fully explain past nuclear activity and continued restrictions on IAEA inspections.

The third round of sanctions approved Monday orders a freeze on assets of more Iranian officials and companies with links to the country's nuclear and missile program, and for the first time bans trade with Iran in some goods with both civilian and military uses.

Last week the IAEA's chief of nonproliferation safeguards presented to board diplomats detailed intelligence suggesting Iran had tried to "weaponize" nuclear materials.

He revealed diagrams, slides and video, much of them from a laptop removed from Iran by a defector, indicating administrative links between projects to process uranium, test high explosives and modify a missile cone for a nuclear payload.

The IAEA director, Mohamed ElBaradei, opening the weeklong governors session Monday, pressed Iran to cooperate with the agency inquiry into the allegations, signaling the IAEA would not take Tehran's flat denials for a final answer.

Iran's ambassador to the IAEA repeated on Tuesday that Tehran would have nothing more to do with the inquiry and would never suspend its nuclear program, but would keep its declared enrichment sites under IAEA monitoring despite the new sanctions.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh noted that ElBaradei had certified Iran had resolved six outstanding questions about its past nuclear activity and said arms studies did not count because they were "fabrications" of Iran's chief foe, the United States.

"The alleged studies were thoroughly reviewed in two rounds of talks, and we gave our final assessment," he told reporters invited to a slide presentation held to counter the IAEA one last week.

"The issue is over."

He offered no substance in the presentation, entitled "A Short Glance at Iran's Peaceful Nuclear Activities," to refute the intelligence material.

U.S. pulls the plug on Europeans who want to visit Cuba

By Adam Liptak
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Steve Marshall is a British travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working because of the U.S. government.

The sites, in English, French and Spanish, had been online since 1998. Some, like Cuba-Hemingway.com, were literary. Others discussed Cuban history and culture, like Cuba-HavanaCity.com. Still others - CiaoCuba.com and BonjourCuba.com - were purely commercial sites aimed at Italian and French tourists.

"I came to work in the morning, and we had no reservations at all," Marshall said on the phone from the Canary Islands. "We thought it was a technical problem."

It turned out, though, that Marshall's Web sites had been put on a U.S. Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his domain name registrar, eNom, which is based in the United States, had disabled them. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.

Either way, there is no dispute that eNom shut down Marshall's sites without notifying him and has refused to release the domain names to him. In effect, Marshall said, eNom has taken his property and interfered with his business. He has slowly rebuilt his Web business over the past several months, and now many of the same sites operate with the suffix .net rather than .com, through a European registrar. His servers, he said, have been in the Bahamas all along.

Marshall said he did not understand "how Web sites owned by a British national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected by U.S. law." Worse, he said, "these days not even a judge is required for the U.S. government to censor online materials."

A Treasury spokesman, John Rankin, referred a caller to a press release issued in December 2004, almost three years before eNom acted. It said Marshall's company had helped Americans evade restrictions on travel to Cuba and was "a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its people." It added that U.S. companies must not only stop doing business with the company but also freeze its assets, meaning that eNom did exactly what it was required to do under U.S. law.

Marshall said he was uninterested in tourists who are U.S. citizens. "They can't go anyway," he said.

Peter Fitzgerald, a law professor at Stetson University in Florida who has studied the blacklist, said its operation was quite mysterious. "There really is no explanation or standard," he said, "for why someone gets on the list."

Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading authority on Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name registrars are based in the United States gives the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, control "over a great deal of speech - none of which may be actually hosted in the U.S., about the U.S. or conflicting with any U.S. rights."

"OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear," Crawford said.

The law under which the Treasury Department is acting has an exemption that seeks to protect "information or informational materials." Marshall's Web sites, though ultimately commercial, would seem to qualify, and it is not clear why they appear on the blacklist.

Unlike Americans, who face significant restrictions on travel to Cuba, Europeans are free to go there, and many do. Charles Sims, a lawyer with the firm Proskauer Rose in New York, said the Treasury Department might have gone too far in Marshall's case.

"The U.S can certainly criminalize the expenditure of money by U.S. citizens in Cuba," Sims said, "but it doesn't properly have any jurisdiction over foreign sites that are not targeted at the U.S. and which are lawful under foreign law."

Rankin, the Treasury spokesman, said Marshall was free to ask for a review of his case. "If they want to be taken off the list," Rankin said, "they should contact us to make their case."

That is a problematic system, Fitzgerald said. "The way to get off the list," he said, "is to go back to the same bureaucrat who put you on."

Last March, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights issued a disturbing report on the blacklist. Its subtitle: "How a Treasury Department Terrorist Watch List Ensnares Everyday Consumers."

The report, by Shirin Sinnar, said there were 6,400 names on the list and that, like no-fly lists at airports, it gave rise to endless and serious problems of mistaken identity.

"Financial institutions, credit bureaus, charities, car dealerships, health insurers, landlords and employers," the report said, "are now checking names against the list before they open an account, close a sale, rent an apartment or offer a job."

But Marshall's case does not appear to be one of mistaken identity. The government quite specifically intended to interfere with his business.

That, Crawford said, is a scandal. "The way we communicate these days is through domain names, and the Treasury Department should not be interfering with domain names just as it does not interfere with telecommunications lines," he said.

Security Council Adds Sanctions Against Iran

By WARREN HOGE and ELAINE SCIOLINO

UNITED NATIONS — The Security Council on Monday adopted its third resolution imposing sanctions on Iran for its refusal to cease enriching uranium, an activity that Western nations say is designed to build nuclear weapons.

The previous two measures gained unanimous support of the 15-member panel, but in Monday’s balloting, Indonesia abstained, saying it “remained to be convinced of the efficacy of adopting additional sanctions at this juncture.” Fourteen countries voted in favor.

The resolution authorizes inspections of cargo to and from Iran that is suspected of carrying prohibited equipment, tightens the monitoring of Iranian financial institutions and extends travel bans and asset freezes against persons and companies involved in the nuclear program.

It adds 13 names to the existing list of 5 individuals and 12 companies subject to travel and asset restrictions. The new names include people with direct responsibility for building fast-spinning centrifuges that enrich uranium ore and a brigadier general engaged in “efforts to get round the sanctions” in the two earlier resolutions.

The new measure also bans all trade and supply of so-called dual-use items, materials and technologies that can be adapted for military as well as civilian ends.

Earlier Monday in Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear monitor, said that newly disclosed intelligence reports that Iran had secretly researched how to make nuclear weapons were of “serious concern” and would be pursued by his office.

“Iran continues to maintain that these alleged weaponization studies related to conventional weapons only are fabricated,” Dr. ElBaradei said in a speech to the agency’s 35-country policy-making body. “However a full-fledged examination of this issue has yet to take place.”

The studies were described last Monday, in a briefing for the agency’s 35-country governing body by Olli Heinonen, the agency’s senior inspector.

They included sketches and a video that appeared to have come from Iran’s own military laboratories, and Mr. Heinonen said they showed work “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon.”

In a thinly veiled criticism of Iran, Dr. ElBaradei said, “I urge Iran to be as active and cooperative as possible in working with the agency to clarify this matter of serious concern.”

Iran says that the agency’s findings support its claim that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes, and it has rejected all suggestions that it was studying how to make nuclear weapons.

Iran’s ambassador to the agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, called the intelligence data “forged and fabricated” and denounced the new Council resolution Monday as “irresponsible” and “an arrow aiming at the heart of” the atomic energy agency.

Iran argues that its program is devoted solely to producing fuel for nuclear reactors that generate electricity. The United States and its European allies on the council contend the real purpose is to make Iran an atomic power, and they say they are determined to prevent that from happening.

The resolution voted Monday was originally scheduled for a decision on Friday, but its two sponsors, Britain and France, delayed consideration in the hope of getting as close to unanimity as possible. In addition to Indonesia, three other Council countries - Libya, South Africa and Vietnam - had expressed reservations.

To address them, the final version included last minute language changes making it clear that cargo inspections must conform to local and international laws and stressing the central role of the International Atomic Energy Agency and evidence in the latest report from Dr. ElBaradei Feb. 22 that Iran was cooperating with the agency.

The resolution extends the reach of punishments in the two earlier measures, adopted in December, 2006 and March, 2007, but it does not make them any tougher.

The text was drawn up after months of talks among the Council’s five permanent members - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — and Germany, which is not a Council member.

It repeats a pledge from the six countries to establish full relations and economic cooperation with Iran should it agree to suspend enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.

In Vienna, Britain, France and Germany said they were preparing a draft resolution critical of Iran that could be adopted by the agency’s policy-making body later this week. The United States, Canada, Australia and Japan already have indicated privately they would support such a move.

It would be the first time the board had passed such a resolution on Iran since it sent the Iran to the Security Council for review two years ago.

The United States, which in the past has criticized Dr. ElBaradei for not being tough enough on Iran, expressed support for this approach. “Despite some progress in addressing past issues, troubling questions remain about Iranian activities that strongly suggest a clandestine weapons-related program,” Gregory L. Schulte, the American envoy to the agency, told reporters in Vienna.

He added, “Between the indications of weapons work, which would constitute a violation of Iran’s treaty obligations and Iran’s blatant violations of Security Council resolutions, there is strong reason for Iran’s file to remain open both in New York and in Vienna.”

Warren Hoge reported from the United Nations, and Elaine Sciolino from Paris.

New Iran Nuclear Sanctions Delayed

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:42 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- In a setback for the United States, Iran won a two-month reprieve from new U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program on Friday. The Bush administration and its European allies ceded to Russian and Chinese demands to give Tehran more time to address international concerns.

An agreement reached in talks here between six key nations and supported by the European Union gives Iran until November to make progress in answering questions about the program that the United States and others alleged is a cover for nuclear weapons development.

The decision marks another blow for Washington in its diplomatic struggle to toughen existing U.N. sanctions on Iran, whose leader this week declared to the U.N. General Assembly that the nuclear issue was ''closed'' and vowed to defy attempts to add new penalties.

The Bush administration had hoped to capitalize on growing international frustration with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hardline stance in refusing to halt uranium enrichment and reprocessing that he insists are purely for peaceful civilian energy use.

Despite increasing support for new sanctions in Europe -- particularly from Britain, France and Germany -- Russia and China refused to yield, insisting on giving Tehran more time to accept an offer for negotiations in exchange for suspending its nuclear activities.

After talks hosted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, backed by the E.U.'s top diplomat, agreed to delay a new sanctions resolution.

A joint statement from the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany said they would finalize the new resolution and bring it to a vote unless reports in November from the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog and the E.U. foreign policy chief ''show a positive outcome of their efforts.''

At the same time, Rice said, they would continue work on a new sanctions resolution so if there were no progress, the resolution would be ready to be introduced in the Security Council for a vote.

''We'll be working to finalize the text and we will be watching to see what progress takes place ... in the November timeframe so that we can move to Security Council sanctions should there not be progress,'' Rice told reporters after the meeting in a New York hotel.

She also noted that the United States and the European members of the so-called ''P5+1'' group would pursue bilateral financial sanctions against Iran and Iranian government entities. For its part, the United States is considering imposing such measures against elements of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.

However, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner signaled Europe wasn't ready to move on multilateral sanctions quickly. The French, British and Germans will meet with the full EU on Oct. 15 to discuss sanctions, but will wait until the Security Council decides before imposing their own measures, he said.

Kouchner said 14 different types of sanctions were being considered, and he wouldn't rule out Iran's oil industry, the Revolutionary Guards, banks and travel visas as possible targets.

''Nobody refused to follow up, to have a discussion on these 14 items,'' Kouchner told reporters after the meeting, but he added that some leaders were ''completely reluctant'' to accept some of them.

Rice denied that the agreement to put off U.N. sanctions was tantamount to a U.S. cave-in to Russia and China although her top negotiator in the matter, the State Department's No. 3 diplomat Nicholas Burns, allowed that ''the alchemy of this group is such that anything is going to be a compromise.''

Burns, who will meet at least twice with his counterparts in the P5+1 before November to produce a new draft sanctions resolution, maintained that the statement sent ''a very tough and strict message to Iran.''

He said the U.S. saw the statement as a commitment by all signatories to back a third sanctions resolution if there is no positive Iranian response. But U.N. diplomats cautioned that what constitutes a positive response may differ, especially between the U.S. and Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who exchanged sharp words with Rice on the sanctions matter earlier this week, appeared to confirm that thinking by saying Friday's agreement did not automatically mean new sanctions in November.

''The statement is very unambiguous,'' Lavrov told reporters. ''What we discussed today is to concentrate on doing everything to help negotiations to succeed.''

In the statement, the ministers and E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana welcomed a July agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency to answer questions about 20 years of nuclear activity -- most of it secret until just over four years ago.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei is expected to present a report to the agency's board of directors in late November on the status of his investigation, which the United States has downplayed because it only relates to past, and not current or future, actions.

Two U.N. resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran have failed to persuade it to suspend uranium enrichment and in a Tuesday address to the U.N. General Assembly, Ahmadinejad said the nuclear issue is ''closed'' and vowed to defy any U.N. Security Council move for more sanctions.

No date was set for submitting the new sanctions resolution to a vote in the Security Council because the six nations want to give Solana and ElBaradei flexibility in producing their reports, Burns said.

^------

Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer and Lily Hindy contributed to this report.

European Company Close to Reaching Libyan Arms Deal

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

PARIS, Aug. 3 — European Aeronautic Defense and Space, Europe’s largest aerospace company, confirmed Friday that it was close to signing two weapons contracts with the government of Libya. It would be the first arms deal with the North African country since the European Union lifted military sanctions on it nearly three years ago.

The progress on contracts with the company, which is under French and German management, worth $405 million by some accounts, comes just a week after President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and his wife, Cécilia, helped secure the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had spent more than eight years in prison after being accused of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with H.I.V.

The case had long strained Libya’s relations with the European Union. But the French government denied Friday that any direct bargain for weapons contracts had been made with Libya for the medical workers’ freedom.

The French defense minister, Hervé Morin, said on RTL radio that the deals had been cleared by a French ministerial commission on weapons sales in February, well before Mr. Sarkozy succeeded Jacques Chirac as president in May.

But undercutting French officials, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, disclosed the contracts in an interview in Le Monde. He said that during a recent visit by Mr. Sarkozy, the Libyans asked him to “accelerate things.”

Optimism after North Korea

Writing in today’s Washington Post, Joseph Nye reminds us that we don’t need to give up on halting international proliferation simply because North Korea built a barely functional nuclear weapon of some kind.

Nye notes that during the 1970s, a similar nuclear "breakout" moment occurred, but the NPT and related proliferation regimes did not collapse. Through assiduous diplomacy, the United States pushed the individual countries who were pressuring the proliferation regime to stop their anti-regime activities and arranged a strengthening and updating of the nuclear proliferation regime, the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group. And most importantly, the United States extended its nuclear umbrella to clearly cover some of its most vulnerable allies, like South Korea and Japan.

Nye says that the U.S. can reaffirm its commitment to Japanese and South Korean security and ask everyone to recommit to international proliferation institutions as the United States had the world do in the seventies. Nye makes it seem that, with work, these are achievable.

Nye also wants the United States to support two IAEA initiatives:

• Increased funding for the IAEA and its inspection activities;
• An international enriched uranium “bank” for countries that promise not to develop indigenous nuclear enrichment programs.

As for North Korea itself, Nye believes that integration is better than sanctions. Of all the things that Nye recommends, that’s the only one I can’t agree with. The North Korean regime would be able to use economic integration to strengthen itself without freeing its people, using the Chinese example.

If anything, the North Koreans’ recent return to nuclear negotiations has given us a hypothesis we really should test – whether financial sanctions are the lever we can use to pressure the Kim regime. If the Kim regime doesn’t back down after the upcoming negotiations, we should try to get China to have its banks limit North Korean access to the international financial system. That pressure, in addition to American limits on North Korean finances, might be enough to push the North Koreans to give up their nuclear programs.

If that fails, then maybe we’ll try Nye’s prescription for economic integration. Only so much optimism for me.

North Korea Returns to Nuclear Talks

Interesting things to note:

1. China set up the meetings that led to the breakthrough on talks. It is clearly taking a forceful, proactive approach to these negotiations. China has apparently reportedly even withheld diesel and heating fuel from North Korea in September.
2. The arrangement that led to the talks was three-way talks between the United States, North Korea, and China in Beijing.
3. The North Koreans are being hurt by American action against their money-laundering activities, as reflected by the priority the North Koreans placed on having U.S. Treasury action against a Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia, on the agenda of nuclear talks. (I think this also reveals the North Koreans' goals in exploding their nuclear device). The bank, which has previously been in the news, purportedly holds the Kim family's bank accounts and had placed North Korean counterfeited cash in circulation.

Politicians' and diplomats’ expectations for discussions to end North Korea’s nuclear programs are low. As David Straub, a former U.S. diplomat involved in earlier discussions stated:

"[B]oth [the United States and North Korea] will almost certainly take even tougher lines."

Straub stated that the U.S. and North Korea need to change negotiating positions, and Democrats say that the U.S. needs to negotiate directly with North Korea.

Today's Washington Post editorial page warns that this supposed breakthrough could simply allow the Chinese and the North Koreans to alleviate pressure on the North Korean regime and for China to control its wayward client while North Korea gives up nothing.

The problem is that this is always true when negotiating with the North Koreans. But if our only real choice is to negotiate, the editorial is correct to place the onus for continued movement by the North Koreans on China. They made these talks happen, and they should be the focus of American pressure to see that they succeed.

Iran Nuclear Sanctions Discussed in New York . . .

Last night, discussions of a sanctions resolution against Iran continued with representatives of the United States, Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China meeting at the British Mission to the United Nations in New York.

The draft was prepared by Britain, France, and Germany (the EU3). While some reports say the United States supports it, the United States apparently wants some unknown changes to the EU3 draft. One notable difference between the U.S. and EU3 is that the United States does not want an exception for nuclear materials to be used at the Bushehr nuclear facility.

According to France's UN representative, Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, the draft resolution would

1. Prevent sale or supply to Iran of materials for a nuclear and missile program;
2. Ban travel by those involved in the nuclear and missile program;
3. Freeze the assets and funds of people and entities involved in Iran's nuclear and missile program.

The draft resolution would penalize failure to comply under Chapter 7, Article 41, of the UN Charter, which allows for sanctions enforcement, but not military action.

France's President Jacques Chirac stated that he was not convinced of the effectiveness of sanctions and believed that if dialogue fails, sanctions against Iran must be "adjusted, adapted, temporary, reversible."

The United States demanded sanctions against Iran to deter proliferation, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stating that "Iran's defiance must be held to account to save the international community's credibility."

Russia questioned the validity of the draft sanctions resolution against Iran, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying that it "did not seem to 'match those tasks the six sides agreed on.'" Russia does not support too much pressure on Iran too quickly.

China also questioned the need for sanctions when negotiations are still possible.

"Since the door for diplomatic efforts is still open, why should we rush to sanctions?" said Chinese envoy Li Junhua said to reporters at the UN. "The EU package is still on the table. Sanctions, in our assessment, will not help."

Representatives of the parties are scheduled to meet again on Monday, October 30.