Team Obama just crossed its own nuclear red line
By Post Editorial Board
June 19, 2015 | 7:42pm
Yet another Obama red line has been crossed. Only this time, Team Obama are the ones who crossed it.
Secretary of State John Kerry this week threw in the towel on a requirement that he long called essential to any nuke agreement with Iran: requiring Tehran to account for all of its past nuclear work.
Never mind, he now says: “We’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another.”
“We have absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities they were engaged in,” he added.
No, we don’t — as everyone who’s worked on the issue will tell you. They’ll also tell you that, absent that accounting, it’ll be impossible to verify if Iran is complying with any deal.
Kerry’s statement is a 180 from what he said just weeks ago. Asked in April about the insistence that Iran disclose its past military-related nuclear activity, he replied: “They have to do it. It will be done. If there’s going to be a deal, it will be done.”
Iran’s nuke program long predates 2003, when the world first learned of it.
If we don’t know what they were doing then, there’s no way to tell if they’ve stopped. As former CIA Director Michael Hayden said, Kerry is “pretending we have perfect knowledge about something that was an incredibly tough intelligence target when I was director, and I see nothing that has made it any easier.”
Little wonder, then, that the State Department insists Kerry’s comments don’t reflect “any kind of concession or change in policy.”
For months, Kerry and President Obama promised the country — and skeptics in Congress — that they wouldn’t take a deal that didn’t include full Iranian disclosure. Now, plainly, Tehran’s refusing to go along — yet our leaders so want some deal that they’ll swallow it, and then lie.
The question is, are key leaders on Capitol Hill — we’re talking to you, Sen. Chuck Schumer — going to pretend they buy the lie?
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