The John Batchelor Show

Monday 25 November 2013

Air Date: 
November 25, 2013

Iran declares victory. 

Photo above: Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a speech to members of the paramilitary Basij force in Tehran, Iran.  Office of the Supreme Leader/AP

"This interim agreement is badly skewed from America’s perspective.  Iran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to continue enriching, and despite modest (indeed, utterly inadequate) measures to prevent it from increasing its enriched-uranium stockpiles and its overall nuclear infrastructure, lays the predicate for Iran fully enjoying its 'right' to enrichment in any 'final' agreement.  Indeed, the interim agreement itself acknowledges that a 'comprehensive solution' will 'involve a mutually defined enrichment program.'  This is not, as the Obama administration leaked before the deal became public, a 'compromise' on Iran’s claimed 'right' to enrichment. This is abject surrender by the United States."  ---Amb John Bolton

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 1, Block A: Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, & Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, in re:  Karzai, the  heroin addict, issues edicts to the United States, his multibillion-dollar donor of many years' standing; claims that the unacceptable demands cone from the just-completed loya jirga. 

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 1, Block B: Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, & Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, in re:  al Qaeda in the Mahgreb in Mali.  Haqqani network in Pakistan.

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 1, Block C: Liz Peek, The Fiscal Times & Fox; Lara M Brown, political analyst and author; Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review & Pirates fan, in re: Some Being Forced into Medicaid ; Some States Report More Signups; Younger People Are Holding Back from Signing Up in California ; Everything is about politics with Pres Obama

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 1, Block D:  Peter Coy, Bloomberg, in re: LARRY SUMMERS: MR. NEGATIVE  The almost-chairman of the Federal Reserve, Larry Summers, is gloomy about U.S. growth prospects and fears the developed economies may be stuck in a world where even a zero interest rate is too high. 

Hour Two

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 2, Block A:  John Fund, National Review Online,& David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Sr Congressional correspondent, in re: Haley Barbour and Chris Christie's friendly association. If Christie were to run for president, Barbour would probably be his choice for chief of staff. 

Obama's poll ratings dive on trustworthiness, management ability President Obama's trustworthiness has taken a serious hit during the first two months of the rollout of his new health care law, according to a new CNN/ORC International poll. The poll shows that, for the first time, 53 percent of Americans believe the president is not honest and trustworthy.

THE NUCLEAR OPTION  Reid’s Law   Harry’s brazen power play in the Senate.  Yes it can be repealed    ;    OPINION  Mark Dubowitz: A Bad Agreement Likely to Get Worse   ; Why did Pres Obama say the website would work?

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 2, Block B: John Fund, National Review Online,& David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Sr Congressional correspondent, in re:     

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 2, Block C: Arif Rafiq, Middle East Institute, in re:  Heroic Pakistani doctor who helped CIA capture Bin Laden faces bizarre murder charge for surgery death eight years ago
Daily Mail - 6 hours ago
Shakil Afridi helped the United States pinpoint Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The doctor remains jailed after several legal battles and now . . .    Shakil Afridi, the 'Bin Laden' doctor, charged with murder in Pakistan
 Shakil Afridi, the ‘Bin Laden’ doctor, charged with murder in Pakistan Woman says Dr. Shakil Afridi was not qualified to operate on her son who was suffering from appendicitis around 2005

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 2, Block D:  Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re:  real estate owners are obliged to pay tax in China – "We pretend to pay taxes, and you pretend [to govern]."  Bitcoin: Beijing is now suddenly promoting this virtual currency. More than half the exchanges running bitcoin are Chinese; China thus has a great deal of influence over bitcoin's current value.  

Hour Three

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 3, Block A:   Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:  Iran: the weapon needs a missile to be effective. Complicated situation; every hour new issues and questions arise. Try to clarify with the Administration because the stakes are very high. Harry Reid is irrelevant – they’ve already passed the legislation; Chuck Schumer and Menendez have come out strongly. Now the question is: give the Administration a while to see if it works, or pass legislation that gives Iran six more months.  The agreement concentrates on fissile material at 3% and 20 %, but no rollback on the 19,000 centrifuges, of which 1,000 are new . . .  centrifuge production is said to be under observation; the ones that burn out maybe replaced by new one.  The original agreement said: no nuclear production at all.  Here, Iran has won the right to keep those arrays – for which they buried facilities under mountains, and hid it from the IAEA for years and have lied consistently. Iran claims that this document gives them the right to enrich;  Kerry says it does not. Zarif has said this twice.  Enrichment, weaponization, missile delivery system.

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On Iran's other legal obligations, the gap is much greater. The Security Council resolutions require Iran to verifiably "suspend . . . all enrichment-related activities." Yet the Geneva agreement fails to commit Iran to suspend enrichment of uranium to 3.5%. The preamble language even appears to position Iran to begin negotiations for a final deal with its domestic-enrichment program already pocketed as a concession.

The U.N. resolutions require Iran to "provide such access and cooperation as the IAEA requests" to resolve the International Atomic Energy Agency's concerns about Iran's research into nuclear-weapons design. Multiple IAEA reports, including from March 2011 and November 2011, have provided extensive descriptions of Iranian research involving activities related to the development of a nuclear explosive and noted that some of the research "may still be ongoing." Yet the interim agreement does almost nothing to gain such access and cooperation or to require Iran to come clean or provide access and cooperation to ensure that such research is not continuing.

Remarkably, not even the agreement's "elements of the final step of a comprehensive solution" make clear reference to Iran revealing its past nuclear-weapons research. Thus, Iran's affirmation, in the interim agreement preamble, that "under no circumstances will Iran ever seek or develop any nuclear weapons" is, with respect to weapons-design research, all trust and next to no verify.

The Security Council resolutions also explicitly require Iran to "not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons." However, the interim agreement includes no Iranian commitments related to its ballistic-missile program. Not even the agreement's "elements of the final step of a comprehensive solution" make any reference to Iran halting its activity related to ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear weapons.

In the absence of verifiable Iranian commitments not to proceed with nuclear-weapon and ballistic-missile research, there is nothing to stop Iran from having a designed bomb and ballistic missile ready to go. Once Iran completes a dash to weapons-grade uranium, it can insert the warhead and quickly have a deliverable nuclear weapon

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 3, Block B: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:  the Brit said, "Yes, the last time I saw von Ribbentrop we had dinner, then he was hanged."   Auto parts, gold, other means of bringing in $8 billion in hard currency with which to fund Hezbollah and such. Implementation: it'll take to New Year's before this'll take effect so IAEA can verify.   Parchin isn't even included; Arak and Bushehr are.  Miniaturization, weaponization, testing fuses.  North Korea.   Chem weapons.  Allies responding to the agreement: Prince Alaweed has been blasting it; the UAE issued a more positive reaction. Fear that this will exacerbate the Sunni-Shia split.   "Israel is not the problem; Iran is."  Did Washington anticipate an adverse reaction from the Gulf? Must have known . . .   How does this advance peace? They didn't bring in critical stakeholders.   this isn’t an interim deal – it'll be the end deal. Flouts the Security Council demand that enrichment cease.

Velayati, childhood friend of Valerie Jarrett, now apptd head of the Expediency Council, a most powerful post. Rouhani and Zarif are water-carriers.  Iran is pushing Syria to become part of the deal: Assad survive and he US force Saudi Arabia and Turkey out of the game.  Now Pres Obama is "asking Iran; help" in dealing with Turkey.  Surrender; complete, abject sell-out.   It may be too late for Israel to strike.  AMb Boltn thiks that the Saudis may strike first.

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 3, Block C:  Peter Gregory, Hoover, in re: Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) was, according to five government investigations, the sniper who assassinated John F. Kennedy, . . .   ‎Jack Ruby - ‎Marina Oswald Porter - ‎JD Tippit - ‎Lone gunman theory

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 3, Block D:   Bruce Webster, and still I persist dot com, in re: Obamacare and the Bursting Dam  The media for the past three years has failed to do its job as independent and skeptical investigative journalists with regards to Obamacare in general and the essential technology infrastructure in particular — not just the Healthcare.gov website itself but all the back-end systems and the state exchanges as well. Even when Healthcare.gov launched, most . . .  [more]

"And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis." -- Edgar Pangborn

Hour Four

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 4, Block A: Reza Kahlili, author, A Time to Betray, in re: Whether the World Wants It or Not  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claims victory for nuclear program: US, Iran secret deal revealed over a year ago

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 4, Block B:  Sebastian von Gorka, FDD, in re: Egypt referendum on constitution 'set for January'  A referendum on Egypt's amended constitution is likely to take place in the second half of January - later than expected, the interim PM says.

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 4, Block C:  Walt Bogdanich, NYT, in re:  NEW FROM FRONTLINE AND THE NEW YORK TIMES: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE POLICE INVESTIGATE ONE OF THEIR OWN?   FRONTLINE Presents A Death in St. Augustine

On the night she broke up with her police officer boyfriend, 24-year-old Michelle O’Connell was found dead from a gunshot in the mouth. Next to her was her boyfriend’s semi-automatic service pistol.  The local sheriff’s investigation concluded it was a suicide—but was it? 

In A Death in St. Augustine, premiering Tuesday, November 26 at 10 p.m. (check local PBS listings), FRONTLINE and The New York Times investigate the death of this young, single mother in Florida— and how effectively police handle cases involving their own officers, especially when there are allegations of domestic violence. 

“What first caught my eye about this death was that an officer’s gun had fired the fatal shot,” says New York Times investigative reporter Walt Bogdanich, the on-camera reporter for A Death in St. Augustine. “The sheriff concluded this was a simple suicide, but I wanted to know how thoroughly did his office investigate the possible involvement of one of its officers.”

As part of the nine-month investigation, FRONTLINE and The New York Times reviewed police, medical and legal records, interviewed dozens of people connected to the case, and consulted with independent forensic and law enforcement experts who found significant problems with the investigation and conclusions of the local medical examiners and St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office. Through the lens of this complex case, FRONTLINE and The New York Times report on what law enforcement experts say is a vexing and under-reported national problem: officer-involved domestic violence.

“There are many barriers to reporting domestic violence under ‘ordinary’ circumstances,” Bogdanich says. “But when your abuser is the police, those barriers . . .

Monday  25 November  2013 / Hour 4, Block D:   John Bolton, AEI, in re:   Abject Surrender by the United States   What does Israel do now?  Negotiations for an “interim” arrangement over Iran’s nuclear weapons program finally succeeded this past weekend, as Security Council foreign ministers (plus Germany) flew to Geneva to meet their Iranian counterpart.  After raising expectations of a deal by first convening on November 8-10, it would have been beyond humiliating to gather again without result.  So agreement was struck despite solemn incantations earlier that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

This interim agreement is badly skewed from America’s perspective.  Iran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to continue enriching, and despite modest (indeed, utterly inadequate) measures to prevent it from increasing its enriched-uranium stockpiles and its overall nuclear infrastructure, lays the predicate for Iran fully enjoying its “right” to enrichment in any “final” agreement.  Indeed, the interim agreement itself acknowledges that a “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.”  This is not, as the Obama administration leaked before the deal became public, a “compromise” on Iran’s claimed “right” to enrichment. This is abject surrender by the United States.

In exchange for superficial concessions, Iran achieved three critical breakthroughs. First, it bought time to continue all aspects of its nuclear-weapons program the agreement does not cover (centrifuge manufacturing and testing; weaponization research and fabrication; and its entire ballistic missile program). Indeed, given that the interim agreement contemplates periodic renewals, Iran may have gained all of the time it needs to achieve weaponization not of simply a handful of nuclear weapons, but of dozens or more.

Second, Iran has gained legitimacy. This central banker of international terrorism and flagrant nuclear proliferator is once again part of the international club.  Much as the Syria chemical-weapons agreement buttressed Bashar al-Assad, the mullahs have escaped the political deep freezer.

Third, Iran has broken the psychological momentum and effect of the international economic sanctions. While estimates differ on Iran’s precise gain, it is considerable ($7 billion is the lowest estimate), and presages much more.  Tehran correctly assessed that a mere six-months’ easing of sanctions will make it extraordinarily hard for the West to reverse direction, even faced with systematic violations of Iran’s nuclear pledges.  Major oil-importing countries (China, India, South Korea, and others) were already chafing under U.S. sanctions, sensing President Obama had no stomach either to impose sanctions on them, or pay the domestic political price of granting further waivers.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s earlier warning that this was “the deal of the century” for Iran has unfortunately been vindicated. Given such an inadequate deal, what motivated Obama to agree?  The inescapable conclusion is that, the mantra notwithstanding, the White House actually did prefer a bad deal to the diplomatic process grinding to a halt. This deal was a “hail Mary” to buy time. Why?

Buying time for its own sake makes sense in some negotiating contexts, but the sub silentio objective here was to jerry-rig yet another argument to wield against Israel and its fateful decision whether or not to strike Iran. Obama, fearing that strike more than an Iranian nuclear weapon, clearly needed greater international pressure on Jerusalem. And Jerusalem fully understands that Israel was the real target of the Geneva negotiations. How, therefore, should Israel react?

Most importantly, the deal leaves the basic strategic realities unchanged. Iran’s nuclear program was, from its inception, a weapons program, and it remains one today. Even modest constraints, easily and rapidly reversible, do not change that fundamental political and operational reality.  And while some already-known aspects of Iran’s nuclear program are returned to enhanced scrutiny, the undeclared and likely unknown military work will continue to expand, thus recalling the drunk looking for his lost car keys under the street lamp because of the better lighting.

Moreover, the international climate of opinion against a strike will only harden during the next six months. Capitalizing on the deal, Iran’s best strategy is to accelerate the apparent pace of rapprochement with the all-too-eager West. The further and faster Iran can move, still making only superficial, easily reversible concessions in exchange for dismantling the sanctions regime, the greater the international pressure against Israel using military force. Iran will not suddenly, Ahmadinejad-style, openly defy Washington or Jerusalem and trumpet cheating and violations. Instead, Tehran will go to extraordinary lengths to . . . read this article online.

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Music

Hour 1:  Dark Shadows. Snowflower & the Secret Fan. All the King's Men. 

Hour 2:  Robin Hood. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. 

Hour 3:  Assassin's Creed. Infamous. 

Hour 4:  Brake. Ides of March. Breaking Bad. 

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