State of the 2016 Race
A weekly column for The Hill analyzing the current state of the 2016 presidential race.
The big sham inside the Kerry-Iran nuke deal:
1. As detailed here last week, Secretary of State John Kerry has never forsaken his dreams of living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
2. As a key component of a possible 2016 campaign for president, Kerry badly wants a nuclear deal with Iran as he believes he might win the Nobel Peace Prize for this accord.
3. And that accomplishment will launch his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
{mosads}4. He very well knows that one of the sticking points to this controversial Iran deal will be on-site inspections of Iranian military sites, where it is suspected that secret, underground nuclear weapons development is ongoing in violation of current agreements — despite claims by Tehran that its nuclear program is solely for “peaceful, civilian purposes.”
5. How will Kerry handle this on-site inspection issue?
6. Past is prologue.
7. We already know how Kerry plans to use so-called “spontaneous no-notice” inspections to claim that his agreement will work.
8. Back in April 1992, then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) negotiated an equally controversial and divisive agreement with the government of Vietnam regarding reports of U.S. pilots still being held alive in Vietnamese prisoner-of-war (POW) camps.
9. In that agreement — as with the one to be unveiled by next Tuesday’s deadline with Iran — on-the-ground verification by trained inspectors was a bedrock requirement in order to get the U.S. trade embargo lifted.
10. But are these “inspections” what they appear to be?
11. Are they truly without advance notice — so that the Iranians could actually be caught unaware as they violate the agreement?
12. Or is Kerry deliberately creating an inspection protocol that he knows is a fraud — designed to assuage and dupe the critics of the agreement?
13. That is exactly what he did in Hanoi in 1992.
14. While proclaiming a breakthrough in relations with Hanoi, Kerry claimed to the traveling media, as reported in The Washington Post on April 23, 1992: “‘I think it’s very significant that on an hour-and-a-half’s notice we were able to walk in here and look around,’ said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. ‘I believe we were all satisfied that we got to see something that has never before been seen'” by official American visitors. Here we can see Kerry requesting a specific location to be visited — and, as it turns out, more than a day in advance!
Is this a no-notice inspection, or is it a wink-and-a-nod sham agreement with the authorities to make it look like a breakthrough to the media and critics of the agreement?
15. Here he is on a C-SPAN show called “Vietnam Revisited.”
16. Then we see Kerry grandstanding to the traveling media about his inspection of a never-before-visited prison.
17. An “hour-and-a-half’s notice”?
18. Really?
19. In fact, it was more than a day, as caught by C-SPAN cameras.
20. Is this what he will propose in the Iran nuclear deal in order to lift U.S.-led sanctions?
21. How many Iranian nuclear scientists could be hustled away from the secret underground facility near Qum in that time?
22. How many records and computers could be removed from the secret site at Fordo in that time?
23. Even in the 90 minutes that Kerry trumpeted, how many signs of Iranian duplicity could be hidden and wiped clean?
24. Could signs of illegal activity at Natanz be erased in that time?
25. Knowing that he did this exact thing back in 1992, how can anyone possibly trust this Iran nuclear deal? Or trust anything John Kerry says?
26. P.S. If you want to see the full five hours of C-SPAN’s “Vietnam Revisited,” and judge for yourself what happened, click here.
LeBoutillier is a former Republican congressman from New York and is the co-host of “Political Insiders” on Fox News Channel, Sunday nights at 7:30 p.m. Eastern. He will be writing weekly pieces in the Contributors section on the “State of the 2016 Race.”