In a highly anticipated speech on Friday, President Barack Obama introduced a series of reforms that will place new limits and safeguards on U.S. intelligence gathering, including additional protections for foreign nationals overseas. 

President Barack Obama talks on the phone with British Prime Minister David Cameron in the Oval Office, Jan. 16, 2014. Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza

After weathering months of new disclosures and increasingly strident public criticism about the extent of U.S. spying, Obama on Friday recognised that the country’s National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies may have overreached in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks and the ongoing “war on terror”.

At the same time, Obama also stated that the particularly controversial bulk gathering of Internet and phone records would remain in place.

“We have to make some important decisions about how to protect ourselves and sustain our leadership in the world, while upholding the civil liberties and privacy protections that our ideals and our Constitution require,” Obama said Friday.

The new directive will “strengthen executive branch oversight of [U.S.] intelligence activities … reform programmes and procedures in place to provide greater transparency to our surveillance activities, and fortify the safeguards that protect the privacy of U.S. persons.”

In an unanticipated attempt to quell loud criticism from foreign governments and U.S. allies, Obama also introduced a series of changes aimed at protecting non-U.S. citizens abroad – the first time that a U.S. president has taken such steps.

“People around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies and procedures,” the president said.

“In this directive, I have taken the unprecedented step of extending certain protections that we have for the American people to people overseas [including] safeguards [that] will limit the duration that we can hold personal information, while also restricting the use of this information.”

In particular, the new directive seeks to ensure that “information about persons whose activities are not of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence value” will not be collected, “whatever their nationality and regardless of where they might reside.”

It is still unclear how exactly these protections will be implemented, but for now, the directive states that the United States will collect data only for the purposes of detecting espionage, cyber crime, threats to U.S. or allied armed forces, and threats from terrorism, weapons proliferation and sanctions evasion.

Yet there remains wide disagreement about the soundness of extending constitutional protections to foreign nationals.

“Although I agree that we should be sensitive to foreign nationals, the question is whether they have equal protection under the Constitution,” Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation, a think tank here, told IPS. “And the answer is that they really don’t.”

Others note that although foreign nationals may not be protected under the U.S. Constitution, their privacy still needs to be respected as a broader human rights issue.

“It may be the case that foreigners overseas do not enjoy constitutional protections, but they do enjoy basic human rights,” Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty & National Security Programme at the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law, told IPS. “And privacy is one of them.”

Distance to go

The president’s announcements comes in the midst of a historic public debate that first broke out in June when a former NSA contractor, Edward J. Snowden, publicised documents revealing the intrusiveness of U.S. intelligence gathering. And while many have welcomed Friday’s speech, the new reforms did little to quell all calls for action.

“The president took several steps toward reforming NSA surveillance, but there’s still a long way to go,” Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital-rights advocacy group, said following the president’s speech. “Other necessary reforms include requiring prior judicial review of national security letters and ensuring the security and encryption of our digital tools, but the president’s speech made no mention of these.”

Others expressed disappointment at the president’s decision to simply reform, but not eliminate, the government’s bulk collection of telephone records, also known as metadata.

“The president should stop bulk collection, approach Congress and support the USA Freedom ACT,” the Brennan Center’s Goitein says, referring to a legislative proposal that, if approved, would substantially rein in the NSA’s activities through an official act of Congress.

The president did note on Friday that he would include Congress in the new overhaul, either by asking legislators to codify the new changes or by ensuring that lawmakers were part of a rigorous oversight mechanism.

However, Goitein warns that Congress should be included only if this will lead to actual reforms, and not as a way to avoid progress.

“The president should go to Congress to tighten the law and to ensure that no other administration will do this in the future,” she says, noting that if the president had really wanted to end bulk collection, he could have done so during Friday’s speech.

Obama also noted that the bulk collection of telephone records would be substituted by an alternative mechanism, although the details of this remain unclear. The president proposed a two-stepped transition that would initially see a more limited surveillance of phone calls, one that would “pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organisation, instead of the current three.”

During this initial period, the attorney-general and the rest of the intelligence community will look for an alternative mechanism to replace the NSA’s storage mechanism. It is still unclear whether this will be a single third party conducting the government’s surveillance or a group of private companies and contractors.

Ultimately, Friday’s speech was a notably public look at some of the United States’ most highly classified programmes, highlighting an already startling distance from the days prior to Snowden’s leaks.

“Intelligence collection is always a delicate business in a democracy, and it should be,” the RAND’s Jenkins told IPS. “Public debate and argument is the only way we have of achieving something that will be more or less acceptable to the public and that will provide the protection to our civil liberties.”

P5+1 foreign ministers after negotiations about Iran's nuclear capabilities concluded on Nov. 24, 2013 in Geneva. Credit: U.S. Dept of State/CC by 2.0

By Jasmin Ramsey
GENEVA, Nov 24 2013 (IPS)

A momentous agreement over Iran’s nuclear programme was officially announced shortly before 3:00 am local time via Twitter by the spokesperson for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, Michael Mann, on Nov. 24, after more than four days of grueling talks.

The deal occurred after years of negotiations with Iran but only three and a half months after the inauguration of Iran’s moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, who has already overseen several historic foreign policy milestones.

“We just finished many days of hard work,” said Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad Javad Zarif, at the night’s first press conference shortly after signing a four-page agreement with his P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) counterparts at the Palais des Nations.

“Now we are in the process of moving forward the resolution based on mutual respect and equal footing,” the veteran diplomat, who has enjoyed consistent support from Iranians and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei since talks resumed in October, added.

“While today’s announcement is just a first step, it achieves a great deal,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in a late-night statement from the White House.

In Geneva, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry praised Zarif’s role in the talks and Tehran’s decision to “come to the table”, which he credited to the very sanctions Iran has vehemently dismissed as a motivator.

He emphasised to reporters that the first-step agreement aimed at reaching a final, comprehensive solution includes significant limits on Iran’s nuclear programme and addresses the international community’s concerns.

Reciprocal accord

“All sides would gain [from this deal], except those few who believe that it’s feasible to expect that Iran could be sanctioned enough to give up enrichment entirely,” George Perkovich, a nuclear non-proliferation and strategy expert focused on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told IPS.

Under the six-month phase of the deal, Iran is expected to halt uranium enrichment above five percent; convert its existing stockpile of 20-percent-enriched uranium to fuel for its Tehran Research Reactor or dilute it to five percent grade; halt “further advances of its activities” at its Natanz and Fordow Fuel Enrichment facilities and at its Arak reactor; and implement further, advanced monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In return Iran will gain approximately 7 billion dollars of sanctions relief; Iran will be given relief from U.S. sanctions on its auto industry as well as spare parts and repairs for its aviation industry; no further U.N., EU or U.S. nuclear sanctions will be issued; and a channel will be established to better facilitate humanitarian trade.

But any gains would be “provisional,” cautioned Perkovich, adding that “the ultimate measure will be in a final agreement.”

U.S., Iran disagree over interpretation

Like many other Iranians, Maryam Askari, a 38-year-old Tehran-based researcher, stayed awake as long as she could to hear news of the negotiation results.

“Many people are doing the same, even housewives – even a servant in my friend’s house asked her about the results of the negotiations,” Askari told IPS shortly before the deal was announced.

Askari added that she wants a deal that eases tensions with Western countries, reduces pressure on Iran’s dilapidated economy and recognises what she considers Iran’s right to peacefully enrich uranium as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

“I am looking for a fair deal,” said Askari.

But what Iran considers its “inalienable right” to enrich uranium – something it has been emphasising for years – was addressed differently by U.S. and Iranian representatives here.

Zarif not only insisted that Iran would continue enriching uranium but he also referenced “two distinct places” in the agreement that have “a very clear reference to the fact that the Iranian enrichment programme will continue and will be a part of any agreement now and in the future.”

But Kerry reiterated that the United States does not recognise any country’s right to uranium enrichment.

“This first step…does not say that Iran has a right to enrichment, no matter what interpretation the prime minister made, it is not in this document and there is no right to enrich within the four corners of the NPT,” responded Kerry.

He added that as per the signed text, “it can only be by mutual agreement that enrichment might or might not be able to be decided on in the course of negotiations.”

Criticism and relief

“We can expect a strong amount of pushback from critics in the U.S. and Israel, and we’ll have to see how hardliners in Iran react,” Alireza Nader, an international policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, told IPS.

Although Kerry stressed that this agreement will bring security to the region and make U.S. ally Israel “safer”, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu today called the deal reached in Geneva “a historic mistake”.

Key members of U.S. Congress also criticised the deal shortly after it was announced.

“Unless the agreement requires dismantling of the Iranian centrifuges, we really haven’t gained anything,” tweeted the hawkish Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, who features in media coverage of U.S. foreign policy debates.

“You’re going to see a bipartisan effort that enrichment is not in the final agreement,” predicted Senator Bob Corker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Fox News Sunday.

In his speech, Kerry said he looked forward to working with Congress in upcoming discussions over the deal but also acknowledged a presidential “possibility of a veto” in an apparent reference to Congress trying to pass more sanctions on Iran during this phase of the deal.

Iran’s team, at least, has returned to much praise from Iranians, who through interviews with IPS and various illegal social media in Iran have been expressing joy since news of the deal broke.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei also expressed his blessing through a tweet and a letter addressed to President Rouhani.

“The content of the agreement will be closely examined, but generally speaking, the mere fact of an agreement has lead to a sigh of relief for most Iranians,” Farideh Farhi, an independent scholar at the University of Hawaii who has been in Iran for the last several months, told IPS.

“It signals a desire for de-escalation from all sides, away from a troubling dynamic that many feared would not only mean more economic hardship but also eventually war,” she said.

Within days of the inauguration of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new president, both Tehran and Washington appear to be sending positive signals to each other.

Iran’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, is President Rouhani’s pick as his foreign minister. Credit: Tabarez2/cc by 2.0

The latest came Monday in a flurry of reports from Iran that its former ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, is Rouhani’s pick as his foreign minister.

“If true, this is a pretty big signal,” according to Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist at the RAND Corporation, a prominent Washington think tank.

“Zarif is more pragmatic than ideological, and if Rouhani intends to improve Iran’s relations with the rest of the world and find a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis, then he’s a logical choice,” Nader told IPS.

“He really knows the American scene and American politics,” added Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University in New York, where he became well-acquainted with Zarif during the latter’s five-year tenure at the U.N. (2002-2007).

“His English is absolutely perfect. He’s extraordinarily smart and highly respected in the United States by the people who dealt with him, both in New York and Washington.”

The reports of Zarif’s impending appointment followed a New York Times report Friday that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has quietly communicated Rouhani’s interest in quickly engaging in direct talks with the U.S. after his inauguration.

They also followed the Barack Obama administration’s announcement late last week that it was easing restrictions on the sale of medical supplies and agricultural products, as well as the provision of humanitarian aid for Iran, in what was taken by many observers here as a goodwill gesture in advance of Rouhani’s formal inauguration Aug. 3-4.

In addition, administration officials have become somewhat more outspoken – albeit on background – over the past two weeks in opposing new anti-Iran sanctions legislation that may reach the floor of the Republican-led House of Representative as early as Wednesday.

The administration and its allies in Congress are worried that new sanctions would only strengthen hardliners in Tehran and undermine prospects for progress in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme between Tehran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany) that are thought likely to resume in September.

The pending bill, which has been strongly pushed by the powerful American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the vanguard of the Israel lobby here, seeks to impose a de facto ban on Iran’s oil exports, cut off any trade involving the euro, and target Tehran’s shipping and automobile sectors.

It would also curtail Obama’s ability to waive sanctions on third countries and their companies that continue to do business with Iran.

The push to get the bill through the House before Rouhani’s inauguration and before the August Congressional recess followed an appeal by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a widely viewed U.S. public-affairs television programme two weeks ago to increase pressure, including “credible” threats of military action, on Iran to abandon its nuclear programme. Netanyahu called Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

While the measure may indeed pass the House this week, it is likely to do so by a less lopsided margin than had been anticipated before Netanyahu’s bellicose appearance, however.

Five days after Netanyahu’s appearance, 131 House members, including 17 Republicans, signed a letter urging Obama to “reinvigorate(e) U.S. efforts to secure a negotiated nuclear agreement” in light of the “potential opportunity” presented by the election of Rouhani, who stressed the importance of easing tensions with Iran’s neighbours and the West during and after the campaign.

The letter also suggested that Washington should be prepared to relax bilateral and multilateral sanctions against Iran in exchange for “significant and verifiable concessions” at the negotiating table and implicitly warned against adding new sanctions at such a sensitive moment.

Some of the signers are now calling on their colleagues to delay the vote or at least amend the bill in order to expand, rather than restrict, Obama’s authority to waive sanctions if it should eventually pass.

While AIPAC took no public position on the letter, it quietly discouraged inquiring House members from signing it, according to knowledgeable sources. Interestingly, Rouhani himself welcomed the letter on his twitter account, tweeting: “131 Congressmen have signed a letter calling on President Obama to give peace a chance with Iran’s new President.”

A similar letter authored by California Democrat and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein is reportedly now circulating in the Democrat-led upper chamber, which, in any event, is considered unlikely to act on any new sanctions legislation until autumn at the earliest, if not after the new year, according to Senate aides.

Meanwhile, a number of European diplomats who dealt with Rouhani in the early 2000s when he was in charge of Iran’s nuclear portfolio have stressed that his presidency offers a major opportunity for a breakthrough on that front.

In an op-ed published by the International Herald Tribune late last week, former French Ambassador to Iran, Francois Nicoullaud (2001-2006), wrote that Rouhani played the central role not only in reaching an agreement with the EU-3 (France, Britain and Germany) that resulted in Tehran’s suspending its uranium enrichment programme, but also in terminating an alleged secret weaponisation programme run by the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC).

Zarif’s appointment would be considered consistent with the growing conviction here that Rouhani is someone with whom Washington can indeed do business, not just on the nuclear file, but also with respect to key regional issues, including Afghanistan and Iraq.

He made powerful acquaintances, including then-senators Feinstein, Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel, during his U.N. tenure, although his contacts with U.S. diplomats date back all the way to the 1980s when he helped negotiate the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon.

“Zarif is a tough advocate but he’s also pragmatic, not dogmatic,” now Vice President Biden told the Washington Post when he was recalled to Tehran in 2007. “He can play an important role in helping to resolve our significant differences with Iran peacefully.”

Citing his talks with Zarif, now-Pentagon chief Hagel called for “direct engagement” between Washington and Tehran.

Amb. James Dobbins, who was recently appointed as Obama’s chief aide on Afghanistan and Pakistan, has spoken highly of Zarif’s role in brokering the Bonn accord that followed the Taliban’s ouster from power in Afghanistan.

Zarif also reportedly played a key role in drafting a 2003 proposal for a “grand bargain” between Iran and the U.S. covering all outstanding issues between the two countries that was secretly conveyed to Washington via the Swiss ambassador in Tehran – only to be ignored by a triumphalist George W. Bush administration emboldened by its speedy, albeit ultimately and illusory, conquest of neighbouring Iraq.

“When he came to New York, he was out to build bridges, and he was quite successful at it,” Sick said. “He never deviated from the official position of the Islamic Republic, but he was capable of presenting it in a non-confrontational and imaginative way so that people could understand and sympathise with what Iran was saying and doing.”

If he is indeed nominated, he must still be approved by the Parliament, where he could face strong opposition from hard-liners due to his close association with former President Mohammad Khatami, according to experts here. As with other major foreign-policy decisions, his fate could ultimately be decided by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

“Zarif is closely associated with Khatami, and the ultra-conservatives … hate Khatami. Looking at Rouhani’s reported list of cabinet ministers, Zarif can be considered to be the candidate most closely aligned with the reformists. He is probably one of the best candidates to deal with the West, but perhaps the candidate most susceptible to political intrigue,” Nader said.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation.

Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: How Would a Nuclear-Armed Tehran Behave?“, the report asserts that the acquisition by Tehran of nuclear weapons  would above all be intended to deter an attack by hostile powers, presumably including Israel and the United States, rather than for aggressive purposes."An Iran with nukes will still be a declining power." -- Alireza Nader of the Rand Corporation

And while its acquisition may indeed lead to greater tension between Iran and its Sunni-led neighbours, the 50-page report concludes that Tehran would be unlikely to use nuclear weapons against other Muslim countries. Nor would it be able to halt its diminishing influence in the region resulting from the Arab Spring and its support for the Syrian government, according to the author, Alireza Nader.

“Iran’s development of nuclear weapons will enhance its ability to deter an external attack, but it will not enable it to change the Middle East’s geopolitical order in its own favour,” Nader, an international policy analyst at RAND, told IPS. “The Islamic Republic’s challenge to the region is constrained by its declining popularity, a weak economy, and a limited conventional military capability. An Iran with nukes will still be a declining power.”

The report reaches several conclusions all of which generally portray Iran as a rational actor in its international relations.

While Nader calls it a “revisionist state” that tries to undermine what it sees as a U.S.-dominated order in the Middle East, his report stresses that “it does not have territorial ambitions and does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations.”

Further, the report identifies the Islamic Republic’s military doctrine as defensive in nature.  This posture is presumably a result of the volatile and unstable region in which it exists and is exacerbated by its status as a Shi’a and Persian-majority nation in a Sunni and Arab-majority region.

Iran is also scarred by its traumatic eight-year war with Iraq in which as many as one million Iranians lost their lives.

The new report comes amidst a growing controversy here over whether a nuclear-armed Iran could itself be successfully “contained” by the U.S. and its allies and deterred both from pursuing a more aggressive policy in the region and actually using nuclear weapons against its foes.

Iran itself has vehemently denied it intends to build a weapon, and the U.S. intelligence community has reported consistently over the last six years that Tehran’s leadership has not yet decided to do so, although the increasing sophistication and infrastructure of its nuclear programme will make it possible to build one more quickly if such a decision is made.

Official U.S. policy, as enunciated repeatedly by top officials, including President Barack Obama, is to “prevent” Iran from obtaining a weapon, even by military means if ongoing diplomatic efforts and “crippling” economic sanctions fail to persuade Iran to substantially curb its nuclear programme.

A nuclear-armed Iran, in the administration’s view – which is held even more fervently by the U.S. Congress where the Israel lobby exerts its greatest influence – represents an “existential threat” to the Jewish state.

In addition, according to the administration, Iran’s acquisition of a weapon would likely embolden it and its allies – notably Lebanon’s Hezbollah – to pursue more aggressive actions against their foes and could well set off a regional “cascade effect” in which other powers, particulary Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, would feel obliged to launch nuclear-weapons programmes of their own.

But a growing number of critics of the prevention strategy – particularly that part of it that would resort to military action against Iran – argue that a nuclear Iran will not be nearly as dangerous as the reigning orthodoxy assumes.

A year ago, for example, Paul Pillar, a veteran CIA analyst who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, published a lengthy essay in ‘The Washington Monthly’, “We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran: Fears of a Bomb in Tehran’s Hands Are Overhyped, and a War to Prevent It Would Be a Disaster.”

More recently, Colin Kahl, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) who also served as the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy adviser for much of Obama’s first term, published two reports – the first questioning the “cascade effect” in the region, and the second, published earlier this week and entitled “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran,” outlining a detailed “containment strategy” — including extending Washington’s nuclear umbrella over states that feel threatened by a nuclear Iran — the U.S. could follow to deter Tehran’s use of a nuclear bomb or its transfer to non-state actors, like Hezbollah, and persuade regional states not to develop their own nuclear arms capabilities.

In addition, Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst at the Brookings Institution whose 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm” helped persuade many liberals and Democrats to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq, will publish a new book, “Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy”, that is also expected to argue for a containment strategy if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon.

Because both Brookings and CNAS are regarded as close to the administration, some neo-conservative commentators have expressed alarm that these reports are “trial balloons” designed to set the stage for Obama’s abandonment of the prevention strategy in favour of containment, albeit by another name.

It is likely that Nader’s study – coming as it does from RAND, a think tank with historically close ties to the Pentagon – will be seen in a similar light.

His report concedes that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would lead to greater tension with the Gulf Arab monarchies and thus to greater instability in the region. Moreover, an inadvertent or accidental nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran would be a “dangerous possibility”, according to Nader who also notes that the “cascade effect”, while outside the scope of his study, warrants “careful consideration”.

Despite Iran’s strong ideological antipathy toward Israel, the report does not argue that Tehran would attack the Jewish state with nuclear weapons, as that would almost certainly lead to the regime’s destruction.

Israel, in Nader’s view, fears that Iran’s nuclear capability could serve as an “umbrella” for Tehran’s allies that could significantly hamper Israel’s military operations in the Palestinian territories, the Levant, and the wider region.

But the report concludes that Tehran is unlikely to extend its nuclear deterrent to its allies, including Hezbollah, noting that the interests of those groups do not always – or even often – co-incide with Iran’s.  Iran would also be highly unlikely to transfer nuclear weapons to them in any event, according to the report.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.