Leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said at a hearing on the Iran nuclear deal today that they requested a meeting with International Atomic Energy Agency on its agreements with Tehran...
...Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) noted that the IAEA is a UN organization “for which we pay membership dues.”
“We are putting an enormous part of the national security of the United States and of our allies in region in the IAEA,” Menendez said, suggesting “maybe their fear is the question of Parchin,” the secretive military site where Iran will be able to collect its own samples and turn them over to the IAEA as evidence of their compliance with the P5+1 nuclear deal.
“The entire inspections regime, the entire verification regime depends upon the IAEA — and not to be able to question the IAEA about how they’re going to go about it, about their abilities to do so, about the budgetary realities they may need in order to accomplish what we want them to accomplish.”
Menendez stressed that he doesn’t “know how one can come to a conclusion on this agreement without understanding from the agency that is involved.”
“The most critical element of this agreement is them. Forget about the sanctions. Because sanctions only come into play if they’re not performing. We have to know whether they’re performing in the first instance, in the implementation, then we have to know subsequently if they’re performing afterward,” the senator said.
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