Iran’s Security Adviser Threatens To Block Inspectors

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The New York Sun

WASHINGTON – Iran’s national security adviser yesterday threatened to block international inspectors from visiting nuclear facilities if the international community spoke to Tehran with “threatening language.”


“If they speak to us with threatening language, we will resist,” Ali Larijani told Iranian reporters yesterday. “We will not leave the Nonproliferation Treaty, but we will not accept the Additional Protocol.”


The additional protocol referred to by Mr. Larijani requires Tehran to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to check, without giving prior notice, any facilities they deem necessary to assessing whether Iran’s nuclear program is intended for bombs or peaceful energy production. It was Iran’s ascension to the Additional Protocol that persuaded Europe and America to forgo sending Iran’s violations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to the United Nations Security Council in 2003, when the Islamic Republic admitted to running a hither too secret network of reactors, centrifuges, and laboratories to the international nuclear watchdog.


The IAEA last month tentatively concluded that Iran had violated its commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but ultimately tabled the question of when these violations would be considered by the Security Council. That body could impose international sanctions on Iran, as it did on Iraq in the face of their obstruction of international inspectors.


Iran’s relationship with the West has been strained in recent days. Last week, British authorities announced that Iranian agents played a role in the recent murder of eight British servicemen.


More recently, American officials have said that high-tech explosive devices used by Iraqi terrorists to explode American military vehicles had been imported from Iran. Last week President Bush said, “State sponsors like Syria and Iran have a long history of collaboration with terrorists, and they deserve no patience from the victims of terror. The United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them, because they’re equally as guilty of murder.”


One factor contributing to the bad blood between the West and Iran has been the choice of new ministers for the government of President Ahmadinejad. Mr. Larijani himself is a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard.


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