Conservative Group Tells White House It Intends To Sue Over Iran Deal

New York Representative Claudia Tenney said on Thursday that “with all troubling news coming to light” about the agreement with Iran, Malley has yet to appear before Congress for a public hearing to provide the American people with an update on the negotiations.

In an opinion piece published in Newsweek earlier in the day, she said since his appointment on January 28, 2021, “Malley has refused to testify publicly before Congress, unlike his predecessor, Brian Hook, who testified on several occasions”.

She said Malley is refusing to testify because of revelations about the Vienna talks over the last several weeks.

Tenney said that “as Russia wages an unprovoked and murderous war in Ukraine, President Biden is bizarrely fixated on securing Russian cooperation to finalize a nuclear deal with Iran”.

Criticizing the administration for not being transparent, the lawmaker said Biden does not want people to know that Tehran could receive “as much as $90 billion” sanctions relief in return for minimal concessions and will remove sanctions on “some of Iran's worst human rights abusers and terrorists” as well as on the Revolutionary Guard.

She added that the administration “plans to surrender nearly $7 billion in ransom for the release of four wrongfully detained American hostages in Iran” and the “biggest secret is that it has no plans at all to involve Congress in the negotiating process”.

Bryan E. Leib, the executive director of Iranian Americans for Liberty, who was among the panellists of the event told Iran International on Thursday that the seminar was cancelled when organizers found out that two of the participants -- Mark Dubowitz and Victoria Coates -- are on the Islamic Republic’s sanctions list.

The event was scheduled to be held on Tuesday, April 19, at the Albany Club in the Canadian city of Toronto.

“The event organizers were alerted of security concerns and in an abundance of caution, the event was cancelled”, Leib said, adding that “We will be rescheduling this event with proper security precautions because we will never stop speaking out against the malign influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran throughout the world."

Dubowitz is a South African-born Canadian-American attorney and the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-profit think-tank and advocacy institute with a critical focus against Iran’s clerical government. He is known as a proponent of sanctions against Iran and was a leading critic of the Iran nuclear agreement.

Coates is an American political consultant who served as the Deputy National Security Advisor for Middle East and North African Affairs in former president Donald Trump’s administration.

Mehdi Salehi, whose death was announced in social media on Thursday, had a stroke and went into a coma in January because of the injection of an unknown drug by Esfahan prison officials, human rights monitors said at the time.

A source close to Salehi's family told Iran International that he was chained to the bed in hospital. Recently, he had come out of coma but suddenly the family was told that he passed away.

He was among five protesters sentenced to death, with Iran Human Rights Organization warning about the possibility of authorities secretly executing them.

Large nationwide protests in December 2017 were triggered by rising prices and turned into anti-Islamic-Republic unrest in over 100 cities and towns. Hundreds of striking and protesting workers and labor activists have also been arrested since 2017, many spending months in prison. Some are still detained without trial.

In a report released this week, Amnesty International slammed Iran for prisoner deaths resulting from deliberate denial of medical care, turning prisons into "waiting rooms for death".

The global rights organization has documented how prison authorities routinely cause or contribute to deaths in custody, including by blocking or delaying prisoners’ access to emergency hospitalization.

Sixty-four of all these prisoners died inside their prison cells meaning they were not given even basic medical supervision in their final hours.

In a letter published Thursday, they asked Ali Khamenei to intervene and stop the petrochemical plant near the Miankaleh wetland, Mazandaran province, which they say will have adverse environmental impacts on the coastal region. Politicians supporting the plant − which will convert natural gas to propylene, which has a range of uses in manufacturing − say it would create 75,000 jobs, but offer no evidence.

The environmentalists’ letter argued Iran already had sufficient propylene, and that a similar project in northern Iran begun by the Golestan Petrochemical company 17 years ago was in limbo although local ranches had been destroyed. The letter alleged there were around 90 abandoned petrochemical projects across the country, for which 40 construction permits had been issued under the previous government of President Hassan Rouhani.

They added that the area earmarked for the petrochemical unit in Miankaleh was high-quality agricultural land and was near to an international Unesco biosphere reserve. The environmentalists said that some work on the site – opponents of the development Tuesday cited welding for fencing and other preparations – was going on despite this week’s orders from President Ebrahim Raisi and the supreme court to pause or halt construction.

Talking through telephone to Fox News on Wednesday, Trump warned of the potential for a weaker agreement with Tehran, saying that the Biden administration's attempt to restructure and re-sign the deal could mean Israel's doom, unless “Israel’s going to have to take up the fight”.

Referring to his withdrawal from the JCPOA, he said he ended “a terrible deal but it was better than the deal” they want to sign with the Islamic Republic now, noting that “Israel is in tremendous peril, tremendous danger… because there is a very quick roadmap for them (Iran) to have a nuclear weapon and a lot of nuclear weapons”.

Criticizing the administration for the potential agreement, he said, “What they’re doing in Congress, and what Biden is doing, I can’t imagine that they would allow this to happen”.

Earlier in April, a group of US Republican senators called on the administration to provide Israel with the military capabilities it needs to defend itself from a nuclear-armed Iran, reiterating that the administration “would put at risk the existence of the State of Israel and the governments of our Arab allies, destroy America’s position in the Middle East, and ultimately threaten the US homeland”.