Friday, April 4, 2014

Before Upcoming Iran P5+1 Talks in Vienna, Talk of Iranian UN Ambassador, Rep. Engel Sanctions, Oil for Goods with Russia?


By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, April 4 -- With the Iran nuclear P5+1 talks set to resume in Vienna, a US Senior Administration Official on April 4 told the press they are "on pace" to begin "drafting in May."
  But what about the US position on Iran's reported new Permanent Representative to the UN, about whom Inner City Press asked the UN on April 3? (The UN called it "bilateral" and would not comment on the US' duties under the UN Host Country Agreement).
  The US Senior Administration Official called the reported nomination troubling, but would not say how it may impact the P5+1 process. 
  Nor would the Official comment on moves to impose non-nuclear sanctions on Iran pitched by Eliot Engel (D-NY) here. The official declined comment on yet unseen legislation.
  There are also unseen transactions, only rumored, like a $20 billion oil for goods deal between Iran and Russia. Concern was expressed, but there is no evidence the deal is taking place.
  So: on pace to begining drafting in May? We'll see.
   Way back in October, Spokesperson of Catherine Ashton, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Michael Mann, canceled a briefing for journalists in Geneva covering those talks. His Twitter feed went silent for 15 hours in the middle of the talks, after Ashton's belated condemnation of a deadly attack on UN peacekeepers in Darfur four days previous.
  Inner City Press asked if this was "on delay." The document Mann linked to does not even MENTION Darfur or UNAMID.
  Inner City Press noted the incongruity, for example, of Reuters covering the Geneva talks with four separate scribes even as editor Stephen Adler speaks of five percent newsroom cuts. (Perhaps relatedly, as Fars got scoops Reuters tweeted the price of hamburgers in Geneva. It is true,as this internal UN post-Sri Lanka proposal exclusively published Friday by Inner City Press puts it, that New York is viewed as a cheaper "duty station" than Geneva.)
 But Iran is the big one for Reuters: at the UN in New York, they festooned their office door proudly with copies of complaints about their reporting from Iran's Mission to the UN. Was this for gumshoe reporting or simply getting leaks from the UK and France?
  (The irony of Reuters and leaks is that the agency's UN bureau chief has used a Digital Millennium Copyright Act filing, here, to get Google to ban from its search a leaked copy of the Reuters chief's "on the record"anti-Press complaint to the UN, with the same strategy Erodgan used to declare his leaked phone calls "copyrighted.")
  In Geneva back in October, a first scoop came from Iran's Fars agency. As noted, when Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif met with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in New York, the only journalists who went up to Ban's 38th floor office to cover it were with Iranian media and Inner City Press.
  Up there, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif quipped to UN Syria envoy Lakhdar Brahimi that he would see him soon in Tehran. Downstairs, the so-called UN Correspondents Association used UN resources to celebrate themselves, having hosted a faux UN briefing by Saudi-sponsored Syria rebel boss Ahmad al Jarba. This is how it works -- UNCA or its first vice president from Reuters also in essence spy for the UN, click here for storyaudiodocument. This has yet to be explained.
It is at the level of foreign ministers that Iran wants the November talks. There are sure to be questions to the US State Department's Jen Psaki and Marie Harf, present at the talks, about this. Harf was tweeting, even as other parts of the US State Department said they stopped, including on theUN Security Council's recent Africa trip, due to or to highlight the US government shutdown. Ah, politics. Watch this site.