US under Israeli pressure over Iran sites inspection: Journalist

Press TV has conducted an interview with Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist from Washington, to get his thoughts on Iran’s demand from the P5+1 group to respect the Lausanne understanding on Tehran's nuclear program.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: The Iranian foreign minister there specifically talking of Lausanne mutual understanding, are we to understand the negotiating partners of Iran are moving away from that mutual understanding?  

Porter: I’m not sure he’s suggesting that in the process of negotiating right now, they’re moving further away from the understanding, but he’s suggesting as I understand at least, that there have been statements made about the Lausanne understanding which may have departed from what Iran understands to be the state of the agreement, the understanding that had been reached at that point. And I have to say that it’s very difficult for an outsider to determine precisely what was agreed on, at least on some of the issues that have been quite contentious.

And particularly, I think the most difficult one to discern is the question of what was actually agreed or what was the state of agreement on the lifting of sanctions, the timetable for that, the precise sequence of steps to be taken by both sides. I think however that in that case the two sides are not as far apart as the Obama administration officials have suggested in some of their remarks at least in the early days after the Lausanne agreement was reached.

I think that some of the statements have been made more recently have suggested that they are much closer to the position that was taken by Iran, but certainly there’s more negotiation to be done on that. On the other hand, on the question of the inspection of military sites, I have written and I do in fact believe quite strongly that the Obama administration felt that it was under terrific pressure from its Israeli allies in particular to claim that the Iranians had already agreed to essentially allow the IAEA to go wherever the IAEA decided that it wanted to go in order to carry out inspections of alleged suspicious sites.

And I think the totality of the evidence strongly suggest that was never the case and that in fact very little had been agreed in terms of the precise details of what was going to govern the question of inspections. I think that is clearly one of the issues that still remained and still remains at this moment to be negotiated.

ABN/GHN 

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