News / Interviews

James Fetzer: No sovereign nation needs US permission to promote self-defense

Sunday, 03 January 2016 10:43 AM [ Last Update: Sunday, 03 January 2016 10:43 AM ]

An S-200 surface-to-air missile is driven past Iranian military commanders during the annual military parade marking the anniversary of the start of Iraq’s imposed war on Iran, in the Iranian capital, Tehran, on September 22, 2015. (©AFP)

Press TV has conducted an interview with James H. Fetzer, a professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth from Madison, on Iran’s response to the US intervention in the Islamic Republic’s defense program.

Following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Do you think Iran, as a sovereign nation, has the right to pursue its defense systems and try to enhance it, or does it need permission from the United States?

Fetzer: No sovereign nation needs permission from the United States to develop its own capacity for self-defense. The leaders of the United States and other Western nations need to review the United Nations Charter, which makes that unmistakable ... They ought to review the Geneva Conventions of 1949, whose Article 33 clearly specifies that collective punishments of the form these sanctions are taking are in offense of violation of Article 33, where only individuals, the only individuals who can be punished are those for crimes they personally committed. This is a form of collective punishment that properly qualifies as a war crime being committed by the United States again and again and again.

Press TV: Why do you think it comes at this timing of Wall Street Journal first reporting that they are going to be sanctions and then later on saying that it’s being delayed? Why is it coming this time where the West and Iran have reached the JCPOA agreement?

Fetzer: It’s outrageous. The whole business about Iran developing nuclear weapons was fraudulent to begin with. All 16 US intel agencies concluded in 2007 that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons - a conclusion they reaffirmed in 2011.

Even the Mossad concluded Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons in 2012, three weeks before Benjamin Netanyahu went to the UN and asserted precisely the opposite.

There is no honor, no integrity in the Western nations, and I’m very sad to say that includes the United States of America, which once had the honor of leading the free world from a position of principle. But we have abdicated those principles and today we are justly the most despised and reviled nation in the world along with our gallant ally in the Middle East, Israel, which, anything, is more reprehensible even than the US.

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