Revealed: A Deal Founded on Lies
In January, Mossad agents located the information they were looking for. Locked inside safes within a storage container inside a warehouse in a suburb south of Tehran were hundreds of pounds of files relating to Iran’s nuclear program. The Israeli agents infiltrated the location and extracted the files. With the Iranians in pursuit, they successfully moved the cache of more than 100,000 files to Israel.
In a dramatic announcement at Israel’s Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv on April 30, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly unveiled the “Iranian nuclear archive.”
Much of the information contained in the archive was unsurprising. As the Times of Israel noted, most of it was already footnoted in a 2011 International Atomic Energy Agency (iaea) report.
So why is the revelation of this nuclear cache so important?
Because there are still government officials in Iran and in the United States and other countries who insist that Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. But as Netanyahu brought out in his presentation, the “files conclusively prove that Iran is brazenly lying when it says it never had a nuclear weapons program” (emphasis added throughout). This is an undeniable mountain of evidence exposing the fact that, to gain the support needed to sign the nuclear deal, Iran lied. And it reveals that the administration of former President Barack Obama also lied, for the same reason.
Netanyahu played a clip from Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif—the man who negotiated the nuclear deal with the Obama administration. Zarif said, “We never wanted to produce a bomb.” Zarif said that on April 22. Iran is still lying about its nuclear program!
“Yes you did,” Netanyahu responded. “Yes you do. And the atomic archive proves it.”
As Netanyahu said, standing next to the trove of nuclear documents, “[T]he Iran deal, the nuclear deal, is based on lies. It’s based on Iranian lies and Iranian deception; 100,000 files right here prove that they lied.”
If the Iranians “never wanted to produce a bomb”—if the program has always been for peaceful purposes—then why all the deception and lies?
Iranian Lies
When he announced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal) on July 14, 2015, President Obama said that the iaea inspectors would “be able to access any suspicious location.” He said “the iaea has also reached an agreement with Iran to get access that it needs to complete its investigation into the possible military dimensions of Iran’s past nuclear research.”
Now it is clear the iaea never received such access. Clearly, Iran’s nuclear weapons program generated piles of documents. These documents were put in secret storage—and only found in a clandestine Israeli intelligence operation. They were housed in a facility purposefully designed to keep them secret from international inspectors.
This backs up what Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry said in a January 2016 Key of David program, “America’s Nuclear Agreement With Iran”: “[Iran’s leaders have] lied and cheated about every significant promise they ever made or any agreement they ever made. There’s no unfettered access to all military sites. That’s what the West wanted, but they didn’t get it. Oh, no, stay away from our military sites. Why, this is a farce! They’re supposed to now go 10 years without building a bomb. Do you think that’s going to happen? I tell you, it is not! Bible prophecy says it is not.”
It should come as no surprise that Iran lied about its “peaceful” nuclear program and about coming clean to the iaea. Nevertheless, the document trove underscores the fact that, as Netanyahu and my father have said, the nuclear deal hinged on these lies.
But these documents prove an even bigger scandal than that. They show that, in order to get the deal done, the Obama administration lied as well!
American Lies
When President Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, an aspiring novelist named Ben Rhodes became one of his top foreign-policy advisers. He was instrumental in convincing people that the time when the Obama administration first reached out to Iranian officials was back in 2013.
Notice what the New York Times wrote on May 5, 2016: “Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented—that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country—was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.”
To sell the nuclear deal to Congress and the American people, this “boy wonder,” as the Times called him, created the false narrative that the new moderates in power in Iran were willing to dismantle their nuclear program and make peace. But as the Times brought out, “Obama’s closest advisers always understood him [Obama] to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency.”
That is astounding! Were they really this deceitful and dishonest? Did they really tell these many audacious lies?
“Today, after two years of negotiations,” said President Obama in that same July 14, 2015, speech, “the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not.”
Why did he say “two years of negotiations”? He was selling the narrative. The Iranians voted in supposed “moderates” in mid-2013. So the Obama administration wasn’t negotiating with the old Iran, but some sort of newer, kinder, gentler Iran.
This false narrative convinced enough American leaders and enough of the American people that Obama’s compromises with the “Death to America” Iranian regime were legitimate.
Iran’s government was not and is not moderate, of course, because it is led by the radical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But more importantly, the Obama administration had been negotiating with Iran for several years. It didn’t just get the idea after Iran’s elections. Formal negotiations on the nuclear deal began after the Iranian elections, but as the Times wrote, “the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the ‘moderate’ camp were chosen …” (op cit).
As those formal negotiations then progressed with the Iranians, Rhodes said that a slew of experts appeared in the media “saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” He admitted that these “experts” were using the Obama administration’s talking points! These were then amplified by journalists, who by and large supported—and still support—Obama. Everyone worked together from the narrative that “boy wonder” created.
As my father writes in his booklet Great Again, they covered themselves in a cloak of deceit. In some cases, they even bragged about their lies.
How the Left Responded
When Netanyahu came forward with 100,000 documents exposing all these facts, how did leftists react?
One strategy was to emphasize that the documents contained largely old information. Trita Parsi, chief of the National Iranian American Council, said it was as if the Mossad just “raided the iaea and not Tehran.” Of course, that avoids the question of whether Iran and Obama lied.
Another strategy was to emphasize that none of the documents showed that Iran has resumed its nuclear program. Again, this avoids the question. (Meanwhile, the nuclear deal provides benefits to Iran in the short term, then allows it to pursue a nuclear weapon.)
Another strategy in response to Netanyahu’s revelation was to claim that Obama knew the Iranians were dishonest, and that is why he needed to get them to sign a deal. A mere three years ago, that was not how Rhodes and Obama sold the deal to the public. Back then the narrative was, Moderates are in power now! They want to negotiate and dismantle their nuclear program!
In June 2009, Iran’s streets were roiling with the Green Movement. It was what some say was the largest Iranian protest since the 1979 Revolution, a major protest against the regime and fraudulent elections. International sanctions against Iran were taking effect. Other regimes across the Middle East and North Africa were being challenged and replaced. But rather than support the Iranian people, who did President Obama side with? The Iranian mullahs. It is now clear why. He had been working on a deal with them. If you listen to his speeches from early 2009, this was clearly at the top of his agenda coming into office.
Look at the terms of the deal. America gave Iran $150 billion, $1.7 billion in cash. The Obama administration also conducted a prisoner swap that turned dangerous criminals loose, and then lied to the public, saying they weren’t actually very dangerous.
It was this kind of deceit that had a great many Americans disgruntled with the Obama administration and the duplicitous politics of Washington. When Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency, he received a lot of support for exposing such deceit and criticizing the Iran deal in particular. It undoubtedly helped propel him into office in 2016. About a week after Netanyahu’s revelation, President Trump scrapped the deal.
Broken Will
Early on in Barack Obama’s presidency, my father emphasized that Obama’s views were extremely radical and that his administration would actively harm the nation. Then it emerged that President Obama was pursuing a compromise involving nuclear weapons with the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism, which refers to the United States as “the Great Satan.” Then Obama actually forced the deal through.
My father called that deal the worst foreign-policy disaster in America’s history! In his September 2015 article “Negotiating Human Survival,” he warned, “Though many don’t realize it yet, the Western world—and especially America—has been humiliated through this deal. The Iranian reaction should be enough to trumpet that fact. …
“America and Britain don’t have the will to stop Iran. The Bible prophesies the complete collapse of will and power in America and Britain. In Leviticus 26:19, God says that He will break the pride of Israel’s power. America’s capitulation in these negotiations is a prime example of this prophecy being fulfilled.”
With a few years of perspective—and 100,000 files of evidence—it is becoming more and more obvious that the Trumpet’s warnings about the Obama administration were well founded. These warnings came not from a huge bureau of overseas journalists or agents or from extensive funding or even from unusually intelligent insight. They came from the Bible and its prophecies.