Iran has a legalized system for buying Uranium ore. And we're all getting used to it as routine:
Iran plans to buy 950 tonnes of uranium ore from Kazakhstan over three years and expects to get Russian help in producing nuclear fuel, its top nuclear official said in remarks published on Saturday.
The acquisition would not violate Iran's landmark 2015 deal with world powers over its disputed nuclear program as the deal did not set limits on the Islamic Republic's supplies of uranium ore.
Which I tend to think is designed to supply North Korea with the raw materials (mentioned somewhere in this data dump) to build nukes for Iran.
This is only the most obvious way that Iran can be technically in compliance with that horrible Kerry-authored nuclear deal with Iran without leaving the path to nuclear weapons.
The other way to be in apparent technical compliance is to further limit the scope of the deal's enforcement gaze even within Iran to only sites approved by Iran:
"Iran has not conducted any uranium enrichment or related research and development activities" at its Fordo nuclear plant, the IAEA added. [emphasis added]
Remember, we don't inspect Iran. The IAEA does. And if we point the IAEA at particular locations, we risk revealing sources and methods. Worst of all, the IAEA can only inspect in approved locations. Like the Fordo plant.
So the correct assessment is that the IAEA hasn't seen any prohibited activities in the narrow range of areas they are allowed to look. Which is a different thing altogether, you must admit.
Oh, and what the Hell does this part from that first article even mean?
The report by the Iranian Students' News Agency ISNA comes a day after the U.N. atomic watchdog said Iran's official stock of enriched uranium had fallen by half after large amounts stuck in pipes was recategorised as unrecoverable under a process agreed with the major powers. [emphasis added]
Uranium ore is stuck in pipes? Like dropping your wedding band down the sink drain? Oh well? Write it off? It is unrecoverable? Really?
Did the uranium ore just disappear the way socks vanish from dryers?
The agreement process allows this?
Remember, the public deal itself is only part of the deal. Even apart from initial secret side deals, the process to carry it out has to be agreed to by all the parties, including Iran and their friends.
What's next? The IAEA lets Iran write off some more uranium because the dog ate it?
How could Iran not be in technical compliance with the deal the way it is run?
Have a super sparkly day.
UPDATE: The Trump administration should release the text of all the parts of the deal. (What is public is bad enough.) You can only imagine how bad the material we haven't seen is given the Iranian reaction to the possibility that they might become public:
Senior Iranian officials are warning the Trump administration about disclosing secret agreements related to the nuclear deal that have long been hidden from the public by the Obama administration, according to recent comments that prompted pushback from senior sources on Capitol Hill.
If the deal is so great for America, why didn't the Senate get to vote on this treaty-like deal? And why can't we see all of it?
And remember all the experts and journalists organized by Obama's Rasputin, Ben Rhodes, to praise the deal didn't have all the documents to make that judgment.
