US Congress to Begin Hearings on Iran Nuclear Agreement

The US Congress begins its review of a nuclear agreement reached between world powers and Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, on Thursday.

Hearings start in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where three principals of the Obama administration tasked with crafting the deal – US Secretary of State John Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew – plan to testify.

Obama has been engaging his critics by questioning their track records on foreign affairs, their smarts and their motives. Earlier in the week, he said the Iran deal his team brokered was the “smarter” approach to solving the decades-long conflict, and suggested that its critics were the same people whose polices led to the second Iraq War.

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Also on Wednesday, the House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee’s Task Force on Terrorism Financing held a hearing related to the nuclear deal. One expert, Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the agreement is set to cancel certain sanctions on Iran that were intended to target its overall behavior.

Sanctions were put on entities such as the Central Bank of Iran for conduct-based activities not limited to nuclear activities but also including money laundering and terrorism, Dubowitz said. “The JCPOA requires the lifting of financial sanctions – including the SWIFT [Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication] sanctions – prior to a demonstrable change in Iran’s illicit conduct.

“The big winner from the unraveling of European and American sanctions,” Dubowitz continued, “will be the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps].”

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