Senator Bob Corker on Thursday presided over the first in a series of hearings examining the nuclear agreement with Iran. The hearing included testimony from Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew.
Below are excerpts from Senator Corker’s opening statement.
“We’ve been through an incredible journey. We began 20 months or so ago with a country that was a rogue nation that had a boot on its neck, and our goal was to dismantle their program. We’ve ended up in a situation where the deal that’s on the table basically codifies the industrialization of their nuclear program. It’s an amazing, amazing transition that has occurred.”
“So the inspection entity that we're relying upon to find out whether Iran is cheating, we're not even going to have access to that agreement…There are qualities to this [agreement] that, unfortunately, I'm told I cannot get into. But there are qualities to this [inspections] program that would not be unlike causing athletes to just mail in their own urine specimens in the mail and us believing that's where it -- that it came from them.”
“We’ve all been out to Walter Reed and we’ve visited these incredible heroes that have lost in some cases two arms and a leg or in some cases two legs and two arms. We see them all over the country. They’re living with this today. This is the country we’re dealing with; the country that created some of the most disturbing types of methods to maim Americans that have ever been seen. They [Iran] tried to kill an ambassador here in Washington, D.C. not long ago.”
“So, what I’ve seen, our secretary—I know he’s developed tremendous warmth with Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif and he talks about it often—but what I think you’ve actually done in these negotiations is codify a perfectly aligned pathway for Iran to get a nuclear weapon just by abiding by this agreement...”
“From my perspective, Mr. Secretary, I’m sorry, but it’s not unlike a hotel guest who leaves only with a hotel bathrobe on his back. I believe you’ve been fleeced. In the process of being fleeced, what you’ve really done here is you have turned Iran from being a pariah to now Congress being a pariah. A few weeks ago you were saying that no deal is better than a bad deal. And I know that there’s no way you could have possibly been thinking about war a few weeks ago. No way.”
“I believe that you have crossed a new threshold in U.S. foreign policy where now it is the policy of the United States to enable a state sponsor of terror to obtain an industrialized nuclear development program that has, as we know, only one real need. That is what you’re here today to ask us to support.”