Iran rebuffs US offer of direct talks

American drone capture embarrassment broadcast on TV in Tehran

DUBAI — Iran’s highest authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, yesterday slapped down an offer of direct talks made by US Vice-President Joe Biden last week, saying they would not solve the problem between them.

“Some naive people like the idea of negotiating with America, however, negotiations will not solve the problem,” Khamenei said in a speech to officials and members of Iran’s air force carried on his official website. “If some people want American rule to be established again in Iran, the nation will rise up to face them,” he said. “American policy in the Middle East has been destroyed and Americans now need to play a new card. That card is dragging Iran into negotiations.”

Khamenei made his comments just days after Biden said the United States was prepared to meet bilaterally with the Iranian leadership. With traditional fiery rhetoric, Khamenei lambasted Biden’s offer, saying that since the 1979 revolution the United States had gravely insulted Iran and continued to do so with its threat of military action.

“You take up arms against the nation of Iran and say: ‘negotiate or we fire.’ But you should know that pressure and negotiations are not compatible and our nation will not be intimidated by these actions,” he added.

In Washington, US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland brushed off Khamenei’s remarks and urged Iran to show up in Almaty “prepared to discuss real substance” either in a group setting or in bilateral talks.

“As the Iranians well know, the ball is in the Iranians’ own court,” she told reporters. “We’ve always said that action on the Iranian side would be matched by action on our side, so it’s really up to Iran to engage if it wants to see sanctions eased,” said Nuland, adding that failure to address the nuclear concerns would bring more pressure on Tehran.

Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor said he was sceptical the negotiations in Almaty could yield a result, telling Israel Radio that the United States needed to demonstrate to Iran that “all options were still on the table.”

Yesterday’s comments followed another jab at the United States: this week Iran’s state TV broadcast a video allegedly extracted from an advanced CIA spy drone captured in December 2011 after crossing into Iranian airspace from Afghanistan. Iran has long claimed it managed to reverse-engineer the RQ-170 Sentinel, and that it’s now capable of launching its own production line for the unmanned aircraft.

After initially saying only that a drone had been lost near the Afghan-Iran border, American officials eventually confirmed that the Sentinel had been monitoring Iran’s military and nuclear facilities. Washington asked for it back but Iran refused, and instead released photos of Iranian officials studying the aircraft.

The video, which aired late Wednesday on Iranian state TV, shows an aerial view of an airport and a city, said to be a US drone base and Kandahar, Afghanistan.

“We were able to definitively access the data of the drone, once we brought it down,” said the chief of the Revolutionary Guard’s airspace division, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, in the TV broadcast.

In an attempt to embarrass Washington, Iran has claimed to have captured several American drones, most recently in December, when Tehran said it seized a Boeing-designed ScanEagle drone — a less sophisticated aircraft — after it entered Iranian airspace over the Persian Gulf. US officials said there was no evidence to support the latest claims.

Herald with AP, Reuters