BEIRUT: A former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has described claims that Hezbollah and Iran were excluded from an annual terror threat report because of a format change as "a flat lie."
“The people who would say this format change are... lying weasels,” John Bolton, the fiery conservative who served as an American envoy to the U.N. under the Bush administration, told Fox News in a television interview Tuesday night.
A U.S. official had Tuesday dismissed speculation that Washington was softening its position towards Hezbollah and Iran after the two were excluded from 2015 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community report.
In a statement released by the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, the official said the two were excluded from the 2015 report despite being named in previous reports because of a "format change."
“The format of this year’s report is exactly the same as last year’s report,” Bolton noted.
He attributed the exclusion of Iran and Hezbollah to the U.S. nuclear talks with Iran, speculating that Tehran’s negotiators urged their American counterparts to “start going easy on us on this terrorism stuff.”
Bolton, known for his hawkish foreign policy positions, said Iran was seeking to relax U.S. sanctions imposed on it over its nuclear program, as well as the punitive measures it has been facing since being added to the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list in 1984.
“This was a concession I think by the administration relating to the nuclear negotiations [that] you will not find in the signed deal,” he said.
In the 2014 terror report, the National Intelligence director said that Iran and Hezbollah continue to directly threaten the interests of U.S. allies. The report claimed that Hezbollah had increased its “global terrorist activity.”
In the latest report, the terrorism section focuses exclusively on the rise of militant groups like ISIS and the Nusra Front.
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