The Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011 (pdf) seeks to block the ban proposed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar within a 1-million-acre buffer zone around the nation’s most iconic national park. Conservation groups say the move is needed to protect the Colorado River watershed and to prevent industrialization of an area heavily reliant on outdoor recreation and tourism.

“We are disappointed in this jobs-killing legislation,” said Roger Clark, air and energy program director at Grand Canyon Trust. “Uranium mining threatens thousands of tourism-related jobs in northern Arizona. Salazar has found the right balance between protecting Grand Canyon and the $700 million tourism industry while leaving promising mining areas further from the national park open to exploration and mining.”

McCain countered that Salazar’s move would be a job-killer.

“The Department’s proposed mining withdrawal would kill hundreds of potential jobs to ‘save’ the Grand Canyon from the same form of uranium mining that conservation groups once supported,” McCain said. “It also threatens to unravel the spirit of the Arizona Wilderness Act and will raise significant questions for future Wilderness bills if agreements to accommodate responsible land uses are neither genuine nor enduring.”

House sponsors of the bill include Arizona Republicans Jeff Flake and Trent Franks.

“It is unconscionable that Senator McCain and Representatives Flake and Franks are seeking to undermine protections for Grand Canyon and its watershed and showing so little regard for the people of Arizona, including all of those who expressed strong support for protecting these lands from uranium mining and the pollution it produces,” said Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter.

The Grand Canyon has been under growing pressure from surrounding mining and power-generating activities, including haze from coal-fired power plants.

Colorado is increasingly in the crosshairs of uranium mining and milling controversy, including a legacy of contamination from the state’s uranium heyday in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Udall, cousin of Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, sent a letter to GAO officials Thursday asking the agency to “undertake an examination of the value of minerals extracted and the amount of revenues collected in fiscal year 2010.” U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., also signed the letter.

“The U.S Department of the Interior manages approximately 700 million acres of subsurface federal minerals on public land and 1.7 billion acres on the Outer Continental Shelf,” the lawmakers wrote. “These minerals include hard-rock minerals — such as gold, silver and copper — that are available without having to pay a royalty.

“It is vitally important that the American taxpayer receives a fair return for the mineral resources extracted from federal land.”

The lawmakers want the GAO to prepare a report on the minerals being extracted under the 1872 Mining Law, which does not require royalties, and various other mineral leasing acts. Specifically, they want to know:

• The amount of minerals extracted from federal lands and the Outer Continental Shelf and the estimated dollar value of those minerals.

• How much the federal government collected for those minerals, including royalties, rents, and bonuses, and how that amount was determined.

Mark Udall, who has previously co-sponsored legislation to reform the 1872 Mining Law, also would like to see uranium mining regulated under the Mineral Leasing Act, which does require royalty payments for the extraction of oil, gas and coal from federal lands.

Gold prices have skyrocketed in recent years, with Newmont Mining of Denver – the second largest gold mining company in the world — seeing its profits double between 2008 and 2010. Environmentalists want such companies to pay royalties for mining on public lands.

“With record high metals prices and skyrocketing industry profits, it’s time for mining companies to pay their fair share,” said Lauren Pagel, policy director for Earthworks. “When it comes to our public lands, we need sound fiscal policies, not an outdated mining law that lets mining companies fleece taxpayers out of millions.”

Advocacy groups also hope the GAO report will help put an end to subsidies and tax breaks for oil and gas companies currently reaping billions in profits.

“Oil and gas companies are robbing American taxpayers blind,” said Matt Garrington, deputy director of the Checks & Balances Project. “ExxonMobil and BP are making billions and can pay a fair price for developing publicly owned oil and gas resources. The report requested by Rep. Grijalva and Sen. Udall is an important step to stopping the giveaway of our public lands to Big Oil.”

The American Petroleum Institute counters the industry is merely taking the same deductions and breaks available to other businesses, while seeking to offset the enormous up-front capital costs of oil and gas production.

“Contrary to what some in politics and the media have said, the oil and natural gas industry currently enjoys no unique tax credits or deductions,” API officials argue (pdf).

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

The New York Times reported on a memo written by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in January about a paucity of U.S. policy options toward Iran if it continued with illicit uranium enrichment but stopped short of possessing a bomb. It’s a real problem — the proliferation equivalent of a bank robber pointing to the bulge in his pocket. (Does he have a gun or not?) By not declaring itself a nuclear power, something Obama administration officials say won’t happen for at least a year*, Iran won’t have opted out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but it will have increased its deterrent force by keeping its adversaries guessing about its actual nuclear capability. Gates’ memo asked if the U.S. was ready for that situation.

[Security1] Whether it was or wasn’t then, it’s pretty easy to see administration policy since then inclining to answer Gates’ question. It’s looking more and more like President Obama — who was so roundly vilified for deigning to propose, let alone pursue, a year’s worth of diplomatic outreach to the Iranian leadership — will be the one who shepherds an economic sanctions package on the Iranian regime’s key organs through the United Nations Security Council. After winning China’s acquiescence; spending almost a year and a half rebuilding relations with Russia; and leveraging new and less patient leadership at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the administration has pieces in position to unite the international community against Iran’s uranium enrichment. Even Obama’s chief Iran critic, his 2008 presidential rival Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), had to concede Wednesday, “I never thought a policy of engagement with Iran’s rulers would succeed, but I understand why the president pursued it.”

Beyond Iran, however, is the general problem of a hostile power nearing nuclear breakout capacity, something Gates’ memo correctly identifies as yielding unclear sanction under the NPT. Maybe that’s why next month, the signatories of the NPT will gather in New York to strengthen its provisions. And according to administration officials, one of the areas the U.S. wants to focus on is creating new rules for when signatories face greater penalties for drifting into noncompliance, perhaps through increased verification authorities and responsibilities for the IAEA — something last week’s nuclear security summit in Washington didn’t really substantively address — allowing the international community to have earlier warning into prospective breakout capabilities. The penalties that would come into force in such a case remain to be proposed, debated and accepted or rejected, of course. But the whole discussion speaks to the lacunae that Gates frets over in his memo.

What should be clear is that the memo doesn’t propose going to war, nor does it make war more likely. Administration officials have never ruled out any option on Iran. But they have leaned, at every step, on measures that attract wide international support and deny that support to Iran — from diplomatic outreach; to intensifying diplomacy when word of the Qom reactor leaked; to the proposal for enriching Iran’s uranium to a bomb-incapable state in a third country; to, as the result of the first three, economic sanctions. The administration shows no sign of changing that fundamental strategy.

Seen from that perspective, the prospect of military action, ahead of a push to sanction Iran at the U.N., would place that strategy at risk. The coalition Obama has stitched together might fray if other countries view the sanctions maneuver as a pretext for military strikes. Hence Gates’ own clarifying statement:

The New York Times sources who revealed my January memo to the National Security Advisor mischaracterized its purpose and content. With the Administration’s pivot to a pressure track on Iran earlier this year, the memo identified next steps in our defense planning process where further interagency discussion and policy decisions would be needed in the months and weeks ahead. The memo was not intended as a “wake up call” or received as such by the President’s national security team. Rather, it presented a number of questions and proposals intended to contribute to an orderly and timely decision making process. There should be no confusion by our allies and adversaries that the United States is properly and energetically focused on this question and prepared to act across a broad range of contingencies in support of our interests.

*Clarification, 9:28 a.m.: The National Iranian-American Council takes issue with my “at least a year” formulation about Iranian nuclear capabilities. Gen. David Petraeus, as far as I’m aware, first gave that back-of-the-envelope assessment to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. And while other administration officials have given further-out assessments of that capability, I leaned on that one for two reasons: first, because all of them, by definition, agree we’re not going to see an Iranian capability for a nuclear weapon this year; and second, because even factoring in that pessimistic assessment, those officials still argue that we don’t have to move to a more bellicose posture from a policy perspective. But NIAC is right, of course, that Gen. James Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put the time frame between two and five years; and Cartwright used to oversee our nuclear weapons.

Iran’s foreign minister said in remarks reported Wednesday that he opposes sending the country’s enriched uranium abroad under a tentative deal negotiated with the United States and other big powers last month. The foreign minister’s remarks cast further doubt on the deal, which the Obama administration had hoped would defuse a standoff over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, told the student news agency ISNA that Iran would consider a simultaneous swap of its nuclear fuel for other uranium. But he told ISNA, “Definitely, Iran will not send its 3.5 percent-enriched fuel out.”

Don’t know how much enthusiasm would be there would be for such a substantial renegotiation of the deal. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ruled it out. But the Obama administration also doesn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about sanctions, as Iran has been under U.S. sanctions for 30 years and multilateral sanctions will be extremely hard to enforce.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Flickr: Daniella Zalcman)

Provocations from Iran accelerated this week, as the ruling Iranian ayatollah gave a speech that suggested Iran would reject a nuclear-fuel deal reached in Vienna last week, while his regime violently suppressed a new round of anti-regime demonstrations across several cities. Yet a group of former diplomats convened by a leading pro-opposition Iranian-American organization urged the Obama administration not to abandon diplomacy.

[Security1]Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program have been stalled over the Iranian leadership’s reluctance to endorse a deal offered by the United States and its allies — and accepted by Iranian negotiators in Vienna — to enrich 75 percent of Iran’s uranium stock in Russia and France, yielding a form of uranium suitable for civilian nuclear power but not an atomic bomb. Iran’s foreign minister said that it was not rejecting the deal, but wished to seek still-unspecified modifications. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, however, declared during a trip to Morocco that “we are not altering” the proposal.

Leaders of both countries issued heated rhetoric. President Obama, in a statement issued late Tuesday night, referred to the Vienna offer and said, “It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.” While not responding directly to Obama, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, Iran’s supreme leader, derided American outreach in a speech commemorating the 30th anniversary of the revolutionary siege of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. “Whenever they smile at the officials of the Islamic revolution, when we carefully look at the situation, we notice that they are hiding a dagger behind their back,” Khamanei said, deriding diplomacy with the U.S. as “naive and perverted.”

Yet at a forum in the Dirksen Senate Office Building convened on Wednesday by the National Iranian-American Council — an Iranian-American education and advocacy group that gained new precedence after denouncing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in June as illegitimate — a few retired diplomats urged Obama to give diplomacy more time to work, even if it meant retracting Clinton’s refusal to amend the Vienna offer. “Political isolation is something the Iranians are very much concerned about,” said Thomas Pickering, who served as undersecretary of state in the Clinton administration, arguing that continued diplomacy gave the U.S. the leverage of presenting Iran with a united coalition.

If Iran, in its formal response to the Vienna offer, rejects the idea of either Russia or France enriching uranium for it, “there are ways to get around that,” said Greg Thielmann, a former top nuclear intelligence official at the State Department.

There are several bills moving through the Congress to place new economic sanctions on Iran, including one sponsored in the House by Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and another in the Senate from Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). But retired Amb. John Limbert, one of the U.S. diplomats held hostage at the embassy in 1979 and 1980, pronounced himself “very skeptical” of sanctioning Iran. “It’s easy to talk about smart sanctions,” he said, “but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one.” Instead, Limbert contended, sanctions would most likely “create shortages and artificial, wonderful opportunities for hoarding” that benefit “those with the best connections to the regime” at the expense of the population. Thielmann agreed, saying sanctions risked “strengthening the regime, when it’s meant to do the opposite.”

The clash between the regime and the Iranian population was on display today in Iran, as demonstrators in Tehran, Shiraz, Rasht, and Tabriz defied a regime order not to use the anniversary of the embassy seizure to protest the regime. Police and regime militiamen beat demonstrators and fired tear gas canisters to disrupt the gatherings. It is unknown whether anyone was killed in the clashes. But at the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said he “hope[s] greatly that violence will not spread.”

Trita Parsi, the head of the National-Iranian American Council, reiterated his support for the demonstrators. “The demonstrations and the reaction of the government shows the aspirations of the Iranian people for fairness, human rights and democracy has not been crushed,” Parsi told TWI. “It shows the opposition’s timeline is correct: this is not a hundred-meter sprint, but a marathon” to achieve Iranian democracy.

Yet in recent days, articles in The Weekly Standard and The Atlantic have accused Parsi of loyalty to the very Iranian regime he has opposed. The Standard’s online editor, Michael Goldfarb, called Parsi “the Iranian regime’s man in Washington,” while Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic blogged last week that Parsi “does a lot of leg-work for the Iranian regime.” When asked by Mother Jones to provide evidence for the accusation, Goldberg clarified that while he “assume[d]” Parsi didn’t “take Iranian government money or Iranian government instruction,” Parsi “does argue quite vociferously against sanctions, and he does tend to present, at least in my reading, a fairly benevolent understanding of Iran’s rulers and their motivations.”

Parsi described his opposition to sanctions and opposition to Ahmadinejad as two halves of the same coin. His organization “strongly stands for human rights, but also opposes war and sanctions for that reason, and favors diplomacy,” he said. He denied taking money from the Iranian regime, saying, “Our records are open and our tax returns are on our Website, and the only people who have made [such allegations] are people with a diametrically opposite political view.”

Parsi continued, “You can debate us on the merits of your policy prescriptions, or you can attack, smear and character assassinate us. Unfortunately, due to the weakness of their position, they’ve chosen the latter. That’s what’s motivating these attacks.”

At Parsi’s Hill forum, Limbert, the former U.S. diplomat held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries, said that the Obama administration had no choice but to negotiate with Iran and should not be too distracted by Ahmadinejad’s character. “I don’t buy the argument that you legitimize Ahmadinejad [through negotiation, since] Iran is more than Ahmadinejad, and he will not be there forever,” Limbert said. “What’s the alternative? To continue what we’ve done for 30 years? That has not had any results.”

Update: This story originally referred to the National Iranian-American Council as a lobby group, when in fact it is an education and advocacy association.

Iran has formally asked for changes to an International Atomic Energy Agency proposal to ship nuclear fuel out of Iran for reprocessing abroad.

The response represents a setback in attempts by the international community to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. Just last week, negotiators from the U.S., France and Russia left the table with Iranian counterparts in Vienna optimistic that they had hammered out a deal acceptable to all parties, including Iran.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today issued a notice of withdrawal of nearly 1 million acres of BLM and U.S. Forest Service land around the Grand Canyon from new mining claims for the next two years to allow for more study and analysis.

The move drew the praise of conservation groups such as the Pew Environment Group, which has been hammering on the antiquated 1872 mining law and the pressing need for reform in light of thousands of new mining claims for minerals such as uranium, copper and gold in and around some of the nation’s most treasured national parks.