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Dec. 22, 2005: The Islamic
Republic's new nuclear "negotiator," Javad Vaidi,
told representatives of the EU-3 during a brief meeting
on December 21st in Vienna that he had nothing to offer, but
that the
Europeans should come back in
January for a new round of
"negotiations."
Sources in Tehran tell FDI that the nuclear "negotiations"
with the European Union are being guided in Tehran by
Revolutionary Guards Corps political director
Yadollah Javani, a Rev. Guards general who is part of
the new generation of leaders brought into power by
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As
Mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad went to Moscow shortly before
his election.
According to a top nuclear affairs
advisor to French president Jacques Chirac, Ahmadinejad's
"Russian connection" may have played a role in the decision
to convert a suspected nuclear weapons development site at
Lavizan-Shian into a Tehran municipal park. Not long after
Lavizan-Shian was exposed as a potential nuclear site in
August 2003, Ahmadinejad took over the site, razed the
buildings, carted away the rubble, and declared it a public
park - according to the official story. But according to
President Chirac's nuclear advisor, Ahmadinejad may have
been instrumental in a ruse, devised in cooperation with
Russian intelligence, aimed at preventing international
inspection of the site. (Before and after pictures of
Lavizan-Shian are
available here.)
 Dec.
19, 2005: Iran's new president is targeting Christians and
other religious minorities for persecution, FDI
Executive Director Timmerman writes in
National Review on-line.
Dec.
12, 2005:
Iranian journalists may have been murdered in airplane
crash, critics say.
The condition of
an Iranian government C-130 Hercules packed with journalists
was so bad that the original pilot refused to fly, Iranian
sources tell FDI. The government had to bring in a back-up
pilot, who radioed ground control almost immediately after
take off from Tehran's Mehrebad airport, asking for an
emergency landing. The authorities denied three requests for
an emergency landing - including at the new Imam Khomeini
airport outside Tehran - and the plane was circling back to
Mehrebad when it crashed into an apartment complex, killing
all on board as well as bystanders on the ground. Among the
journalists on board were several known critics of the
regime.
Nov. 25, 2005:
Confronting
Iran: Why the world community must refer the Islamic
Republic to the UN Security Council for eventual sanctions,
from
Frontpagemag.com
September
17: "Former
U.S. hostages ID Ahmadinejad,"
from
Newsmax.com
FDI Executive
Director Kenneth R. Timmerman called on NYPD Commissioner
Ray Kelly to send Ahmadinejad back to Iran, in an address to
pro-democracy demonstrators in new York on Sept.
14.
Click
here for the full story and more pictures.
Sept. 15, 2005:
Stay
tuned for FDI exclusive reporting on
demonstrations at the United Nations headquarters in New
York protesting the arrival of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Former
U.S. hostages in Tehran formally identified the
terrorist-president, and took issue with a U.S. intelligence
report leaked to the press in August that their
identification of Ahmadinejad as a key interrogator of
seucrity and intellgence officials at the embassy was just a
case of "mistaken identity."
Ahmadinejad
today told reporters in New York that the Islamic Republic
was willing to transfer nuclear technology to other
"Islamic" nations, AP reported from Tehran. After meeting
with the turkish Prime Minister at the UN, he said: "Iran is
ready to transfer nuclear know-how to the Islamic countries
due to their need."
•Sept. 14, 2005:
ACTION
ALERT: PRO-DEMOCRACY GROUPS PROTEST THE ARRIVAL OF ISLAMIC
REPUBLIC PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD IN NEW YORK ON
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 14, 2005.
More
than 50 prominent Iranian-American community leaders from
Los Angeles are flying into New York on a special charter to
join protesters who have arrived by bus, train and car. Meet
them on the streets of New York across from United Nations
Plaza from 9 AM through 5 PM. The special flight from Los
Angeles has been coordinated by Marzepor
Gohar (Iranians for a Secular
Republic).
Among
the groups participating in "Iran
UN Protest 2005"
are the National-Secular Party, Iran Society, Marzeporgohar,
Alliance of Iranians (TX), National Iranian Congress,
Social-Democrats, Iranian Council, Free-Thinkers,
Pan-Iranist, Iran of Tomorrow and the Students Movement
Coordinating Committee (SMCCDI)
The
main protest will be held at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at 1st
Ave and 47th East.
At 3:30
PM, former hostages from the US Embassy in Tehran, Iranian
torture victims, and a former UN Special Rapporteur on Human
Rights will provide first-hand evidence of the involvement
of IRI president Ahmedinejad as "a practioner of and an
agent of terror of" the Islamic Republic. Bickman Tower
Hotel, 49th St & 1st avenue. Open to accredited
journalists. (Contact:
justice4Freedom@aol.com)
•September
13, 2005: "NYPD:
Deport This Man!"
Why
NY Police Commissioner Ray Kelly should escort the
terrorist-president of the IRI to Kennedy
airport.
From today's Washington Times.
Click
here for a picture from the
early days of the 1979-1981 hostage crisis in Tehran that
appeared in the Iranian press at the time. It depicts the
hostage-takers milling around surveillance cameras on the
grounds of the U.S. embassy in preparing. The young man in
the lower left hand corner is believed to be Ahmadinejad.
(Photo courtesy of Marzeporgohar)
 August
31: "Mullah's
Best Friend."
Why German Chancellor Schroeder won't win this time by
demonizing Bush. From National Review
On-line
Aug. 8, 2005: The
KDPI today released
the names of 17 Iranians killed in the clashes in northern
Iran when regime helicopter
gunships machine-gunned crowds of protesters in recent days.
The clashes have spread beyond Saqqez and Mahabad to Sine,
Sardasht, Piranshar, Marivan, Shino, Baneh, Divan and
Dareh.
On August 5, Reza
Pahlavi sent a letter
to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, urgently requesting
his "kind personal intervention to put as much pressure
as possible on the Islamic Republic of Iran to end such
practices."
Aug. 4, 2005:
The regime
unleashed combat attack helicopters on crowds of
demonstrators in the Iranian Kurdish town of Saqqez on
Thursday, killing 13 demonstrators and wounding more than
200, according to eyewitness
reports on Los Angeles-based Radio Sedaye Iran and National
Iranian TV (NITV). The killings came from a regime effort to
put down three weeks of protests in northwestern Iran
following the assassination of a prominent pro-democracy
activist on July 9
By the end of the day, the death toll in Saqqez reportedly
reached 39, and more family members collected their dead and
phoned in reports to the exile radio and TV stations in Los
Angeles. Similar unrest and regime counter-attacks was
reported in other Kurdish towns, including Piranshahr and
Sanandaj.
Exile sources tell FDI that Kurdish
Iranian leaders are calling for a general strike throughout
the region for this coming Sunday,
and are encouraging shop keepers to respect .
More information, including links to foreign news accounts
that are beginning to filter out from the region, are
available here:
http://regimechangeiran.blogspot.com/2005/08/iran-sends-in-troops-to-crush-border.html
August
2: Tonight PBS ran a
documentary
filmed in Iran on a
"reformist" newspaper, Shargh, that supported
Hashemi-Rafsanjani during the latest presidential elections,
that revealed the very real, difficult choices Iranians must
make if they remain in Iran.
Bill Moyers of PBS destroyed any
positive impact this very intriguing film may have had by
interviewing
Council on Foreign Relations Middle East "expert" Judith
Kipper, who urged the
United States to open diplomatic relations with the current
regime. Send
your comments to PBS...
Otherwise, stay tuned
for a protest
of the upcoming visit of IRI "president" Mahmoud Ahmedinejad
to the UN General Assembly in New York on September 15
by visiting this
website...
Opposition
sources say demonstrations are scheduled for tomorrow in
front of Evin
prison and in front of the
United Nations
office in Tehran, to
protest the continued detention of political prisoners by
the regime. The mother of jailed activists Akbar and
Mohammad Mohammadi vows she will protest in front of Evin
until her two sons are released.
Iranian-Americans will hold similar
demonstrations tomorrow in front of the UN office in
Washington, DC at 18th and K street between 4-7 PM, and
in front of UN headquarters in New York.
August
1, 2005: The regime today
delivered formal notification to the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) that it was
resuming
production of uranium hexafluoride
at a conversion plant in
Isfahan, and would be breaking IAEA seals on production
equipment on Aug. 2. French foreign minister Philippe
Douste-Blazy responded that Iran's actions would trigger
"an exceptional meeting of the IAEA council of governors" in
Vienna. "If despite this Iran carries on, we will need to
go to the Security Council,"
he told Agence France Presse.
July 27, 2005: Unrest
continues today in Iranian Kurdish areas.
Strikes and
protests are now in their eighth day in Mahabad and other
cities in the northwest of Iran. The protests began after
the cold-blooded murder of a Kurdish pro-democracy activist,
Shivan Qaderi, and two others on July 9 by government
security forces. Qaderi's body was then dragged through the
town behind a Toyota jeep.
(Caution:
the family has made available
graphic
photographs of
the man's dead body, to document his torture at the handsof
regime agents). Regime military forces today attacked
demonstrators in the city of Oshnavieh, reportedly killing
four people. Kurdish journalists, cited
by the BBC on
Monday, reported
that three people were killed on Monday and seven others in
previous days by regime forces.
July 23:
An Iranian
hard-line weekly close to the Revolutionary Guards Corps,
Partoo Sakhan, ran
an advertisement in today's
paper
calling for volunteers for a new
"martyrdom-seeking
division" to
carry out suicide attacks against Western and especially
U.S. targets.. In its headline, the ad quotes IRI
founder Ayatollah Khomeini: "Martyrdom-seeking operations
embody the pinnacle of a nation's greatness and the apex of
its epics." It calls on volunteers to submit two photographs
and a copy of their identity cards to a Tehran Post Office
box, to be selected for suicider training.
July 13,
2005: The
White House has issued a statement calling for the
"Unconditional release of Akbar Ganji in Iran.
"Through his now
month-long hunger strike, Mr. Ganji is demonstrating that he
is willing to die for his right to express his opinion.
President Bush is saddened by recent reports that Mr.
Ganji's health has been failing and deeply concerned that
the Iranian government has denied him access to his family,
medical treatment, and legal representation. ...The
President calls on all supporters of human rights and
freedom, and the United Nations, to take up Ganji's case and
the overall human rights situation in Iran. The President
also calls on the Government of Iran to release Mr. Ganji
immediately and unconditionally and to allow him access to
medical assistance. Mr. Ganji, please know that as you stand
for your own liberty, America stands with you." The
original statement
is here.
Here
are the
latest photos of Akbar
Ganji in
prison.
July 12 newsflash:
Thousands of protesters gathered in the streets in front of
Tehran University today, calling on the regime to free
political prisoners, including jailed journalist and author,
Akbar Ganji.
According to
callers from Tehran who gave live reports to National
Iranian TV in Los Angeles,
some 4,000 to
10,000
protestors had
gathered, despite a police crackdown. Toward 8 PM local time
(11:30 AM Eastern time), female protestors who had taken off
their chadors were being assaulted by regime riot police and
plainclothes bassiji enforcers, and hauled off to police
stations. According to local residents, the regime shut down
all phone service in the vicinity of the demonstration, so
callers had to go to other parts of the city to get
information out to overseas broadcasters.
Despite the
crackdown, NITV reported, the crowds of demonstrators
continued to grow after the evening rush
hour.
Developing...
First
photos of the demonstration are available
here.
Click on the small image to be taken to a larger picture on
the yahoo news server.
More
pictures of demonstrators carrying
banner,
demanding the
release of jailed journalist
Akbar
Ganji (courtesy of IranPressNews)
•
June 30:
The
Washington Times today
reveals that Iran's
radical new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been
positively identified by three Americans held in the 1979
seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Iran as one of their
interrogators during the hostage-crisis. "As soon
as I saw his picture in the paper, I knew that was the
bastard," said retired Army Col. Charles Scott, 73, a former
hostage who lives in Jonesboro, Ga."He was one of the top
two or three leaders. The new president of Iran is a
terrorist."
That is not the only element of
Ahmadinejad's terrorist pedigree. Other sources have
identified him as an executioner at Evin prison, whose role
was to administer the coup de grace with a revolver to
condemned political prisoners. Later, he became a founding
commander of the Qods Force, the overseas terrorist strike
force of the Revolutionary Guards.
In comments that appeared in
today's
edition of Iran News in
Tehran,
the new
president vowed to ignite a worldwide Islamic
revolution. "Thanks to the
blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen
and the Islamic revolution of 1384 [the current Iranian
year] will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice
in the world," Ahmadinejad said. "The era of oppression,
hegemonic regimes, tyranny and injustice has reached its
end. The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the
entire world."
June 25: Several
websites have posted photographs of empty polling places in
Tehran.
Regimchangeiran
has collected them on its blogspot. Here are
photos
of polling places
from Iran Focus; and traffic
webcams of main
thoroughfares in Tehran on election day, virtually empty of
traffic, thanks to SOSIran.
June 24: Illegal
ballot boxes in California.
The Islamic Republic has once
again rented space in a Los Angeles hotel and in other
locations to place illegal ballot boxes for the second round
of the presidential election farce.
SMCDDI has put out an urgent action,
calling on pro-freedom
activists to go to the Crown Plaza Hotel at Commerce Casino
at 6300 E. Telegraph, Commerce CA 90040 to protest the
hotel's collaboration with the Islamic Republic regime. The
direct phone number of the hotel manager, Mr. Joe Zarrahy,
is 323-823-4001. His assistant's direct line is
323-832-4001. FDI has phoned Mr. Zarrahy to confirm the
presence of the illegal ballot box and will post more
information as it becomes
available.Thanks
to your calls, the regime closed this polling
station.
•
June 22: The pro-Rafsanjani
forces are organizing in the United States, attempting to
sway public opinion and the media into believing the
legitimacy of the presidential election farce. It's not
surprising that they are counting on the support from the
Left in America. (This
link will take you to a press release,
off-site, from the
Progressive Newswire). This is yet another attempt by regime
supporters to spread pro-regime propaganda in the United
States.
FDI believes the current election in
Iran is more aptly termed a selection, since all
eight candidates allowed to run (seven finally appeared on
the ballot last Friday) were vetted and approved by the
Islamic fundamentalist Council of Guardians. None of the
selected candidates supports dismantling absolute clerical
rule (Velayat-e faghih) or the establishment of a secular
government.
•
Read this extraordinary account, from
Marzeporgohar, of the efforts by pro-democracy activists in
the United States to prevent illegal ballot boxes from being
used in California and in Canada.
June 17, 2005: Flash: The Student
Movement Coordinating Committee for Democracy in Iran and
other pro-democracy groups are calling on supporters to
phone or fax hotels that are hosting regime ballot boxes in
the United States. Click
here to download a PDF file with the
names, addresses and fax
numbers (75 kb). Click
here to read the SMCCDI urgent action.
FDI Executive Director Kenneth R.
Timmerman calls the "selection" in Iran today a "sham
election." Read
his article in today's Washington
Times.
June 15, 2005: Opposition
coalition urges Iranians to boycott election. An unusual
coalition of opposition leaders, human rights activists, and
community leaders in exile have called on Iranians to
boycott the "rigged, anti-democratic " June 17 presidential
selection in Iran. In a letter they released to explain
their move, the signers noted that since "the mullahs
consider any vote in the election to be a vote for the
regime," it was better for Iranians to boycott the polls.
Signers included prominent supporters of monarchy,
constitutionalists, members of the center-Left National
Front, women's leaders, writers, and broadcasters.
Read
the full text of the declaration and the list of
co-signers.
Police today broke up a protest outside
Tehran's Evin prison by more than 100 people demanding the
release of all political prisoners, Reuters reported from
Tehran. One of the organizers, Seifollah Akbari, said that
police with batons had beaten several demonstrators and
detained two women and a man. Protesters were demanding the
release of journalist Akbar Ganji, who published a scathing
investigative book on former (and possibly future) president
Hashemi-Rafsanjani and his responsibility for ordering the
murder of Iranian dissidents.
June 12, 2005: Tehran women protest
regime. Iranian women gathered today in front of the
University of Tehran to protest human rights abuses by the
regime. Click
here to see a picture of the demonstration,
courtesy of the the Iranian
Student News Agency. The sign reads: "We are the Children of
Cyrus the Great. We are the messengers of human
rights."
• June 11, 2005: FDI
Executive Director Kenneth
R. Timmerman introduced Iranian
freedom fighter Roozbeh
Farahanipour to the
Democracy
Celebration rally on the
National
Mall in Washington, DC, hosted by
Citizens United. A
transcript of the event is now available
from Marzeporgohar.
June 8, 2005: LA opposition to hold
hunger strike. Opposition leaders in Los Angeles
announced today they would hold a hunger strike this
Saturday, June 11, in sympathy with hunger strikers in Iran
who are protesting the re-arrest of Akbar Ganji and other
journalists. The LA hunger strikers will be lead by Reza
Pahlavi at the Los Angeles Federal building in
Westwood.
May 28: Opposition accuses regime of
assassination in Paris. Opposition leaders in California
held a
memorial service in Los Angeles
today for Dr. Kasra Vafadari, who
was found dead ten days ago in his apartment in Paris,
stabbed in the neck. Dr. Vafadari, a Zoroastrian cultural
and political figure, had taken French citizenship and
lectured on pre-Islamic religions at the University of
Paris. (See
IranPressNews in Farsi). So far,
the French authorities have called his murder a domestic
squabble, not a political assassination. However, if top
counter-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere picks up the
case and determines that Vafadari was assassinated, it will
be the first time since 1997 that the regime has chosen to
strike at dissidents living outside of Iran. The previous
assassination campaign claimed more than 100 victims, and
was led by former president Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who is
jockeying to stage a comeback in the June 17 elections.
May 26: Oppositions demand the U.S.
close illegal regime voting booths in California.
Opposition activists Roozbeh Farahanipour
(Marzepourgohar party), Aryo Pirouznia (Students
coordinating Committee) and Roxanne Ganji are calling on the
U.S. authorities
to prevent the Islamic Republic from setting up illegal
voting booths for the upcoming
presidential election on June 17.
May
25: Referendum advocate calls for U.S. to reject
elections. In Washington, DC, former reformist publisher
and regime official Mohsen Sazegarah told an audience at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy today that "the
United States should announce that it will not recognize
this election or any election [in Iran[ until there
is a change in the constitution." He added that "unpublished
polls" in Iran showed that "only 28% of the voters intend to
vote" in the upcoming presidential election.
May 24: Sec. Rice blasts mullahs. In a speech to the annual
meeting of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice warned Iran's
"unelected leaders" that the day will come when their people
will demand the same rights and liberties recently sought by
Iraqis and Lebanese. Read the story from
today's New York Sun.
May
23, 2005: "Reformist" candidates barred.
The
Guardians Council barred all but six
candidates for the upcoming
presidential elections, spurring "reformist" politicians in
Tehran to join opposition calls for an election boycott.
Left in the running are re-tread Ali Akbar
Hashemi-Rafsanjani, former police chief Mohammad Bagher
Qalibaf; former radio and television chief Ali Larijani;
Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; former parliamentary
speaker Mahdi Karroubi; and former Rev. Guards military
commander, Mohsen Rezai. A prominent journalist, Akbar
Ganji, has joined other opposition leaders in calling for a
boycott of the elections,
Iran Press Service reports. On
Monday, Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, stung by criticism,
wrote to Guardians secretary
general Ayatollah Jannati, asking him to reconsider his
decision and to reinstate the candidacies of former
Education and Training Minister Mustafa Moin and Vice
President for Physical Training Mohsen Mehralizadeh,
considered "reform" candidates. (Click here for an
RFE/RL
report).
May 19, 2005: The Senate Foreign
Relations committee today held a hearing on Iran's
nuclear program and what the United States can do to keep
Iran from going nuclear. Geof Kemp and George Perkovitch
(respectively, from the Nixon Center and Carnegie) urged
Senators to mix a new cookie dough of "incentives" to
encourage the mullahs not to do anything irresponsible with
their new nuclear weapons. Only William Samii, of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Libery dared to suggest that the United States
should provide help to pro-democracy forces inside Iran as
the best possible alternative to war. PDF
files with prepared testimony can be found on the Committee
website.
MEK/MKO
disputes Human Rights report. A U.S. representative of
the National Council of Resistance in Iran, a front
organization for the Mujahedin-e Khalq, tells
Radio Farda that a 28-page Human
Rights Watch report on MEK abuse of former MEK members in
Iraq is a pack of lies, and that former MEK dissidents are
actually Iranian government intelligence agents. But former
MEK member Mohammed Hussein Sobhani says he was imprisoned
in the MEK's Camp Ashraf in Iraq for eight and a half years,
transferred to the Iraqi security service for 35 days, then
held in Saddam's infamous Abu Ghreib prison for another
year. Other witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch tell
similar stories. Georgetown
University professor Raymond Tanter has come out in support
of the MEK, (see also
a
Washington Institute Policy Watch
paper Tanter wrote with Patrick
Clawson) as have pro-MEK websites such as IranFocus.
Read the HR Watch report
on their website, or
download
a pdf copy here. MEK dissidents
have established their own website with individual stories
of abuse by MEK leaders Maryam and Massoud Rajavi,
iran-interlink.org.
May
16, 2005: Referendum disputes. In a statement issued by
the party's European representative today, the Iran People's
Party (Hezb-e Mellat-e Iran) blasted supporters of the
referendum movement for claiming the IPP had agreed to take
part in an upcoming strategy conference in Gothenberg,
Sweden, planned for May 26-27. Recalling an earlier
statement issued in Iran, the IPP's European representative
reiterated that "referendum is our national right; however
due to the current situation in Iran, a national referendum
is simply not possible" at the present time. IPP leaders
tell FDI they fear the mullahs will stage a fake referendum
(monitored, say, by Jimmy Carter), similar to a Soviet-style
election. Referendum supporter Mohsen Sazegarah, however,
believes the momentum behind the movement has already built
up sufficient pressure to make the risk of holding an
election too great for the regime to take.
• May 15, 2005: Call for
boycott. Housang Amirahmadi, a long-time advocate of
lifting sanctions on the Islamic Republic, has declared that
he intends
to run for president in the upcoming June 17 elections in
Iran. Mr. Amirahmadi founded the
American-Iranian Council, a lobbying group that has
consistently supported the so-called "reform" movement in
Iran and encouraged the United States to reconcile with the
Islamic republic. Now that the reform movement has declared
its own death, Mr. Amirahmadi is trying to resurrect a new
sham movement of regime supporters in a last, desperate
attempt to save the dying clerical regime. FDI urges
Iranians not to fall for more false promises of reform, and
instead to boycott the June 18 elections.
• April 26, 2005:
Iranian-Americans blast anti-sanctions activists.
The Iranian-American Jewish Federation (IAJF), led by
Sam Kermanian, has joined the growing ranks of
Iranian-American groups to expose the agenda of an
anti-sanctions lobbying group that shares many of the same
policy objectives as the Islamic Republic. The National
Iranian American Council (www.niacouncil.org) has been
seeking for years to organize Iranian-Americans to lobby
Congress against the sanctions and in favor of open economic
ties with the clerical regime in Tehran. Also opposing
NIAC's latest efforts to create false facts (such as a
"scientific" poll showing that Iranian-Americans want
sanctions to be lifted so they can invest in the Islamic
Republic of Iran is the nationalist, secular Marzepourgohar
movement, led by Roozbeh Farahanipour. Click
here for the full text of the IAJF and MPG
statements.
Earlier, the Iranian-American
Republican Council denounced the NIAC
poll, which claimed that four out
of five Iranian-Americans opposed the
Iran Freedom Support Act
(see April 14, below). The IARC urged
Iranian-americans to make their views known directly by
phoning or writing to members of Congress in support of HR
282, and demanded NIAC's "immediate and clear retraction
[of] false claims of representing the views of
Iranian-Americans."
• April 25, 2005: Catholic
University sponsors Iranian Islamic scholars to
an
interfaith conference in Washington,
DC on April 25-26, 2005. The
invitation of Iranian clerics, many of whom lecture at top
universities in Tehran where their teachings are regularly
vetted by the regime, was greeted with suspicion at the
State Department but finally approved at the urging of the
White House, FDI has learned. Most of Catholic University's
Iranian guests are considered "intellectual" ayatollahs, not
"political" ayatollahs, and will be speaking about Islam and
democracy...
One exception appears to be
Dr.
Mehdi Sanaei, the deputy for
research of the Islamic Culture and Relationship
Organization in Tehran, who lists degrees in political
science and international relations. The 36-year old Sanaei
spent three years as "cultural counselor" of the Islamic
Republic of Iran embassy to Kazakhstan from 1995-1998, and
the next four years as a diplomat in Russia. The regime
targeted both countries throughout the 1990s as sources of
nuclear and missile technologies, using intelligence
operatives working under cover as diplomats, students, and
private businessmen.
April 14,
2005:
[From VOA
News] A U.S. congressional committee has approved
legislation seeking to strengthen existing U.S. sanctions on
Iran and put more pressure on Iran's government on the issue
of weapons of mass destruction, while providing greater
support for Iranian democracy groups.
The Iran Freedom Support
Act declares it should be U.S. policy to support human
rights and pro-democracy forces in the United States and
abroad opposing what it calls the non-democratic government
of Iran.
HR 282, whose authors
say is supported by some 140 House members, was approved
Wednesday by the House Middle East Subcommittee chaired by
Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. "Iran is the full
ticket. It has medium and long-range missile programs, it is
believed to have (a) chemical and biological weapons
program, it is pursuing nuclear capabilities, it remains the
most active state sponsor of terrorism in the world," he
said. [Read
complete VOA dispatch]
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