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Reza'i: Iranian Nation To Make 'Final Decision' in Confrontation With US IRNA (Internet Version-WWW) Bushehr, April 21, IRNA -- Secretary of the State Expediency Council Mohsen Rezaei (Reza'i) said here late Thursday the Iranian nation will make the final decision in the challenge with the US. Addressing a gathering in this southern province, Rezai said the Iranian nation, as proved in 1979 Islamic Revolution, is decisive in defending their rights. He rejected the possibility of a US attack on Iran, saying under such crucial circumstances in which there is a possibility of economic sanctions, the Iranian nation will have the...

A top Iranian cleric in Tehran publicly acknowledged on Friday that “disciples” of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, took American diplomats working in the United States embassy in Tehran hostage in November 1979. “When you [the Americans] sent Imam Khomeini to exile on November 4 [1963], you didn’t think that disciples of the Imam would seize your embassy on the anniversary of that day and would take away your spies blindfolded”, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who heads the powerful Guardians Council, told worshippers during his Friday prayers sermon in the Iranian capital. Islamist militants...

MIAMI, Florida (Reuters) --The fugitive founder of a violent Puerto Rican independence group was killed in a gunfight with federal agents at a mountain farmhouse in western Puerto Rico, the FBI said Sunday. Filiberto Ojeda Rios, 72, opened fire on agents who were trying to arrest him at a house in the Hormigueros area of Puerto Rico on Friday, the FBI said. Ojeda Rios was killed, and an FBI agent was shot in the stomach and severely wounded, the agency said. Ojeda Rios was the founder and leader of Puerto Rico's radical Boricua Popular Army, which sought independence for the...

Behrouz Javid Tehrani is a 27 year old student activist struggling towards democracy in Iran. Mr. Tehrani has spent more than four years of his life in prison simply because of his belief in freedom and democracy. He was first arrested at the age of 22 during the July 9, 1999 student uprising. After his arrest he spent 10 months in solitary confinement inside cell block 209 of the notorious Evin Prison. This is the prison where political prisoners are taken to be tortured, have their spirits broken, and even murdered at the hands of the regime agents. It is...

After we had talked about all manner of jihadists for an hour — jihadists in Kashmir attacking India, jihadists in Afghanistan attacking America and today jihadists in Pakistan attempting to kill President Pervez Musharraf — I asked the high American official, “don’t you feel that you spend all your time just picking up the pieces for the wrongheaded policies when the West supported the jihadists as a tool against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan?” He sighed, nodded and replied, “That’s right”. Driving away from that conversation I was convinced more than ever that the various terrorist movements unleashed in this...

The Bible is full of praise for Persia (today's much-maligned Iran) and for its rulers. In the Book of Ezra, God speaks through the proclamations of Cyrus, the king of Persia, who declares, "The Lord God of Heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem." Cyrus acceded to this divine command, and thus was the Second Temple in Jerusalem built. In other parts of the Old Testament, there is ringing praise of Cyrus as God's "anointed" and the "chosen" ruler, who freed Jews from their Babylonian...

Student followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini send shock waves across America when they storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The radical Islamic fundamentalists took 90 hostages. The students were enraged that the deposed Shah had been allowed to enter the United States for medical treatment and they threatened to murder hostages if any rescue was attempted. Days later, Iran's provincial leader resigned, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran's fundamentalist revolutionaries, took full control of the country--and the fate of the hostages. Two weeks after the storming of the embassy, the Ayatollah began to release all non-U.S. captives, and...

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 20 (Reuters) - The United States can designate foreign organizations as terrorist groups and bar Americans from financially backing them, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday. "Leaving the determination of whether a group is a 'foreign terrorist organization' to the executive branch ... is both a reasonable and a constitutional way to make such determinations," Judge Andrew Kleinfeld wrote for a three-judge panel. "The Constitution does not forbid Congress from requiring individuals, whether they agree with the executive branch determination or not, to refrain from furnishing material assistance to designated terrorist organizations." The ruling by the...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The Supreme Court refused Tuesday to take the case of California death row inmate Stanley "Tookie" Williams, a founder of the Crips street gang whose later work for peace won him Nobel Peace Prize nominations. Williams, who has been praised for his children's books and efforts to curtail youth gang violence, likely will be executed in December if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger does not grant clemency. The 51-year-old former gang member claims Los Angeles County prosecutors violated his rights when they dismissed all potential black jurors. Williams, who claims he is innocent, is in line to be...

MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. -- “Once captured, there is no comprehending what goes through your head,” said former Marine and Vietnam prisoner of war, Walter W. Eckes, 59, who spoke at the Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital’s 15th annual Prisoner of War/Missing in Action remembrance ceremony Sept 16. The first national commemoration for POWs/MIAs was July 18, 1979. Since then, Congress has passed yearly resolutions for the tribute. But in 1996, a presidential proclamation designated the third Friday in September as National POW/MIA Recognition Day. For the commemoration in 1991, the hospital planted a tree as a living memorial...

A group of former hostages is demanding that the CIA turn over a classified report that they say wrongly cleared Iran's new president of his role in interrogating them during the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran that began on Nov 4,1979. Incensed that the Bush admin failed to investigate properly Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's role in the hostage crisis, they have launched a campaign ahead of his speech this week at the United Nations to hold the Iranian leader to account. A September 9 letter from four of the former hostages to the chairman and ranking member of the House International Relations...

WASHINGTON – Iranian President Mahmood Ahmadinejad has been identified by at least six U.S. hostages as a ringleader in the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover. He has been identified by former Iranian President Bani Sadr as Ayatollah Khomeini's liaison with the hostage takers. He stands accused of the murder of a Kurdish leader in Vienna by officials in Austria who say they have compelling evidence and want an arrest warrant sworn for him And, as mayor of Tehran, he was one of the principal forces behind a campaign to recruit and train suicide bombers throughout the country. Nevertheless, he will be...

Analysis not final, officials say WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A CIA report has determined with "relative certainty" that Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was not involved in the taking of U.S. hostages 26 years ago, three government officials told CNN on Friday. The officials insisted on anonymity, saying they did not want to speak for the CIA about its report. Another U.S. official said the tone of the report is that there is no evidence to date that the new Iranian president was among those who held U.S. diplomats hostage. The officials cautioned that the analysis is not final. Two former...

Al Muhajiroun (Khavarej) is referred to a clandestine group of four who cooperated to assassinate four leaders at promptly the same time: Imam Ali who was a religious leader (the fourth Suni's Khalif and the first Shiite's Imam), Moavieh who was the leader of the land, Amro Aas who was a canning politician and a senior advisor to Moavieh, and - Of the four only one, namely Ibn Moljam, successfully carried out his assassination by wounding Imam Ali with a poisonous sword, during the Imam's pray. Imam Ali died of his wound on the third night, the 21st, of Ramadan....

When American bombs were raining down on what is left of Afghanistan, fellow Muslims in the neighbouring Islamic republic of Iran took out to the Streets. Contrary to our expectations in the West, they did not rally to denounce the 'Great Satan' - the name given to America by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Instead, ordinary Iranians, in one of the most extraordinary shifts in the geopolitical landscape since September 11, challenged their own hard-line Islamic clerics who swept Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi from power in 1979. Tens of thousands of men and women also demonstrated, in several cities, after World...

Oil cartel OPEC's second largest producer, Iran on Wednesday said it expects crude oil prices to touch $70 a barrel by the end of 2005 due to demand-supply mismatch."Many experts expect oil prices to reach $70 per barrel at the end of this year. We think it may happen," Iranian Deputy Oil Minister Nejad Hosseinian said. He said oil prices were at an all time high as "demand is higher than supplies. (For producers to) increase supplies of crude will take time."India, which depends on imports for 73 per cent of its oil needs, is already facing a huge burden...

TEHRAN: Iran confirmed on Sunday that hardline president-elect Mahmood Ahmadinejad will attend the UN General Assembly in New York in September, dismissing any possible US visa restrictions in the wake of allegations of his role in the US embassy siege. “Yes, Mr Ahmadinejad and the accompanying delegation will go to New York to take part in the UN world summit, he will also meet with the Iranians there,” foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters. Asefi again denied US allegations about Ahmadinejad’s possible role in the 1979 hostage-taking at the US embassy in Tehran following the Islamic revolution, a...

In 1947, Ruhalhah Khomeini, then a mid-ranking mullah in Qom, issued a “fatwa” (opinion) that made it incumbent on “the faithful” to murder Ahmad Kasravi. It took a group of eight “faithful” to plan and carry out the murder several months later. A jubilant Khomeini told his entourage that he had “eliminated that paragon of impiety” for ever. At the time of his murder Kasravi was one of Iran’s leading intellectuals. A veritable Renaissance man, he was a senior jurist at the high court, a distinguished historian, a magnetic orator, a master of the Persian prose, and a best-selling author....

The White House said Thursday that Iran's incoming president was a leader of the student movement that orchestrated the capture of the U.S. Embassy in 1979, but the United States still hasn't determined whether he took hostages as alleged by some of those who were held. Six former hostages have identified Iran's ultraconservative president-elect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as one of their captors during the 444 days they were held. Bush said on June 30 that their allegation ``raises many questions.'' The U.S. government has been investigating since then. ``I don't think it should surprise anyone given the nature of the regime...

"As soon as I saw his picture in the paper, I knew that was the bastard," retired Army Col. Charles Scott, 73, a former hostage told the Times. "He was one of the top two or three leaders." Added Scott, "The new president of Iran is a terrorist." Scott is one of at least six former hostages who have stated that they believe the men are one in the same. This is being viewed as an issue that can further complicate an already very complicated situation, as the U.S. seeks to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons and from continuing...