Free Republic

An American fugitive, accused of murdering an aide to the late Shah of Iran in the United States, was made an editor of Iran’s English-language television network in Tehran. Hassan Abdulrahman, who is wanted by the FBI for shooting dead Ali Akbar Tabatabai in Maryland, worked for Iran’s flagship broadcaster Press TV, which has bureaus across the world, including London. A Press TV journalist who resigned in protest over the channel’s coverage of the apparently rigged Iranian election in June told The Times yesterday that Mr Abdulrahman was chief editor at the head office of the network. The journalist, who...

The State Department acknowledged Wednesday that someone in its public affairs bureau made a “deliberate” request that several minutes of tape be cut from the video of a 2013 press briefing in which a reporter asked if the administration had lied about secret talks with Iran. The embarrassing admission by State Department spokesman John Kirby came three weeks after another spokesperson insisted that a “glitch” had caused the gap, discovered only last month by the reporter whose questioning had mysteriously disappeared. “This wasn’t a technical glitch, this was a deliberate step to excise the video,” Kirby told reporters. Kirby said...

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri was one of the leaders of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. At one time he was designated successor to the Ayatollah Khomeini but fell out with Khomeini in 1989 because he disagreed with government policies that infringed on freedom and denied people's rights. He is a senior Islamic scholar and a Grand Marja (religious authority) of Islam. Montazeri has never been a big fan of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his nuclear and economic policies. While agreeing Iran had the right to develop nuclear energy, he called Ahmadinejad's approach to the issue aggressive, saying, "One has to...

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri was one of the leaders of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. At one time he was designated successor to the Ayatollah Khomeini but fell out with Khomeini in 1989 because he disagreed with government policies that infringed on freedom and denied people's rights. He is a senior Islamic scholar and a Grand Marja (religious authority) of Islam. Montazeri has never been a big fan of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his nuclear and economic policies. While agreeing Iran had the right to develop nuclear energy, he called Ahmadinejad's approach to the issue aggressive, saying, "One has to...

Reports: Iran Riot Police Shooting Protesters 'Like Animals' June 24, 2009 New violence erupted in Iran Wednesday as riot police fired tear gas and shot protesters "like animals," according to Internet reports. Twitter users believed to be in Tehran are painting a grim picture there, reporting beatings and gunfire on demonstrators supporting opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. These reports, obtained by Sky News, could not be independently confirmed by FOX News. Police beat the protesters gathered on Baharestan Square with batons and fired tear gas canisters and rounds of ammunition into the air, the witnesses told The Associated Press....

Reporting from Tehran -- Hundreds of thousands of Iranian protesters defied authorities Monday and marched to Tehran's Freedom Square, as the Islamic Republic's supreme leader ordered an investigation into allegations of voter fraud that the opposition described as little more than an attempt to dampen anger over the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the Guardian Council, which is filled with his own appointees and led by a hard-line cleric close to Ahmadinejad, to examine challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi's claims of vote fraud. Days after Khamenei blessed the election of Ahmadinejad and urged Iranians to...

It was a crudely stage-managed insult to everyone involved. By Christopher Hitchens For a flavor of the political atmosphere in Tehran, Iran, last week, I quote from a young Iranian comrade who furnishes me with regular updates: I went to the last major Ahmadinejad rally and got the whiff of what I imagine fascism to have been all about. Lots of splotchy boys who can't get a date are given guns and told they're special. It's hard to better this, either as an evocation of the rancid sexual repression that lies at the nasty core of the "Islamic republic" or...

THE day before Iran's ninth presidential elections last June, President Bush sent a discouraging message to potential voters. Iran's electoral process "ignores the basic requirements of democracy," Mr. Bush declared, and these elections would be "sadly consistent" with the country's "oppressive record." For Iranians, there was no mistaking the American president's point: he was tacitly sanctioning the call that some Iranian exiles and activists had issued for an election boycott, based on exactly this logic. An American administration that had called on other Middle Eastern populaces to vote in flawed elections greeted the Iranian electoral process with nothing but open...

Top News Story Iran Focus Tehran, Iran, Sep. 04 – Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the jihad against Israel must continue and be strengthened, Iran’s semi-official daily Jomhouri Islami reported on Sunday. “The only way to fight the Zionist enemy is to continue and increase resistance and jihad”, Ayatollah Khamenei said at a meeting on Saturday with secretary general of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, Ramadan Abdullah, the hard-line daily Jomhouri Islami wrote. Iran’s official policy is to call for the annihilation of the Jewish state. The country’s clerical rulers have been strongly opposed to Palestinian President...

Top News Story U.S., Europe Must Forge Broader Alliance, Says State's Fried The Washington File, Embassy of the U.S., London: America and Europe must work together to support democratic development throughout the broader Middle East, just as they supported the democratic aspirations of pro-democracy movements in central and Eastern Europe, says the State Department’s Daniel Fried. Speaking in Paris September 1, the day after attending a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the founding of Solidarity in Gdansk, Poland, Fried said the Polish people “achieved democracy through their own efforts, but they had support from abroad,” including from Western...

Top News Story Iranian President Gets Terror Law Exception An Excerpt: World News Tonight, ABC News:State Department says Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a terrorist, but will grant him a visa anyway, ABC News has learned. The State Department has issued a legal finding that Ahmadinejad is ineligible for a U.S. visa because of section 212(a)3(b) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which says anyone with terrorist ties cannot be granted a visa. But U.S. officials have decided to waive section 212, so that Ahmadinejad can get a limited visa to attend the United Nations General Assembly, which begins...

Top News Story See no evil? (Washington, D.C.): The leaking earlier this month of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) projection that Iran is a decade away from obtaining nuclear weapons - doubling previous official estimates - is, in some ways, more ominous than would have been a finding that the mullahs are about to get "the Bomb." After all, the latter would be no surprise, given the considerable evidence (albeit, much of it circumstantial) that has accumulated about Tehran's intentions and activities in this area. By contrast, the pollyanish assessment not only seems wildly out of touch with such...

Top News Story A Clash of Civilizations An Excerpt: Amir Taheri, Newsweek International:Eight years ago a pirated translation of Samuel Huntington's celebrated essay "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order" appeared in Tehran. The publisher received an order for 1,000 copies, half the print run. "We wondered who wanted them," recalls Mustafa Tunkaboni, who marketed the book. The answer came when a military truck belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps arrived to pick up the books. Among the officers who received a copy was Yahya Safavi, now a general and commander in chief of...

Top News Story BBC Iranian judges have been given approval to carry guns and to use them if they feel threatened after a judge was shot in an attack in Tehran, officials say. Mohammed Reza Aghazadeh was shot outside his home in the capital, sustaining injuries to his eye. The incident comes less than a month after another judge was killed by a gunman on a motorcycle in Tehran. Hassan Moghaddas was a prominent judge who was involved in a number of high-profile political cases involving human rights or freedom of speech and who had jailed a number of...

Top News Story Drone crashes in IranAn unmanned single-engined plane has crashed in a mountainous area of western Iran and the wreckage has been recovered by the Iranian armed forces. It was not clear if the plane was Iranian or foreign, although the influential Kayhan newspaper pointed out that "usually these sort of planes are used for spying on other countries". The reports quoted Ali Asgar Ahmadi, deputy head of security in the interior ministry, as saying the plane went down on Thursday in the Alashtar mountains near the city of Khorramabad, the capital of Lorestan province, 350 kilometres...

Top News Story 'Iran had designed N-capable cruise missiles' LONDON, August 27 (IranMania) - A prominent Iranian dissident on Friday claimed Tehran had mastered the design of nuclear capable cruise missiles secretly sold to the Islamic Republic by Ukraine and was on the verge of producing copies.Alireza Jafarzadeh said the 12 weapons were now in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, and also fired off new claims about the corps' past links with disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan, according to AFP.His charges, made at a press conference in Washington, coincided with a spike in tensions in the...

Heads Up!! The worst is about to happen Alan Peters: The name “Alan Peters” is a nom de plume for a writer who was for many years involved in intelligence and security matters in Iran. He had significant access inside Iran at high levels during the rule of the Shah, until early 1979. The news item below hidden among so many other stories, fails to call enough attention to perhaps the very worst that could happen seemingly to be about to happen. Oil might soon no longer be linked to the US Dollar and move to the Euro. As...

Top News Story EU powers still want Iran nuclear talks - France By Paul CarrelPARIS (Reuters) - European powers are still keen to talk to Iran about its sensitive nuclear programme despite calling off an Aug 31. negotiating meeting, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said on Wednesday.Britain, France and Germany have called off next week's negotiations on proposals they made to Iran earlier this month because Tehran has resumed some nuclear work in breach of a promise to freeze it while talks lasted, France said on Tuesday.Douste-Blazy said the trio, acting on behalf of the European Union, were not...

Top News Story Europeans call off crucial atomic talks with Iran Tue Aug 23, 2005 9:07 PM BST By Paul CarrelPARIS (Reuters) - European powers have called off August 31 talks with Iran over its nuclear programme, France said on Tuesday, marking a breakdown in two years of negotiations with Tehran to halt its sensitive atomic work.French Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said talks on a formal European proposal made earlier this month would not go ahead because Iran had resumed certain nuclear work in breach of a promise to freeze it while talks lasted.Iran shrugged off the cancellation,...

Top News Story IRAN: JOURNALIST SUSPENDS HUNGER STRIKETehran, 22 August (AKI) - The Iranian journalist and writer, Akbar Ganji, has suspended the hunger strike he began in prison on June 11, his wife, Massoumeh Shafii, told Adnkronos International (AKI). She confirmed the news after seeing him at the Milad hospital in the Iranian capital Tehran, where he was transferred from prison after his health worsened. Shafii did not say what led her husband to break off his hunger strike. There is speculation in Tehran that Ganji's decision could be the result of a letter from UN secretary-general Kofi Annan...