Ping
Leave it to the Democrats to undermine US interests. Sometimes you have to wonder if Democrats live in America.
bfl
Well, heck...you don’t have to be Einstein to figure that one out.
I’m going to swim against what I guess will be the tide in this post and say I’d sooner trust Democrats than some former president of Iran. If politics really should stop at the water’s edge, then we at least have to give our countrymen the benefit of the doubt before we believe an avowed enemy of our nation. I’m not saying there’s no way Democrats didn’t leak this thing, just that I’m not ready to jump onto this bandwagon being driven by a guy named Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who himself said it was just his “speculation”. I’ll wait for some evidence.
Look for the home page for choices if you decide to go there.
“Ahmadinejad is harmless” bump
Information on Rafsanjani from a Newsmax article:
Newsmax sources in Tehran believe that Ahmadinejad has come out on top of a recent power struggle with his chief rival, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who has portrayed himself as a “pragmatist” willing to come to an accommodation with the West.
But other sources believe that Rafsanjani continues to play a major role in checking Ahmadinejad’s power, and could succeed in toppling him before his presidential term expires in the spring of 2009.
On Wednesday, Rafsanjani said that he believed the NIE had been “issued either by the Democrats or independent groups,” since it concluded that Iran did not intend to acquire nuclear weapons.
One clear sign of the behind-the-scenes jockeying for power was the forced resignation last week of a Rafsanjani protégé, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, from his position as deputy interior minister in charge of intelligence affairs.
Gen. Zolqadr, a former deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards, rallied to the Rafsanjani camp along with his former boss, Gen. Mohsen Rezai.
He is best known for his role in providing training and support to al-Qaida during the 1990s, when Osama bin Laden was still based in the Sudan, as I reported in my 2005 book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.
Adding to the confusion were rumors of a foiled assassination plot against Rafsanjani last week, when his convoy was attacked by armed men who succeeding in wounding two bodyguards. Apparently forewarned, Rafsanjani was traveling separately in an unmarked car when the convoy was attacked.
Ahmadinejad was summoned to the residence of Supreme Leader ayatollah Khamenei on Thursday, Dec. 6, during the early morning hours, just as the Zolqadr controversy was brewing.
He cut short an official visit to Ilam province to make the meeting and was accompanied by body guards from the Ansar-e Mehdi, a special unit of the Revolutionary Guards Corps that is personally loyal to him.
“The regime is nervous that the US and the Europeans have spies inside the nuclear program,” said Sardar Haddad, an Iranian dissident living in the United States.
The shadowy kabuki dance would appear to be an effort to smoke out the positions – and the vulnerabilities - of various Iranian leaders.
Haddad pointed to the arrest earlier this year of former nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian, whom Ahmadinejad accused in public of being an American spy.
“The Mousavian business is serious. He has been attacked because he is close to Rafsanjani,” Haddad told Newsmax.
According to one interpretation, each faction in Tehran is trying to blame the other for having leaked real information that wound up in the NIE. According to another, each side is trying to take credit for having passed off false information to the CIA.
Despite the spying charges, Moussavian was later released, a move seen in Tehran as a defeat for Ahmadinejad and his faction.
“It is true that they have rolled up U.S. [intelligence] networks in Iran,” said Haddad. “But they have also found people who were just about to defect, and have given them bogus info to feed to the Americans and to other intelligence services, to give a wrong impression of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”