Committee Against Ahmadinejad

PR Newwire/US Newswire
August 28, 2007

NEW YORK, Aug. 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In Iran in last 365 days, there have been over 5000 rallies, strikes and demonstrations against the Iranian regime. According to Amnesty International, Iran continues to have one of the highest rates of executions in the world. The reported executions in 2007 have already exceeded 150. Presently, political opponents in Iran are charged with bogus criminal offenses and then executed in public. The United Nations has at least 52 times condemned the Iranian government.

House bills H. CON. RES. 21 & H. RES. 43 call on the United Nations Security Council to charge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the United Nations Charter because of his calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.

For nearly 30 years, Iranian government has incited and then exploited public sentiments to spread negative propaganda against Christians, Jews, and Bahaies. A great example of such exploitation is Ahmadinejad's call for the destruction of Israel.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is leading a dangerous crusade against the Iranian people and the civilized world. Ahmadinejad's Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRG) organization is responsible for killing and torture of the Iranian people as well as training and equipping terrorist in Iraq.

Beginning in 2005, the Committee against Ahmadinejad (CAA) been led the effort in exposing Ahmadinejad's activities as well as organizing protests against his presence at the United Nations General Assembly. In the past 2 years, 30 members of the United States Congress, dozens of religious leaders, and numerous human rights advocates have supported CAA.

Once again, the United Nations General Assembly meeting is scheduled to begin in mid-September, 2007. Accordingly, CAA once more commences in order to mobilize the broad voices of discontent against Ahmadinejad, specially embracing the following goals:

1. Call the freedom and peace loving public citizens to voice solidarity with the families and victims of atrocities in both Iran and Iraq, as well as the victims of Iranian regime's terrorist acts in Buenos Aires, Khobar Tower and Lebanon Marine Barracks,

2. Call for U.N. member states to act by referring Iran's humans rights file to the U.N. Security Council for crime against humanity,

3. Urge the United Nations to appoint a special envoy to investigate Iran's human rights violations.

4. Call the US government to deny Ahmadinejad's presence in US.

Tehran prison has 600 on death row, Iranian dissidents say

Bloomberg News

August 27, 2007
By Fabio Benedetti-Valentini

About 600 political prisoners are awaiting execution in a Tehran jail as Iran resorts increasingly to capital punishment, said the People's Mujahedeen, an exiled opposition group.

The Iranian government, faced with ``growing popular upheavals,'' is turning to ``mass executions as a last resort,'' Mujahedeen leader Maryam Rajavi said in an e-mailed statement.

More than 60 political prisoners have been executed since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected Iran's head of state two years ago and some 600 people are on death row in Gohardasht Prison, western Tehran, she said today.

“Thousands of workers, teachers, students and youths have been arrested and sent to detention centers where they have been subjected to indiscriminate torture,'' Rajavi said. Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has executed a total of 120,000
political prisoners, she said.

The movement has its headquarters at Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris.

Ahmadinejad Denies Iran Has Slowed Atom Work

Reuters
Aug 28, 2007

TEHRAN (Reuters) - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday denied reports that Iran had slowed down its atomic work, which the West fears is aimed at making nuclear bombs.

"These (reports) are not true," Ahmadinejad said in response to a question at a news conference.

Diplomats in Vienna have said Iran's atomic work seems to have slowed in pace this summer and Tehran appeared to have fewer than the 3,000 centrifuges, used in enriching uranium, it planned to have working by the end of July.

Ahmadinejad, voicing continued defiance in the face of Western demands that it suspend sensitive nuclear work, said Iran was now a nuclear country and was mastering the complete nuclear fuel cycle.

"I want to officially announce to you that from our viewpoint the issue of Iran's nuclear case has been closed, today Iran is a nuclear Iran, meaning that it has the complete cycle for fuel production," he said.

Iran threatens foes with new bomb

The Times
August 27, 2007

TEHRAN - Iran has vowed to use a 2,000lb (900kg) “smart” bomb against its enemies and announced mass production of the new weapon, according to state television.

Tehran first announced on Thursday that it was developing the long-range guided bomb, for possible delivery by its ageing US-made F4 and F5 jets. Yesterday Mostafa Muhammad Najjar, the Defence Minister, said on state television: “We will use these [bombs] against our enemies when the time comes.”

He continued his threats as footage showed him unveiling a production line for the weapon in Tehran.

Islamic Republic of Fear

The Economist
August 23, 2007

The head of Iran's judiciary is a confident man. Despite foreign attempts at slander, Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi recently declared, his country has presented a fine image to the world of Islamic law at work.

If news were limited to such mercies as the recent release, on bail, of Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old Iranian-American academic, after six months in jail on charges of espionage, or the amnesty granted to 4,000 other prisoners on the occasion of the birthday on August 20th of Imam Hussein, a revered Shia martyr, Mr Shahrudi's confidence might be justified. But these welcome developments come against a darkening backdrop, as the administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intensifies a campaign to reimpose the moral fervour, and xenophobic zeal, of the 1979 Islamic revolution's early years.

The rest of the world may be more concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But for many Iranians, the issue that has begun to outweigh other troubles, such as poverty, unemployment and the danger of war with America, is human rights.

This is not surprising. Recent months have seen the largest crackdown on civil liberties since the 1980s. Purges of suspected liberals have decimated university faculties, and repeated closures have all but silenced the once-vociferous opposition press. Ms Esfandiari was the best-known of four Iranian-American scholars incarcerated earlier this year for alleged ties to American intelligence. Her colleagues remain in prison. But since the spring a wave of arrests has targeted everyone from women's-rights advocates to student leaders, trade unionists and critical journalists, packing the country's prisons so tight that police are commandeering other buildings as makeshift lock-ups... Read More

Iran vows to use 'smart' bomb on enemies

Associated Press
Sun. 26 Aug 2007

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran vowed Sunday to use a new 2,000-pound "smart" bomb against its enemies and unveiled mass production of the new weapon, state television reported.

The government first announced development of the long-range guided bomb Thursday, saying it could be deployed by the country's aging U.S.-made F-4 and F-5 fighter jets.

"We will use these (bombs) against our enemies when the time comes," Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said on state television Sunday.

Iran often announces new weapons for its arsenal, but the United States maintains that while the Islamic Republic has made some strides, many of these statements are exaggerations.

The broadcast included a brief clip of a fighter jet apparently dropping one of the bombs, which destroyed a target on the ground... Read More

Iran increasing Iraq militant support: U.S. commander

Reuters
26 Aug 2007

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq accused Iran on Sunday of stepping up support for anti-American Shi'ite militants in Iraq as U.S. policymakers await a crucial assessment of the violence-torn country.

Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno said Iraqi Shi'ite groups have received more weapons, ammunition, funding and training from Iran in the past two months, while President George W. Bush's "surge" strategy to quell violence in Baghdad has taken effect.

"It's clear to me that over the past 30 to 60 days they have increased their support," Odierno said on CNN's "Late Edition."

"They do it from providing weapons, ammunition -- specifically mortars and explosively formed projectiles," he said in a video link from Iraq.

"They are providing monetary support to some groups and they are conducting training within Iran of Iraqi extremists to come back here and fight the United States," he added... Read More

Inhuman and Degrading Punishments in Iran

Under Ahmadinejad, the Inhumane and Degrading

Public Punishment of Iranians Continue

Iran's Hangmen Work Overtime to Silence Opposition

Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom)

August 24, 2007
By Con Coughlin

Stonings, hangings, floggings, purges. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might claim that United Nations sanctions can't hurt his country, but that is not how it feels for Iran's long-suffering population which now finds itself on the receiving end of one of the most brutal purges witnessed since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The most visible manifestation of the new oppression sweeping Iran has been the wave of public executions and floggings carried out in Teheran and provincial capitals over recent weeks in a blatant attempt by the regime to intimidate political opponents. The official government line is that the punishments are part of its "Plan to Enforce Moral Behaviour".

It's the same kind of argument that was used immediately after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took control to purge the country of its prosperous, secular middle class and secure his hold on power. Now Mr Ahmadinejad is adopting similar tactics in a desperate attempt to keep his embattled regime in power.

Although Iran has one of the world's highest execution rates, until recently most of the sentences were carried out within the confines of prisons such a Teheran's notorious Evin complex. But this month diplomats at the Japanese and Australian embassies in the capital were alarmed to find the bodies of two convicted criminals hanging from cranes stationed directly outside their office windows.

The location of the cranes, at a busy thoroughfare surrounded by office blocks, was chosen as much to remind the diplomatic community that Mr Ahmadinejad's hardline regime was still very much in charge as to send a message to ordinary citizens... Read More

Man hanged in public in southern Iran

Thu. 23 Aug 2007
Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Aug. 23 – Iranian authorities hanged a man in public in the southern province of Fars, state media reported on Wednesday.

The man, identified as Qoliollah Q., was hanged in public on Wednesday in the provincial capital Shiraz, the official news agency IRNA said.

He was accused of murder.

Iran hangs two in volatile Iran city

Iran Focus
Wed. 22 Aug 2007


Tehran, Iran, Aug. 22 – Authorities hanged two men on Tuesday in the south-eastern province of Sistan-va-Baluchistan, state media reported.

The two unnamed men were hanged in a prison in the provincial capital Zahedan.

They were accused of drug trafficking.

Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on bogus charges such as armed robbery and drug smuggling.

Sistan-va-Baluchistan Province is home to Baluchis, a predominantly Sunni Muslim ethnic minority.

Iran has witnessed escalating unrest since 2006 in areas populated by Baluchis, who complain of discriminatory and repressive policies by the theocratic regime.

Since 2006, Iranian authorities have stepped up executions in the restive province in what many Baluchis believe is a response to a spate of attacks by dissidents on government and security officials.

The Enemy Late Acknowledged

National Review
By The Editors
August 20, 2007

Two reactions are appropriate to the Bush administration’s decision to place Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. First, one should cheer. Second, one should ask how much longer it will take the president to resolve the contradiction at the heart of his Iran policy.

One should cheer because the Revolutionary Guard is among the world’s most effective forces for barbarity and chaos. Separate from Iran’s regular military, it espouses the revolution-exporting ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei (the latter of whom possesses ultimate control of its actions). It has killed Americans gladly, as at the Khobar Towers. Its current specialty is killing American soldiers in Iraq, through Iraqi proxies, with armor-piercing bombs. These things alone do not make it a terrorist group in the precise sense of that term, but its arming and financing of Hezbollah certainly does. Likewise the massacres of civilians that its aid to Iraqi militants has made possible.

To designate the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist entity, then, is to acknowledge reality. Yet there is something decidedly unrealistic in the idea that the Revolutionary Guard can be separated from the Iranian government as a whole. (The distinctions got even more jesuitical when it emerged that the State Department might not designate the entire Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, but simply its Quds Force, composed of special covert units.) There is no getting around the fact that the Revolutionary Guard — including the Quds Force — expresses the will of Iran’s highest rulers. If what it does counts as terrorism, they count as terrorists.

Given their history of working mayhem in the Middle East and beyond (recall, for example, their handiwork in Argentina in 1994), this is an obvious enough fact, and the State Department designation will do little to make it more obvious. It will also do little to hurt Iran — the designation would freeze any assets the Revolutionary Guard had in the U.S., but, as you might imagine, it prefers to bank elsewhere.

What the designation does do is lay bare the contradiction in President Bush’s Iran policy. After September 11, in a moment of great strategic clarity, Bush said that the U.S. would not distinguish between terrorists and the governments that harbored them. Yet his administration has approached Iran — the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism — as though it were a legitimate government, capable of being persuaded to adopt positions agreeable to liberal democracies.

On Iran’s nuclear program, Bush has deferred first to Europe and then to Condoleezza Rice’s State Department in allowing years of negotiating, followed by a few more years of negotiating, followed by (wait for it) more negotiating.

Worse than do nothing, this strategy created an illusion that the world was seriously confronting Iran when just the opposite was true. The two Security Council resolutions against the Islamic Republic were so weak as to be meaningless, except in distracting attention from alternative courses of action (e.g., effective sanctions or military force). Iran’s leaders have grown more brazen at every turn — kidnappings of foreign soldiers and proxy wars are now par for the course — yet the Bush administration has remained unable to forge a credible policy.

What one should hope now is that the administration, in its waning days, is making a course correction. The squeamishness with which much of Europe opposes the designation suggests that it fears just this. For a variety of reasons — economic interest, anti-Americanism, and reflexive pacifism chief among them — it would prefer to avoid any bad blood with the Islamic Republic. Most of the U.S. State Department feels likewise. But the simple truth is that, unless Iran’s regime gives up both its terrorist ideology and its weapons, we will never be safe. The president has taken an important — albeit partial and overdue — step toward facing that unpleasant reality.

Iranian leader Ahmadinejad denounces Israel as 'flag of Satan'

By Reuters
August 19, 2007

In a new verbal assault on Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced Israel yesterday as the "flag of Satan" and said it may be facing disintegration, official Iranian media reported.

Yesterday the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying of Israel in a speech: "When the philosophy of the establishment and the continuation of this regime is not just, it is not unlikely that it is on the path of decline and disintegration." Accusing Israel of "occupation and aggression," he added: "This regime is the flag of Satan".

It was not clear whether his choice of words was an indirect reference to Israel's close ally the United States, which Iran's clerical leaders have branded "the Great Satan."

Ahmadinejad, who triggered outrage in the West two years ago when he said Israel should be "wiped off the map," has often referred to its destruction but says Iran poses no threat. Two months ago, he said the Lebanese and the Palestinians had pressed a "countdown button" to bring an end to the State of Israel.

Iran often praises the Palestinians for what it says is their resistance to Israeli occupation. Tehran also described last year's Second Lebanon War between Hezbollah and Israel as a victory for the Iranian-backed group.

Ahmadinejad's comments in 2005 caused consternation in Israel and the West, which also fear Iran is trying to build an atomic arsenal under cover of a civilian nuclear power program, a charge Tehran denies.

Sacked Iran minister warns of energy 'catastrophe'

Agence France Presse
August 19, 2007

Iran's sacked oil minister has issued a parting warning to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, predicting a looming "catastrophe" in the Iranian energy sector because of high consumption, media reported Sunday.

"If we do not find a solution to the energy problem in the next 15 years, the country will face a catastrophe," Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh was quoted as saying at his farewell ceremony late on Saturday by the ISNA student news agency.

"I am ready to prove that if the fuel situation continues along current trends we will face an energy crisis in the future," he said. "The current pattern of consumption is a disaster for the country."

The comments by Vaziri Hamaneh, who also revealed for the first time that he was sacked in a cabinet reshuffle last week, are a stark warning about the energy problems of a country rich in natural resources.

Iran is OPEC's number two crude oil producer and is also pinning major hopes on its gas reserves, estimated to be the second largest proven reserves in the world after Russia.

But frenzied consumption of petrol forces it to import millions of litres per day of refined oil to make up for a domestic shortfall. Wasteful heating methods also create gas shortages in winter.

The government introduced petrol rationing in June in a bid to ease the immense strain on the budget of importing petrol for Iran's 70 million people, but it is still forced to import huge quantities of petrol daily.

A further problem comes from under-investment in its oil fields, an issue compounded by US action to prevent banks lending to Iran over its controversial nuclear programme.

The influential research centre of parliament also sounded a downbeat note on the future of Iran's gas industry, saying that exports would not be possible in the next 10 years given the scale of domestic consumption.

"It seems that for at least the next 10 years there will not be any extra gas for export. Iran is advised to remove gas export from the country's policy due to the limited production capacity," it said.

Turkey is currently the only recipient of Iranian gas exports, receiving several billion cubic metres annually.

But Iran is seeking to export large quantities of gas to Turkey and other countries in the Middle East, as well as to India and Pakistan through new pipelines.

Vaziri Hamaneh confirmed for the first time that he was sacked in the reshuffle, which also saw the departure of Industry Minister Alireza Tahmasebi and was seen as a bid by Ahmadinejad to step up his control over the economy.

"I did not resign, because I still have the ability to work. Anyone who has the ability to work will not resign," Vaziri Hamaneh said, according to the Mehr news agency.

"Sacking me from the ministry was the president's idea, and I obliged," he added.

Vaziri Hamaneh is a veteran oil ministry official who was Ahmadinejad's fourth choice for the post when he took power in 2005. Two candidates were rejected by parliament and another stepped back of his own accord.

He complained that in the "two years of Ahmadinejad's government, oil managers had been forced to pay for all mistakes made in the past.

"And I say here if these group's pressures are not stopped, the industry and the country will face crisis."

Tahmasebi also launched a stinging attack on Ahmadinejad's economic policies in his resignation letter, complaining of under-investment and damaging personnel changes.