FROM BAD TO WORSE IN IRAN
"Why would you want to visit that old bastard’s grave?" asked the guard at the subway station in south Tehran when Christopher Hitchens asked for directions to the cemetery where the Ayatollah Khomeini is buried.
The young guard’s attitude, which appears to be shared by about three quarters of his countrymen, illustrates why the recent election was a sham.
According to the Iranian government, former secret policeman Mahmoud Ahmadeinejad defeated former president Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, 62 percent to 37 percent, in a runoff for the presidency last Friday. Turnout was 60 percent, the government said.
AP reported the government’s figures as if they were true, even though there was a boycott of the election (photographs taken throughout the day showed polling places in urban areas virtually empty), and Rafsanjani claimed massive ballot box stuffing.
The election was boycotted by reformers because the only candidates permitted to run in it were those approved by the mullahs who hold the real power in Iran. Even in a diminished electorate comprised largely of government employees, Revolutionary Guardsmen and secret policemen, Ahmadeinejad required help to reach the runoff. Michael Ledeen’s sources told him about 7 million people voted in the first round of the election June 17th. Yet the government claimed 29 million ballots were cast.
The blatant manipulation of an already sham election to install a hardline reactionary as president suggests that the Ayatollah Khameini, chief of the Guardian Council, no longer sees a need to put a "reformist" face on the regime.
That suggests to me that Iran is very close to — or already possesses – a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it.
That Iran’s nuclear program is more advanced than most in the West realize is the subject of two recently published books, "Countdown to Terror" by Rep. Curt Weldon, and "Countdown to Crisis," by investigative reporter Kenneth Timmerman.
Weldon’s book consists mostly of memoranda from "Ali," an Iranian exile in Paris, who runs an anti-regime intelligence network. Weldon published the memos out of frustration with the CIA’s refusal to take Ali seriously, even though intelligence he provided uncovered a 2003 al Qaeda plot to hijack an airplane in Canada and fly it into the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire.
Why would Iranians have detailed knowledge of an al Qaeda plot? Perhaps because so much of al Qaeda’s leadership has taken refuge in Iran.
Two of Osama bin Laden’s sons and al Qaeda’s former military chief, Saif al Adel, are among 20-25 al Qaeda leaders living in villas near the town of Chalous on the Caspian sea, reported NBC investigative producer Robert Windrem June 24th.
Windrem described the al Qaeda leaders as being "under virtual house arrest," but this is disputed by Ali and by Timmerman’s chief source, a recent defector from a top position in Iranian intelligence.
Osama bin Laden himself has been in Iran since a meeting late last year in which he met with Iranian leaders to plan attacks on the United States, Timmerman’s source said.
If bin Laden is under Iranian protection, it would explain why he has yet to be captured, even though CIA Director Porter Goss told Time magazine this month he has "an excellent idea" where bin Laden is.
9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al Shibh spent nearly a month in Tehran before the attacks, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reported in July of last year. If al Qaeda and the mullahs are in cahoots, then al Qaeda may get the bomb when Iran does. The war on terror could be about to heat up in a very, very big way.
In the meantime, now that the mullahs have discarded their "moderate" mask, there likely will be a bloody crackdown on dissidents. "It’s only a matter of time now before the liberal forces inside of Iran are cut off at the knees and shot in the head," one source tells me. "This election alone has determined the future of hundreds of thousands of families. Make no mistake. Ahmadeinejad was not selected by accident."