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Thursday, February 24, 2005

Iranian Mullahs Getting Nervous

The Iranian mullahs must be getting extremely anxious these days. In addition to U.S. forces literally closing in all around them in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Uzbekistan, mullahs are facing internal dissention as well.

As I mentioned earlier this week, Iranian bloggers are being jailed for their potentially dissident views. Iranian weblogger and journalist Arash Sigarchi, who was interviewed by Radio Farda, a U.S.-financed radio station broadcasting in Persian to Iran, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on February 22 by a revolutionary tribunal in Gilan, Iran. This seems to signal a desperate attempt on the part of the government to prevent solidarity movements from taking hold.

In addition, today’s Debkafile is reporting that intelligence sources reveal “a high-placed Iranian mole has been caught in Iranian president Mohammed Khatami’s office in Tehran.”

Hossein Marashai, head of Iran’s cultural heritage council, was caught using a sophisticated US-manufactured listening-long-distance-transmitting device at top-level Iranian leadership meetings. Debkafile’s sources call this the deepest foreign intelligence penetration in all 26 years of Iran's Islamic regime.

Maybe this is the reason for the recent crackdown.