2135 GMT: Rumour of Day. Kalameh alleges that prisoners held in cellblock 209 of Evin Prison have been commanded to fill in forms about their views on election fraud and whether the protest leaders are connected to foreign countries.
2100 GMT: Dr Mohammad Maleki, the former head of Tehran University, has reportedly been released after 191 days in detention. Maleki, 76, suffers from prostate cancer.
2055 GMT: United4Iran has a profile of Jahanbakhsh Khanjani, former advisor to Iran’s Minister of Interior in the Khatami Presidency, who was released on 24 February after spending more than eight months in prison. According to another released prisoner, Khanjani was under pressure to confess and was constantly moved from general confinement to solidarity confinement.
2110 GMT: Khamenei v. Khomeini. Radio Zamaneh has more on the criticism of Ayatollah Khomeini’s grandson, Seyed Hasan Khomeini, by the Supreme Leader’s representative in the Revolutionary Guards, Ali Saidi.
The conflict was sparked when the head of the Institute of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Publications, Mohammad Ali Ansari, wrote to Saidi to remind him of the Khomeini’s insistence on no military intervention in politics, Ali Saidi then criticized Hassan Khomeini’s decision not to attend the August inauguration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He alleged that the Ayatollah’s grandson was standing against “the system and the Leader”.
2100 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Mehrdad Bal Afkan, a senior member of the Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution party and Mir Hossein Mousavi’s campaign, was arrested in Isfahan on Thursday.
Mr Verde follows up our analysis of the “mystery” of the Assembly of Experts statement/non-statement supporting the Supreme Leader and declaring that time has run out for a seditious opposition.
The Assembly of Experts has been holding twice a yearly for many years. Most of its meetings are behind closed doors. The official reports of the meetings usually included a few set-piece and rather predictable speeches. And they were ignored by most people.
The only notable “news” about the Assembly meetings in recent years was the 2007 election to replace the deceased Ali Meshkini as chair. Until then only one candidate stood in the election and was elected unanimously to show unity. This time, however, there were two candidates: Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati.
Q: We are approaching the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. How can the recollection and commemoration of those days benefit us today?
MOUSAVI: First and foremost, I want to congratulate all of our people on the 31st anniversary of our [victory in the] Revolution, particularly the families of our martyrs, our [war] veterans and prisoners of war [with Iraq].
Analyzing the Islamic revolution has not come to an end yet. There have been thousands of books and articles written about it and many still to come. It is interesting that the recent elections and the events following it have brought forth new critiques of the Revolution.
24 hours ago, we were evaluating the regime’s stepped-up threat, through the public declaration of Ayatollah Jannati, “We Will Kill You”. We wrote, “This Government, this Supreme Leader has to prevent the mantle of the 1979 Revolution from being wrested from its grip on 22 Bahman (11 February).”
We got it within hours. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, in a meeting documented by video cameras, issued a declaration that stood upon Karroubi’s own stepped-up challenge of the last week and, indeed, harked back to Karroubi’s response last autumn to Government warnings of arrest: Bring. It. On.
Sometimes a story doesn’t take shape immediately. Sometimes words are put out for the public, their possible significance only emerged when they are repeated, reprinted, recycled. Sometimes the speaker may not even realise how “big” his declaration is going to be.
Sometimes, even when two people have their lives cut short for reasons far beyond their specific place in this world, the act is only fulfilled in days and weeks to come.
So it may prove with the hangings of Mohammad Reza Ali Zamani and Arash Rahmanipour, two men whose arrest for alleged membership of a “monarchist” group took on its imposed meanings in the conflict which began two months later and is still ongoing. So it may prove with the speech of an Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a man whose long, confirmed membership within the Iranian regime reaches the point where he argues that Iranians could and should be put to death.
It may prove so for, twelve days before the anniversary of 22 Bahman (11 February), Jannati — as not the speaker at Tehran’s Friday Prayers but as the head of the Guardian Council, the body that supposedly gives legitimacy to Iran’s elections — saw not the ballot box but the coiled noose, the cocked trigger, the unsheathed blade and said, “Do it!”: Read the rest of this entry »
Yet another forthright declaration comes from Mehdi Karroubi in an interview with his website Saham News today, following his detailed statement to a British newspaper on Wednesday.
In case anyone is still unclear, Karroubi hammers home the message: Ahmadinejad is an illegitimate and irresponsible “President”. And those who back him, not those who oppose him, have betrayed the Islamic Republic. (Supreme Leader, what say you?)
SAHAM: Mr. Karroubi, Recently there was news from you regarding the status of Ahmadinejad’s administration that was followed by different interpretations. The most important interpretation that bothered many people was the idea of your retreat from and overturning of your position after the election. Did your remark mean retreating and entering a new phase?
KARROUBI: It is really strange for me that the experts misunderstood my clear and blunt remark. I ask the experts to pay attention to the introduction and conclusion of my remark.
I have emphasised my criticism over the problems with the election and its results which were the outcome of fraud and engineering OF the votes and continue to do so. However, Mr. Ahmadinejad is the head of the administration, whom despite all the protests has taken the power in the Executive Branch and thus must be accountable for his actions. Currently everyone, inside and outside [the country], in favour of him or in opposition, calls him the head of the establishment’s administration, meaning the one who controls the Executive Branch. Therefore, they demand [from him] that which s the responsibility of the head of the Executive Branch.
2200 GMT: Closing Notes (Until Tomorrow). Big news is that, despite attempts by some analysts to declare “Much Ado About Nothing“, Mehdi Karroubi has not only clarified his challenge today, not only maintained it, but declared that he will soon be extending it by setting out his demands on the electoral, legal, and political processes.
Elsewhere, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has maintained his own defiance by appointing aide Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, the target of both “reformist” and “conservative” opposition, as the chief of the President’s youth advisors. This is an addition to Mashai’s positions of President’s deputy for affairs of Iranians living abroad, special advisory of President in oil affairs, head of assembly for free economic zones, and the chairman of the cultural commission in the cabinet.
Mohammad Taqi Rahbar, the head of the clergies committee in Parliament, is not impressed, however: he has criticised Ahmadinejad’s special relationship with Mashai, declaring that the President is sacrificing the regime and Government for Mashai’s favour.
2135 GMT: Rumour of Day. Kalameh alleges that prisoners held in cellblock 209 of Evin Prison have been commanded to fill in forms about their views on election fraud and whether the protest leaders are connected to foreign countries.
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