A Tale of Revolutionary Brothers, Russia Talks Nukes to US

Roxana Saberi

" My main regret is that Keith Richards is going to outlive me." - John Nelson Palmer

After yesterday's violence that left 13 dead and over 100 wounded, the unarmed were labeled terrorists by the fake president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At night, while more unarmed terrorists took to their rooftops to shout that "God is great" as a form of protest, the Revolutionary Guard set about ambushing and arresting those they felt were influential during the past week. The Washington Post reports that: "Also Sunday, state-run news media reported the arrest of the eldest daughter and four other relatives of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a Shiite Muslim cleric who heads two powerful groups in Iran's theocratic governing system. Rafsanjani has emerged as a strong critic of Ahmadinejad. The whereabouts of Rafsanjani himself were unknown. Members of the pro-government Basij militia is asking for her and other members of the family to be put on trial for corruption.

Mousavi made no public appearances Sunday and there were growing fears among his supporters that he could be arrested."

An analysis piece published by al Jazeera describes that the internal conflict is more than the fake election, and gives dire warning in the arrests of Rafsanjani's family: "Some influential moderate clerics privately admit that Khamenei has not done "justice" to the presidential candidates and has not treated them with impartiality. This behaviour, they believe, could jeopardise his position as leader since one of the main qualities required of the supreme leader is "justice".

Rafsanjani is also the chairman of the Expediency Council which is a body charged with the power to resolve differences or conflicts between parliament and the Guardians of the Constitution, but its true power lies more in its power to oversee the supreme leader.

It is a well-known fact that there is a lot of bad blood between Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani whom the president accuses of corruption and aristocratic behaviour. Ahmadinejad angered Rafsanjani when in his presidential television debate with Mousavi, he alleged that all the three opposition candidates had been put forward by Rafsanjani to defeat him.

He further accused Rafsanjani of unlawfully accumulating massive wealth over many years and putting his cronies in the way of the president. The allegations prompted Rafsanjani to write a highly critical open letter to Khamenei, which the supreme leader ignored." 

So Iran is turning out to be just like every other petty military dictatorship, showing contempt for its citizens, killing them when it thinks the world isn't looking, making a mockery of Islam, and blaming it all on old ghosts, Britain and the US. Sad, really...


Our world is becoming smaller and smaller. We now think that even dinosaurs were much smaller in size, not the ponderous thunder lizards of movies past. It's becoming increasingly clear what might happen if nuclear weapons were unleashed, and Russia is signalling its high time for serious negotiations, Reuters reports: "Russia is ready to dramatically cut its nuclear stockpiles in a new arms pact with the United States if Washington meets Russia’s concerns over missile defence, President Dmitry Medvedev said on Saturday.

”We are ready to reduce by several times the number of nuclear delivery vehicles compared with the START-1 pact,” he told a news conference in Amsterdam.

”As far as warheads are concerned, their numbers should be lower than envisaged by the Moscow 2002 pact,” he added.

He was referring to an interim pact called the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) which commits the sides to further cuts in their arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads by 2012." The ball is in the US's court, are we going to play?