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All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Mohamed Sahimi.
Back on the show.
Of course, he teaches chemical engineering at USC in Los Angeles and used to write for PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau.
You can find a whole lot of his work there.
He's got an archive at antiwar.com/Sahimi.
And then, oh no, I should have had it pulled up.
His new site is imenews.com, if I remember it right, if I just entered it right.
Yeah, there it is, imenews.com.
Welcome back to the show, Mohamed.
How are you doing?
Thank you very much, Scott.
It's good talking to you.
Great to have you here.
Okay, now, so here's the thing.
Normally, not every time, but normally when you and I talk, especially if it's like for the KPFK show where I know that there will be tens of thousands of Iranian expats listening in Los Angeles and that kind of thing, we try to take time to make sure that everyone understands that you're not pro-regime, you're just making a habit out of debunking war party lies that would lead to a terrible conflict, a much worse conflict than we already have between the United States and your home country, Iran, where you come from.
And you've made it clear on the show many times that you're an expat for a reason.
You're no apologist for the regime at all.
You're just trying to stop a war.
It just so happens all the reasons for the war aren't true.
So there you go.
And then we go on to debunk the war party lies, right?
Well, in this case, I want to kind of turn it around a little bit.
I have my own little disclaimer, and I think for the most part it'll be the same as what you'd like to say as well, about how I have no problem with Iran's challenge of American hegemony in the region.
I don't care if they make hydrogen bombs.
I still don't think they would use one on Israel or America or anybody else.
But I'm not worried about their refusal to go on with the U.N. Security Council.
I'm opposed to every threat of war.
I spent 2007 debunking the lie that they were behind every roadside bomb in Iraq, and the same thing for Afghanistan.
And I will challenge any warmonger on any point of fact about Iran whatsoever.
And I don't mean to help the war party at all.
But I do want to take some time to tell the truth about just how cruel and corrupt and illegitimate the regime of Iran is.
And so I'd like to give you a chance to give your disclaimer about how anti-war you are.
But then we can talk about the truth about the Iranian government.
That's a great question.
Look, Scott, I am an American citizen and also a native of Iran.
And as an American citizen, I do not like my adopted country to get into another illegal, immoral and quite possibly criminal war with Iran, a country that despite all the problems that it has had, poses no threat to the United States.
And at the same time, I don't want my adopted country to get in a war while we have so many problems here at home.
Our infrastructure is collapsing.
One third of the people live on the poverty line.
We have millions of people that are insured.
Our education system is well behind other advanced countries.
And we have spent at least a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, and we've been involved in the war in Afghanistan for 11 years.
It's becoming 12 years.
So as an anti-war activist, I don't want my adopted country to get this type of war that only benefits the war mongers, the war industry and so on.
At the same time, I am from Iran.
I was born there, I grew up there, I did my undergraduate studies there, and then I moved here in 1978 to do graduate work.
And obviously, I don't want my native country, Iran, to be attacked by the United States and its allies over something that poses no threat to the United States or Israel.
You pointed out something very important.
The confrontation between Iran and the United States, Israel and their allies over Iran's nuclear program is not, in my opinion, over any threat that Iran's nuclear program might possibly pose to this country, but it is over hegemony.
The United States and Israel want to be hegemonic power of the Middle East, and therefore they cannot tolerate another country that goes its own way, has its own independent path, and has also a credible deterrent against any military adventure by these countries.
That is the gist, that is the crux of the issue.
So once we get past that, once we understand that, even if we wake up tomorrow morning and Iran, find Iran to have the most democratic political system in the world, where every citizen can fully participate in the political process, they can choose their leaders and so on, but yet this democratic political system, this government, has an independent political path that does not carry water for the United States or Israel, this country, such a country will still be in trouble with the United States and Israel, because they don't want any country in that region that has its own path, that decides its own fate, and does not carry water for what war mongers in this country perceive as the national interest of the United States, which in my view are not even national, true national interest of the United States.
So having said that, we can now talk about the despicable Iranian regime that Iran has had for the past several decades.
Okay, great.
Well, so yeah, let's talk about that, and I think we don't really need to spend a bunch of time talking about 1953 through 79, because the listeners to this show, they know about the CIA coup, and they know about the Shah Reza Pahlavi and the SAVAK and all of that, but just because the Americans foisted a fascist dictatorship on Iran doesn't mean that whoever came next somehow is legitimate and great, and in fact I think there were a lot of people from what I've read, and there was that great kind of cartoon movie about this a few years back too, there were a lot of people who were pretty thrilled to see the Shah's government fall, and then were terribly dismayed to see the rise of the Ayatollah Khamenei and his morality police and worse.
Well, let me first point out something very important, and that is the fact that in Iran we have a sort of a religious dictatorship that came out of the Iranian Revolution, is the direct result of the CIA coup of 1953.
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, that was put in power after the coup, eliminated all the nationalist forces, all the progressive forces, all the moderate religious forces, and therefore created a huge political vacuum.
Therefore, when his dictatorship and his corrupt system gave rise to the Iranian Revolution, because of the political vacuum that his regime had created, the only viable force that had been left that people could turn to were the religious and the Mullahs, because they had been more or less immune against the Shah.
Just to give you an example of what the Shah did, in 1975, in March of 1975, the Shah ordered all the political parties that were not really political parties, they were a cartoon of political parties, and they were totally loyal to him, he ordered all of them to be dissolved, disbanded, and combined all of them into a sort of a neo-fascist political party where everybody had to be a member of that party.
And then he declared that anybody who doesn't like this can get his passport and leave Iran.
Well, under these conditions, when he had suppressed all these nationalist, progressive, moderate religious forces that wanted to have a democratic system of government, like Prime Minister Mehdi Barzakhon, who became the first Prime Minister after the revolution, then the political vacuum gave rise to the power of the Mullahs.
Now, in Iran, except for the first couple of years after the revolution, and except for the, let's say, two years, the first two years of the first term of former President Mohammad Khatami, Iran has been basically a complete religious dictatorship.
And that's why people like me are not even able to go back to Iran and visit.
I haven't been to Iran for many, many years, and the reason is that I know if I go there, I get arrested.
A friend of mine traveled to Iran several years ago.
He was arrested.
He spent about five months in solitary confinement, and several months later he was finally released and he was allowed to leave Iran.
And then when he came back here in Los Angeles, he told me that I should not go back to Iran, because when he was being interrogated while he was in solitary confinement, his interrogator asked about me several times because of my political activity here.
Any political activity that people like me have is in opposition to war, not in support of the religious dictatorship in Iran.
Now, in Iran, up until 2005, we had elections, actually up until 2002, we had elections that were not democratic.
Iran's elections have never been democratic, have never been free.
But up until 2002, from the revolution of 1979 to 2002, the elections were competitive in the sense that there were candidates from different political factions with real differences between them, and the elections, although not democratic in the real sense of the word, but they were competitive so that at least one or two candidates represented and defended some of the interests of the people.
But beginning in 2002, when we had the election for the seventh parliament after the revolution, the hardliners decided to eliminate all those candidates that they didn't want to run.
In Iran, we have a constitutional body called the Guardian Council, and the Guardian Council decides the qualification of people who want to run in various elections.
So through this Guardian Council, the hardliners decided that they want to disqualify all those candidates whom they don't like.
And in 2002, for the election of the seventh parliament, they disqualified about 650 candidates that were basically reformists, democratic, and were defending the rights of the people.
So when the elections were held, the reformists had said in advance that out of 290 seats that the Iranian parliament had, because of the elimination, 190 had already been decided before even one single vote had been cast.
And their prediction turned out to be exactly correct.
They even published a list of 190 districts that they said that had already been decided.
So after that, then we had the election in 2005, where Ahmadinejad was supposedly elected.
They also manipulated the vote there in Iran in a presidential election.
If no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote, 51 percent of the vote, then there is a second round of voting.
So in the first round of elections, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani and the reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi, who is now under house arrest, got the highest vote.
But the Revolutionary Guards and their militia, the Basij, manipulated the votes.
They declared that Ahmadinejad was the second vote-getter instead of Karroubi.
So they sent Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani to the second round.
And in the second round, they declared that Ahmadinejad had won the election.
Again, the fact that the first round had some candidates that were defending some of people's interests was acceptable.
But then we had the election in 2009, when Ahmadinejad wanted to run for a second term.
And then former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Moustavi was a candidate.
And Karroubi, who was twice the speaker of Iranian parliament and had run in 2005, was also a candidate.
And Ahmadinejad was a third candidate.
Despite every prediction and despite all the evidence, the hardliners announced that, declared that Ahmadinejad had won the election and had been elected for a second term.
Then Ayatollah Khamenei, who is Iran's supreme leader, gave a Friday prayer sermon just a week after the election.
And he, through his support behind Ahmadinejad, he declared that everybody else was wrong.
And he warned people that if they protest, they will be killed.
And the responsibility for them getting killed is with the Green Movement, which was basically a movement that came out of the reform movement of Mohammad Khatami in 1997.
So Iranian people marched into the streets, millions of them, in the aftermath of the election.
They demonstrated.
And the security forces, led by Revolutionary Guards, put them down violently.
At least 125 people have been killed.
I myself posted an article on Tehran Bureau about two years ago in which I listed 110 people that have been killed with their names, age, and so on and so forth.
So the estimate is that at least 125 people have been killed.
Thousands of people.
Yes.
Let me just finish it because it's very important.
Thousands of people were arrested.
A lot of young people were detained at this detention center in southern edge of Tehran, where the government usually keeps, you know, common criminals and narcotic traffickers and so on.
Four young people who were among the demonstrators were murdered in that detention center.
And then the country was put into deep political repression that has continued to this date.
All right.
Now, and I want to get right back to that, the state of the well, the state of the police state there.
But so on the election of 2009, there's so much other stuff that unfortunately, obviously, we have to skip over here.
But on the election 2009, I spoke with Reese Ehrlich, who is a great independent journalist, and he was in Tehran at the time that that happened.
And he would absolutely agree with you that Ahmadinejad lost that thing, that the green candidate, Mousavi, clearly would have been would or should have been the winner, et cetera, like that.
But then Flint and Hillary Mann Leverett seemed to cast quite a bit of doubt on that.
And I didn't go back and review all of everybody's notes from back then and whatever, for the purposes of this interview.
But in a nutshell, I think what they found is that, yeah, in the cities, Mousavi won.
He is identified, I guess, as as we would call it in America, the more liberal candidate.
But in out in the countryside, the right wingers have the support.
And this is the same way that they would say, I think, about 2005 as well.
George Bush actually came out and said, hey, you right winger, you Iranians better not elect the right winger right before the elections in July of 2005.
And that seemed to be what put Ahmadinejad over the top.
But anyway, specifically, I guess, on the question of 2009, you completely disagree with the Leveretts about the numbers there.
And I completely disagree with them, because, first of all, I have responded to them in my past writing and not only me, but other people.
And let me tell you, Eric, that you mentioned is a good friend of mine.
And I know he agrees with me.
But the problem with people like Flint Leverett and his wife is that they accept, for example, the statistics of voting that the Iran Ministry of Interior that is controlled by the hard line and Ahmadinejad that published.
So if you accept that, then, obviously, you can declare anything.
But the main protest was that the votes had not been counted.
And there have been so many evidence, even Revolutionary Guard commanders, some of them came out and said that they had planned for this.
Let me just give you one example.
Right after the election of 2009, the day after, major political figures among the reformist and green movement were arrested.
When they were arrested, the arrest warrants that they were shown had been dated several days before the election.
In other words, the hardliners knew what was going to happen.
And therefore, they had decided to arrest people right the day after the revolution in order to prevent them from organizing people and organizing demonstrations.
If the elections were completely clean, why did they need to, you know, issue arrest warrants way in advance of elections and at least not wait to see how things develop?
That's just one piece of evidence.
There have been many, many other pieces of evidence.
And each and every one of them has been discussed with me and described with me with the articles that I publish on Tehran Bureau, and people can go there and see it.
The other thing that is interesting to me is that Flint Leverett and his wife, people who were involved with the State Department and the CIA and so on, now are siding with the most reactionary element in Iran, which are Ahmadinejad, the hardliners, and so on.
And that is really puzzling to me, that why people would side with them.
And maybe you shouldn't be too surprised.
In fairness to the Leveretts, I think they just side with the right-wing's version of the facts rather than really siding with them.
Well, I mean, when they say Ahmadinejad won, get it over with, then that means that, you know, that means that they're fighting with him.
But when they wrote that, they weren't telling the people of Iran to get over it.
They were telling the war party in D.C. to get over it, because they were using it as another piece of their excuse for, you know, why the Iranian regime is so bad that maybe we need to do something about it.
That is true.
That is true.
One can look at it that way.
But at the same time, the principal position is that anything that Iranian regime, you know, as terrible as Iranian regime is, any changes that is desired within Iran, within Iran political system, must be something that is done by the Iranian people, not something that is done by outside forces, in particular neocons and so on.
Right.
Well, now, and speaking of which, you know, I can see why the people of Iran, in great majorities, would have wanted to get rid of Ahmadinejad, because he is such a clown.
He makes a better lightning rod than a self-appointed supreme ayatollah.
I mean, if he's a better poster boy for the evil of the Iranian regime than the ayatollah himself, then he's a really lousy president to have acting as the head of state and talking on TV.
And, you know, I was actually criticized for wanting to ask him a question about why he denies the Holocaust all the time.
But, of course, the question wasn't, oh, why do you keep hurting my feelings with your Holocaust denial?
The question was, what are you doing?
When, of course, the entire narrative of the American War Party is that these people are so the government of Iran is so horrible and crazy and evil and such Holocaust deniers that how in the world could you suggest that we sit down at a table and deal with them?
And then so what does he do?
He comes out and he denies the Holocaust ten more times.
I mean, what the hell kind of points is he trying to score here?
He's a terrible leader from any objective point of view from outside Iran anyway.
I totally agree.
And I think, in fact, Ahmadinejad's rhetoric and his sort of adventurous foreign policy has greatly contributed to the standoff between Iran and the West over Iran's nuclear program.
Let me remind the people who may be listening to this that before Ahmadinejad became Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami was Iranian president, and he tried to reach a diplomatic solution with European countries during the Bush administration that were basically representing the Bush administration.
So his government, his administration negotiated with France, United Kingdom, and Germany over Iran's nuclear program.
They reached an agreement in October of 2003 that Iran would voluntarily implement the provisions of additional protocol and other modifications to Iran's safeguard agreement, and Iran will also suspend its nuclear program so that the IAEA can go in and inspect everything.
And Iran did that for nearly two and a half years.
Iran did all of that.
In fact, that contributed greatly to IAEA gaining an understanding of the history of Iran's nuclear program.
But in return, the three European countries were supposed to offer Iran significant economic and security concessions, and they were supposed to offer Iran security guarantees, and they did none of this.
The point I'm trying to make, but during that whole time, because Khatami was a reformist guy, because he was a man of diplomatic solution, because he wanted to have detents with both the United States and the European countries, and because he had been elected with 22 million votes in Iran, neither the Bush administration nor the European powers dared to talk about imposing sanctions on Iran or send Iran's nuclear dossier to the United Nations Security Council.
But at the same time, the European countries reneged on the promises that they made to the Khatami administration, which gave rise to a phenomenon called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, because Khatami did everything that they asked him to do in terms of Iran's nuclear program, but he got nothing.
An Iranian politician said that we gave them all these pearls, and in return we only received candy.
In other words, Khatami suspended the nuclear program and all of that, and in return Iran received nothing.
So that gave rise to a guy like Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad has been Iran's worst enemy in terms of the rhetoric that he has used, denying the Holocaust, talking about Israel constantly, and so on.
And Iranian people actually recognize that.
So that's why in the election of 2009, 85 percent of eligible voters in Iran participated in elections.
I've never seen anything like that.
Even here in this area, in Los Angeles, there were huge, long lines of Iranians voting, hoping that they would get Mahmoud Ahmadinejad out of office.
But the election, in the view of people like me, was rigged, and the hard-liners wanted to have Ahmadinejad for another term.
Khamenei stood up to the nation and declared that he is the winner, and then he said, well, if you have any, you know, any doubts or any protests, talk to, you know, the responsible organizations or responsible organs of the government.
But when he has already declared Ahmadinejad as the winner, and when he has already thrown his support behind him, and when he has already threatened the nation that if they continue protesting, then they may be killed, and the responsibility for getting killed will be not with him and his hard-liners, but with the leaders of the Green Movement.
That left no room for any compromise of any sort.
So that's why people continue to protest.
For many, many months, people continued to protest.
The elections were in June of 2009, and the protests continued all the way to January of 2010.
And during that time, the Green Movement was really strong, but it was put down with the use of severe violence by Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
So this is not a regime that Iranian people like, despite whatever Flint Leverett and his wife may say.
This is not a regime that some of the supporters of Ahmadinejad in Los Angeles may say.
I know some of them even send email to you or, you know, editors at Antiwar.com talking about this.
This is a despicable regime in Iran.
But the point that people like me always make is that whatever the nature of this regime is, changing it, replacing it with a democratic regime, changing it with a popular regime, and so on, is something that should be done by the Iranian people inside Iran.
Of course, people like me have tried to be a voice for the suppressed voice of Iranian people inside.
We have talked about gross violation of human rights in Iran.
We have talked about all the crimes that were committed before and after the election of 2009.
I myself have written many, many articles that people can put on their own bureau.
I have a long record of writing about these crimes from 1980s to 1990s and to 2000.
So we have tried to be a voice for those suppressed voice.
I have talked about political prisoners.
Iran currently has about a thousand political prisoners, and most of whom are the leading figures of Green Movement and the reformists.
And they all want free elections in Iran so that people of Iran can decide what type of political system, what type of government they want.
But the hardliners, led by Khamenei, are opposed to it.
So when we talk about nuclear program, and just like you said, we debunk what the War Party, Israeli lobby, and so on, say or claim about Iran's nuclear program, is not because we support the Iranian regime.
Rather, we believe that if there is no war with Iran, and if there is a diplomatic resolution of the standoff over Iran's nuclear program, that provides the political space for the democratic groups and forces in Iran to go after the government and try to push it towards a more representative government.
But so long as there is a foreign threat against Iran's national security, against Iran's territorial integrity, so long as there is a threat by Israel and the United States that they may use military force against Iran, this will never happen.
Only in an environment of reconciliation and peace and resolution of diplomatic resolution of Iran's nuclear program, democratic groups and forces in Iran can do their work.
And that's why we support, we are opposed against sanctions, we are opposed to war, and we try to debunk all these exaggerated claims and all this nonsense about Iran's nuclear program.
We do hope that there would be a resolution, diplomatic resolution, so that people that we support in Iran, democratic groups that won free elections and then won a representative government, can actually achieve their goals.
Right now, tell me, well, let me tell you, this is why, you know, what you're talking about right there is really why I thought it was plausible that Ahmadinejad won, sort of like I was saying about 2005, how Bush had really said, you know, conservatives better not turn out to vote in Iran tomorrow, or something, you know, pretty stumbling, pretty blatant like that, that really provoked him into electing him in the first place.
And I know that it's the government of Iran's propaganda that anyone that opposes them is a CIA stooge.
I mean, of course, that's what probably any dictator in the world says about all of their opposition.
Except that anybody can pick up a computer and find out that, yeah, actually, the CIA and JSOC are running all over the place and supporting dissident groups wherever they can, and trying to finance even student democracy groups and whatever.
Almost as if they're deliberately trying to help the dictatorship delegitimize anyone who would support them, or who would oppose them.
I mean, look, if the question is, when all those huge demonstrations broke out in Iran after the election of 2009, whether Western intelligence agencies tried to take advantage of it and stir things up, if that's the question, I have almost no doubt that they tried.
But that is different from saying that the whole Green Movement, all those huge demonstrations that even Tehran mayor, for example, who is a hardliner himself, even he said that at least 4 million people took part in demonstrations in Tehran.
If the question is whether all that huge, all those huge demonstrations, the Green Movement with authentic leaders that Iranian people have known for decades, whether they are stooges of CIA and Western intelligence, that's the most ridiculous claim that anybody can make.
Mir Hossein Mousavi, for example, who was Iran's prime minister...
No, wait, wait, pardon me.
Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to waste your time giving credence to the idea that the entire Green Movement was a CIA thing.
I was just referring to, you know, in the days leading up to the election, that would have been what the government was telling the people, was that, you know, the Americans are trying really hard to defeat Ahmadinejad.
So if you're against that, turn out to support him, and that could be effective shtick.
I didn't mean to say that it was plausible that, you know, about the whole Green Revolution, that it was just another color-coded thing.
I understood that, Scott, but I must say to the Obama administration credit, his administration didn't make, you know, claims like George Bush did in 2005.
On the eve of Iranian election in 2005, George Bush said, as you pointed out, that, you know, Iranian president doesn't have any power.
So why should Iranian people even vote?
But when Ahmadinejad was elected, so to speak, and became Iranian president, and started using all that rhetoric against Israel and the United States and so on, all of a sudden the Bush administration claimed that Ahmadinejad is the most powerful man in Iran who makes all the decisions and so on.
But in 2009, to Obama administration credit, they didn't make, you know, provocative statement like that.
This time, Iranian people are recognizing what Ahmadinejad had done over the past four years during his first term, which even if he set aside the political aspects of it, his performance when it came to economic issues was miserable, was totally miserable.
They tried to peacefully replace him with a more reasonable guy.
Not that the political system was going to change dramatically, but at least it would have put Iran on a path that one could see where the country was going.
But it was blocked by the hardline and Khamenei, which is why, you know, things have continued and Iran is in deep repression ever since.
All right.
Now, and let's talk about more, you know, more about that.
You know, for the average person who's not a political dissident, but he's just trying to get by in life in Iran.
How totalitarian is that police state anyway?
I hear that their court system is at least as corrupt as America's.
And I thought, oh, no.
It's true.
I mean, Ahmadinejad administration is perhaps the most corrupt administration that Iran has known over the past 50, 60 years.
It's probably even more corrupt than anything that we saw during the last years of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, before the revolution.
This guy has wasted Iran's resources.
Statistics by international organizations show that during the past seven and a half years, Iran has made about $600 billion for exporting of its oil.
When you look at what has been done in Iran, there is very little that this guy can show for all that income that Iran has had.
Instead, what he has done has been, first of all, with his rhetoric and his adventurous foreign policy and everything that he has done, he has basically forced European corporations to leave Iran, not to invest in Iran.
And therefore, he has used that as an excuse to give huge contracts to companies that are linked with the Revolutionary Guards.
And therefore, Revolutionary Guards have basically taken over Iranian economy.
One reason that people like me are opposed to these sanctions is that, in fact, these sanctions have tightened the grip that the Revolutionary Guards have on Iran's economy, because there is nothing in Iran that can compete with Iranian Revolutionary Guards in terms of economic power.
And when you impose these sanctions, they can use that as further evidence that there is a threat, and therefore we have to control everything.
And at the same time, when you don't have a transparent government, a government that does everything in full transparency, everything is possible, and every type of corruption is possible.
In just one case that the hard-liners have been forced to reveal, a group of people who were connected to Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards have embezzled billions of dollars from Iranian banks.
And that's just one case.
A former minister recently said that 60 percent of all the wealth in Iran is controlled by 300 people in Iran.
This is even worse than what we have in the United States.
And a lot of it has happened during Ahmadinejad's terms as Iranian president.
So this guy has been one of the worst and most incompetent administrators and presidents, even when it comes to economic policy.
Forget about political freedom, freedom of expression, all of that.
It is true that the average Iranian people, when they wake up in the morning, their first concern is not freedom of expression or anything like that.
The first concern is not political freedom.
The first concern is to make a living.
But when it comes to that, even when it comes to that, Ahmadinejad has performed so terribly and so miserably that it is almost unimaginable.
Yeah, he's got an American economic policy, right?
Print more money, it'll all work out.
Exactly.
And let me also add to this.
The sanctions that the U.S. and its allies have imposed on Iran have provided an excuse for this corrupt government to hide behind the sanctions and say, well, everything that we are experiencing in Iran is the result of sanctions.
Yes, sanctions have made things much worse.
That's true.
A lot of people like me in this country have opposed it.
But the fact of the matter is Ahmadinejad's administration is also corrupt.
And what the sanction has done has made the problems much worse, but also has given his administration and the Revolutionary Guard an excuse to hide behind these sanctions and, you know, excuse themselves for everything, which is basically not true.
So the next result is that Iran and the lives of tens of millions of Iranian people have been disrupted as a result of these sanctions and the corruption of Ahmadinejad's administration.
And they find themselves in a miserable situation that they are finding it right now.
Well, and now, but what about political freedom?
And well, and actually, no, besides that point, but what about criminal justice, right?
Somebody is accused of something like that.
How fair is the average trial in Iran?
Occasionally, we see pictures of people hanging from their neck in public.
Well, the judiciary in Iran can basically be divided into two groups.
One group is, you know, the people that deal with dissidents, political figures, journalists, human rights activists, feminists, and so on.
And one group is our judges and part of the judiciary that deals with ordinary people.
The part that deals with ordinary people is not too bad, although there is also corruption there.
And the main reason is because the bad economic situation affects everybody from the ordinary people to judges and so on.
But that part is not too bad.
Just to give you an example, just yesterday, this judge declared that this guy that was supposedly a member of Revolutionary Guard and had died in a car accident, and the government had tried to claim that his death was not accidental, but in fact, a supporter of the Green Movement had hit him with his car to kill him.
A judge said that's not true, and this was just a pure car accident.
This is, of course, political, but it wasn't, you know, something very significant.
But the point is that part of the judiciary, although there is corruption in it, is not too bad.
But then we have the other part of the judiciary that deals with dissidents, you know, human rights activists, journalists, and so on.
And that part has lost its independence totally.
It is controlled by security forces.
And in many, many cases, the judges that have been appointed to handle this have their own cases of corruption, have their own cases of things, questionable things.
And at the same time, they are basically dictating what type of sentence they should issue for political dissidents.
This is a very well-known fact in Iran that the interrogators of the political dissidents that are basically members of revolutionary guards, intelligence, and security forces tell the judges what type of sentence they should give to these political dissidents, whereas the only things that these political dissidents have had is, you know, talking their minds and talking about how Iran, you know, a great country, an old nation with, you know, all this glorious history, is still far from, you know, a democratic system of government, and how corruption, whether it's political or economical, has ruined the lives of the Iranian people.
So that part of the judiciary is totally broke, and it is even discussed more or less openly, even within Iran.
I mean, even in this tight repression, it has been so obvious, it has become so glaringly obvious that it is impossible to prevent the discussion of it.
And in fact, there is a big argument between the opposition and the judiciary that this judiciary, that part of it that deals with political dissidents and other activists, has lost its independence and is totally corrupt and under control of security, intelligence, and revolutionary guard forces.
Well, now, yeah, and isn't it funny, too?
It's always the revolutionary guard forces, like you're saying, who control the black markets and profit the most from American foreign policy, when they're supposedly the epitome, the very worst part, they're even criticizing Hegel for voting against a resolution to call the revolutionary guard forces terrorists back in, I think, 07, which was, of course, a thin pretext.
They were pushing for strikes on revolutionary guard bases in Iran under the excuse that they were behind every roadside bomb in the Shiite parts of Iraq, which was obviously a pile of lies debunked on this show at the time, of course.
But anyway, they're the ones, everybody else suffers, and they're the ones who are bringing the oil to the black market and making all the profit, the very correctly identified as the worst part of the Iranian police state.
They're the ones who benefit the most from what America does, which I don't think is deliberate, but it might as well be.
It's so blatant.
But now let me ask you about this, or you can say something about that if you want more, but I wanted to ask about the oppression of minorities.
I know at least the CIA seems to think that it's a good idea to help the Balaki, Sunni, Jandala, Al-Qaeda type guys blow up things, and the Israelis seem to have been participating in some of that too, depending on which source you're reading, which agency is which there.
But of course, there's also been rumors about American support for PJAC, which is the anti-Iranian version of the PKK, basically up in Kurdistan, and maybe, geez, what if we can come up with a brilliant plot to split off the Azeri sections of Iran?
So my question, though, is, is that based on a sort of plausible theory that these ethnic and religious minorities actually really hate the Iranian government because they really are that oppressed and they could be bought off and could be made to participate in some kind of regime change?
Well, there are two questions here.
One is, first of all, whether ethnic groups are dissatisfied with the state of affairs in Iran and they think that there is discrimination and so on.
The answer is yes, there has been discrimination against ethnic groups, but this has a long history.
This is not just restricted to during the Islamic Republic era.
This goes back many, many decades.
It existed during the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his father.
So it is true that some of these ethnic groups have suffered by, you know, because of values type of discrimination.
But one of the great things about Iran is that despite having many, many ethnic groups, these ethnic groups have been very well integrated into a unified nation called Iran.
If you look at, for example, the leadership of the Islamic Republic or the leadership of the opposition, you see that many, many of the most important figures are not actually the Persians, but rather belong to ethnic groups.
Khamenei himself is of Azeri origin.
Mir Hossein Moustavi is Azeri.
Abdullah Reza Mezangzadeh, who is a leader, leading reformist and was a spokesman for the Khatami government, is a Kurd.
Mohsen Rezai, who was a former commander of Iran Revolutionary Guards and now is an influential figure, is from the province of Khuzestan, where there is some Iranian Arab population.
Shamkhani, who was commander of Iranian Navy, is an Iranian Arab.
So this has helped Iran to be a unified, integrated nation over the ages.
Now, as I said, if we talk about discrimination, yes, there has been discrimination.
There is no doubt about it.
For example, one of the complaints that ethnic groups have had is that the central government should allow teaching of their own local language in their schools, and they should be allowed to use their own language in their schools in those areas, in addition to Farsi, which is the national language.
Or, for example, people in Khuzestan, which is the oil province of Iran, the most important oil provinces, have complained that they should get more share of the oil income for their own development.
These are all real.
These are all legitimate.
These are all factual.
But as I said, the ethnic groups have been very well integrated within the nation of Iran.
Now, as you said, for example, CIA is believed to have supported a terrorist Sunni group, Jundalat, that operates from Pakistan and attacks both ordinary Iranian security forces in Iran's Khuzestan and Balochistan provinces, which is on the border with Pakistan, or the Pejak group that you mentioned, which is the Iranian version of the PKK, Turkish PKK group, that also has attacked Iranian towns in the Kurdistan area.
But I don't believe any one of these can lead to, you know, let's say, disintegration of Iran.
But the point of supporting these groups is to create maximum trouble for Iranian government and steer ethnic tension among Iran, so that hopefully what they hope for is that the Iranian government will have less resources and less time to do other things.
But in the final analysis, I don't believe this will have any effect, except that, of course, it will create a lot of bloodshed, a lot of, you know, innocent people will get killed because of all these supports that foreign governments have been giving to these ethnic groups.
In addition to the United States, Britain is known to have, you know, supported some of these Iranian Arab dissidents.
They have set up bogus organizations called the Liberation Front of this or that, with offices in London, for example, or even in Washington.
And these groups basically consist of a website and a small group of people that are on payroll of this or that.
And so these things have been known, and a lot of people are, Iranian people are aware of this, and they follow this.
So, and that's, of course, that's also one of the things that the regime in Iran uses as, you know, as evidence that Western power, when they want to talk to Iran and they want to negotiate with Iran, they don't do it in good faith.
Rather, you know, they talk about negotiating with Iran while they support all these terrorist groups and while they, you know, ratchet up their sanctions and so on.
So these all have provided other excuses for Iranian government to put more pressure on Iranian people.
Yeah, you know, I forgot, maybe it was Scott Ritter who said years ago first on my show that, well, I don't know who it was.
It would have been way back.
But anyway, the point being, from the Americans' point of view, and I guess the Israeli point of view, too, the neoconservatives' point of view, which is more like the Israeli point of view than the American one.
But anyway, from that point of view, the moderates are the enemy in Iran.
And if you wanted to be cynical enough, something like George Bush intervening the way he did in 2005 or something like that, or all this blatant support for groups like Jandala and PJAK really is just, and the MEK, really is a great way to help marginalize the moderates, just like you're saying is the effect of it.
Because, in fact, the hard right-wingers, people like Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah himself, they make the best boogeymen for the argument that what we need is a regime change, not a negotiation of the nuclear issue.
And so really, that's the agenda.
This is the means to that end.
What do you think of that?
This is totally true, Scott.
I mean, we don't have hardliners just in Washington.
We also have hardliners in Tehran.
And as I mentioned, for example, when the moderate reformist Mohammad Khatami was Iranian president, the West, instead of helping him to overcome the resistance by hardliners for a negotiated solution, they hampered his effort.
At that time, it was very well known that there is seizures in the Iranian political establishment between moderates and reformists led by Khatami and the hardliners led by Khamenei.
And Khatami tried to make decent with the European powers that were negotiating on behalf of the Bush administration.
So a wise policy would have been doing something that would make Khatami's case for a negotiated solution stronger.
Instead, what they did was, in return for all the things that Khatami did, they didn't do anything.
They just offered some vague promises for the distant future or things that had no meaning whatsoever.
For example, they promised Iran that they will not attack Iran with nuclear weapons.
Well, Iraq wasn't also attacked by nuclear weapons.
Iraq was invaded by U.S. and British forces.
And use of nuclear weapons is banned anyway by United Nations charters and so on.
So this is not something that Khatami administration could hang its hat on or, you know, can present it to the hardliners as a major concession by the West towards Iran.
And at the same time, it is very, very well known that when Ahmadinejad ran for the second term in 2009, the Israeli establishment really was in favor of him continuing as Iranian president because, as you said, you know, they could use him as an excuse to threaten Iran to, you know, to provoke more sanctions against Iran and so on.
So what has happened is that we have hardliners on both sides that don't want any compromise, and then the moderates, as you said, and probably as Scott Ritter said, they have been marginalized because this is not in the interest of neocons and Israeli lobby in the United States to have moderates in power in Tehran.
And we also have hardliners in Tehran who don't want any compromise because they think that the only thing that the United States is interested in is in overthrowing the regime and replace it with a pro-U.S. puppet regime in Tehran.
OK, and now I do want to end this interview before it's too long for anyone to want to hear it, Mohammed, but let me ask you one more thing, too.
How how much does the Iranian regime use torture on its own citizens, more than, say, the average Texas Sheriff's Department?
I don't know.
OK, this is a difficult question because I don't know how much Texas Sheriff, how much torture Texas Sheriff uses against inmates.
Well, just a little bit.
You know, but I do know that Iranian security forces do use torture against dissidents and the torture that they they use have all sorts of forms and shapes.
For example, they put people in solitary confinement for long periods of time.
They cut off his contact with everybody.
That's, of course, a very severe form of torture.
Other people have been physically harmed.
And there are very well-known documented cases.
One case that I can mention right now is a political figure named Abdullah Momineh.
Abdullah Momineh was a major dissident among Iranian university students.
He's a major figure.
He's a very moderate, very reasonable person.
He was arrested immediately after the 2009 elections.
He has been in jail ever since.
And he was tortured severely in jail because they wanted to force him to confess to things that he hadn't done.
After the torture, he wrote a letter to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Momineh, in which he described in great detail what has happened to him, which caused more problems for him, more torture for him, more mistreatment for him, and led to widespread protests both inside Iran and outside Iran by the Iranian community.
So there is no denying that the Iranian government does use torture against political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists, and so on.
This cannot be denied.
And what about the average suspected criminal, too?
In many ways, I would say that they are in better conditions than the political figures are.
For example, an average common criminal gets regular furlough to visit his family.
They get to have regular daily telephone contact with their family.
They get to see their family on a weekly basis, face to face in jail.
Whereas a lot of these political prisoners have not been granted furlough and have not been allowed to contact their families and so on and so forth.
So in many ways, the common offenders are in better conditions than the political offenders.
Well, it sounds like a pretty clear parallel to a Guantanamo-type system, or even they have these prisons now that, I'm sorry, I forget the initials for it, but it's the secure communications facility kind of prison, something like that, where it's this new level of lockdown for the whole prison, more than a supermax.
I totally agree, yes.
Well, yeah, and you know what?
If we did this whole interview about the parallels between the American system and the Iranian one, I think we would arrive at quite a bit more examples than that.
But anyway, we got to cut it off here because I want people to still want to hear this thing.
And we're clocking an hour right now.
So thank you very much for your time, Mohamed.
I always learn a lot.
And it's always great to talk to you.
Thanks, Scott.
And before we go, let me just say one more thing, and that is the parallel that you mentioned.
In fact, the Iranian authority always do say that if you look at our system, there is no worse than what is happening in American jails.
That's what they always point out.
Right.
And why wouldn't they?
It's just like the Soviets used to point at American ghettos.
Yeah, those capitalists sure care about human rights a lot.
Look, exactly.
You know, given our our so-called, at least, enemies, plenty of ammo to use against us.
That's for sure.
Exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you so much for your time, Mohamed.
Thank you, Scott.
I appreciate it.
All right, everybody.
That is the great Mohamed Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC, and he keeps this brand new website.
IME News, Iran News and Middle East Reports, and you can find his massive archive at PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau and, of course, at antiwar.com/Sahimi.
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