Harry's Place

The Argentian-Iranian “truth commission”– formed last month to investigate the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires which killed 86 people– is becoming increasingly farcical.
In 2006 Argentine prosecutors accused the Iranian authorities of directing Hezbollah to carry out the attack on the center. They called for the arrest of former Iranian [...]

Hojjat al-Islam Mehdi Taeb, a senior Iranian cleric and head of the effort to defeat the “soft war” against the Islamic Republic, has declared Syria to be “the 35th province [of Iran] and a strategic province for us.”
Taeb added: “[I]f we lose Syria, we cannot keep Tehran.”
This is a remarkably candid admission. Iran’s rulers clearly [...]

Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. His most recent book, The Pasdaran: Inside Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was released in September 2011.
In Fathom 2 – online February 6 – Ottolenghi speaks to Fathom Assistant Editor Jules Robinson about the Pasdaran – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, [...]

A few years ago, it seemed the Argentine government was finally getting serious about bringing to justice the murderers responsible for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires which killed 86 people.

In 2003, after almost a decade of botched and scandal-plagued investigations, then-president Nestor Kirchner opened sealed government documents relating to [...]

You may have seen this photo of a young Iranian convicted of a violent but non-fatal mugging crying on the shoulder of one of his executioners before being publicly hanged in Tehran.

Thomas Erdbrink of The New York Times was there and reports:

The two men, both unemployed and from poor families, had been caught two months [...]

A popular coffee shop in Tehran is closing down rather than comply with a government order to install telescreens, er, surveillance cameras.
Cameras have proliferated in Tehran coffee shops since last summer. “Most people thought they were part of the security systems installed by owners to protect against theft,” one Tehrani said. However the cameras are [...]

The website Arseh Sevom reports:
Isa Saharkhiz, Keyvan Samimi and Hila Sedighi are three of the 41 writers to receive 2012 Hellman/Hammett grants, awarded by Human Rights Watch, for their commitment to free expression and their courage in the face of persecution.
Mr. Saharkhiz a veteran journalist arrested shortly after the June 2009 presidential elections. To this [...]

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may be a Zionist “who offered a prize for Israelis who kill Palestinians.”
And an Iranian military parade may have featured a placard warning of the “damages of the Facebook internet site.”
But that hasn’t stopped Iran’s oh-so-hip Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei from signing up for his own Facebook page.
Golnaz Esfandiari at Persian [...]

Iran’s Fars New Agency reports:
Commander of Iran’s [paramilitary] Basij (volunteer) force Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi said that the international community does not pay enough attention to the sufferings of the American nation who have been victimized by their rulers.
Speaking in Iran’s Northwestern province of Zanjan today, Naqdi pointed to the reactions shown by the [...]

This is a guest post by Peter Tatchell
The final sessions of the Iran Tribunal investigation into the execution of 20,000 political prisoners in the 1980s has opened in The Hague.
The charges against Iran include crimes against humanity.
In one very bloody seven month period, from August 1988 to February 1989, at least 4,500 people, some of [...]