Iran seeks to calm prison abuse outrage

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-08-10 11:11

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (C), Judiciary Chief Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi (top L) and head of the Guardian Council Ahmad Jannati (lower L) arrive in Parliament for Ahmadinejad's swearing-in ceremony in Tehran August 5, 2009. [Agencies]

A senior guard commander struck back on Sunday and challenged the judiciary for not going after the three top opposition leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karroubi and former president Mohammad Khatami themselves, who initially led the protests over the June 12 elections on the grounds they were rigged.

"If Mousavi, Khatami ... and Karroubi are the main elements of a velvet coup in Iran, which they are, it is expected that judicial bodies and intelligence officials go to them to put out the fire of sedition, arrest, try and punish them," Yadollah Javani said, according to IRNA.

The Guard was created following the 1979 Islamic revolution as an ideological force to defend Iran's clerical rule. The 120,000-strong force is believed to be better armed and equipped than the regular military. In recent years, the Guard has also amassed a wide network of economic and political power.

The tensions between the Revolutionary Guard and judicial authorities suggests possible rivalries emerging in the highest levels of Iran's leadership as it tries to regain balance after the worst internal unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Such internal rifts could pose serious complications for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has previously relied on near seamless unity at the top to enforce policies and control.

The tensions come as Iran presses forward with a mass trial of more than 100 prominent reformist figures, opposition activists and others accused of offenses ranging from rioting to spying and seeking to topple the country's Islamic rulers through what they call is a "soft overthrow".

The trial, which has included televised confessions that rights groups say are likely extracted through pressure, is the government's latest attempt to crush the opposition.

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a TV interview broadcast Sunday that the Obama administration continued to back the opposition, as she said it did in the days just after the vote.

"We're continuing to speak out and support the opposition," she said on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" program.

Clinton said she was appalled at the treatment of detainees brought to trial.

"It is a show trial. There is no doubt about it," she said. "And it is a sign of weakness. It demonstrates, I think, better than any of us could ever say, that this Iranian leadership is afraid of their own people, and afraid of the truth and the facts coming out."

During a second hearing in the trial on Saturday, defendants talked about helping a shadowy monarchist-linked group planning a terror campaign to destabilize the country as well as meeting with US intelligence operatives in northern Iraq, state-run Press TV reported.

Mohammad Reza Ali Zamani said he met with a US intelligence agent called "Frank" in Irbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdish autonomous region, and received money and a phone from him in return for information on the Iranian government and student movements.

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