Iran Lobby

Exposing the Activities of the lobbies and appeasers of the Mullah's Dictatorship ruling Iran

What If Iran Held an Election and No One Voted?

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What If Iran Held an Election and No One Voted?

Iranian clergymen vote in the parliamentary and Experts Assembly elections at a polling station in Qom, 125 kilometers (78 miles) south of the capital Tehran, Iran, Friday, Feb. 26, 2016. Iranians across the Islamic Republic voted Friday in the country’s first election since its landmark nuclear deal with world powers, deciding whether to further empower its moderate president or side with hard-liners long suspicious of the West. The election for Iran’s parliament and a clerical body known as the Assembly of Experts hinges on both the policies of President Hassan Rouhani, as well as Iranians worries about the country’s economy, long battered by international sanctions. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

The Iranian regime’s presidential election is fast approaching on May 19th and with it comes expectations around the world of what the election will mean.

For the mullahs in Tehran and their overlord, Ali Khamenei, it has meant staging an election that gives the world the appearance of being fair and free, but in fact is anything but. They have even sought to create the aura of tension and debate by offering up “hardliners” to run against “moderate Hassan Rouhani.

In reality, this election—like so many others before it—has already been pre-ordained. The difference is that the mullahs learned their lesson from the disastrous 2009 re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which convulsed Iran in massive street protests that had to be put down ruthlessly and aired live on then-novel fledgling social media networks around the world.

Since then the mullahs offered up a less contentious election in 2013 with Rouhani being foisted on the world as a paragon of moderation and friendly attitudes through the removal and disqualification of any other threatening candidates to make the ballot.

The parliamentary elections last year saw a massive crackdown against journalists, dissidents, artists, students, and just about anyone else that might have Twitter on their cellphone.

Now the mullahs are staging an election where the outcome has already been pre-determined and the rest of the world just has not been clued in yet.

Slater Bakhtavar, an attorney, foreign policy analyst and political commentator, described the election farce in a piece for Forbes.

Western media are bafflingly enamored of extolling the virtues of Iran’s “free” and “democratic” electoral process, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it is neither. Anyone holding naive notions of any and all Iranians having some unalienable right to submit their name for election, then have a fair and equal chance to earn votes through rigorous campaigning and the debate of ideas, would do well to abandon such lofty fantasies, he writes.

“The actual voting process is riddled with fraud, too. The government meticulously plans initiatives to transport poor people (whose political leanings are known beforehand) to the polling stations, and official government employees are essentially ordered to vote. Tactics such as these allow officials to report enormous voter turnout numbers, pleasing journalists and maintaining the facade of Iran’s democratic international image,” Bakhtavar adds.

Bakhtavar notes how the Obama administration fell for the façade or the mullahs in supporting a flawed nuclear deal that did not reform the regime’s government and shockingly enabled the mullahs by paying cash ransoms for American hostages, thereby convincing the mullahs their path of squashing human rights was the correct one and carried no repercussions.

He does note however that the election of President Trump provides an opportunity to reset the scales with Iran and empower an Iranian dissident movement that has been under constant assault by the mullahs for three decades.

“President Trump is correct in his backing of the Iranian people, both morally and pragmatically. It has always been the right thing to do to support these oppressed people as they increasingly seek reform and the formation of a freer society, but now, in the early 21st century, the timing is perfect,” Bakhtavar said.

“New technologies exist now that allow communications on a wider scale than ever before, enabling the proliferation and exchange of new ideas and ways of thinking. Free thought is a danger to Iran’s theocratic regime, as it is to all dictatorships. These technologies are to be encouraged among the people of Iran, and those people should be afforded the dignity and respect of being addressed directly – not through their tyrannical rulers,” he added.

This explains why the mullahs spend such an inordinate amount of the regime’s time and resources to confiscating satellite dishes, blocking access to social media apps, tracking illegal online activity and trying to break the encryption of communications platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp.

The mullahs live with the very real fear that if the Iranian people were ever able to organize and communicate effectively, especially with the outside world and dissident and human rights groups, their tenuous hold on power would slip away.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, chair of Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), one of the largest Iranian dissident groups, answered this very real concern of the mullahs.

“Over the past 38 years the clerical regime has entirely relied on execution and prison to stay in power and all regime’s officials, including Rouhani who has been one of the decision makers in the regime during this period, are directly responsible for the crimes committed,” Mohaddessin said.

To that end, the Iranian resistance movement has offered an alternative to the Iranian people dissatisfied with their choices in the election: Simply boycott the vote.

An online campaign has been picking up steam with photos of demonstrations in Iran beginning to leak out on social media of Iranians calling for a boycott of the elections.

While it’s doubtful the mullahs would even reveal the effects of any boycott since returns are usually suspected of being falsified in the first place, any boycott is a sign of growing resistance, especially in a regime where any overt act of defiance often lands one in prison or worse yet at the end of the hangman’s noose.

But some intrepid Iranians are talking to Western media about participating in such a boycott over their disgust with their choices.

“I will not vote,” said Hossein Ghasemi, a 35-year-old taxi driver who voted for Rouhani in 2013 told Bloomberg. “None of them care about our demands and difficulties linked to daily increasing prices.”

There are already warning signs on the horizon for Rouhani. A report Monday by the state-run IRNA news agency said a survey of over 6,000 eligible voters found over a third saying they would not be voting, while another 46 percent said they would pick their candidate later. It offered no margin of error on the nationwide random survey, according to Bloomberg.

We can only hope that on May 20th the full extent of the dissatisfaction of the Iranian people is heard.

Michael Tomlinson

Ali Khamenei Reinforces Why Things Will Not Change After Elections

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Ali Khamenei Reinforces Why Things Will Not Change After Elections

Ali Khamenei Reinforces Why Things Will Not Change After Elections

Ali Khamenei, the mullah at the top of the power pyramid in Iran, gave another of his vitriolic speeches in which he reinforced exactly why things won’t change much in the Iranian regime after presidential elections May 19th no matter who gets elected.

He warned that any disrupters of the election would receive a “slap in the face” which is a not so-veiled warning to anyone planning protests over the election results.

The warning came in remarks he made to graduating cadets of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, in which he stressed the importance of security as the dominant issue in the election. An emphasis that is at odds with protests around Iran by ordinary Iranians demanding better jobs wages and economic growth.

The tensions are so bad that Hassan Rouhani’s recent appearance at the scene of a mine collapse trapping and killing scores of miners was met with derision and protesting miners kicking and banging on his car.

Those underlying tensions are a clear signal to Khamenei and the other mullahs of the precarious nature of their hold on power, which is why Khamenei chose to deliver his comments before the regime’s military.

It is also why controls on this year’s elections are much stricter with street rallies banned and restrictions on televised debates.

The elections have also done nothing to alter the trajectory of the regime’s military build-up, which if anything has stepped up in tempo as evidenced by Iran’s communications minister recently announced plans to put two satellites into space, but the impending launch may be cover for ballistic missile research.

Mahmoud Vaezi announced on Monday that the two supposedly home-made satellites will be launched into orbit in the coming months. The launches may seem innocuous, but such space technology could be used to help advance Iran’s missile technology.

“Iran is certainly using its satellite program to shield the ICBM (inter-continental ballistic missile) program. The technology and challenges in the two programs are similar in many aspects and one can move from one to another,” Saeed Ghasseminejad, an Iran research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Iran needs to disguise its ICBM program, he added, and satellite launches are an ideal method. The Islamic Republic has been sanctioned by the U.S. for its missile tests in the past, even since the signing of Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement in 2015. Iran’s military has engaged in at least eight missile launches since the deal was inked.

Iran’s missile arsenal forms the backbone of its national defense. The Islamic Republic was cut off from Western military support after its revolution in 1979, diminishing the capabilities of its air force. The country instead focused on advancing its missile program, which was easier to maintain thanks to the help of North Korea. An Iranian missile tested in January had North Korean origins, according to the Pentagon.

That commitment to Iran’s missile capability was reinforced by Khamenei in the same remarks to the Revolutionary Guard Corps cadets.

“The hype over Iran’s missile capability is because of their (enemies) spite and anger about this element of power in Iran,” Khamenei said.

“We possess missiles which are very precise and can hit the targets with high precision from thousands of kilometres away,” he said, adding that “We will preserve this capability with all in power and will increase it powerfully.”

He said that Iran’s military power serves as a tool for “deterring purposes” and relies on domestic potentials.

Also, the regime test-fired a high speed torpedo, a senior U.S. defense official told Fox News, marking the latest provocative action from the Islamic Republic.

The Hoot torpedo, which has a range of six miles, was fired in the Strait of Hormuz, where much of the world’s oil passes each day.

It’s unclear if the torpedo test was successful.

It is not the first time Iran has tried to test this torpedo. The last time it did so was in February 2015. It also follows a cruise missile test from a midget submarine also based on North Korean designs.

Iranian officials announced in April that the regime’s defense budget increased 145 percent under Rouhani, hardly the sign of a government intent on becoming a “moderating” influence in the region as promised by the Iran lobby.

In the end, very little has changed in Iran and will remain so no matter who gets elected. The only real hope for democratic reforms and change remains empowering the global Iranian resistance movement and give it the international backing it needs to become a force within Iranian politics again.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Military Buildup Continues Obscured by Election

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Iran Military Buildup Continues Obscured by Election

Iran Military Buildup Continues Obscured by Election

It’s no secret that while the Iran lobby was busy promising more moderation and accommodation from the Iranian regime during nuclear talks two years ago, the mullahs in Tehran were busy working over their calculators figuring out what they were going to buy with their newfound cash coming from relief from economic sanctions and the bonus of billions coming from a prisoner swap with the U.S.

Since the completion of the deal, the Iranian regime has been busy replenishing its military which was drained from years of fighting in Syria and Yemen, as well as supplying its proxies with weapons and ammunition including Hezbollah, Shiite militias and the Houthis.

More worrisome though is analysis indicating that Iran has sought to not only rebuild its military, but transform it primarily from tactical, regional actions to a more strategic, offensive posture posing a menacing threat to its neighbors, especially long-time rivals Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

Iranian officials announced late last month that Iran’s defense budget had increased by 145 percent under President Hassan Rouhani and that the military is moving forward with a massive restructuring effort aimed at making it “a forward moving force,” according to regional reports.

Regime leaders have stated since the Iran deal was enacted that they are using the massive amounts of cash released under the agreement to fund the purchase of new military equipment and other armaments. Iran also has pursued multi-million dollar arms deals with Russia since economic sanctions were nixed as part of the deal, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Leading members of Congress and U.S. officials working on the Iran portfolio suspect that at least a portion of the Obama administration’s $1.7 billion cash payment to Iran  has been used to fund and support terrorists in the Middle East.

The latest disclosure about Iran’s military buildup is further fueling concerns that U.S. cash assets returned to the country—which were released with no strings attached by the Obama administration—are helping Iran pursue a more aggressive military stance against U.S. forces in the region.

Iranian Brigadier General Kiumars Heidari announced the military buildup during Iran’s annual Army Day. While the announcement did not grab many headlines in the Western media, national security insiders have been discussing the announcement for weeks, according to conversations with multiple sources.

Iran’s goal is to turn its army into an “offensive” force, a major shift from its historic role as a support agent for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC, Iran’s extremely well funded primary fighting force.

Iran hopes to revamp its army from top to bottom, including improving logistical capabilities, weaponry, and other armaments.

The regime has also escalated its attempts to demonstrate additional military capabilities including the launching of ballistic missiles.

Another sign was an Iranian Yono-class “midget” submarine attempted to launch a cruise missile from the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, according to U.S. officials.  The only two countries in the world that operate this type of submarine are Iran and North Korea. The test launch was not successful, reported Fox News.  Iran had previously announced it had successfully tested a sea-launched missile and it is not known if this was the first actual submarine launch of the weapon.

The increase in military activity and emphasis on first-strike weapons and tactics is leading many to speculate what path the Trump administration will pursue to stymie the mullahs.

Much crystal-ball gazing has been going on lately, not the least of which coming from Iran lobby members such as the National Iranian American Council who hope to shape the narrative much as it did during the nuclear negotiations.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last month that Iran is complying with the terms of the 2015 nuclear agreement. The positive finding of the State Department’s routine periodic review of the nuclear agreement, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was surprising given President Trump’s assessment that it was “the worst deal ever negotiated.” Some analysts believed Tillerson was signaling that the Trump administration would let the agreement stand rather than “rip it up” as the president had promised.

But according to James S. Robbins, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, who served as a special assistant to the secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration, there is something deeper going on. The key language in Tillerson’s statement dealt with the National Security Council’s inter-agency review to determine whether continued suspension of the sanctions is “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” This phrasing points to the key weakness in the structure of the deal, said Robbins.

“In addition, previously secret aspects of the deal have begun to be revealed, such as the Obama administration freeing Iranian prisoners accused of major crimes related to the nuclear and missile programs. These shady aspects of the bargain make it easier for the Trump administration to make the political case against it, which Americans opposed by wide margins to begin with,” he added.

If the National Security Council determines that Iran’s activities are not in U.S. national security interests, the president can lift the sanctions waivers. This puts Iran in a bind. Tehran has threatened it could restart its nuclear program “in a new manner that would shock Washington.” But if Iran chooses openly to violate the terms of the deal, this would activate the agreement’s Article 37 “snap back” mechanism which restores all the pre-JCPOA international sanctions. The only way the “snap back” would not happen is if the UN Security Council votes otherwise, but the United States could veto any resolution that keeps the deal alive, according to Robbins.

This puts Iran in a lose/lose position: accept renewed and potentially tougher U.S. sanctions while staying within the framework of the JCPOA; or breach the deal and suffer the “snap back” consequences. Of course, Iran could just attempt to go full-bore to develop nuclear-armed missiles as quickly as possible and hope for the best. But the developing crisis with North Korea should be instructive to Tehran. The Trump administration is less willing than its predecessors to accommodate or ignore the nuclear ambitions of rogue states.

All of which places the Iranian regime squarely in the sights of the international community for the first time in nearly four years when Iran was dragged unwillingly to the bargaining table because of the effectiveness of previous sanctions.

We shouldn’t let this opportunity slip away like the last one.

Michael Tomlinson

Middle East Headed for More Instability Courtesy of Iran Regime

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Middle East Headed for More Instability Courtesy of Iran Regime

Middle East Headed for More Instability Courtesy of Iran Regime

To say that Saudi Arabia and the Iranian regime are at odds is to make one of the bigger understatements of the decade. For the Iranian regime, its adherence to its own particular extremist faith and expansionism, drives it to view any other country in the region with deep suspicion if not outright hostility.

Its relationship with Saudi Arabia has been fraught with peril as the mullahs in Tehran have consistently waged a silent war to destabilize the kingdom in a myriad of ways, including resorting to terror strikes such as the bombing of the Khobar Towers to insurrection in neighboring Yemen through Houthi rebel proxies.

From Saudi Arabia’s perspective, it has been in open—if not yet declared—war with the Iranian regime and for some powerful members of the ruling family, they’ve had enough.

Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince closed off the potential for more dialogue with the Iranian regime accusing it of following an “extremist ideology” and seeking to take over the Muslim world, according to the New York Times.

The prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is second in line to the throne and serves as defense minister and said the kingdom would fight Iran’s efforts to extend its influence in the region.

“We are the primary target for the Iranian regime,” Prince Mohammed said in describing efforts by Iran to take control of Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. He vowed Saudi Arabia would not wait for Iran to attack Saudi Arabia, but would instead battle the regime in Iran.

The proxy wars between the two Islamic nations have already been waged on opposite sides in Syria and Yemen with both sides blaming the other for supporting terror and extremist groups.

The war in Syria doesn’t appear to be winding down in any meaningful way as Iran announced it would be providing more troops to fight there on behalf of the Assad regime according to a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran has provided military support to Assad’s forces since at least 2012, but initially did not comment publicly on its role. But as the military support increased and Iranian casualties also rose, officials began to speak more openly.

“The advisory help isn’t only in the field of planning but also on techniques and tactics,” the Fars news agency quoted Mohammad Pakpour, head of the Revolutionary Guard ground forces, as saying. “And because of this the forces have to be present on the battlefield.”

An Iranian official said late last year that more than 1,000 Iranians had been killed in the Syrian civil war. These include a handful of senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, according to Iranian media reports.

Iran has helped to train and organize thousands of Shi’ite militia fighters from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Syrian conflict. Fighters from Lebanon’s Hezbollah are also working closely with Iranian military commanders in Syria, according to Reuters.

While the conflict continues to grind on in Syria, the prospect of stopping Iran’s expansion in Yemen might provide the leverage necessary to roll back the regime as outlined in an editorial by Gerald Feierstein, former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, in Defense One.

Feierstein pointed out differences in how to confront Iran between Saudi Arabia and its partner Gulf states may be easing as Yemen has proving to be common ground for agreement.

“Yemen may be the key to solving the GCC’s Iran problem. After last year’s Kuwait round of Yemeni negotiations ended in stalemate, the Saudi-led coalition determined that only a shift in the military balance would bring the Houthis and their allies, loyalists of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, back to the negotiating table. A strategy was derived to push the Houthis off the Red Sea coast — the Yemeni terminus of the arms-smuggling route that begins in Iran — and seize the vital port of Hodeidah,” he said.

Return of the port to government or even UN control would be a big step towards thwarting Iran in Yemen and eventually turn the tide in its struggle against Saudi Arabia.

The hammer could be a Trump administration review of Iranian policy that could mark a significant shift back towards valuing human rights improvements within Iran as a condition of future economic sanctions relief.

Amir Basiri, a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog and an Iranian human rights activist, touted the potential of this shift in a column.

While Iran does pose a major military threat, through supporting what has been described by Trump as “radical Islamist terrorism,” Tehran’s ongoing human rights abuses should finally receive the long overdue attention they deserve. In fact, U.S. interests can be advanced through a robust challenging of Iran’s domestic dissent crackdown. U.S. strategy seeking to confront Iran would receive a correct boost through combating Tehran’s authoritarian dogma, Basiri said.

“Parallel to such policy overhauls, the U.S. should stand alongside the Iranian people and their organized resistance, represented for decades by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the umbrella group of different organizations and individuals led by Maryam Rajavi, advocating regime change and peaceful transition to democracy,” he said.

“Increasing sanctions on Iranian regime elements involved in human rights violations is another aspect that would complete the canvas of Trump’s policy vis a vis Iran. Such measures would also send messages to the international community regarding the dangers in seeking short-term economic interests at the cost of the Iranian people’s long and ongoing misery,” he added.

By realigning U.S. interests to valuing human rights, we could also effectively sideline the Iran lobby which has been loath to discuss Iran’s human rights record knowing it to be dismal.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Up to Old Tricks of Assassination Overseas

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Iran Regime Up to Old Tricks of Assassination Overseas

Iran Regime Up to Old Tricks of Assassination Overseas

The Iranian regime has a long history of committing violence around the world either through its terrorist proxies such as Hezbollah, its intelligence operatives and Quds Forces, as well as its own Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The mullahs have long adopted the use of deadly force as a tool of statecraft. Not since the medieval age when monarchs plotted assassinations of rivals, has a nation used killing as part of an ordinary foreign policy tool.

The only other nation that seems to share that same affinity for killing is fellow rogue state North Korea which was implicated of the assassination of its leader Kim Jong Un’s half-brother in a brazen chemical attack at an airport in Malaysia in front of passers-by.

The use of chemical weapons seems to be a common trait shared by North Korea, Iran and its client state of Syria.

Now comes word that a dissident British-Iranian television executive was assassinated in Istanbul over the weekend only a few months after being sentenced in absentia to a six-year prison term by an Iranian court for allegedly spreading subversive propaganda, according to the New York Times.

Saeed Karimian was the owner of Gem TV, a network of television channels broadcasting in Farsi and other languages. He was shot “minutes after leaving his office,” Gem announced on Sunday. Also killed was his Kuwaiti business partner, whose name has not been released.

The assailants fled, and their vehicle was found abandoned and partly destroyed in another part of Istanbul, according to reports by Gem and several Turkish news outlets.

While there was an effort to spin the killing as a dispute over money, others saw the Iranian regime’s dark hand at work.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, one of the largest Iranian dissident groups, claimed that Karimian was assassinated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on the orders of top mullah Ali Khamenei. Iran has been accused of assassinating Iranian exiles in the past, most recently Abbas Yazdi, an Anglo-Iranian businessman who was kidnapped in Dubai in 2013 and is now thought to be dead.

Karimian had long been the target of propaganda and smears by media outlets linked to Iranian security services, the NCRI statement said.

His network has been aggressively expanding lately, recently adding several new channels and recruiting Iranian artists and staff from inside Iran and abroad.

Several regime-controlled Iranian media reports meanwhile said Karimian was linked in the past to The People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI), an Iranian dissident group which is part of the NCRI coalition, which may be one explanation for the assassination since the Iranian regime has allegedly instigated several documented attacks on refugee camps housing PMOI dissidents in Iraq resulting in massacres of unarmed civilians.

Turkey and Iran are neighbors and major trade partners, but relations have recently been strained. The two are regional rivals and have backed opposing sides in the Syrian civil war, according to the Washington Post.

Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom watchdog, ranks Iran as one of the worst oppressors of journalists in the world. The motive behind the killings, however, remains unclear.

The BBC reported that Karimian’s family said that the Iranian government had threatened him in recent months and that he had planned to leave Istanbul for London.

According to the New York Times, an Iranian court announced last January in a judicial newspaper that Karimian had been sentenced to six years in prison for spreading propaganda against the country’s Islamic government, and acting against national security.

What was so threatening to the mullahs? Apparently soap operas and other entertainment broadcast by Karimian’s networks are a threat to the religious theocracy the mullahs built in Iran since seizing power in 1979.

The potential pollution of the mullahs’ harsh religious control is so precarious that the regime bans satellite dishes and regularly sends militia and police out to rip them off rooftops; they are widely used, and millions of Iranians watch dissident’s “subversive” programming.

Karimian had previously suggested that he hoped his work would change Iranian society. “We will do our best to create an Iran one day that we can take pride in,” Karimian said in comments that were broadcast posthumously on his own network on Sunday following his killing.

The potential for change in Iran must have been seen as too threatening to the control of the mullahs it seems.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Denies British Aid Worker Appeal and Keeps Her Imprisoned

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Iran Denies British Aid Worker Appeal and Keeps Her Imprisoned

Iran Denies British Aid Worker Appeal and Keeps Her Imprisoned

In another display of the cold-blooded nature of the Iranian regime, Iran’s supreme court up held the conviction of a British-Iranian women sentenced to five years in jail on vague charges relating to national security. The decision ends her last legal avenue to ending her harsh imprisonment.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the news agency’s charitable arm, had lodged a final appeal in January after the confirmation of her sentence in a lower court. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said on Monday that the supreme court had rejected her appeal.

“I hadn’t had great hopes for the supreme court appeal,” he told the Guardian. “Now, realizing that that’s it, that all options are gone … in the middle of an election cycle, it’s hard to get attention on Nazanin’s case.”

According to the Guardian, Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 38, has spent 387 days behind bars, most of which have been in the notorious Evin prison. The regime’s Revolutionary Guards arrested her in April 2016 while she and her two-year-old daughter, Gabriella, were about to return to the UK after a family visit to Iran. She was tried and found guilty on the unspecified charges relating to national security last September.

Although the exact reasons behind Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s incarceration remain unclear, the Guards have accused her of attempting to orchestrate a “soft overthrow” of the Islamic Republic. An Iranian news agency affiliated to the country’s judiciary also said in April that she was a spy. Richard Ratcliffe has vehemently denied both allegations.

It also reinforces the regime’s dubious practice—articulated by Hassan Rouhani in media interviews—that it does not recognize the dual-national status of any Iranian and as such maintains the rights to arrest anyone.

The use of imprisoned American-Iranians as hostage bargaining chips during nuclear negotiations yielded billions of dollars in cash and sanctions relief and only emboldened the regime to go on another spree of arrests shortly after the deal was reached.

New revelations by Politico also revealed disturbing information about that prisoner swap by the Obama administration with the Iranian regime.

Obama announced the “one-time gesture” of releasing Iranian-born prisoners who “were not charged with terrorism or any violent offenses” last year, his administration presented the move as a modest trade-off for the greater good of the Iran nuclear agreement.

Obama portrayed the seven men he freed as “civilians.” The senior official described them as businessmen convicted of or awaiting trial for mere “sanctions-related offenses, violations of the trade embargo.”

In reality, some were accused by Obama’s own Justice Department of posing threats to national security. Three allegedly were part of an illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made microelectronics with applications in surface-to-air and cruise missiles like the kind Tehran test-fired recently. Another was serving an eight-year sentence for conspiring to supply Iran with satellite technology and hardware, according to Politico.

And in a series of unpublicized court filings, the Justice Department dropped charges and international arrest warrants against 14 other men, all of them fugitives. The administration didn’t disclose their names or what they were accused of doing, noting only in an unattributed, 152-word statement about the swap that the U.S. “also removed any Interpol red notices and dismissed any charges against 14 Iranians for whom it was assessed that extradition requests were unlikely to be successful.”

Three of the fugitives allegedly sought to lease Boeing aircraft for an Iranian airline that authorities say had supported Hezbollah, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization. A fourth, Behrouz Dolatzadeh, was charged with conspiring to buy thousands of U.S.-made assault rifles and illegally import them into Iran.

A fifth, Amin Ravan, was charged with smuggling U.S. military antennas to Hong Kong and Singapore for use in Iran. U.S. authorities also believe he was part of a procurement network providing Iran with high-tech components for an especially deadly type of IED used by Shiite militias to kill hundreds of American troops in Iraq.

The most worrisome prisoner was Seyed Abolfazl Shahab Jamili, who had been charged with being part of a conspiracy that from 2005 to 2012 procured thousands of parts with nuclear applications for Iran via China, including hundreds of U.S.-made sensors for the uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran whose progress had prompted the nuclear deal talks in the first place.

The revelations were devastating to federal prosecutors and cast a dark shadow over the claims constantly made by the Obama administration and the Iran lobby about the nature of concessions granted to the Iranian regime and proved the promises of “moderation” to be illusory.

The damage to long-running investigations into the regime’s illicit efforts to procure technologies to boost its ballistic missile program and military capabilities was severe, but the more important question yet to be answered is how to repair the damage to refocus efforts on pushing democracy forward in Iran.

Dr. Majid Sadeghpour, political director of the Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIACUS), a non-profit organization that works to promote human rights and democratic freedoms in Iran, emphasized that one positive that came from the Obama administration was the saving of Iranian dissidents under constant attack in Iraq by the regime in a piece for The Hill.

“Recently, Senate Armed Service Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) met with Maryam Rajavi, the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and addressed members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) in a rally in Tirana, Albania,” he said.

“Senator McCain’s visit represents a turning point in the plight of the Iranian dissidents now in Albania, but more importantly, marks a significant milestone in their struggle to bring about democratic change in Iran,” Sadeghpour added.

“Despite years of delays and several deadly attacks by mercenaries loyal to the Iranian regime, the MEK left Camp Liberty in Iraq with help from the previous occupants of the White House — perhaps the only piece of former President Obama’s Iran policy that will prove to have a lasting positive effect. As many as 3,000 lives were saved.”

It’s unfortunate the Obama administration could exercise the same foresight in confronting the Iran regime instead of appeasing it on the nuclear deal.

Michael Tomlinson

US Steps Up Sanctions Against Iran Prison Industry

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US Steps Up Sanctions Against Iran Prison Industry

US Steps Up Sanctions Against Iran Prison Industry

Each passing day seems to bring more evidence that the Trump administration intends to chart a very different path than the Obama administration when it comes to dealing with the Iranian regime.

The first clue was the harsh rhetoric directed at the mullahs and the nuclear agreement, as well as the multi-billion dollar payment made by the Obama administration as part of the deal.

Then came the first series of sanctions in response to Iran’s launching of ballistic missiles; a move the Obama administration did not make for fear of upsetting the mullahs and threatening the nuclear deal.

Next came the cruise missile strike against a Syrian airbase in response to a chemical attack against civilians, including young children and infants.

In less than three months, President Trump has acted aggressively and swiftly against Iran and its interests in Syria in a bold departure from the feckless policies of trying to appease the mullahs in Tehran practiced by President Obama.

Now the Trump administration is leveling new economic sanctions against senior Iranian officials and its prison system for widespread human rights abuses, including the systematic torture of those being held in these facilities, according to White House officials familiar with the matter.

The latest sanctions target the Tehran Prisons Organization and Sohrab Suleimani, a senior official in the prison system and the brother of Qassem Soleimani, a senior Iranian military figure responsible for operating Iran’s rogue activities in Syria and elsewhere.

Sohrab Soleimani is responsible for overseeing Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, which is known for torturous interrogations, forced interrogations, and widespread mistreatment of inmates.

The latest sanctions are certain to rankle Tehran, already the subject of a range of new sanctions under the Trump administration, which is currently conducting a widespread review of all matters related to the landmark nuclear agreement.

A senior official on the White House National Security Council told the Washington Free Beacon that the Soleimani family has a history of fomenting violence and unrest both inside and outside Iran.

“It’s no coincidence that Sohrab Suleimani is the brother of the notorious Qasem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC’s Quds Forces, who has been responsible for so much of the violent disruption Iran has been spreading through the region,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on record.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe Gen. Soleimani is overseeing Iran’s military operations in Syria, which are designed to prop up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The U.S. and its Middle East allies also said they have seen Gen. Soleimani’s hand in Revolutionary Guard military activities in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

Iranian human rights abuses have only grown under the leadership of so-called reformist President Hassan Rouhani, the official said. This includes the detention of U.S. citizens

“There has been a disturbing and significant increase in the number of detentions and executions of Iranian citizens under President Rouhani, and the infamous Evin Prison under Sohrab Suleimani’s control has been a key facility in this program of domestic repression,” the official said.

The Trump administration is holding meetings with the family members of American citizens still being detained in Iran and believed to be subjected to torture.

Soleimani’s role in Iran’s prison system makes him one of the foremost human rights abusers worldwide.

Soleimani oversaw an April 2014 incident at the Evin Prison in which dozens of security guards and prison officials beat a number of political prisoners. The attack is believed to have lasted several hours and impacted more than 30 prisoners. Many of these prisoners were later denied medical treatment.

Evin Prison is home to large number of Iranian political dissidents and other government opponents, who are routinely shut down and arrested by the Iranian regime for political activities targeting those in power.

The sanctioning of someone so central to the regime’s enforcement system against dissidents and a family member to a key figure in Iran’s military represent a significant escalation in attempts to push and contain the Iranian regime’s influence.

More importantly, the move once again highlights human rights as a central policy concern for the U.S. moving forward and redefines the need for the regime to improve its human rights practices.

U.S. lawmakers have been calling in recent week for the U.S. to further impose sanctions on Iran for its nonnuclear activities. They specifically cited Iran’s continued detention of four U.S. nationals and two U.S. green-card holders as justification for more penalties. Iran has accused most of these Americans of espionage, a charge they have denied.

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers wrote Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last week and noted that Iran hadn’t been sanctioned for any human-rights violations since the nuclear agreement was reached in July 2015.

“Failing to sanction individuals and entities committing flagrant abuses of human rights against the Iranian people not only goes against our most cherished values and principles but also undermines the credibility of our government,” they wrote.

This is an important step, but it’s only a step forward to finally bringing hope and democracy back to the Iranian people. We can only hope the pressure continues to build through next month’s presidential election in Iran.

Laura Carnahan

Trump Administration Must Move to Sanction IRGC

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Trump Administration Must Move to Sanction IRGC

Trump Administration Must Move to Sanction IRGC

With recent moves such as the launching of a cruise missile attack against a Syrian airfield, the dynamics of the how to confront the Iranian regime are inevitably changing in the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.

The pressure on the Iranian regime can be seen in the stepped-up attacks by the Iran lobby to try and dissuade U.S. policymakers from shifting to a more aggressive stance against the mullahs in Tehran.

How and in what form that stance will be is taking shape internally within the administration and in the halls of Congress and the mullahs are desperate to influence that debate. Unfortunately the easy access Iran enjoyed through the open door policy at the Obama White House through multiple visits by Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council and other members of the Iran lobby is now shut off.

The Trump White House is poised to ratchet up existing sanctions against Iran and is weighing a much stricter interpretation of the nuclear agreement between Tehran and major world powers, according to Foreign Policy.

The administration is inclined to adopt a “more rigorous application of the tools at its disposal,” a senior White House official told Foreign Policy, referring to sanctions policy. Among the options under consideration: broadening U.S. sanctions to include much larger chunks of the Iranian economy linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

No final decision has been taken by the president or the cabinet. But officials said some decisions will need to be taken soon. On April 25, Iran and the six governments that negotiated the nuclear deal with Tehran, including the United States, are due to meet in Vienna for a quarterly review of the accord.

How President Donald Trump decides to proceed on sanctions and the nuclear deal more broadly carries high stakes for the United States, Iran, and the wider Middle East. A concerted U.S. effort to squeeze Iran would represent a gamble that Tehran’s regional push for power, particularly in Syria and Yemen, could be checked in part by increasing economic pressure.

Another major decision facing President Trump is whether or not to stick with the nuclear deal that he so roundly criticized on the campaign trail. The calculation of whether or not to keep it will have to rely on a central question which is are the mullahs abiding by it or simply using it as a smokescreen to rebuild their military as many suspect.

But the president doesn’t have to shred the deal to put pressure on the Iranian regime. As Foreign Policy pointed out, the agreement is not a binding treaty as such he has broad leeway to interpret its provisions. Under President Obama, that flexibility allowed him to grant Iran broad leniency in areas such as enriched fuel and heavy water. Trump could choose to close those loopholes.

Evidence of that tougher stance has cropped up as the Treasury Department announced new sanctions last week, including the brother of the powerful head of the special forces arm of the IRGC, Sohrab Soleimani, for his role in abuses at the country’s prisons. And in February, the Treasury Department blacklisted eight organizations linked to the Revolutionary Guards, as well as one of its officials based in Lebanon.

The focus on the IRGC and its Quds Forces signal a significant change that could hold the promise of increased effectiveness because of the deep roots the organizations have throughout Iran and its economy.

At the moment, any entity that has a 50 percent ownership stake or more held by the IRGC is subject to sanctions, but the administration is mulling a change that would drop the threshold to a lower percentage.

Such a move would break with long-standing policy at Treasury, which has traditionally defined ownership as above 50 percent for any category of sanctions. A lower threshold would mean blacklisting hundreds and possibly thousands of additional Iranian companies and organizations with links to the IRGC, experts said.

The mere threat of a lower threshold has helped stifle potential investments into the Iranian regime as banks and companies from Europe and Asia fret about possible sanctions being levied by the U.S. down the road should they invest.

That has had a ripple effect as the much-promised economic benefits from the nuclear deal have failed to materialize leading to speculation that top mullah Ali Khamenei may have decided to abandon the pretense of moderation in favor of a harder line as evidenced by who makes the presidential ballot for next month’s election in Iran.

Emanuele Ottolenghi, Ph.D., a senior fellow and expert on Iran at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote in The Hill of the need to close one loophole benefitting the regime now which the lifting of sanctions restricting the sale of commercial airliners to Iran.

The activities of Iran’s aviation sector have exposed the inadequacy of the nuclear agreement’s caveat that licensed items and services must be used “exclusively for commercial passenger aviation.” Currently, at least five Iranian and two Syrian commercial airlines are engaged in regular military airlifts to Syria, he writes.

These carriers have been crisscrossing Iraqi airspace since 2011, but have increased their tempo since the summer of 2015, when Iran and Russia coordinated their efforts to save Assad’s regime. Flight tracking data indicate that, from the nuclear deal’s implementation day on Jan. 16, 2016 to March 30, 2017, there were at least 696 flights from Iran to Syria, only six of which were carried out by Iran’s air force, she added.

She points out that it is extremely likely that Iran Air is still an active participant in the Syria airlifts. First, there is no justification for frequent commercial flights to Damascus: Syria is a war zone with little tourism or commerce, yet it is served almost twice daily by Iranian airlines. Iran Air, for example, flies to Damascus twice a week. It is doubtful Iranian tourists are posing for selfies in the ruins of bombed cities.

The flight cannot be purchased on Iran Air’s booking website or through travel agencies and the booking website does not include Damascus among its destinations from Tehran’s international airport, where the flights originate. Finally, Iran Air flights to Damascus occasionally make unscheduled stopovers in Abadan, an IRGC logistical hub for the Syria airlifts.

The next few months will show whether or not the Trump administration will follow through on its campaign promises and finally begin the hard work of stopping the mullahs.

Michael Tomlinson

Over 1,600 Presidential Candidates in Iran and None Are Moderates

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The Iranian regime has over 1,600 people registered as candidates for next month’s presidential election, but like all previous elections in the mullah’s regime, the outcome is predetermined and not a single moderate or dissident will end up on the final ballot.

The logjam of registered candidates is typical of a system that offers the false veneer of inclusive democracy when it in fact is anything but. It’s emblematic of the root problems within the Iranian regime and why any idea of appeasement or rapprochement is just plain fantasy.

The Associated Press provided a nuts and bolts overview of the election process in Iran.

Under Iranian law, there’s no fee for registering. Hopefuls only must swear allegiance to Iran’s government and be Shiite Muslims. That gives gadflies and publicity seekers the chance to smile and wave to gathered journalists. It’s still a lot of candidates, though. The last similar turnout was Iran’s 2005 election, which saw more than 1,000 register, according to the AP.

All the candidates will be vetted by the Guardian Council, a 12-member panel half selected by the top mullah Ali Khamenei and half nominated by the judiciary and approved by parliament. The council controls elections and must approve all laws passed by parliament. It has never allowed a woman to run for president and routinely rejects candidates calling for dramatic reform. The panel also declared Ahmadinejad won the 2009 election despite widespread fraud allegations.

And who sits at the top of this pyramid? Khamenei of course. The supreme leader also serves as the country’s commander in chief over its military and the powerful Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary force involved in the wars in Iraq and Syria that also has vast economic holdings across Iran. An 88-member elected clerical panel called the Assembly of Experts appoints the supreme leader and can remove one as well, although that’s never going to happen.

Iran does not allow international observers to monitor its elections. Security forces answering only to the supreme leader also routinely arrest dual nationals and foreigners, using them as pawns in international negotiations, according to AP.

All of which brings us back to the central point people need to remember as these elections unfold, which is that there is no democracy in Iran. The Iranian people have very little choice and fewer real options and nothing happens without Khamenei’s direct approval.

Iran’s election system puts to a lie the arguments long made by Iran lobby members such as the National Iranian American Council which has consistently argued the fiction that real factions and splits occur between “moderate” and “hardline” elements there; when in fact the differences in Iran’s political and religious elite is basically comprised of fights over who’s snout can dig deepest into the trough of ill-gotten gains. The fact is that Iran’s government consistently ranks as one of the most corrupt on the planet and no matter who’s sit on president’s seat, the regime has continued to be the number of executor of its people per capita and the number one state sponsor of terrorism in the world.

The fact that the Iranian people’s top choices right now are its current president, Hassan Rouhani, who promised many reforms including a liberalization of the economy and more economic benefits to the people—all of which has actually gotten worse—and former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was widely reviled during his tenure.

The other choice being Ebrahim Raisi, custodian of Iran’s wealthiest charity, Astan Quds Razavi in Iran’s holiest shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, northeastern Iran, who was also tied to massacres of 30,000 Iranian dissidents in the 1988.

These are not great choices for the Iranian people, nor do they spell any kind of relaxation in the regime’s often barbaric policies in terms of human rights abuses and more foreign policy misadventures.

That is because the regime mandates fealty to the principle of obedience to Supreme Guardianship (Velayat-e faqih), meaning, the rule of the ayatollahs. It would be akin to eliminating all political parties in the U.S. and forcing every candidate to swear allegiance to one ruler who can never to drummed out of office.

In many ways the election of a president means relatively little since the real power resides within Khamenei and the position of supreme leader, which is why no matter who gets elected on May 19th, how to deal with Iran, especially its military is the real concern for Iran’s neighbors and the U.S.

Mohammad Amin, an analyst in Iranian affairs and fellow at the Paris-based Middle East Research Foundation, examined the wide-ranging reach of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and how confronting it is the biggest challenge facing the West.

“The IRGC, the Leviathan of Terror, which has the financial and military resources that exceed the wildest dreams of ISIS, now lurks in the Middle East. Its tentacles extend well beyond the geographical borders of Iran. While ISIS claimed parts of Syria and northern Iraq, the IRGC’s Shiite militias have an extensive presence in almost every country in the region,” he writes in the Daily Caller.

The main Iranian opposition the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) has revealed a list of 31,690 Iraqi mercenaries of the IRGC, all of whom receive their salaries from Iran.

Last year, U.S. military officials said that as many as 100,000 Iranian-backed Shiite militia are now fighting on the ground in Iraq, “raising concerns that should the Islamic State be defeated, it may only be replaced by another anti-American force that fuels further sectarian violence in the region,” he added.

Amin adds that an essential first step in the direction of controlling the IRGC is for the Trump administration designating the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Failure to adopt this critical measure will only serve to embolden the regime while the region and the wider world continue to grapple with the menace of religious extremist and terrorism.

For any chance of democracy in Iran, the West needs to support Iranian opposition groups such as the NCRI and cut off the financial support the regime receives from the IRGC. That is surest pathway to eventual freedom for the Iranian people.

Michael Tomlinson

After Syria Strike Next Move Should be Pushing Iran Out

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After Syria Strike Next Move Should be Pushing Iran Out

After Syria Strike Next Move Should be Pushing Iran Out

You can almost pinpoint to the day when things turned really bad in Syria. For much of the fall and spring of 2012-2013, the Assad regime was on the ropes from a series of victories by rebel forces including the loss of a key airbase and provincial capital.

The Syrian army suffered from several publicized defections of key leaders and the rebel coalition had grown significantly around moderate groups backed by the U.S.

Then in April of 2013, the Iranian regime directed its terrorist proxy Hezbollah to join in the fray, along with advisors and commanders from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Coupled with a massive influx of cash and weapons, the restocked Syrian army launched a series of counteroffensives that began to turn the tide.

Up until that point, the rebels had pushed to within eyesight of Damascus and Assad was frantically figuring out where his exile should take place.

For the mullahs in Tehran, it was an equally scary time as its major Shia partner was about to fall.

But with the reinforcements and direct intervention by Iran, the tide of the war changed and with it the situation we are now mired in.

Not only did Syria alongside Iranian forces fight rebels, they specifically targeted, moderate Western-backed units in order to decimate their numbers and leave only radical Islamic groups on the battlefield forcing the U.S. and its allies to pick between a certifiable mass murderer in Assad or groups such as ISIS and Al-Nusra.

It was a clever strategy and one that worked too well given the Obama’s support of the corrupt Al-Maliki government in Iraq, preserving ISIS at a critical time when its numbers were small and lacked cash and weapons. It gained both when it exploited the divided government in Iraq; split apart by Iranian regime’s insistence on a Shia only leadership thereby pushing some of the Sunnis straight into the waiting arms of ISIS and leading directly to the blitzkrieg that toppled Mosul and delivered ISIS its first major victories.

Less than two years later, as Iran was again on the ropes with its resources depleted and rebel forces on the verge of breaking out again in Syria, Iranian mullahs took the step of begging Russia to intervene and save its proverbial goat, which Vladimir Putin was all too happy to oblige, sensing an opportunity to preserve its naval base on the Mediterranean while filling the power vacuum left by the Obama administration’s total withdrawal from the region.

But President Trump’s decision to retaliate against Syria for the use of chemical weapons changed the game plan entirely and now raises the question of how to best move forward?

There is no doubt that the most desirable solution in Syria is a diplomatic one, but focusing on removing Assad from power is only treating the symptom. The real sickness that afflicts Syria is the presence of the Iranian regime there; it is so embedded many Syrians have taken to view Iranian soldiers as an occupation force.

By removing Iran from Syria, the situation resolves itself in a myriad of ways: Russia would lose its key partner on the ground; A peace deal with rebels will definitely prevail; and the Syrian people would have the chance to choose their own destiny.

It would also allow for the repatriation and resettlement of the four million refugees that have fled Syria since the war began.

And the key to pushing Iran out of Syria lies within supporting—fully—the dissident movement within Iran itself.

As Reuel Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, explained in an editorial in the New York Post:

“The regime’s survival is now dependent on unsteady security services and the power of patronage, which ebbs and flows with the price of oil. Iran’s continuing stage-managed elections and colorless apparatchiks, including President Hassan Rouhani, a founding father of the feared intelligence ministry who mimics reformist slogans, have failed to convince, much less inspire,” they said.

“Today, the Islamist regime resembles the Soviet Union of the 1970s — an exhausted entity incapable of reforming itself while drowning in corruption and bent on costly imperialism,” they added. “If Washington were serious about doing to Iran what it helped to do to the USSR, it would seek to weaken the theocracy by pressing it on all fronts. A crippling sanctions regime that punishes the regime for its human-rights abuses is a necessity. Such a move would not just impose penalties on Tehran for violating international norms but send a signal to the Iranian people that the United States stands behind their aspirations.”

Re-prioritizing human rights as a dominant issue with Iran moving forward would place the U.S. back on the moral high ground that the Obama administration vacated and serve as an effective counter to the ceaseless arguments made by the Iran lobby opining about potential economic benefits of trade with Iran.

A new report by human rights group Amnesty International showed that Iran remained a dominant executioner of its own people, second in the world only to China, which makes hammering the regime on human rights all the more critical.

That emphasis on human rights was boosted by the European Union’s decision to extend sanctions until April 2018 on Iran for “serious human rights violations.”

The bloc has also extended by a year its travel ban and an asset freeze on 82 Iranian people and one entity, as well as a ban on exports to Iran of equipment for monitoring telecommunications and other gear that “might be used for internal repression.”

Sir David Amess, a member of the British Parliament, pointed out in an editorial in the Washington Examiner that the key to confronting Iran ultimately is to cut off the IRGC’s commerce as outlined by a leading Iranian dissident group.

“The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) specifically identified the sites of some 90 docks operated exclusively by the IRGC within Iranian ports. The information was obtained from the network of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), which has assets within the clerical regime and the IRGC itself and made international headlines in 2002 when it revealed key details about the regime’s nuclear program,” Amess said.

“Iran’s destabilizing regional influence and its subversive activities will only be diminished if the domestic and international power of the IRGC is confronted and constrained, first through the rightful designation of the organization as a terrorist organization and then through the sanctioning of all its economic activities followed by financing regional conflicts and threats against the West,” he added.

Ultimately the U.S. should use its influence to specifically diminish the IRGC and its influence in Syria if there is ever to be any hope of a lasting peace there.

Michael Tomlinson