You know things have become serious when, at prayers today, hard line cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami felt comfortable enough to openly claim that those protesting in Iran are defying God’s law and that opposition leaders should face execution as enemies of the republic.
Defying God’s law? The last time that I checked there was nothing in the Qur’an about the Supreme Leader of the Iranian Republic holding complete religious providence over the entire Islamic faith. In fact, Ayatollah Khamenei isn’t even the “supreme leader” within the context of Shia Islam.
That said, and to my very great disappointment, the employment of USAID might be in the works regarding Iran.
For those of you that that unfamiliar with the U.S. Agency for International Development, which reports to the office of the Secretary of State, it has long been used as an entity to mask covert operations, most commonly by the Central Intelligence Agency. A recent example of its use for such purposes was its role in supporting those that attempted to overthrow Hugo Chavez in 2002.
According to reports, USAID has been in the process of “soliciting applications” in an endeavour to raise $20 million dollars to help “promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Iran”.
Now, that might not seem strange to anyone given that they’ve been seeking funding for a year, and it must also be pointed out that the President hasn’t sought to sustain “Iran-specific grants” in the 2010 budget, but what can’t be overlooked is that the Near Eastern Regional Democracy Initiative, which doesn’t specify any of the nations that its funding impacts, is being singled out by the administration to be given a $15 million dollar injection of funds.
As I’ve said over the last few weeks, there is absolutely no question that foreign intelligence operatives are in Iran. I would wager that, for the moment, they’re collecting intelligence and helping form a picture of what is happening and how, if it comes to it, the situation can be exploited. Having said that, given what has taken place I’m sure that the CIA is using this opportunity to rebuild its list of assets within the country after an alleged incident in 2004 in which a CIA official in Langley accidentally attached an encrypted list of US assets within the country to an individual that had flipped. According to the account, highlighted in James Risen’s State Of War, which was vigorously denied by the US intelligence community, the incident led to Iranian intelligence rolling up much of the agency’s network in Iran.
While the CIA claimed that Risen’s book contained serious errors in almost every chapter, he was still subpoenaed to appear before a Federal Grand Jury in 2008 to reveal his sources, making the CIA’s assertion rather curious to say the least.