On the even of the Iranian president’s visit to America, where he intends to take full advantage of our freedom of speech, an Iranian news website that criticizes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been shut down.
Tehran – The Iranian judiciary has closed down the news website Baztab which is critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration, ISNA news agency reported Sunday. Baztab manager Mohammad-Javad Barbarian told ISNA that the prosecutor office sealed the Baztab office last Wednesday upon a request by the Ahmadinejad government which had argued that a legally filtered website should not be allowed to work.
And gee, look who’s pulling Baztab’s strings:
Baztab is said to be actually run by Mohsen Rezaie, former commander of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards and spokesman of the Expediency Council, a body meddling in legislative disputes and chaired by ex-president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who currently leads the opposition to Ahmadinejad.
But hey, watch for Ahmadinejad to make some jabs at the people who tried to get his speech at Columbia cancelled. In fact, watch for Ahmadinejad to not answer a single question asked of him at that speech, in spite of Lee Bollinger’s insistence that there will be a “tough” question-and-answer session.
If Mike Wallace couldn’t get him to give a straight answer to the tough questions, you can bet no one in Columbia’s going to manage it, either.
Bollinger’s assertion is laughable. Is he really that naive. Does he really believe that his tough questions will be answered.
It is almost offensive.