The mullahs’ new president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad introduced his cabinet members to the Majlis (parliament). All of them are among the mullahs’ henchmen, terrorists and senior Revolutionary Guards commanders.
Manouchehr Mottaki, Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Eje’i, and Brig. Gen. Hossein Saffar Harandi were nominated as Foreign, Interior, Intelligence, and Culture and Islamic Guidance ministries respectively.
Manouchehr Mottaki was appointed as ambassador to Turkey in 1985. He has a long record in planning and organizing terrorist operations particularly against Resistance’s activists and dissidents abroad. In 2001, he was appointed as Deputy for Communications in the Islamic Culture and Communications Organization, the Iranian regime’s principal agency for fundamentalist activities abroad as well as recruiting and training foreign nationals for terrorist operations.
Mottaki was directly involved in planning and implementing the abduction of Mr. Abol-Hassan Mojtahedzadeh, an Iranian Resistance activist, in Turkey in 1998 and the attempt on the life of Mr. Hossein Abedini in 1990 in Istanbul. After his abduction, Mojatahedzadeh was tortured in the Iranian regime’s consulate in Istanbul for several days. He miraculously escaped as he was being taken to Iran in a car with Iranian diplomatic license plates.
In his position as the Foreign Ministry’s legal and international deputy, Mottaki provided service and diplomatic passports as well as other logistical assistance to Intelligence Ministry’s agents and the IRGC Qods (Jerusalem) Force for use in terrorist operations outside Iran.
Mullah Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi was among the perpetrators of the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988. Since the inception of the Intelligence Ministry, Pour-Mohammadi acted as deputy to the Minister, mullah Mohammad Mohammadi Rayshahri. As the Ministry’s representative, Pour-Mohammadi took part in the meetings of the "Death Commission" that was tasked with carrying out the fatwa by Khomeini to massacre 30,000 political prisoners. He also held the post of Acting Deputy and Deputy in the Intelligence Ministry’s Foreign Affairs Directorate under Ali Fallahiyan and Qorban-Ali Dorri Najafabadi, subsequent intelligence ministers in the 1990s. During Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, he was appointed to the Supreme Leader’s special office for intelligence and security.
Pour-Mohammadi was among the principals in the "chain murders" in the 1990s, in which at least 120 dissidents, writers and intellectuals were abducted and brutally murdered. After the grisly murders of Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar in autumn 1998, the killers called Pour-Mohammadi as the commander of this shocking crime to inform him of their "success."
Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Eje’i, who is reportedly slated to become the Minister of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), represented the Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office in the MOIS and played an active role in the arrest and execution of the Mojahedin and other dissidents. As the chief judge in branch three of the Islamic Revolutionary Court, Mohseni Eje’i personally sentenced to death thousands of political prisoners. He was appointed as the Acting Prosecutor in 1995 and as the Prosecutor in 1998 for the Special Clergy Court, where, he personally took part in the sentencing, imprisonment and execution of hundreds of dissident clerics. Mohseni Eje’i was also directly involved in the "chain murders" and issued the fatwa for the murder of one of the victims, Pirouz Davani, who was imprisoned at the time of his death.
Brig. Gen. Hossein Saffar Harandi was the former editor in chief of Kayhan daily, the mouthpiece of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He was also an IRGC commander and among the key officials in charge of censorship, clampdown and intimidation of writers and journalists. He worked closely with Saeed Imami, the infamous Deputy Intelligence Minister who planned and carried out the 1990s "chain murders". He was also the leader of "Mohammadan’s Pure Fedayeen" extremist group, which actively participated in crushing the July 1999 student uprising in Tehran and 18 other Iranian cities.
Last week, Brig. Gen. Ali Larijani was appointed as the Supreme National Security Council secretary and Tehran’s top nuclear negotiator with the European Union. Earlier, Brig. Gen. Ezzatollah Zarghami and Brig. Gen. Esmail Ahamdi Moghaddam had been appointed as the head of the State Radio and Television network and the State Security Forces commander respectively. In addition, dozens of Majlis deputies are IRGC members.
As such, in the greatest internal political purge in the past 26 years, the Supreme Leader has consolidated power in the hands of the most extremist factions in an effort to realize the idea of global Islamic rule through obtaining nuclear weapons and installing a puppet theocracy in Iraq.
This development is, before anything else, a result of more than two decades of appeasing the ruling theocracy by Western countries, especially the European Union, under the cloak of "empowering the moderate faction." At the same time, it attests to the veracity of the Iranian Resistance’s contention that "a viper would never give birth to a dove." Obviously, at the end of a catastrophic, 16-year journey from religious fascism to religious fascism, the only principled and effective policy to counter the increasing threats posed by the medieval theocracy ruling Iran is decisiveness and standing with the Iranian people in their struggle for democratic change in Iran.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
August 14, 2005