Change! Hope! Well, lot’s of change, but, none of it is actually hopeful. Except for Ahmadinejad and the Mad Mullahs of Iran
For the past five years, researchers in a modest office overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers on those they say are Iran’s most infamous human-rights abusers.
But just as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was ramping up to investigate abuses of protesters after this summer’s disputed presidential election, the group received word that – for the first time since it was formed – its federal funding request had been denied.
“If there is one time that I expected to get funding, this was it,’’ said Rene Redman, the group’s executive director, who had asked for $2.7 million in funding for the next two years. “I was sur prised, because the world was watching human rights violations right there on television.’’
Many see the sudden, unexplained cutoff of funding as a shift by the Obama administration away from high-profile democracy promotion in Iran, which had become a signature issue for President Bush. But the timing has alarmed some on Capitol Hill.
Way to go Barry! I’m sure Mahmoud got a good belly laugh out of this one.
This POTUS has achieved Iran saying that they will send all of their enriched nuke material to Russia. Bush ? all he achieved in 8 YEARS was a big fat zero in Iran
Most of us “lefties” are actually concerned more about the danger to our own country rather than the internal politics of Iran. Obama has achieved something in 8 months that Bush could not do in 8 years
Let’s look at this shall we… Iran “says” they will send their Uranium to Russia to enrich and have it returned for “peaceful purposes”. They also said they only had one enrichment site, which turns out to be a big fat lie. Who is to say that they don’t have another one somewhere? Is it possible for them to further enrich the uranium that Russia sends them?
I’m not a nuclear engineer but think about this, what if they take the “almost weapons grade uranium” that Russia gives them, and they give it the extra boost to 11 to make it weapons grade? Is Russia just helping them toward the ultimate end goal? There are way too many questions left to answer and Iran has proven to be untrustworthy. So All barry has accomplished in 8 months, in my opinion, is to push Iran further toward their goal of getting nukes.
But that aside John, you have yet again not addressed the topic in question, which is turning a blind eye to the human rights violations of Iran. We apparently have abandoned our position as advocates for democracy around the world under BO.