Ayatollah Faces Star Chamber Trial

Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Khalaji, who is in Evin Prison for expressing his views, faces trial and possible execution in the Star Chamber. He has never held any government position, and before the 1979 revolution just over 20 years ago, he was close to Ayatollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Experts say that his arrest was arbitrary, and that it violates Article 34 of the Iran constitution. The criticisms that Ayatollah Khalaji expressed were very mild, saying that he disapproved of the violence against the protesters, but he never went so far as the late Ayatollah Montazeri.

Says Mehdi Khalaji, son of the prominent 62-year-old cleric:

“My father is an expert in Islamic and religious studies…My father has said that Islam does not allow for political prisoners; neither the Prophet nor Imam Ali ever put anyone in prison for expressing their opinions. My father believes that the regime must obtain people’s satisfaction and cannot rule with force. He does not belong to any groups, not even groups within the Seminary, no political or even religious organizations. He is not related to any groups or factions and he does not engage in political activities. The only reason he is in prison is because of his opinions.”

Since the elections six months ago, literally hundreds of journalists, political figures, bloggers, and womens’ rights activists have been arrested, as have thousands of protesters. They are detained in order to curtail the right to speak freely, which directly counters Iran’s laws which protect freedoms of expression and conscience. When a government breaks its own laws, it can not longer be considered a government, but is instead a form of tyranny.

Information From “Why We Protest”

My name is @UtahPirate. I have asked the owner of this site to publish this anonymously. I do this because there have now been three reports I am aware of, of people being attacked in the United States (where I live) by Iranian nationals who are apparently pro-Khameni/Ahmadinejad. These attacks are not lethal and have so far not been truly harmful, but they are worrisome. Anonymity is therefore warranted and prudent.

(For the record, the owner of this blog is not in control of all aspects of it and so my own information is available, for those who dig hard enough.)

I have reposted several items of interest from the Why We Protest – Iran forums, since they say that people should. The reason for this is that the forums are apparently under attack by Iranian Regime forces—and the servers aren’t particularly stable to begin with. This results in a large number of outages, and a significant amount of downtime for the site. Maintenance is ongoing, as far as I’ve been told.

The posts which have been reposted should be clearly identifiable because of a link to notify our readers of the original source. These include all of the Green Briefs, and several other items of interest. These will appear as dated on the original date of posting (so far as we can ascertain—NiteOwl has been exhausted, and expressed that he couldn’t really remember the dates. Luckily for NiteOwl, the approximate dates are listed in the forums).

We would hope that NiteOwl would continue his excellent work in sifting through the news, tweets, and other sources of information to arrive at the most accurate information possible, given the limited resources and opportunities for information coming out of Iraq. As we are able, we will continue to bring information here.

Also, I am told that this blog has so far remained free from a significant amount of downtime. I (and this blog’s owner) wanted to thank the provider, Blogspot, for the excellent work in keeping its blogs up and running. While there have been reports of a few blogs being compromised, this hasn’t been one of them. Keep up the great work, Blogspot!

As a final note, we have updated our arrest list as of a few days ago. This will continue to be updated as we receive information. We duplicated the lists because of efforts by pro-regime hackers to take down the web site of the UN Council on Human Rights in Iran. Since the lists are sometimes not available there, they will be made available here as circumstances permit.