Ahmadinejad Betrayed Me

Less than two years after a senior and well-known right-wing cleric in the Islamic republic publicly said that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his close allies had implemented Abbas Palizdar’s project to get re-elected to the presidency in 2005, Palizdar now has followed on that theme and confirmed that Ahmadinejad’s accusations against many senior officials of the Islamic republic of Iran during the televised presidential debates with rival candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi were because of his remarks about them.

Palizdar was a the fiery member of Majlis’ Judicial Inquiry and Review Committee who went to jail for “disclosing state secrets” and airing accusations against senior regime members in 2008. He was sentenced to six years of prison, but was conditionally released last year, after which he requested forgiveness from at least one person he had aired accusations of economic corruption against: Nategh Nouri. He revealed two days ago in his talk with Hamshahrie Mah magazine, the mouthpiece of Tehran’s municipality, that he had compiled incriminating documents against Ahmadinejad’s presidential rivals two years ago while being promised a cabinet position in return.

The revelations are not completely new as Palizdar has spoken about them to Siasate Rooz newspaper, in which he exposed some aspects of his ploy to defame Ahmadinejad’s rivals.

This latest expose expands on many of the earlier themes with more details. Palizdar considers himself to be a member of the conservative group, to which Ahmadinejad belongs as well, but says that the group has betrayed him.

In his interview with Hamshahrie Mah, Palizdar describes the vast network and machinery that was created to spread slander against Ahmadinejad’s right-wing rivals that included Nouri and Hashemi Rafsanjani. Others mentioned to be part of this group are  Fatemeh Ajorloo, Mohammad Dehgan, Alireza Zakani, Hossein Kamran and of course Ahmad Tavakkoli, who is today a vocal critic of Ahmadinejad, even though they belong to the same political faction. Palizdar said that he had been asked to speak against Ahmadinejad’s rivals at universities and other places as the first step in discrediting the rivals. “One day, Mrs. Ajorloo called me to tell me that preparations had been made for me to go and speak at Hamedan University.”

In that speech, Palizdar humiliated and discredited a number of prominent authorities in the Islamic republic that included Rafsanjani, and called many of them “corrupt on earth”. His accusations and charges stopped at Iran’s leader ayatollah Khamenei.

Palizdar claims that he was betrayed by Ahmadinejad and his allies, but they did use his information in the presidential campaign debates where the incumbent discredited his rivals.  This former MP claims that the accusations that Ahmadinejad raised were all prepared and investigated by him. He then asks: “If these accusations were true, then why did he not follow up on them?” He adds, “I was not supported by them even though they claimed I was a trusted comrade in arms even as much as Roxana Saberi, the spy was,” which is a reference to American-Iranian journalist from North Dakota who had been arrested on charges of espionage and sentenced to 8 years of prison but who was subsequently released under international pressure.

In his talk with the magazine, this notorious cleric said he had been promised executive positions in the new administration, something that never materialized. “I was supposed to be the minister of industries in the ninth administration, and made preparations for it. But I was never introduced to the Majlis, which incidentally had a positive view of me,” Palizdar claims in the report.

Prior to Palizdar’s recent round of revelations, another conservative cleric Mohsen Doagoo, the Friday leader of Tehran’s satellite town Shemiran had told reporters of Kargozaran’s newspaper in 2008 that Palizdar’s talk at Hamedan University where he had defamed many clerics and senior officials of the regime, was only part of a larger scheme to deceive public opinion during the presidential race in 2005. Doagoo is also a member of the conservative Jame Rohaniyate Mobarez clerical group. It should be noted that Doagoo had been one of the staunchest critics of Mohammad Khatami’s reform administration prior to his attacks on Ahmadinejad’s administration. In his interview, Doagoo compared Ahmadinejad with Khavarej, traitors in early Islamic history who had broken away from the mainstream rulers. He had warned prior to the 2008 elections that Ahmadinejad and his clique could very well engage in electoral fraud, which history has confirmed to be correct. In that election, Doagoo threw his support behind Mir-Hossein Mousavi and has since the announcement of the results of the elections not given his consent and continues to promote the opposition’s view that electoral fraud did in fact take place.