Contributed by: filbert Thursday, August 20 2009 @ 07:46 PM CST
Defendants in the show trials under way in Tehran are being given the third degree over their links to foreign masterminds. The chief prosecutor is asking defendants questions such as, “Were you sent by Michael Ledeen? What did Michael Ledeen tell you to do?” Another was told flat out, “You are an agent of Michael Ledeen!” The universal response has been, “Michael who?”
“You have to understand – these are crazy people,” Mr. Ledeen told The Washington Times yesterday. He is the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former consultant to the National Security Council, the State Department and the Defense Department. He has published widely on Iranian matters, and his tag line “faster, please” — referring to the need to accelerate the pace of change in Iran — is well-known among those who follow the issue closely. Mr. Ledeen is one of three public intellectuals implicated by the Iranians, the others being Ambassador Mark Palmer and political science professor Abbas Milani at Stanford University. Why these three? “I have no idea,” Mr. Ledeen said. “We mostly agree on the issues, but we’ve never worked as a group.”