Iran's illogical cruelty: Via Robert Tait | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk .

The imprisonment of the frail reformer Saeed Hajarian exposes the callousness of Iran's leaders – and their lack of logic

You know things are bad in Iran when the hard-headed schemer Hashemi Rafsanjani is moved to bemoan the plight of the country's political detainees. The mass round-up and incarceration of opposition figures that followed last month's election debacle was denounced by the old "pragmatist" and arch pillar of the Islamic revolution at his much-awaited Tehran university Friday prayer sermon last week, perhaps rather from cold political calculation than heartfelt principle. A more authentically indignant condemnation might have dwelt on some details, wherein lies the devil – and no small measure of stupidity.

Specifically, Rafsanjani might have shamed his apparently conscience-free adversary, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, if he had mentioned Saeed Hajarian. Of all those dumped in Evin prison and other secret detention centres, the case of Hajarian does most to expose the regime's moral squalor and callousness. Long hailed as the intellectual mastermind of the reformist movement, he is today physically frail thanks to a failed assassination attempt nine years ago ordered, in all probability, by the same hardline zealots who plotted the recent election buffoonery.
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