UPDATE: Scroll down for updates.

Two days ago Iran Focus alleged that the photo below was of Iranian President Elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We, of course, jumped right on the story.

Yesterday watching Hardball with Chris Matthews, one of the former hostages--I believe it was Don Sharer-- denied that the man in the photo above was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But he claimed that he was 100% sure that Ahmadinejad was one of his captors, but that the photo above was not of Ahmadinejad. He said that Ahmadinejad was only around occasionally and seemed to be a leader of some sort when he did come around.

Oxrant was the first that I know of to attempt to debunk this. I should have linked to it yesterday but I was busy being sick. Look at the photo comparison which he gives here. (Click image below for close-up)

It looks as if the critics may be right on this one. It should be noted, though, that noses can change over time. My father's, for instance, who broke his nose several times and it never looked the same. But having said that, Oxrant's comparison does seem compelling.

But wait....there's more. Oxrant notices some Freepers doing their homework here. The image compares recent photos of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to another person in the 1979 AP photos. Look at the man in the turtleneck, just to the right of the person circled above.

Were we simply looking at the wrong man in the photo? Go check out Oxen's other photo comparisons. Here's another page with more of the same photo comparisons.

CRITICAL UPDATE: Take this for what it's worth, but it certainly seems relevant. Times Online:

But today, an reformist newspaper in Tehran, Shargh, said that the Iranian students shown in the photograph were JaÂ’afar Zaker, a militant who went on to die in the Iran-Iraq war, and a student known only as Ranjbaran, who was later executed for alleged links to an extreme opposition group.

As for the American hostage shown in the photograph, The Times learnt yesterday that he is Jerry J. Miele, who was working at a communications officer at the Embassy in 1979. Reached at his home today in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, Mr Miele, 66, declined to comment on the photograph but said: "I don't have anything to say about the new President of Iran, I don't want to cause any trouble."

ANDREA MITCHELL:.... We have taken that picture, a number of pictures, in fact, to a former FBI photo expert, Chris. And he says that there is a less than 50 percent chance that the person in the photograph [ed: the one we highlighted two days ago] is the person that is now the president of Iran....

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about the—the question is, though—let me ask you to take a look at the picture again. This is the president-elect. We‘re going to show you a picture of the president-elect of Iran. There he is, the man on the right [ed: recent photo of Ahmadinejad].

The man on the left [ed: old AP photo that we highlighted] in the monitor you‘re looking at, Mr. Sharer, is someone who has been mentioned as someone who was close to you, who was one of the captors. It‘s really not important. But does the man on the left look like the man on the right you? And is the man on the left the man you remember as well?

SHARER: Yes. The man on the right [Ed: recent photo of Ahmadinejad] is the one that I saw that reminded me of it, and just about the same beard.

MATTHEWS: Right.

SHARER: Had a little half-inch, quarter-inch growth.

MATTHEWS: I know what you mean.

(CROSSTALK)

SHARER: And the man on the left [ed: the old AP photo that we highlighted], there‘s too much facial hair to really look at.

San Francisco Gate :

Six former American hostages have said they recognized Ahmadinejad.

"As soon as I saw the face, it rang a lot of bells to me," Don Sharer of Bedford, Ind., told CNN. The former naval attache at the Tehran embassy said he was 99 percent sure of his identification. "When you're placed in a life- threatening situation of that nature, you just remember those things," he said.

Another former hostage, William J. Daugherty, a former CIA officer who now lives in Savannah, Ga., said he remembered Ahmadinejad "acting in a supervisory or leadership capacity" during the early weeks of his captivity.

Retired Col. David Roeder, 66, who was deputy Air Force attache at the embassy in 1979, has told reporters that Ahmadinejad watched as interrogators threatened to kidnap Roeder's handicapped son in the United States and mutilate him "if I didn't start to cooperate."

In 1979, Dr. Daugherty was a young CIA agent. He was stationed in Tehran, the Iranian capital, when he and dozens of other Americans were captured and held for over a year. 25 years later, Dr. Daugherty says a familiar face from that time is now running Iran.

Last week Iranians picked a new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Daugherty says he's sure he was one of his captors.

"This is him, he's clearly- uh you can see he's trying very hard to look menacing and threatening here, here he's looking much more relaxed but you see the similarities in the nose, in the chin, the hair line, the eyebrows."

Dr. Daugherty is a professor at AASU here in Savannah now, teaching political science. He says he's not surprised the new president of Iran is one of his former captors. He says others have held positions in the Iranian government.

The Iranian government says these men are not the same person, but Dr. Daugherty says he knows they are.

"When somebody takes your liberty, puts your life in danger, causes your family great agony and humiliates your country, you don't forget who that person is."

UPDATE: Bryan Williams compares terrorists to Founding Father's. Sure Bryan, the British could have called the Founding Father's terrorists, just like Pakistanis like to call Osama bin Laden a 'freedom fighter' and Michael Jackson called Lisa Marie 'wife'.

UPDATE II: It gets worse, much worse. In our original post we noted that several unofficial biographies of Ahmadinejad claimed he was directly involved with murdering Iranians at home and abroad. Check out this from Dafydd over at Captain Ed's who found more from Global Security:

With the formation of the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the IRGC, Ahmadinejad became one of its senior commanders. He directed assassinations in the Middle East and Europe, including the assassination of Iranian Kurdish leader Abdorrahman Qassemlou, who was shot dead by senior officers of the Revolutionary Guards in a Vienna flat in July 1989. Ahmadinejad was a key planner of the attack. He was reported to have been involved in planning an attempt on the life of Salman Rushdie....

Ahmadinejad, an unabashed conservative, resurrected the fervor of the 1979 Islamic Revolution during the campaign by saying Iran "did not have a revolution in order to have democracy, but to have an Islamic government." Ahmadinejad had a bloody background. He was responsible for the execution of hundreds of dissidents after the war.

Posted by: Rusty at 10:54 AM | Comments (22) | Add Comment
Post contains 1396 words, total size 11 kb.

CRITICAL UPDATE 7/01: Have we been looking at the wrong man in the photos below? New information suggests that this may be the case. See this post here.
----------original post below------------------

President Elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran today.

President Elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran in 1979 with an American hostage.

UPDATE: Let's just put the photoshop argument to rest. Tim of Four Right Wing Whackos drops this link in the comments to a book about the Hostage Crisis.

If you have any more photos, please send them to me or e-mail me a link.

Iran Focus:

The identity of Ahmadinejad in the photograph was revealed to Iran Focus by a source in Tehran, whose identity could not be revealed for fear of persecution.

Who is Ahmadinejad? Iran Focus:

After finishing high school, Ahmadinejad went to Elm-o Sanaat University in 1975 to study engineering. Soon the whirlwind of Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept him from the classroom to the mosque and he joined a generation of firebrand Islamic fundamentalists dedicated to the cause of an Islamic world revolution.

Student activists in Elm-o Sanaat University at the time of the Iranian revolution were dominated by ultra-conservative Islamic fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad soon became one of their leaders and founded the Islamic Students Association in that university after the fall of the ShahÂ’s regime.

In 1979, he became the representative of Elm-o Sanaat students in the Office for Strengthening of Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries, which later became known as the OSU. The OSU was set up by Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, who was at the time KhomeiniÂ’s top confidant and a key figure in the clerical leadership. Beheshti wanted the OSU to organise Islamist students to counter the rapidly rising influence of the opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK) among university students.

The OSU played a central role in the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Members of the OSU central council, who included Ahmadinejad as well as Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, Mohsen (Mahmoud) Mirdamadi, Mohsen Kadivar, Mohsen Aghajari, and Abbas Abdi, were regularly received by Khomeini himself.

According to other OSU officials, when the idea of storming the U.S. embassy in Tehran was raised in the OSU central committee by Mirdamadi and Abdi, Ahmadinejad suggested storming the Soviet embassy at the same time. A decade later, most OSU leaders re-grouped around Khatami but Ahmadinejad remained loyal to the ultra-conservatives.

Former OSU officials involved in the takeover of the U.S. embassy said Ahmadinejad was in charge of security during the occupation, a key role that put him in direct contact with the nascent security organizations of the clerical regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, which he later joined....

Defectors from the clerical regime’s security forces have revealed that Ahmadinejad led the firing squads that carried out many of the executions. He personally fired coup de grace shots at the heads of prisoners after their execution and became known as “Tir Khalas Zan” (literally, the Terminator).

Al Jazeera:

As a young student, Ahmadinejad joined an ultraconservative faction of the Office for Strengthening Unity, the radical student group spawned by the 1979 Islamic Revolution and staged the capture of the US Embassy.

According to reports, Ahmadinejad attended planning meetings for the US Embassy takeover and at these meetings lobbied for a simultaneous takeover of the Soviet Embassy.

In 1986, Ahmadinejad became a senior officer in the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards and was stationed in Ramazan Garrison near Kermanshah in western Iran. In Kermanshah, Ahmadinejad became involved in the clerical regimeÂ’s terrorist operations abroad.

As soon as I saw a picture of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's new president, I knew there was something faintly familiar about him.

And it was not because he was mayor of Tehran, because, like many other Western journalists, I have been barred from visiting Iran in recent years.

Then, when I read a profile of him in the English-language Tehran Times, I realised where I must have seen him: in the former American embassy in Tehran.

Ahmadinejad was a founder of the group of young activists who swarmed over the embassy wall and held the diplomats and embassy workers hostage for 444 days.

Somewhere in the BBC archives is the interview I recorded with him and his colleagues, long after the siege was over. They all seemed rather similar - quiet, polite, but with a burning zeal.

A quarter-century after they were taken captive in Iran, five former American hostages say they got an unexpected reminder of their 444-day ordeal in the bearded face of Iran's new president-elect.

Watching coverage of Iran's presidential election on television dredged up 25-year-old memories that prompted four of the former hostages to exchange e-mails. And those four realized they shared the same conclusion -- the firm belief that President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been one of their Iranian captors.

"This is the guy. There's no question about it," said former hostage Chuck Scott, a retired Army colonel who lives in Jonesboro, Ga. "You could make him a blond and shave his whiskers, put him in a zoot suit and I'd still spot him."

Scott and former hostages David Roeder, William J. Daugherty and Don A. Sharer said on Wednesday they have no doubt Ahmadinejad, 49, was one of the hostage-takers. A fifth ex-hostage, Kevin Hermening, said he reached the same conclusion after looking at photos.

Not everyone agrees. Former hostage and retired Air Force Col. Thomas E. Schaefer said he doesn't recognize Ahmadinejad, by face or name, as one of his captors.

Several former students among the hostage-takers also said Ahmadinejad did not participate. And a close aide to Ahmadinejad denied the president-elect took part in the seizure of the embassy or in holding Americans hostage.

"I can absolutely guarantee you he was not only one of the hostage-takers, he was present at my personal interrogation," Roeder said in an interview from his home in Pinehurst, N.C.

Daugherty, who worked for the CIA in Iran and now lives in Savannah, said a man he's convinced was Ahmadinejad was among a group of ringleaders escorting a Vatican representative during a visit in the early days of the hostage crisis.

"It's impossible to forget a guy like that," Daugherty said. "Clearly the way he acted, the fact he gave orders, that he was older, most certainly he was one of the ringleaders."

Another update: MSM now reporting this. I'm listenning to the radio and ABC News is reporting that hostages recognize the man in photo as Iran's President-elect.....

Apparently, the Editor and Publisher piece is really an AP news story. Here is some more of it as reported by The Guardian:

``He kind of stayed in the background most of the time,'' Scott said. ``But he was in on some of the interrogations. And he was in on my interrogation at the time they were working me over.''

Scott also recalled an incident while he was held in the Evin prison in north Tehran in the summer of 1980.

One of the guards, whom Scott called Akbar, would sometimes let Scott and Sharer out to walk the narrow, 20-foot hallway outside their cells, he said. One day, Scott said, the man he believes was Ahmadinejad saw them walking and chastised the guard.

``He was the security chief, supposedly,'' Scott said. ``When he found out Akbar had let us out of our cells at all, he chewed out Akbar. I speak Farsi. He said, `These guys are dogs they're pigs, they're animals. They don't deserve to be let out of their cells.'''

Scott recalled responding to the man's stare by openly cursing his captor in Farsi. ``He looked a little flustered like he didn't know what to do. He just walked out.''

Roeder said he's sure Ahmadinejad was present during one of his interrogations when the hostage-takers threatened to kidnap his son in the U.S. and ``start sending pieces - toes and fingers of my son - to my wife.''

``It was almost like he was checking on the interrogation techniques they were using in a sort of adviser capacity,'' Roeder said.

Hermening, of Mosinee, Wis., the youngest of the hostages, said that after he looked at photos and did research on the Internet, he came to the conclusion that Ahmadinejad was one of his questioners.

Hermening had been Marine guard at the embassy, and he recalled the man he believes was Ahmadinejad asking him for the combination to a safe.

``His English would have been fairly strong. I couldn't say that about all the guards,'' Hermening said. ``I remember that he was certainly direct, threatening, very unfriendly.''

More from Gateway Pundit and Charles Johnson who it looks like found the first pics.

Moon reminds us: "Now, how quickly do you think the Ted Kennedy's and Diane Feinstein's will start complaining about Bush's inability to deal with this guy?"

Thanks to Captain Ed for the link, and check out his spot on analysis:

With all of this already out in the open, having the mullahcracy twist the recent election to put an experienced terror operative as their head of state really doesn't amount to a big surprise. And given Hashemi Rafsanjani's track record, that result was inevitable anyway.

Eh. Not too surprising coming from Iran.

It would be hard to dispute the contention that Iran is a terrorist nation when the "population" just elected a known terrorist as president. By any reasonable measure of justice, Ahmadinejad should be in prison, not the presidential palace.

Others: Hal.co.net, Dr. Zin, All Things Conservative, Jimgoism, Iran News Blog, Watcher Magazine, Solomania, Polipundit, Oxrant, Emergent Chaos

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian, iran, hostages

Posted by: Rusty at 12:22 PM | Comments (44) | Add Comment
Post contains 1796 words, total size 17 kb.

An al Qaeda linked group has threatened to behead a captive Iranian security officer named Shahab Mansouri if the new President did not release all members of 'The Organization of God's Soldiers' from Iranian jails. Al Arabiya television ran parts of the video in which the group is described as saying:

....it would send the hostage's head as a gift to the elected president if its demands are not met,

Posted by: Rusty at 01:28 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 114 words, total size 1 kb.

A picture is worth a thousand words......... more...

Posted by: Rusty at 10:45 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
Post contains 19 words, total size 1 kb.

The Student Movement Coordinating Committee for Democracy in Iran's(SMCCDI) website at Daneshjoo has been shut down again. Since the Iranian elections are just days away, Aryo Pirouznia is pleading for help in finding a new hosting company ASAP. E-mail Dr. Zin right away if you can help find them a new hosting company.

Posted by: Rusty at 04:19 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 63 words, total size 1 kb.

1 translated in italian

Posted by: KrilliX at June 08, 2005 03:32 AM (/7AIJ)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Not surprising. The caveat on this is that the source is the Iranian opposition. Iran Focus:

More than 30 armed agents dispatched from Iran were arrested in the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala, according to sources close to the Iranian opposition PeopleÂ’s Mojahedin.

Sources said that the 30 agents were mercenaries of the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force branch of IranÂ’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Posted by: Rusty at 07:56 AM | Comments (26) | Add Comment
Post contains 81 words, total size 1 kb.

Below are images of you're mullahs at work. I don't really have a problem with the death penalty in the abstract. The man was convicted of multiple counts of rape and murder. But the mad mullahs also have a tendency to do this sort of thing to the victims of rape too.

Why does the term barbaric suddenly come to mind?

And we wonder why so many young Persians resist the tyrrany of the Islamic Republic?

UPDATE: Ive moved all images below because some may find them offensive.

UPDATE II: Joyner takes the legal angle on this one and comes down on the side of civilization.

Volokh, on the other hand, seems to take it for granted that Iran's sharia court system actually convicted the right man. more...

Posted by: Rusty at 02:51 PM | Comments (49) | Add Comment
Post contains 139 words, total size 2 kb.

At least this teenage girl didn't get the maximum sentence for sex outside of marriage which is the death penalty. Under sharia law, a rape victim must prove that they sufficiently struggled against her attackers. If a woman claims rape and there are no male witnesses to testify on her behalf she is subject to penalties such as this.

Robert Spencer notes that "How did they establish that she consented? This article doesn't say, but it was probably from the testimony of the men involved. Traditional Islamic law disallows a woman's testimony in such a case."

Further, note the discrepency between the girls punishment and the boys involved. BBC:

The court dismissed the girl's claim that she was raped. It said she had sex of her own free will, the official Iran Daily newspaper reported.

The girl was sentenced to 100 lashes because her accusations of rape and kidnap could have landed her partners a death penalty, the Tehran judge said.

Sex outside marriage is illegal in Iran and capital punishment can be imposed.

The young men in the case were sentenced to 30 and 40 lashes each.

Under Iranian law, girls over the age of nine and boys over 16 face the death penalty for crimes such as rape and murder, while capital punishment can be imposed in certain cases of illegal sexual relationships....

Posted by: Rusty at 08:39 AM | Comments (25) | Add Comment
Post contains 261 words, total size 2 kb.