Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issues challenge to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issues challenge to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Iran's president forgets lame-duck script, making very public power
struggle with judiciary head in defiance of supreme leader

Saeed Kamali Dehghan
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 February 2013 18.52 GMT

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran's president seven years ago, he made his presence felt through incendiary statements targeted at Israel and the west. Now, in his dying days in office, he is going out all guns firing. Only this time he is taking aim at the edifice of the political system that championed him.

This week, while schools across Iran were made to decorate classrooms as part of the celebrations marking the 34th anniversary of the 1979 revolution, Tehran was the scene of an unprecedented, and very public, spat at the highest levels of the Islamic republic. On Sunday, a power struggle between Ahmadinejad and the speaker of the parliament, Ali Larijani, reached a climax when the former, in a dramatic sequence of events, played a secretly filmed tape for jeering MPs that showed the latter's brother, Fazel, allegedly trading on his sibling's influence for financial gain in a conversation with Saeed Mortazavi, the caretaker of Iran's social welfare organisation.

Ahmadinejad was addressing the parliament in defence of his employment and welfare minister, Abdolreza Sheikholeslami, who was facing impeachment for appointing Mortazavi, a close ally of the president, to the welfare job. Mortazavi, a former judge and prosecutor general of Tehran, is loathed by the MPs because of his links to the death in custody of at least three protesters in the aftermath of the 2009 disputed presidential election which gave Ahmadinejad a second term.

[font size=1]-snip-[/font]

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/mahmoud-ahmadinejad-ayatollah-ali-khamenei

[bemildred]

1. So many of them don't want to leave when their time is up. nt