P U L S E

Mohamad Reza Shah Pahlavi leaving Iran with tears in his eyes.

According to Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com, the American Administration is moving forward with plans to provide ”grants” to the tune of $20 million to Iranian dissident groups.

Despite President Barack Obama’s persistent claims that the United States is not meddling in the post-election furore in Iran, the administration is moving forward with plans to subsidize Iranian dissident groups to the tune of $20 million in the form of USAID grants.

The program is not new, and the solicitation for the grant applications actually came under the Bush Administration. But with the deadline for submissions just four days away, the administration has a convenient excuse to subsidize opposition and dissident groups under the guise of promoting “the rule of law” in Iran.

The White House and the State Department both defended the program, insisting it did not run counter to the administration’s pretense of neutrality. The administration declined to provide details of exactly which opposition figures it had been funding, however, citing “security concerns.”

There is considerable criticism for this program, not just from the perspective of getting the US involved in the internal affairs of Iran, but also for the taint it places on various opposition groups and NGOs, whether they received any of the grant money or not.

In other (related?) news, the son of the ousted Shah of Iran, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, cried on national television on June 22 claiming that he had

added her (Neda) to the list of my daughters. She is now forever in my pocket.

Pahlavi would have been the next notoriously corrupt Shah of Iran had his father not been deposed during the 1979 Revolution.  He has a significant following in various countries all over the world composed of expatriate Monarchist Iranians who believe that Iran should go back to the days of being ruled by a royal family.  Pahlavi did not mention whether he kept the thousands of women that were tortured and murdered at the hands of his father through institutions like the SAVAK (the Shah’s secret police) in his pocket as well.