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US cutoff of funding to Iran human rights cause signals shift - The Boston Globe
This is bad, very bad. It sends a message to the Ahmadinejad administration that we don't care what he does to his people who have taken to the streets in peaceful protest. We should not be fighting the battles of the people of Iran, but we ought to be PUBLICIZING THEM and WATCHING.
This is a huge mistake by the Obama administration, imo.
WASHINGTON - For the past five years, researchers in a modest office overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers on those they say are Iran’s most infamous human-rights abusers.
But just as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was ramping up to investigate abuses of protesters after this summer’s disputed presidential election, the group received word that - for the first time since it was formed - its federal funding request had been denied.
“If there is one time that I expected to get funding, this was it,’’ said Rene Redman, the group’s executive director, who had asked for $2.7 million in funding for the next two years. “I was sur prised, because the world was watching human rights violations right there on television.’’
Many see the sudden, unexplained cutoff of funding as a shift by the Obama administration away from high-profile democracy promotion in Iran, which had become a signature issue for President Bush. But the timing has alarmed some on Capitol Hill.
This is bad, very bad. It sends a message to the Ahmadinejad administration that we don't care what he does to his people who have taken to the streets in peaceful protest. We should not be fighting the battles of the people of Iran, but we ought to be PUBLICIZING THEM and WATCHING.
This is a huge mistake by the Obama administration, imo.