Palizar's Bombshells

Discussions on a professional list-serve called my attention to significant allegations of corruption against much of the Iranian establishment made by a parliamentary ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"A film and the speech of Abbas Palizar, a member of Iran’s Majlis Investigative ‎Committee are now available on the Internet for the public, whose contents expose the ‎country’s judiciary and senior clerics. Palizar made his speech at Hamedan University in ‎western Iran and named leading politicians and clerics from the conservative camp and ‎accused them of engaging in corrupt economic practices. He also revealed that the plane ‎crash that carried, and killed, Iran’s former minister of transportation during Khatami’s ‎presidency was the work of sabotage by insiders, and also that another air crash that ‎killed a former army commander at the Passdaran, Ahmad Kazemi, was at the least ‎‎'suspicious'.‎..

"The person whose revelations at Hamedan University have now attained sensational ‎quality was for some time the 'operational secretary' of the research unit of the seventh ‎Majlis where his key responsibility was to head the (Infrastructure Research Bureau) ‎Daftare Motaleat Zirbanai. He was the leading figure to draw up a plan to punish those ‎who committed economic disruption and prior to being the head the Majlis research unit, ‎he was the advisor to the Majlis Economic Committee and the Chairman and ‎spokesperson of the Board of Trustees of the House of Industrialists of Iran (Khane ‎Sanatgaran’e Iran). He had made an unsuccessful bid for Tehran’s provincial council ‎while running on the list that supported president Ahmadinejad.‎"

Global Voices Online also covers the matter. Although associated in the west with his hardline foreign policy, Ahmadinejad won the 2005 elections as a populist reformer. This frontal assault on the establishment may represent the opening salvo of his 2009 re-election bid. Where it will lead, however, depends on what's happening behind the scenes in Iranian politics. The conservative establishment began crushing President Khatami's liberal reformists when they began investigating financial corruption. Will the same now happen to Ahmadinejad and his allies, or has he in some fashion made himself secure enough to survive? I suspect he's playing a dangerous game, as his allies were decimated in the last elections for both the parliament and the Assembly of Experts.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)