Inside the Mind of Iran’s Khamenei
Inside the Mind of Iran’s Khamenei ( Video)
Why Iran’s iron ayatollah distrusts the US and what that means for nuclear talks and the possibility of war with the West.
Deep inside an old Tehran political prison, three turns off a dark corridor and through a small gap, lies a bleak cell for solitary confinement. Too narrow for a prisoner to extend his arms, it was once the cell of the man who today holds the official title in Iran, “God’s deputy on earth.”
Scratched into the blackened paint is a hopeless verse about “the prison ashamed of the face of the liberated.”
It was here in the 1970s that opponents of the American-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi were held and tortured by the SAVAK secret police, as popular anger outside swelled inevitably toward the 1979 Islamic revolution. That event would oust the shah and usher in a self-proclaimed “government of God.”
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The downtown prison has since been turned into a museum called Ebrat, which means “lesson” or “example.” Its ghoulish displays are a stark reminder of just one critical influence - a wary anti-Americanism - on the thinking of its most famous inmate, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.