Let me say this clearly: this is precisely what the President of the United States should be doing, and every American, regardless of his or her politics, should be proud that he’s doing it.
(Peter Heck – Disrn) In June of 2009, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets of Tehran to protest the stolen election by the then Ayatollah-approved dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Dubbed the “Green Movement,” desperate protestors braved bullets from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to rally for freedom and change.
Throughout the several months that the demonstrations occurred, there was one voice that was conspicuously absent: the one belonging to the so-called “leader of the free world.” Obsessed with his persistent effort to make friends out of the Islamic clerics running Iran, U.S. President Barack Obama largely avoided the uprising, making only passing comments of acknowledgement when awkwardly forced to.
Bloomberg reported,
Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon uncovers new details on how far Obama went to avoid helping Iran’s green movement. Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America’s support.
Solomon reports that Obama ordered the CIA to sever contacts it had with the green movement’s supporters. “The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms,” Solomon writes. “But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”