No Need To Worry About Iran's Possible Nuclear Threat

Investigative news reporter, Sean Penn assures that Iran is our friend!

Hollywood actor, Sean Penn is at it again. This time he has taken it upon himself to travel to Iran. You can read his comments of his trip here.

Once, again Sean is trying to "understand" a country that President Bush has "marginalized" by including them in his list of countries that comprise the "Axis of Evil."

Actor, Sean Penn is over in Iran playing journalist:

At the same time, I found myself approached with hundreds of opportunities for interviews with all those on the journalists’ circuit of interviewees. I was offered interviews over here, interviews over there. I was even contacted for a potential interview with former president and candidate Rafsanjani himself. But I was a little uninterested in most of it.

I’m not sure why he thinks he has the skills of a journalist, much less why he thinks we actually want, or care about his viewpoint. Nonetheless, as usual, Sean Penn thinks that we can all benefit from his efforts:

Akbar Ganji, a heroic investigative journalist who at one time wrote columns implicating high-ranking individuals in assassination of dissidents, had disappeared two days before my arrival in Tehran. The talk on the street had him in prison or dead. Ganji had already spent 62 months behind bars on a term that began in April 2000 for expressing political views. (The following day, it would be revealed by Human Rights Watch that he had been taken back into solitary confinement at Tehran’s Evin prison, was barred from contact with family or lawyers and has taken to a life-threatening hunger strike.)

I put out the word that I would like to speak with Abbas Abdi, another prominent dissident who had been jailed two years for polling Iranians on relations toward the United States. I was told that in the uncertainty of the moment, and because of the disappearance of Ganji, Abdi was giving no interviews. I was starting to question, very seriously question, Mehdi Rafsanjani’s view of what represents a free press in Iran versus that in the United States.

[Sean’s interview with Mehdi Rafsanjani resulted in Rafsanjani trying to make the comparison of Iran’s censure and America’s recent censure and imprisonment of Judith Miller as being the same.]

So, Mr. Penn is only now coming to question the veracity of Rfsanjani’s statements. He may play the "tough guy" in the fantasy of Hollywood films, but he obviously is the gullible idiot when it comes to playing journalist in Iran.

Rafsanjani played Mr. Penn like a fiddle during his interview. In fact, here is Mr. Penn’s report on the interview:

After lunch we had an appointment with Mehdi Rafsanjani, a campaign director and son of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He’s an informal man. A little portly, he seemed almost amused at the opportunity not so much to answer our questions but to anticipate them. We spoke on a range of issues, from Iran’s nuclear intentions to the rights of women, the process of elections and the history of our two countries’ tension. In almost all cases, he referred our questions back to us. "You have less candidates than we do." "You develop nuclear energy." Norman Solomon took this one on. Referring to pockets of high cancer rates in the vicinity of our nuclear facilities, he conceded that perhaps we have made some mistakes. The young Rafsanjani responded, "We like your mistakes." The issue of nuclear weapons brought an ironic smile to his face. "Why does the U.S. administration continue to pressure and pry into our business? It was the United States that made the chemical weapons used by the Iraqis against 10,000 people at Halabja." (Only six weeks after the horrific events in Halabja, President Reagan sent his Middle East envoy, current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to deliver to Saddam Hussein the news that the United States had taken Iraq off its terrorist hot list. The meeting was sealed with the now infamous photograph of Rumsfeld and Hussein shaking hands.)

Currently, the United States holds $12 billion in Iranian assets frozen. And young Rafsanjani suggested the releasing of those funds might be a good first step for the United States in the normalization of relations with Iran.

Then he said something that really caught my ear. "There are four or five dissidents only who are currently in prison," he said with disconcerting ease. "Even you, in the United States, have journalists in prison, probably the same amount, and some currently under threat. There are some human rights issues, then we have to solve that. In the United States, your Guardian Council are the rich. It is not so different." In the days to come, the younger Rafsanjani’s words would be put to the test. He had posed a balance between Iranian treatment of free press and that in the United States. I chose to diligently consider this proposition, and was mindful of the cases against Matt Cooper and Judith Miller, and separately, the suspicious umbrella over Robert Novak back home. (Iranian law demands journalists reveal their sources upon government request. Our own 1972 Supreme Court decision effectively demands the same of journalists in the United States.) While the language of the court decision may have been gray, today Miller sits in jail for refusing to reveal a source.

Obviously, Sean doesn’t know how to be a journalist, much less a "tough journalist". No, the intrepid actor turned journalist allowed Rafsanjani plenty of unchallenged leeway to turn the interview into a PSYOP opportunity.

Penn obviously didn’t complete any preliminary homework about his interviewee and his likely "modus operandi" when being interviewed by an American, (particularly, that most gullible and malleable of American types: the "Great American Hollywood Idiot" ).

More from Penn:

Of course, we wanted the interviews if we could get them. These were two major figures, one of whom, it appeared at the time, was likely to be returned to a presidency he’d relinquished in 1997. But we wanted to be careful not to be led into something by one, and there are many, of those who, for their own purposes, would design circumstances simply to create a sense of Iran as an unstable place.

Here we catch a glimpse of Penn’s agenda. He feels he has to be careful to engineer his interviews to steer clear of getting any kind of response that might possibly hint at Iran being an "unstable place".

Well, by all means we certainly can’t have that happening on Penn’s watch can we?

After all, he is in the business of "understanding our enemies".

First, Mr. Penn went over to Iraq to defend the "Butcher of Bagdad" and now he is over in Iran defending the crazed mullahs in Iran and their desire for nuclear weapons.

Here is some more of Penn’s delusional crap:

There is a love for our nation that is palpable on the street. There is a deep desire for our respect in return. And this seems very crucial to the psychology of Iranian politics, both hard-line and reformist. For all of the bad blood between our nations, you can't help observing that Iranians also love us, and what they know of America. I'm not talking now of the minority militant bastions of hatred but, in my limited experience, of Iranians in general.

Yeah right Sean. Young men in Iran just love the U.S. That’s why they are pouring into Iraq, and joining up with other terrorists whose express purpose is the killing of as many U.S troops and Iraqi troops and Iraqi policemen as possible to prevent any possibility of a free Iraq.

Yeah, they just love America.

This is a country where over half the population is under 26 and, given a chance, would indeed move their nation toward a more secular democracy. It isn't just their declarations of love toward this traveling American. There is proof of it in their knowledge and excitement about our country. This interest was not created for my benefit. It was there when I arrived. Yet if the United States continues to pursue inflammatory rhetoric, like the "Axis of Evil," or worse, increased sanctions and potentially unjustified military action, you can't help wondering if it may move a heterogeneous country, well on its way to new ideas and pursuits of freedoms, into a homogenous monolith of hatred.

Ok. Sean. First, we are expected to swallow your dubious, "tap and dance routine" about how Iran’s youth is on our side, and then you expect us to be prepared to "walk on eggshells" when we talk of Iran and it’s actions. We wouldn't want to lose their friendship and support would we.

While the regime's behavior has been suspicious, Iran consistently claims compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which it is signatory), and the International Atomic Energy Agency seems to concur. Any reckless action on the part of the United States or Israel may lead to Iran dropping out of the treaty. For the moment, Iran's greatest concern is a possible Israeli attack on Natanz or Bushehr, its primary nuclear facilities. (It should be noted that only weeks prior to its inclusion in the Axis of Evil, Iran invested $560 million in support of U.S. actions in conjunction with pro- Iranian Afghans against a declared, mutual enemy in the Taliban.)

Sean Penn just can’t defend Iran enough can he?

Can somebody please explain to me why it wouldn't be best for Sean to just immigrate over to Iran permanently? Is there any chance he could convince Alec Baldwin, and any other Hollywood traitors to join him?