Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri is Iran’s most prominent clerical dissident. He was the designated successor of Ayatollah Khomeini, but Montazeri’s criticisms of the authoritarian nature of Khomeini’s government earned him rejection by Khomeini, followed by years of house arrest.

Montazeri issued a statement today strongly supporting political and religious pluralism, and cautioning both the regime and the demonstrators against violence:

The distinction of a powerful government — Islamic or non-Islamic — is its ability to heed both similar and opposing views and, with religious compassion, which is a prerequisite of government, allow all the strata of society, whatever their political beliefs, to participate in the running of the country, instead of totally alienating them and constantly increasing their [the dissidents] number. Since this government is known as a religious government, I fear that the conduct and actions of the officials may ultimately harm the religion and undermine the people’s beliefs. [...]

I urge all the people, in particular the youth, to pursue the realization of their rights with patience and grace, to maintain calm and security in the country by virtue of sagacity and intelligence, and to refrain from aggression or any action that may harm their image and legitimate demand, and which would give an excuse to those of unfit character, who infiltrate the crowds, to create turmoil and disorder, and set people’s homes and belongings on fire, in a bid to generate an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. [...]

I advise all the officials, as well as the military and security forces, to uphold their religion and not sell their souls; they must understand that the term “officials are excused [because they are only doing their duty]” would not be accepted by the Almighty God on the Day of Judgement. They must regard the protesting youth as their own children, and refrain from violent and cruel actions. They must learn from the mistakes of the predecessors and understand that, eventually, those who oppress the people will receive their just comeuppance. In this day and age, one cannot hide the truth from the people through censorship, closures and restrictions of communication means.

In conclusion, I beseech the Almighty God to grant success to all those who serve Islam and the Muslims, and honor and glory to the dear Iranian nation.

Unlike allegations of vote fraud from American congressmen and former presidential candidates, this is the sort of statement, a respected clerical authority making an appeal for justice, tolerance, and non-violence on the basis of Islam, that could has the potential to really change the outcome on the ground. Hopefully more clerics will join with him.

Earlier this month, U.S. citizen, Irving Palomo, was detained and put in a van headed for Mexico due to an ICE mix-up. A few months ago Mark Lyttle, a U.S. citizen who suffers from mild retardation, was deported to Mexico. Mexican officials then deported him to Honduras, and Honduras deported him to Guatemala. After spending four months in Latin American prisons and homeless shelters, Atlanta airport officials tried to deport Lyttle again on his way back to his home in North Carolina.

Now a Louisiana newspaper is reporting that Diane Williams, a U.S. citizen of Caucasian and Native American descent, was recently deported to Honduras due to a mistake made by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials.

Williams was finishing up a prostitution sentence in Texas under a fake alias when she received a deportation order from the U.S. government. Two weeks later she found herself pleading her case at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Williams claims that she was pressured by ICE officials to waive her right to judicial review. “They didn’t read nothing to me. They just told me to sign,” says Williams.

Jorge Baron, executive director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Seattle, told Louisiana’s Daily Comet that ICE officials “cut corners” and “are pushed to deport people quickly.” According to the newspaper:

Immigration-rights advocates say thousands of people with credible claims to U.S. citizenship are detained every year by an overloaded immigration-enforcement system, in part because of pressures on agents to show results in numbers of deportations and a lack of adequate civil-rights protections.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) conservatively estimates that approximately 100 U.S. citizens are accidentally ensnared by the country’s broken immigration system each year. Joanne Lin, legislative counsel with the ACLU in Washington, told a Tennessee newspaper that these mistakes are indicative of “a whole host of immigration enforcement and due process problems that exist in the system.” As immigration restrictionists incessantly call on immigration officials to ramp up their deportation efforts, ICE can barely handle the deportation work they’re already doing.

The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel has a great article up on how conservatives who had previously scoffed at the idea that Iran’s elections had any meaning while praying for an Ahmadinejad victory are now casting about for a plausible position in regard to Iran’s reform movement and the growing legitimacy crisis.

The article also quotes neocon Michael Ledeen smearing Iran scholar and president of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi, whose knowledge of Iran and work on NIAC’s blog has been an invaluable resource over the last week. Ledeen says Parsi “is not a human rights activist…He’s a leading apologist for the regime.”

Leaving aside why we should take seriously the human rights views of someone whose eponymous “doctrine” was transmitted by acolyte Jonah Goldberg as: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” this isn’t the first time Ledeen has slandered an genuine Iranian human rights activist who disagreed with his cracked theories. In his book The Iranian Time Bomb, Ledeen discussed the case of Iranian activist Akhbar Ganji, and suggested that Ganji’s opposition to the Bush administration’s threats against the Iranian regime were the result of Ganji’s having been broken by Iranian torturers:

The Ganji who had been brought back from the edge of death was no longer the forceful campaigner who had demanded that the regime submit to the people’s will…Indeed the regime sent him on a Western tour where he spent most of his time denouncing American pressure on the mullahs.

The Iranian torturers do their work well; Ganji is not the first dissident to decide not to sacrifice his own life, or those of his family and friends, in a desperate gesture of independence.

As this subsequent interview with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman shows, Ganji remained a strong critic of the Iranian government. But, simply by virtue of criticizing George W. Bush’s foreign policy and disagreeing with Ledeen’s ideas about regime change, Ganji and Parsi are treated by Ledeen as dupes of the regime. Ledeen simply can’t countenance the idea that the reason that actual Iranian human rights activists (as well as most other people in the world) disagree with the neoconservative policy of bringing democracy to the Middle East at the point of an American gun is because it’s an irretrievably stupid policy, one that has done about as much as Iran’s hardliners could have hoped to justify and strengthen their hold on power.