The Iranian Revolutionary Guard-Flynt Leverett Connection

Lee Smith has a very good piece about the various unsavory aspects of Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, regime apologists:

The opposition camp has been critical of Leverett for his collaborations with Mohamed Marandi, director of Tehran University's Institute for North American Studies and the son of Khamenei's personal physician, who appears to have facilitated Leverett's upcoming visit. "The University of Tehran is the institution which has applied for our visas," Leverett explained to me.

Leverett was offended when I asked if the Revolutionary Guard had played a role in his invitation, and yet there's little doubt that his co-author is personally and professionally close to the regime--and publicly justifies some of its most brutal actions. Since the June elections, Marandi has been the Ahmadinejad government's key spokesperson in the English-language media, and he recently defended the regime's sentencing opposition members to death. His true occupation may be even more unsavory. "He passes himself off as an academic, but he's with the Ministry of Intelligence," says Ramin Ahmadi, co-founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentary Center and a professor of medicine at Yale.