Iran Watch: Former Iranian President Mohammed Khatemi Granted USA VISA

Former Iranian President Mohammed Khatemi (NB Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in background)

NY Sun: Bush Administration Grants Visa To Ex-President of Iran

Despite intense disagreement over suspected nuclear weapons and terrorism, the Bush administration decided yesterday to allow the former leader of Iran, President Khatemi, to visit America.

A visa was granted yesterday to Mr. Khatemi and several Iranians who will accompany him on the visit early next month, a State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said.

His travel will be unrestricted.

Mr. Khatemi plans to attend a U.N. conference September 5–6 and speak at the Washington National Cathedral on September 7.

No meetings with American officials are anticipated, Mr. Casey told reporters at a briefing.

Mr. Khatemi would be the most senior Iranian official to visit Washington since Islamic fundamentalists seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held Americans there hostage for 444 days.

Now, why would the United States State Department and Condoleezza Rice approve a visa of a former President of a terrorist state?

Hezbollah and the Iranian Mullahs must be laughing their ASSES off.

What do these characters have to do?

KILL MORE AMERICANS?

Hugh Hewitt registers his disgust here.

While a case could be made that he must be allowed to travel to and from the UN, how is it that he is being allowed to come to Washington, and who invited him to speak at the Washington National Cathedral four days prior to the fifth anniversary of the attacks? It was from the National Cathedral that the national day of prayer and grievance proceeded five years ago, and the State Department does not understand how it might be unacceptable to allow the leader of the world’s greatest sponsor of terror to tread there at any time, much less in September? This decision makes me angry. How does it affect the families of the victims of terror, or the survivors of lost and wounded in the war?

Indeed……..

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