WikiLeaks says Iran's Khamenei has cancer: report
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Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei smiles while attending an official meeting with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri (not pictured) in Tehran November 29, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Khamenei.ir/Handout
PARIS |
PARIS (Reuters) - U.S. diplomatic cables released by online whistle-blower WikiLeaks include remarks from an Iran source in 2009 saying Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has terminal cancer, French daily Le Monde reported.
The source, a non-Iranian businessman based in Central Asia and traveling often to Tehran, "has learned from one of his contacts that (former president Ali Akbar) Rafsanjani told him Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has terminal stage leukemia and could die in a few months," according to an August 2009 cable.
The document, written by a U.S. diplomat, says that Rafsanjani, a critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has expressed sympathies with Iran's reformist movement, decided on learning of Khamenei's illness to start preparing himself to be a successor.
As Supreme Leader since 1989 Khamenei has final say on policy in the Islamic Republic, which is locked in a stand-off with key world powers over the nature of its nuclear activities.
The document cited by Le Monde is one of thousands of cables leaked by the WikiLeaks website at the weekend that reveal confidential views and information from senior U.S. diplomats overseas that would normally remain confidential for decades.
Le Monde, one of a handful of newspapers around the world given access to the cables, said the Iran documents showed Washington relied on a network of Iran-watchers in the Middle East to shed light on a country it sees as an enigma.
The United States broke diplomatic relations with Iran 30 years ago after fundamentalist students in Iran seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held staff there hostage for 444 days.
(Reporting by Catherine Bremer; Editing by Samia Nakhoul)
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I dont believe ” a non-Iranian businessman based in Central Asia and traveling often to Tehran” is a reliable source and close enough to Khamenei to be aware of this issue while the rest of the world has had no idea..I dont trust whatever wikileaks leaks!
However, this claim is kind of special, meaning that this person he told this to, his spy connections are blown.
But it is impressive how western media manage to turn these messages as the truth about Iran.
The reality is that the US and Israel are the warmongers in the region backed by its puppets, the brutal dictators of Saudi Arabia, the military dictators in Egypt and Pakistan etc.
Compared to SA Iran has immense amount of respect for women. SA is also the main producer of “terrorists” to the west. So why do the US ally itself with the dictators?
Yes because nothing is more stable then a dictatorship and that Iran has #2 largest oil fields and #3 on gas. And that it has some kind of democracy, however it is completely flawed, that makes it more unstable then the dictators around.
Remember; CIA destroyed the democraticly elected government in Iran in 1954. It was completely democratic, but that was not what Washington wanted, and they made the dictator shah to take over.
When the population had enough with the secret police, the torture, the killings, the shah fell cause of a uprise amongst normal inhabitants.
That they changed the dictatoric shah for the dictatoric religious government, is not their fault, but the US fault for destroying the real democracy in the country.
Israel and the US are the problem for world peace. US for being an imperic militaristic government that promotes democracy in word, but promotes dictature in reality, same way as dictators promote communism (China, vietnam, North-Korea), Islam (Iran and almost all countries in the ME) or Judeaism/democracy like Israel.
What people use as a reason for their actions does not matter. What they do in reality is what we can endorse or hate.
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