MORE DISGRACE - AT 11:03 P.M. ET:  A number of readers have alerted us to another disgraceful action by the Obama administration.  (There are now so many that we'll soon need an index.)  Consider this, from, surprisingly, the liberal Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON - For the past five years, researchers in a modest office overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers on those they say are Iran’s most infamous human-rights abusers.

But just as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was ramping up to investigate abuses of protesters after this summer’s disputed presidential election, the group received word that - for the first time since it was formed - its federal funding request had been denied.

Another example of the Obama administration's commitment to human rights.

Many see the sudden, unexplained cutoff of funding as a shift by the Obama administration away from high-profile democracy promotion in Iran, which had become a signature issue for President Bush. But the timing has alarmed some on Capitol Hill.

“The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center is at the forefront of pioneering and vitally important work,’’ said Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, in a statement yesterday. “It is disturbing that the State Department would cut off funding at precisely the moment when these brave investigations are needed most.’’

Hillary Clinton should be dragged before the appropriate committee, and answers should be demanded.  The problem is that the "appropriate committee" is foreign relations, headed by John Kerry, whose interest in human rights has generally been hard to locate. 

But the GOP should take up this issue and use it...loudly.

And this is deeply troubling:

...at least three other groups that received funding under Bush’s democracy program for Iran have been told they would not receive funding this year, according to Roya Boroumand, founder of the Bormound Foundation, which works against the death penalty in Iran. Boroumand said her group does not get State Department funds, but that she is in contact with other organizations who do, and all are worried.

“If the rationale is that we are going to stop funding human rights-related work in Iran because we don’t want to provoke the government, it is absolutely the wrong message to send,’’ she said. “That means that we don’t really believe in human rights, that the American government just looks into it when it is convenient.’’

COMMENT:  Isn't this an administration run by "progressives"?  I think that's what they call themselves.  They should be ashamed, but they come from a part of the political spectrum in which shame is not an approved emotion.

October 6, 2009