Iranian officials call latest U.S. sanctions ‘desperate’

Iranian officials said Friday that the Obama administration’s decision to sanction eight high-ranking security officials for human rights abuses demonstrated Washington’s complicity with opposition activists and showed America as desperate.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday unveiled travel and financial restrictions against eight Iranian officials allegedly responsible for the brutal months-long crackdown against protestors decrying alleged fraud in the 2009 reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“With this measure, America intends to boost the morale of the anti-revolutionary groups,” national police chief Gen. Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam told worshipers in a pre-Friday prayer sermon speech broadcast live on radio. “American officials are so desperate these days that they cling to any flimsy branch in order to save themselves.”

Other Iranian officials described the sanctions as America’s attempt to turn the world’s attention from what they described as Ahmadinejad’s stellar performance during his recent visit to the United Nations in New York, where he suggested that the United States may have been responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“Another aim of American officials is to divert the public opinion of the world and the American people from the logical question that Mr. Ahmadinejad raised about the Sept. 11 realities,” said Ramin Mehmanparast, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency. “Instead of an appropriate answer to this question, we are witnessing inconsiderate behavior accompanied with anger.”

The United States and its allies have applied a series of escalating sanctions against Iran for its refusal to curtail its nuclear technology program, which many fear is aimed at building nuclear weapons and increasing the regional dominance of a government deemed by the West, Israel and Arab governments as radical and destabilizing. Iran says its nuclear development program is solely for civilian purposes.

Clinton’s announcement, the first sanctions targeting Iran for alleged human rights abuses, appeared to catch Iranians off-guard. Friday’s chorus of official responses came more than 36 hours after the U.S. unveiled the sanctions, suggesting the comments were coordinated and carefully vetted by the Supreme National Security Council, a powerful body that includes supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several of the eight people sanctioned.

Iranian officials and analysts said the sanctions would be ineffective because none of the eight men targeted have bank accounts in the United States or plan to travel there.

“This is also a real confession which says [America’s] games of sedition following Iran’s elections have come to an end,” Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran’s foreign minister, said in a television interview. “In other words, [they] could not achieve anything after all the messages [they] sent during this sedition,” the term Iranian officials use to describe the mostly silenced protest movement that shook the country.

daragahi@latimes.com