In 2013, Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran, succeeding the blunt revolutionary Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who loved to provoke Western sensibilities. To the Obama administration, the smiling cleric Rouhani was destined to bring “change” to Iran, and the American press hailed him as a “moderate” who favored liberalization. He was, of course, nothing of the sort, as Isaac Schorr writes:

To Rouhani, “Israel is the great Zionist Satan” that “can never feel that it is in a safe place,” and “the beautiful cry of ‘Death to America’ unites” his country. In a 2004 speech, Rouhani boasted that nuclear negotiations he was holding with Britain, France, and Germany bought time that allowed engineers to install “equipment in parts of the [nuclear conversion] facility in Isfahan.”

This much could be determined from Rouhani’s words alone, but his actions speak far more loudly. Not only has Iran, under his watch, continued to export terror, war, and slaughter throughout the Middle East, but Rouhani’s government has also brutalized its own population. Schorr cites a recent report by Amnesty International detailing the treatment of those who participated in last year’s protests:

During his original campaign in 2013, Rouhani ran on a platform of freeing political prisoners and curbing the power of the morality police. . . . During and after the protests, [however], thousands of Iranians were arrested by security forces—in the vast majority of cases, for merely showing up to demonstrations. . . . Children as young as ten years old were taken into custody.

Many of those arrested disappeared for weeks and even months. Family members who inquired as to their status were often “subjected to harassment [and] intimidation.” . . . Torture was used not only to force the “confessions” of individuals’ unlawful behavior, “but also about their alleged associations with opposition groups outside Iran.” Among the methods used by authorities to elicit such confessions were beatings, prolonged stays in solitary confinement, stress positions and suspension, electric shocks, mock executions, and sexual violence and humiliation, including “forced nakedness, invasive body searches intended to humiliate the victims, sustained sexual verbal abuse, pepper spraying the genital area, and administering electric shocks to the testicles.”

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.