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Over 18 months after the rigged presidential election of June 12, 2009, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and former Majles Speaker Mehdi Karroubi, together with Mousavi's wife, Dr. Zahra Rahnavard, and to a significant extent former President Mohammad Khatami, form the core of the Green Movement's leadership. Their thoughtful positions and critiques of what the hardliners are doing to Iran and Iranians, and what needs to be done to correct the dangerous path that they have put the nation on have become a thorn in the side of the ruling elite, led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the high-ranking officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps -- in particular, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, the Guards' top commander, and Brigadier General Yadollah Javani, head of the Guards' political directorate.

Although the hardliners have proclaimed the death of the Green Movement -- what they refer to as the "sedition" -- on too many occasions to count, not a single day passes in which they do not attack Mousavi and Karroubi and the movement's supporters. The reactionary cleric Ahmad Khatami (no relation to the former president), explained in his sermon during Tehran's Friday Prayers of December 3 that Mousavi and Karroubi are still denounced on a regular basis because "they have not retreated from their positions" of defending people's rights, democratic elections, a free press, and freedom for political prisoners.