IRANIAN POLITICS….This has mostly been news on the right wing of the blogosphere, so you might have missed it, but apparently the new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was once head of security for the Office for Strengthening of Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries, a group that played a key role in the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. The pictures on the right show Ahmadinejad then and now.

I picked up the story here, and there are more pictures and additional background here. Apparently kidnapping American embassy workers qualifies as “playing to the base” in Iranian elections.

I’m not sure that this really matters a lot, since Ahmadinejad has been routinely described as ultra conservative all along and it’s pretty obvious that neither he nor the clerics who actually run Iran have any love lost for the United States. But it’s an interesting tidbit anyway and I thought you might be interested.

UPDATE: Associated Press reports that several former hostages have identified Ahmadinejad as one of their captors, but that several of the hostage takers deny it, as does one of Ahmadinejad’s close aides. Stay tuned.