Over the weekend, Grand Ayatollah Asadollah Bayat Zanjani criticized the mass arrest of reformist activists and protesters.
"Every healthy mind casts doubt on the way the election was held," the high-ranking cleric said in a statement published online.
"More regrettable are postelection large-scale arrests, newspaper censorship and website filtering and, above all, the martyrdom of our countrymen whom they describe as rioters," he said.
The families of detainees also spoke out harshly against the government.
"My father is a defender of pure Islam," Mehdi Saharkhiz, the son of imprisoned journalist Issa Saharkhiz, wrote Monday -- Father's Day in Iran -- in a letter posted on various websites.
"My father has done his utmost to defend the republican nature of the regime," he wrote. "He wants to establish religious democracy, but you and your accomplices prefer your mundane interests to anything else," he wrote, insultingly referring to Ahmadinejad with the informal "you."
The Revolutionary Guard is trying hard to stifle such criticism. The uniformed leaders, Jafari and Javani, joined by cleric Ali Saeedi, Khamenei's representative, said they would henceforth play a more active role in defending the Islamic Republic's core values, though they insisted this should not be interpreted as "interfering" in politics.
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daragahi@latimes.com
