The BBC trumpeted today:

The head of Iran's hardline judiciary has launched an unprecedented attack on legal processes in his own country.

Is this good news? Or is this Iran’s mullacracy performing public relations, hoping to sway the ever-gullible legions of the terrorism-appeasers? Call me a cynic, but I’m not falling for another load of terrorist BS about Iran’s pretend democracy. More from the BBC:

Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi criticised police interrogators for extracting confessions.

"Sometimes they do some things like put a bag over the head, which resembles what the Americans do to terrorists in Abu Ghraib," he said.

He said such mistreatment was against the constitution, Islam and international legal principles.

Iran has regularly been criticised by international human rights groups for a range of human rights abuses and its tough penal system.

BBC correspondent in Tehran, Frances Harrison, says this is not the first time Ayatollah Shahrudi has criticised the behaviour of the security forces, but it is certainly his most outspoken attack.

Where the hell was Shahrudi when his fellow Ayatollahs disqualified 2,530 of the 8,157 candidates originally on the ballot for the February 20th, 2004 parliamentary elections? Where was he when Human Rights Watch declared last year that Iranian human rights abuses were at the worst level since 1997 and identified “systematic abuses against political detainees, including arbitrary arrest, detention without trial, torture to extract confessions, prolonged solitary confinement, and physical and psychological abuse.” Where is Shahrudi when his own government’s security forces keep abusing Iranians protesting against living in an Orwellian nightmare?

I just can’t believe anything that Iran’s government spews forth. Today’s news is just more pabulum for the politically gullible.