WHILE IRANIAN PRESIDENT Mahmood Ahmadinejad’s recent call to wipe Israel off the map has elicited a great deal of much-needed international condemnation, relatively little focus has been paid since to Iran’s long-standing support for international terrorism. Thankfully, a recent article published in the German political magazine Cicero, titled “How Dangerous is Iran?” serves as a welcome supplement to the Iranian president’s remarks that, among other things, argues that Iran is currently harboring the surviving al Qaeda leadership.

This information is by no means new. In September 2003 for example, the Washington Post reported that “after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the locus of al Qaeda’s degraded leadership moved to Iran. The Iranian security services, which answer to the country’s powerful Islamic clerics, protected the leadership.” But the same article also claimed that after the May 2003 Riyadh bombings “the Iranians, under pressure from the Saudis, detained the al Qaeda group.” Most news reports on Iranian support for terrorism since then have claimed that the al Qaeda leaders are being held in some form of light detention or perhaps loose house arrest.