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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the state-security frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
State-security frame
Iranian authorities have executed three men convicted of working with a hostile foreign intelligence service, killing a security officer and orchestrating violent unrest that destroyed public property — a lawful response to a foreign-backed plot.
Crackdown-on-dissent frame
Tehran is once again using Mossad-collaboration charges and the death penalty to punish participants in street protests, folding ordinary unrest into a national-security narrative that justifies executions with little independent scrutiny.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot A
The hostile-intelligence-operations case
An Iranian counterintelligence official would argue —
These were not protesters caught up in a moment. The court found that Rasouli, Miri and Dolatabadi acted in coordination with Mossad — a foreign service that has assassinated our scientists, sabotaged our facilities, and openly seeks to destabilize the state. One of them led a group that killed a security officer and burned a Basij base and a bank during the Mashhad unrest. Any sovereign state, facing armed agents of a hostile power operating on its soil during a period of orchestrated disorder, would prosecute under its most serious statutes. The penalty is severe because the crime is severe: paid violence on behalf of a foreign enemy, with a dead officer and torched public property as the evidence.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.