Juan Cole observes how even Iranian hard liners are getting fed up with post-election violence:
The call for the punishment of security men who abused prisoners to death, on the part of a hard line newspaper, is remarkable. The condemnation of extra-judicial punishment is likewise not what you would expect from a Khomeinist organ (but that is what this newspaper is). [...] In a way, these killings of prisoners is functioning like the shooting of Kent State protesters by National Guardsmen in 1970 in the US, which helped turn a lot of fence-sitters against the Vietnam War. In this case, the harshness of the methods deployed by the hard liners is becoming repulsive even to other hard liners. Remember that they view themselves as highly ethical and as acting in accordance with islamic norms, and these deaths challenge their own self-image.