Was Ahmadinejad aware of the student protesters?
No, no, they didn’t see anything, and never could see anything. I had told them that it would be arranged so that he could come and go without every encountering any protest. He wouldn’t see anything, he wouldn’t hear anything. That’s what the Secret Service wanted and Columbia security wanted. From a protest point of view… like most protests… like when there’s a big protest in Washington, the President’s at Camp David– protests are more for the good of the protesters. But I think in this case [the ambassador] should have briefed him… If the ambassador had been here a long time it would have been different. Because he just presented his credentials in July. The other guy [Javad Zarif] had been in this country before and worked for the World Bank. So, I don’t know… The speech sounded like one that had not been written for him. Maybe Ahmadinejad wrote the speech himself. I think he would have liked to have felt like he was being accepted as a fellow intellectual. Were those aspe
