Ahmadinejad Lashes Out at Rival Before Iran Vote

By Anna Johnson, The Associated Press

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's hard-line president took a final shot at his rivals Wednesday during his last public pre-election rally, accusing them of resorting to a smear campaign against him similar to the one used by Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is locked in a neck-and-neck race against reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi. Both have launched intense political attacks against each other and have turned the presidential election into a display of Iran's deep political divides.

Heightening the tension before the race, a top official of Iran's hard-line elite Revolutionary Guards accused Ahmadinejad's reformist opponents of seeking to launch a "velvet revolution" - alluding to the 1989 ouster of the Communist government of then-Czechoslovakia - and vowing to crush any such attempts.

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