THE OBAMA administration could not have picked a more inappropriate moment to cut off funding to a watchdog group documenting Iran’s human rights abuses. When Iranians protested the corrupt reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this summer, the repressive regime took a lesson from Tiananmen Square and suppressed the popular uprising with force.

This makes it unsettling that the US State Department has turned down a federal funding request by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The group, which has tallied the assassinations of political dissidents and investigated prisoner abuse, will shut down in the spring without grants to continue its vital work.

The State Department had no explanation for turning off the tap that has channeled more than $3 million to the group. The Obama administration should not abandon its efforts to engage Iran. But surely the United States, as it pursues diplomacy, can also finance a nongovernmental group that documents Iran’s human rights violations. If the United States buries its head in the sand as a precondition of talking with Iran, it would send the wrong message to the country’s proponents of democracy.

Human rights groups watching Iran deserve US support as they continue to pressure the regime. The uprising this summer exposed the cracks in the legitimacy of the entire Islamic republic. Information about mass arrests and the abuse of prisoners will bolster the dissident movement - the one glimmer of hope that the Iranian police state will some day come to an end.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.