Telephones Cut Off, Mousavi Arrested, Rafsanjani Resigns

[Sweejak]

Sometimes I think these photoshop exposés are actually designed to be found out.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/6/17 ... ear-Larger

[JackRiddler]

Stratfor analysis (usually of interest):

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090615 ... an_reality

Western Misconceptions Meet Iranian Reality

June 15, 2009 | 1745 GMT


Graphic for Geopolitical Intelligence Report

By George Friedman
Related Link

* The Geopolitics of Iran: Holding the Center of a Mountain Fortress

Related Special Topic Page

* The Iranian Presidential Elections

In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.

The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.

The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising — Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than those in the first group.
Misreading Sentiment in Iran

Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.

Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.

There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.

Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.

Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this.
Ahmadinejad’s Popularity

It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.

First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.

Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.

Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.

Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.

For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.

Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then proceeded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression.
The Road Ahead: More of the Same

The question now is what will happen next. Internally, we can expect Ahmadinejad to consolidate his position under the cover of anti-corruption. He wants to clean up the ayatollahs, many of whom are his enemies. He will need the support of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This election has made Ahmadinejad a powerful president, perhaps the most powerful in Iran since the revolution. Ahmadinejad does not want to challenge Khamenei, and we suspect that Khamenei will not want to challenge Ahmadinejad. A forced marriage is emerging, one which may place many other religious leaders in a difficult position.

Certainly, hopes that a new political leadership would cut back on Iran’s nuclear program have been dashed. The champion of that program has won, in part because he championed the program. We still see Iran as far from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon, but certainly the Obama administration’s hopes that Ahmadinejad would either be replaced — or at least weakened and forced to be more conciliatory — have been crushed. Interestingly, Ahmadinejad sent congratulations to U.S. President Barack Obama on his inauguration. We would expect Obama to reciprocate under his opening policy, which U.S. Vice President Joe Biden appears to have affirmed, assuming he was speaking for Obama. Once the vote fraud issue settles, we will have a better idea of whether Obama’s policies will continue. (We expect they will.)

What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure position, something that normally forms a basis for negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran doesn’t want to give.

On the surface, this would seem to open the door for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Former U.S. President George W. Bush did not — and Obama does not — have any appetite for such an attack. Both presidents blocked the Israelis from attacking, assuming the Israelis ever actually wanted to attack.

For the moment, the election appears to have frozen the status quo in place. Neither the United States nor Iran seem prepared to move significantly, and there are no third parties that want to get involved in the issue beyond the occasional European diplomatic mission or Russian threat to sell something to Iran. In the end, this shows what we have long known: This game is locked in place, and goes on.

[Sweejak]

Khamenei rides a storm in a tea cup

Page 1 of 2
Khamenei rides a storm in a tea cup
By M K Bhadrakumar

Western capitals must make a difficult choice: how long to pin hopes on the eruption of a "color" revolution in Tehran? The burden falls almost entirely on Europe, since Washington has different priorities.

The United States cannot afford to be spotted in the barricades on the frontline of any attempt to prise open the Iranian regime at this delicate point in Middle Eastern politics. Tehran will not forgive for another quarter century at least any such American folly, and the Barack Obama administration has no intentions of committing hara-kiri, either.

Within Europe, it is unclear who is spearheading the charge of the

light brigade. No country seems to want to be seen up front - except the Czech Republic, which has no choice, since it currently chairs the rotating European Union presidency. But then, most European countries would probably seldom fail the chance to be Tehran's bete noire, but will, true to a pattern, swiftly fall back the moment they estimate that the law of diminishing returns is at work and continued tirades might jeopardize lucrative commercial interests in Iran.

Tens of thousands of supporters of defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi planned to keep up their street protests in Tehran on Wednesday, even though the authorities have promised a partial recount of Friday's vote that saw incumbent Mahmud Ahmadinejad win another four-year term.

No scope for a color revolution
Europe has no real experience in staging color revolutions. This has been the forte of the Americans - conceptualized in the post-Soviet space in Eurasia by the Bill Clinton administration and subsequently grasped by the neo-conservatives in the George W Bush team. Europeans were curious bystanders in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. France to some extent might have been on the inside track over Lebanon, but then the result turned out to be a mish-mash.

At any rate, to borrow Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin's famous words in a philosophical context, staging a color revolution in Tehran is not like breaking an egg. The signs are that the color revolution struggling to be born on the streets of Tehran has had a miscarriage. Ahmadinejad's participation at the summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at Yekaterinburg, Russia, on Tuesday was possible only with the tacit acquiescence of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It was an important decision to take at a critical juncture. Earlier reports in the Western media speculated that Ahmadinejad might stand down in view of the developing political situation.

Evidently, the regime decided that Tehran should not in any way project an atmosphere of crisis as that would only play into the hands of the proponents of a color revolution within Iran and abroad. To quote well-known Iranian dissident Ibrahim Yazdi, "Certainly, the gap inside Iran, politically, will be widened. Our main concern is how to keep the enthusiasm that was created for the election alive, in order to monitor and constrain the power of the government. The only way to counter it is the power of the people. We need to organize them."

How is the regime coping? Clearly, Khamenei is in the driving seat and is in control of the state apparatus. He is skillfully navigating the regime through the choppy waters. Khamenei's meeting with the principal opposition candidate in the election, Mousavi, merits attention. The official statement makes out certain key points. First, Khamenei indicated unambiguously to Mousavi that the regime would not tolerate any street protests and he must therefore "channel protests through legal bodies". It now becomes extremely difficult for Mousavi to be seen as defying the Supreme Leader's diktat.

Second, Khamenei suggested that there was nothing extraordinary about the present situation, insofar as "in previous elections also, there were some people and candidates who had some problems". But they pursued the matter through the Guardians Council, which in any case has to approve the conduct of the presidential election in Iran.

Mousavi's existential choice
However, it is the third point made by Khamenei that is most crucial. He pointed a finger at the "enemies' provocative actions" as well as "certain behind-the-stage plots" which aimed to "create chaos in Iran". Khamenei then went on most meaningfully to remind Mousavi that "your [Mousavi's] character is different from such people and it is necessary that you pursue the problems through calm".

The highly personal remark had a touch of admonition, but also the hint of a fulsome invitation to reasoning that could open up doors leading into pleasant pathways along which the two interlocutors known to each other for long, after all, could take a stroll. It was a very Persian remark.

Khamenei virtually reminded Mousavi of their old association, when the latter served as Iran's prime minister under him and the two were not only close comrades-in-arms for the preservation of the Iranian revolution through the critical years of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s but also worked together to frustrate the cunning ploys of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who as the powerful speaker of the Majlis (parliament) constantly conspired to arrogate state power.

During that period, Rafsanjani constantly sniped at Mousavi and tried to undercut him, although he enjoyed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's endorsement. On numerous occasions, Rafsanjani gave him hell on the floor of the Majlis, embarrassing him when he sought parliamentary approval for his moves, whittling down his authority to execute his policy and systematically undermining his political standing in public opinion.

Rafsanjani had already begun jockeying for position in expectation of the post-Khomeini era. As Khomeini fell ill, Rafsanjani became more assertive. Mousavi, in fact, found himself identifying with the Iranian revolutionaries (like Ahmadinejad), who were appalled by Rafsanjani's suggestion to Khomeini to "drink from the chalice of poison" and order a ceasefire to end the Iran-Iraq war that effectively meant allowing Saddam Hussein the escape route. Those were tumultuous times when the fate of the Iranian revolution of 1979 hung by a thread.

The main sticking point was the economic policy of the Mousavi government. Rafsanjani sought a policy that catered to the Tehran bazaar, which would benefit his family members as well as large sections of the corrupt clergy, who were aligned with him. But Mousavi opted for state control of the economy and insisted he was acting in accordance with the ideals of the revolution and Khomeini's wishes. What Rafsanjani proposed during those difficult years was to have the latitude for his clan and other hangers-on to do some war profiteering. Mousavi's answer was a firm "no", and he stuck to the austere economic policy.

When the eight-year war with Iraq ended in August 1988, Rafsanjani proposed that Iran should dilute its revolutionary ideals and take Western help for reconstruction. (The Rafsanjani family initially made its fortune by exporting Iranian products such as pistachio nuts and carpets to the US.) But Mousavi firmly disagreed and refused to go against the grain of the revolution. Finally, when the levers of power were passed into his hands as president, Rafsanjani's wrath knew no bounds. Vindictive by nature, he literally drove Mousavi into political exile. The ex-prime minister summarily abandoned politics and returned to his profession of architecture and teaching.

Thus, Khamenei all but jogged Mousavi's memory at their meeting in Tehran by suggesting that the latter should not join hands with Rafsanjani against him. He suggested that Rafsanjani and his circles are simply using him as a political ladder. Khamenei virtually reminded Mousavi of his old constituency. Indeed, as prime minister (1981-89), Mousavi had an impeccable reputation as a hardliner - every bit as much as the "international community" regards Ahmadinejad today. In a memorable article penned in 1988, the Economist magazine described him as a "firm radical".

Khamenei folded up his conversation with Mousavi by "admiring" the massive turnout in Friday's election and "once again underlining its healthy and calm nature". In a subtle way, he allowed Mousavi to have a peep into his thought processes about the current situation.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF18Ak01.html

[Sweejak]

Struggle within Iranian elite Pt.2

Pepe Escobar: Aggressive US and Israeli policy strengthens hand of Iran's Revolutionary Guard

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?opti ... mival=3876

[JackRiddler]

[JackRiddler]

.

Robert Baer:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/ ... 53,00.html

Viewpoint
Don't Assume Ahmadinejad Really Lost
By Robert Baer Tuesday, Jun. 16, 2009

There is no denying that the news clips from Tehran are dramatic, unprecedented in violence and size since the mullahs came to power in 1979. They're possibly even augurs of real change. But can we trust them? Most of the demonstrations and rioting I've seen in the news are taking place in north Tehran, around Tehran University and in public places like Azadi Square. These are, for the most part, areas where the educated and well-off live — Iran's liberal middle class. These are also the same neighborhoods that little doubt voted for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rival, who now claims that the election was stolen. But I have yet to see any pictures from south Tehran, where the poor live. Or from other Iranian slums. (See TIME's covers from the 1979 Islamic revolution.)

Some facts about Iran's election will hopefully emerge in the coming weeks, with perhaps even credible evidence that the election was rigged. But until then, we need to add a caveat to everything we hear and see coming out of Tehran. For too many years now, the Western media have looked at Iran through the narrow prism of Iran's liberal middle class — an intelligentsia that is addicted to the Internet and American music and is more ready to talk to the Western press, including people with money to buy tickets to Paris or Los Angeles. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a terrific book, but does it represent the real Iran? (See pictures of Iran's presidential election and its turbulent aftermath.)

Before we settle on the narrative that there has been a hard-line takeover in Iran, an illegitimate coup d'état, we need to seriously consider the possibility that there has been a popular hard-line takeover, an electoral mandate for Ahmadinejad and his policies. One of the only reliable, Western polls conducted in the run-up to the vote gave the election to Ahmadinejad — by higher percentages than the 63% he actually received. The poll even predicted that Mousavi would lose in his hometown of Tabriz, a result that many skeptics have viewed as clear evidence of fraud. The poll was taken all across Iran, not just the well-heeled parts of Tehran. Still, the poll should be read with a caveat as well, since some 50% of the respondents were either undecided or wouldn't answer.

No doubt, Iran will come out of last Friday's election a different country. But it would serve us well to put aside our prism that has led us to misunderstand Iran for so many years, an anticipation that there would be a liberal counter-revolution in the country. Mousavi is far from the liberal democrat that many in the West would like to believe he is. The truth is, Ahmadinejad may be the President the Iranians want, and we may have to live with an Iran to Iranians' liking and not to ours. (See pictures of Ahmadinejad's supporters on LIFE.com.)

The absolute worst things we could do at this point would be to declare Iran's election fraudulent, refuse to talk to the regime and pile on more sanctions. Hostility will only strengthen Ahmadinejad and encourage the hard-liners and secret police. We should never forget that Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatullah Khameinei, along with Ahmadinejad, have the full, if undeclared, backing of both the Revolutionary Guards and the army, and they are not afraid to use those resources to back up their mandate.

Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.

[JackRiddler]

Now here's a rather different take, fully persuaded of election fraud but seeing the Pasdaran (the Guards) as the real winners of an essentially military coup, crowding out the clerics and the "supreme leader":

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- ... -coup/full


Iran's Military Coup
by Reza Aslan
June 15, 2009 | 8:18am

Iran election protest The Iranian election was bald-faced election fraud, writes The Daily Beast’s Reza Aslan, perpetrated by a powerful intelligence unit known as the Pasdaran.

Plus, read more insight on Iran's election from other Daily Beast writers.

So let’s get this straight. We are supposed to believe that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reelected in Iran’s presidential election last week by a 2 to 1 margin against his reformist rival Mir Hossein Mousavi. That this deeply unpopular president, whose gross mismanagement of the state budget is widely blamed for Iran’s economy hovering on the edge of total collapse, received approximately the same percentage of votes as Mohammad Khatami, by far Iran’s most popular past president, received in both 1997 and 2001? That Mousavi, whom all independent polls predicted would at the very least take Ahmadinejad into a runoff election, lost not only his main base of support, Tehran, but also his own hometown of Khameneh in East Azerbaijan (which, as any Azeri will tell you, never votes for anyone but its own native sons)…and by a landslide. That we should all take the word of the Interior Ministry, led by a man put in his position by Ahmadinejad himself, a man who called the election for the incumbent before the polls were even officially closed, that the election was a fair representation of the will of the Iranian people.

Bullshit.

Such bald-faced election fraud is a totally new phenomenon in Iran, which takes its election process very seriously. This is, after all, the only expression of popular sovereignty that Iranians enjoy. Over and over again, the electorate has defied the will of the clerical regime when it comes to choosing the country’s president: in 1997 and 2001, when 70% of the population rejected the establishment candidate, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, in favor of a completely unknown cleric, Khatami, whose greatest political contribution was as head of Iran’s National Library; and again in 2005 when Iranians rejected Hashemi Rafsanjani—the billionaire former president and the quintessential establishment candidate—to vote instead for a little-known mayor of Tehran named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who until that time had never run for any political office (Ahmadinejad was appointed mayor of Tehran after his predecessor was charged with corruption).

There is a genuine fear among these groups that Iran is beginning to resemble Egypt or Pakistan, countries in which the military controls the apparatus of government.

Indeed, despite what most Americans think, Iran boasts among of the freest and fairest presidential elections in the whole of the Middle East (a pathetic statement, but nevertheless true). Have there been examples of corruption and graft in previous elections? Yes, but not any more so than, say, in American elections. Are Iran’s presidential candidates vetted by an unelected Council of Guardians that filters out anyone it deems “unqualified” for the office? Yes, but this has partly to do with Iran’s strange elections laws, which allow practically anyone with a pulse to run for the office of president. This year, nearly 500 people ran for the post, some of them homeless, a few of them living in insane asylums. (It should be noted that a great many of these 500 candidates were women. The constitution of Iran uses a gender-neutral term to describe those who can run for the office of president, though in a blatantly unconstitutional act, the Council of Guardians, made up exclusively of men, automatically disqualifies all women from the post.) And while the Council’s decisions are obviously politically motivated, the truth is that the four candidates who qualified to run for president this year offered Iranian voters a greater diversity of political views than one sees in most American presidential elections.

Yet the brazenness with which this presidential election was stolen by Ahmadinejad’s supporters has caught everyone in Iran, even the clerical establishment, by surprise. Indeed, I am convinced that what we are witnessing in Iran is nothing less than a slow moving military coup against the clerical regime itself, led by Iran’s dreaded Revolutionary Guard, or Pasdaran, as the organization is called in Iran. The Pasdaran is a military-intelligence unit that acts independently from the official armed forces. Originally created by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to be the supreme leader’s personal militia, the Pasdaran has been increasingly acting like an independent agent over the last decade, one that appears to no longer answer to the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In 2005, the Pasdaran threw its support behind Ahmadinejad, a former member of the organization, and Ahmadinejad returned the favor by placing high-ranking Pasdaran members in important ministerial and ambassadorial posts in his administration. This was a complete departure from previous presidents—both conservatives and reformists—who went out of their way to keep the military out of the political realm. Today more than one-third of Iran’s parliament, or Majlis, are Pasdaran members, while the organization itself is thought to control nearly 30% of Iran’s economy through its oil, gas, real estate, and construction subsidiaries (the Pasdaran’s net worth is estimated to be between $12 billion and $15 billion).

It is the Pasdaran that controls Ahmadinejad, not the mullahs. Indeed, it was precisely fear of the Pasdaran’s rising political and economic influence that led to the “anybody but Ahmadinejad” coalition we saw in this election, wherein young, leftist students and popular reformists like Mohammad Khatami joined together with conservative mullahs and "centrists" like Rafsanjani to push back against what they consider to be the rampant militarization of Iranian politics. There is a genuine fear among these groups that Iran is beginning to resemble Egypt or Pakistan, countries in which the military controls the apparatus of government.

It is difficult to know how this coalition will react to Ahmadinejad’s “victory.” Thus far, their appeals to Ayatollah Khamenei to treat this stolen election as “an act of treason against the state,” which is how both Mousavi and Rafsanjani have described it, have fallen on deaf ears. What is abundantly clear, however, is that the days in which power in Iran rested in the hands of a single individual (the supreme leader) or a single group (the mullahs) are over. For better or worse, the new power base in Iran is the Pasdaran.

Reza Aslan, a contributor to the Daily Beast, is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside and senior fellow at the Orfalea Center on Global and International Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of the bestseller No god but God and How to Win a Cosmic War.

[JackRiddler]

.

Looks like this is one of the major tweet facilitators of the Green Revolution. Interesting reading. Note that (s)he condemns the obviously counterproductive tactic of DDOS attacks (which a bunch of very suspicious characters on DU were recruiting for).

Can't find it in me to object to Demands No. 1 and 3.

http://emsenn.com/iran.php

contact @ProtesterHelp on MSN: protesterhelp@live.com
UPDATES FROM IRAN
(sorry for slowness, but I'm getting thousands of hits) times in EST, add 8:30 to get Iranian time, 4:00 to get GMT

* 4:49est: Twitter has gone down for maintenance, they said one hour. No contact from Iran yet, informing all of downtime
* 5:09est: Besiji moving into Tehran university in force.
* 5:11est: Many bikes and buses in Shiraz being burnt and piled on street. Unconfirmed
* 5:15est: All news from Tehran University has gone silent
* 5:30est: Haven't heard news in 15 minutes. From anyone, not even rumors.
* 5:38est: Massive assault in Tehran University? Getting reports of anything from 200 to 5000 Besij. Students standing in doorways with chairs, waiting for raids.
* 5:40est: leaving for a while, twitter will be back before I am.
* 5:41est: Basij seen taking away many students from Tehran University. Most likely to Evin Prison, but that's just my impression

How to Help
So you want to help Iran, but you're not actually in Iran? here's what you can do to help (Focused on twitter, since that's where the infowar is occurring.

* Change your location and time zone on Twitter to Tehran, Iran (that's GMT+3:30
* Change your profile icon to green in some way.
* Set up a proxy. and send a DM to @ProtesterHelp. On Windows, do this and on Linux do this. On Mac, do this (NOTE: These will be reposted here soon to save bandwidth)DO NOT POST THESE PUBLICLY. DM TO @austinheap or ProtesterHelp
* DO NOT retweet posts verbatim from Iran. This puts the users at risk. The Iranian Minstry of the Interior is watching Twitter closely now. Don't use names and reword the post.
* Submit e-mails to CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other news sources about the Iranian Revolution- demand more coverage
* DO NOT DDOS (PageReload) Iranian government websites. It slows all Iranian traffic, doing more harm than good in this information war.
* ANON IS ROCKING THIS SHIT

What do we want?

1. Remove Khamenei from supreme leader
2. Remove Ahmadinejad because he took it forcefully and unlawfully
3. Put Ayatollah Monazeri as supreme leader until a review of the constitution is set up
4. Recognize Mousavi as official president
5. Let Mousavi rule as the constitution is reformed
6. Free all political prisoners, immediately
7. Call off all secret militia and offices

Who hosts this
emsenn
Who runs it?
@ProtesterHelp. I am an American, living in America (despite what my twitter profile says), and have decided to do my part to help the Green Revolution by posting my advice on how to safely protest against such a strange enemy (the Besiji). I also have several sources inside and around Iran, and tweet verified events as well. I also provide proxy information to Iranian citizens. See the top line of this page for information on the current status on me, my server, and why I might be silent on twitter. And please, share this link to help raise awareness not just of what is going on, but how you can help. I WILL NOT TURN IN SOURCES TO MEDIA, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. PLEASE, STOP WORRYING. AND MEDIA, STOP ASKING

[John Schröder]

http://travellerwithin.blogspot.com/200 ... xpert.html

To You, the new Iran 'expert'
Yes, you.

Who thought until this morning that Shiraz was just the name of a wine

Who's beaming with pride you can now write 'Ahmadinejad' without copy-and-pasting it from a news website

Who only heard of Evin prison when Roxana Saberi was there (Roxana who?)

Who's changed your Facebook profile picture to a green rectangle saying "Where's my vote?" even though you don't actually vote in Iran

Who actually thinks that Mir-Hossein Mousavi is a secular
And that his election means that Iran will give up its nuclear claims
And allow you to visit Tehran for Christmas

Who joyfully makes Azadi/Tiananmen square comparisons
Who first heard of Azadi square last Sunday

Who's quick to link to articles you haven't read, debunking other articles you've barely heard of

Who has just discovered that Iran has a (quasi-)democracy, and elections, and the like

Who blinked in disbelief at the images of women - oh, they have women! and they're not in burkas! - demonstrating

Who has never heard of Rezai or Karroubi before (hint: they ran for election in a Middle-Eastern country last Friday)
Who staunchly believes that the elections have been stolen - either by ballot box stuffing, (14 million of them!) or by burning some ballots, or both (somehow?), regardless of the absence of any proof (yet)

But who nevertheless

Has been tweeting, and re-tweeting, and polluting cyberspace with what is essentially hearsay, rumours, and unconfirmed truncated reports or falsification coming from people who actually know about the realities of Iran's political world and have an agenda:

You know nothing. Abso-fucking-lutely nothing about what happened, or is happening across Iran at the very moment. Most of us don't, actually. What we see is a tiny slice of reality, mind you, what is happening on the main squares in the big cities, under camera lenses.

Yes, you are entitled to an opinion, to formulating it, to blog it, and to discuss it. I do that too. (this my blog after all).

But do everyone, and you first and foremost, a favour.
Learn from the people who know a thing or two about the issue at hand.
Be selective about you read, listen to, and watch. A simple way is to follow an Iranian friend's updates and the links they put up.
(Even the State Dept is reading tweets from Iranians.)

Ask questions more than you volunteer answers.
And when you get a tweet that says UNCONF or 'can anyone confirm?', for Pete's sake, that says "This is potentially bullshit". Don't spread nonsense. Don't spread unconfirmed or unsourced information.

And rather that getting all excited following live some current events taking place in a country you probably cannot place on a map, read analysis of what it means, what the candidates actually stand for, and what the result will mean for the Iranians and the world.

Then, I would be delighted, truly, to read what you have to say.
Until then, please, pretty please - SHUT UP.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

As for what I think? I don't know. I think the results could be fake - and they also could be real. We probably will never know.
And I don't think we're watching a Ukraine '04 redux or a 'Green revolution'.
And I think that the people on the street will tire of getting beaten up by a government that is currently revoking foreign media licenses and will forfeit. We're - well, Iran is - likely stuck with Ahmadinejad for four more years.

And while the troubles on the street are unlikely to lead to a change of government, they'd have had the benefit of showing the Iranian people in a new light - they're normal people, only with more courage than most of us have.

[note: the "what I think" part at the end is from the original article, not that anybody thinks I added that -- John]

[JackRiddler]

.

JS: that is a great article, thank you!

Continuing to round up the usual suspects, here's old Pepe Escobar:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF16Ak03.html

THE ROVING EYE
The meaning of the Tehran spring
By Pepe Escobar

It is 1979 in Tehran all over again. From Saturday to Sunday, the deafening sound deep in the night across Tehran's rooftops was a roaring, ubiquitous "Allah-u Akbar" (God is great). Then, in 1979, to hail the Islamic revolution; now, in 2009, to signify what appears to be the hijacking of the Islamic revolution. Then, the revolution was not televised; it was via (Ruhollah Khomeini) radio. Now, it is being broadcast all across the world.

Let's cut to the chase: what Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi qualified as "this dangerous charade" and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "the sweetness of the election", or better yet, a "divine assessment", has all the non-divine markings of intervention by the Iranian Republican Guards Corps (IRGC). This follows President Mahmud Ahmadinejad officially gaining 64% of the vote in defeating Mousavi in what in



the days before Friday's vote had widely been called as a very close race.

Scores of protesters equating Ahmadinejad with Augusto Pinochet in 1973's Chile might not be that far off the mark. Call it the ultra-right wing, military dictatorship of the mullahtariat.

This is emerging as a no-holds-barred civil war at the very top of the Islamic Republic. The undisputed elite is now supposed to be embodied by the Ahmadinejad faction, the IRGC, the intelligence apparatus, the Ministry of the Interior, the Basij volunteer militias, and most of all the Supreme Leader himself.

The elite wants subdued, muzzled, if not destroyed, reformists of all strands: any relatively moderate cleric; the late 1970s clerical/technocratic Revolution Old Guard (which includes Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami and Mousavi); "globalized" students; urban, educated women; and the urban intelligentsia.

Even fighting a cascade of political and economic setbacks, for the past three decades the regime has always been proud of the Islamic Republic's brand of popular democracy, and its alleged legitimacy. Now the revolution enters completely uncharted territory as thousands of people have taken to the streets in protest against the result.

What will be the distinguishing features of the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat? How does the revolution recoup from a coup? A 29-year-old female journalist working in a moderately conservative Tehran newspaper spelled it out for Radio Free Europe: "Coup means that right now they're beating people in the streets. A coup means they didn't even count people's votes. They announced the results without opening the ballot boxes. It was sent as a circular to the state television, which announced it. Is it so difficult for the world to understand this?"

The trillion-dollar-question regarding this new "revolutionary" situation is that as things stand, no pacifying solution can be found within the institutional framework of the Islamic Republic. In a nutshell, Ahmadinejad has made his power play against Mousavi and Rafsanjani. The Supreme Leader fully supported him. Mousavi and Rafsanjani, plus Khatami, need an urgent counterpunch. And their only possible play is to go after Khamenei.

As Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, among others, has noted, Rafsanjani is now counting his votes at the Council of Experts (86 clerics, no women) - of which he is the chairman - to see if they are able to depose Khamenei. He is in the holy city of Qom for this explicit purpose. To pull it off, the council would imperatively have to be supported by at least some factions within the IRGC. The Ahmadinejad faction will go ballistic. A Supreme Leader implosion is bound to imply the implosion of the whole Khomeini-built edifice.

Null and void
As a prelude, Mousavi has already bypassed the Supreme Leader, sending an open letter to the powerful mullahcracy in Qom asking them to invalidate the election
. Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, head of the election vote-monitoring committee, has officially requested that the Council of Guardians void the election and schedule a new, fully monitored one.

One of the stalwarts of Qom power, the moderate Grand Ayatollah Sanei, who had issued a fatwa against vote rigging, calling it a "mortal sin", has already declared the Ahmadinejad presidency "illegitimate". His house and office are now under police siege. Iranians eagerly expect a public pronouncement from Grand Ayatollah Muntazeri, the country's true top religious figure (not Khamenei) and a certified anti-ultra-right wing.

Even more strikingly, a group of Ministry of Interior employees sent an open letter to the chairman of the Council of Experts (Rafsanjani), the president of the parliament (Majlis), former nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, the heads of the legislative and the judiciary, and many other government agencies
. The crucial paragraph reads: "As dedicated employees of the Ministry of Interior, with experience in management and supervision of several elections such as the elections of Khamenei, Rafsanjani and Khatami, we announce that we fear the 10th presidential elections were not healthy."

The Islamic Combatant Clergy Association (ICCA), close to Khatami and supportive of Mousavi, said on its website that the counting process was "widely engineered [manipulated]", and there was enough evidence to prove it. So for the ICCA, the election should be nullified.

Mohsen Rezai, who ran as a conservative and who is nothing less than a former head of the IRGC, also sent a letter to the Council of Guardians saying the election was illegitimate. This is crucial; it means a serious crack inside the IRGC - because Rezai's former subordinates are still active and will inevitably support him (he remains very influential). "Officially", Rezai had less than 1 million votes. He maintains that according to his own polls, "in a worst-case scenario I should have had between 3.5 and 7 million votes."
Even a former Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Ayatollah Mohajerani, went on the BBC Persian service to say the Supreme Leader was not infallible, and should be replaced in case of "dishonesty".

How it all evolved
The ultra-right wing maybe has not seen it coming this way - the urban youth of Tehran behaving like it's May 1968 in Paris. But they seem to have prepared themselves accordingly. The only question is when. Was it long-term pre-planning? Did it emerge after the televised presidential debates propelled the "green revolution"? Or was it a last-minute, cooked up in minutes, gambit?

As the election approached, an impartial observation of the Iranian presidential TV debates would signal that Ahmadinejad was virtually freaking out. The public debate in Iran made clear that what mattered most for voters was Ahmadinejad's record of economic incompetence, much more than his foreign policy tirades.

In the debates, Ahmadinejad managed to get away with fanciful figures regarding inflation and unemployment. He went into overdrive on the eve of the election, virtually accusing his three opponents of being Zionist agents. He may have calculated that a second round with Mousavi would be too risky. Ahmadinejad knew Khamenei was on his side. But it's fair to argue neither Ahmadinejad nor the ultra-right wing spectrum may have evaluated the full implication of a dubious electoral victory possibly imploding the whole system as they know it.

By the end of May, Mousavi was ahead of Ahmadinejad in Iran's 10 biggest cities by at least 4%.

Fast forward to this past Friday, when Khamenei met with Rafsanjani, the powerful, actual number two in the regime, who had warned the Supreme Leader three days earlier about the serious possibility of election fraud. Khamenei dismissed it.

Mousavi had also warned of fraud after Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic, Mahdist spiritual mentor, appeared to endorse vote rigging.

Ominous signs were piling up fast. Before the election, the IRGC officially warned it would not tolerate a "velvet revolution" orchestrated by Mousavi's urban sea of green. On election day, ballot papers "disappeared" from thousands of polling places. SMS messages were blocked.

The polls closed at 10pm on Friday, Tehran time. Most main streets then were fully decked out in green. In an absolutely crucial development, the great Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf told Radio Farda how Mousavi's main campaign office in Tehran received a phone call on Saturday at 1am; the Interior Ministry was saying "Don't announce Mr Mousavi's victory yet ... We will gradually prepare the public and then you can proceed." Iranian bloggers broke down the vote at the time as 19.7 million for Mousavi, between 7 and 8 million for Ahmadinejad, 7 million for Karroubi, and 3 million for Rezai.

Then all hell seemed to break loose. Phones, SMS, text messaging, YouTube, political blogs, opposition websites, foreign media websites, all communication networks, in a cascade, were shutting down fast. Military and police forces started to take over Tehran's streets. The Ahmadinejad-controlled Ministry of Interior - doubling as election headquarters - was isolated by concrete barriers. Iranian TV switched to old Iron Curtain-style "messages of national unity". And the mind-boggling semi-final numbers of Ahmadinejad's landslide were announced (Ahmadinejad 64%, Mousavi 32%, Rezai 2% and Karroubi less than 1%).

The fact that the electoral commission had less than three hours to hand-count 81% of 39 million votes is positively a "divine assessment".
Masked mobs encircled and attacked the headquarters of both Mousavi and Karroubi. By 3am on Saturday, long military convoys escorted by Basij militias on motorbikes took over the streets of Tehran, crying "Mousavi bye-bye" - the countercoup to the green revolution's chant of "Ahmadi bye-bye". The whole thing started to feel like Tiananmen in Beijing in 1989. Or a plain and simple coup.
On Saturday, Khamenei had to go on the record to stress there was no fraud. And on Sunday, he felt he needed to re-certify the whole thing, describing the election as "an epic and ominous event".

The official breakdown of the vote had Ahmadinejad taking Tehran by over 50%. He may be popular in the rural provinces and in parts of working-class south Tehran, but not even "divine assessment" could be expected to give him more than 30% in the capital.

Ahmadinejad won in the big city of Tabriz. Tabriz is in Azerbaijan. Mousavi is Azeri. Azeris are an ultra-tight ethnic group, they vote for one of their own. The notion that Mousavi was beaten, four to one, in his home ground borders on fiction.

Karroubi had less than half of Ahmadinejad's vote and came in a distant second in his own hometown of Oligudarz. Karroubi not only didn't win in his home province of Lorestan, he had less votes than volunteers helping in his campaign. The first numbers on election night came from rural villages and small towns voting Ahmadinejad. Something immediately seemed to be way off when less than 1% of voters in western Iran went for Karroubi, very popular not only in his native Lorestan but also in Kurdistan.

As for Rezai, from Khuzestan, where most of Iran's oilfields are, he expected 2 million votes in his province alone. He polled less than a million nationwide. Everywhere, all over the country, Ahmadinejad got between a steady 66% and 69%, no matter the region, no matter the predominant ethnic group, no matter the demographics.

By law, the Electoral Commission must wait three days before certifying the results. Then they inform Khamenei and he gives his seal of approval. This is to prevent any "irregularities". This time, Khamenei approved the official results in less than four hours.

But could he actually win?
"Landslide" apart, a true Ahmadinejad victory would not be implausible. He could have reasonably scored something like 48%, for instance, ahead of Mousavi, and both would square off in a second round of voting. Ahmadinejad visited every Iranian province at least twice in these past four years. Deep, rural Iran has nothing to do with upscale north Tehran.

He plundered the reserve fund, full of oil money, set up by Khatami, to shower more money to pensioners and distribute more pork. Inflation skyrocketed. The working classes suffered with inflation and unemployment as much as north Tehran. But the average Iranian still seemed to be satisfied that his standard of living under Ahmadinejad was slightly higher.

Ahmadinejad turned the election into a referendum on the whole idea of the Islamic revolution. He literally enveloped himself in the flag - a crowd pleaser in a very religious and nationalistic country.

Mousavi had the urban youth vote, the urban, educated female vote, the intelligentsia vote, the upper middle class, globalized vote, and even the bazaar vote. But that was not enough. In the showdown between SMS and Facebook and the poor, rural and working-class masses - many of whom have a lot of empathy with the pious son of a blacksmith - it's fair to assume he could be the winner. But not in a landslide. Khatami had a real landslide in 2001, when he got no less than 78% of the vote (after 70% in 1997). The notion that an over 70% reformist impulse has been transformed over these past few years into a 62% ultra-right wing fervor is questionable.

See you in the barricades
The biggest winner in all this seems to be the Supreme Leader - who else? This is how it all played out. When Mousavi said in the TV presidential debates that Ahmadinejad was a disgrace to Iran's global image, he did not get away with it. The slap came via the very influential Kayhan newspaper, very close to the Supreme Leader.

Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, went after billionaire Rafsanjani with all guns blazing, accusing him of corruption and nepotism. This still strikes a chord at the popular level, and especially strikes a chord with the IRGC.

Rafsanjani is the de facto number two most powerful player in the Iranian system, and has been so for more than 20 years now. He controls the Expediency Council and the Council of Experts (which has the power to depose the Supreme Leader). The IRGC fear him and are against him. It's no secret that those that really matter in the Iranian system are the top mullahcracy and the IRGC. (The name says it all; they are the guardians of the whole idea of the revolution. And they only respond to the Supreme Leader.)

With the Basij militia working as a kind of military cell in every one of the 90,000 mosques all over the country, and multiplying rapidly (they may number close to 13 million by now), these forces can do no wrong.

Ahmadinejad was very clever in the TV debates to equate Rafsanjani with Khatami and Mousavi. He painted them to his key constituency as a shock to the system. The system had to strike back. Game, set, match. For the Supreme Leader - the constituency that matters the most - Ahmadinejad even served the divine satisfaction of crushing Mousavi, who as prime minister in the 1980s (during the terrible years of the Iran-Iraq war) was played by Khomeini to control the power of then-president Khamenei.

Will Rafsanjani go for broke? As he prepares a Council of Experts counterpunch against the Supreme Leader and Mousavi plots the next resistance steps, the ball is now in the Iranian street's court. Much will depend on this Monday's peaceful march along Vali Asr street in Tehran and in 19 other cities, and a national strike on Tuesday, both called by Mousavi. Everyone remembers how a week ago the green revolution formed a chain down the entire 18 kilometer length of Vali Asr.

Ahmadinejad's show of force was his victory rally this Sunday - attended by a huge mass of true supporters in south Tehran, Basij in civilian dress and rent-a-mobs from all over the place. In a press conference earlier, Ahmadinejad hinted that in his second term he will be "more and more solid".

Ahmadinejad blamed the whole Iranian turmoil on foreign media - which not by accident are now being virtually persecuted by the security apparatus. The crackdown is assuming ultra-hardcore proportions. Yet the revolution continues to be broadcast to the whole world in English and Farsi, although the indispensable Tehran Bureau website was been taken down by the thought police. Riot police have fought students inside the dorms of the University of Tehran.

The Ministry of Interior is now protected by tanks. Many in Tehran believe that a lot of the motorbiked Basij are in fact Arabs doing the "dirty work" true nationalist Persians would refuse. Basij have been fighting hard for hours to subdue throngs of protesters. There are widespread reports of a "staggering" number of injured in Tehran hospitals. A Basiji center in north Tehran seems to have been captured by protesters on Sunday night. This means the green revolution having access to weapons.

This has nothing to do with the US-supported color-coded revolutions in Eurasia. This is about Iran. An election was stolen in the United States in 2000 and Americans didn't do a thing about it. Iranians are willing to die to have their votes counted. There is now an opening for a true Iranian people-power movement not specifically to the benefit of Mousavi, but with Mousavi as the catalyst in a wider struggle for real democratic legitimacy. The die is cast; now it's people power against "divine assessment".

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

[Percival]

Has everyone forotten this, I have to imagine those assets are still on the ground and doing their thing:

Bush Authorizes New Covert Action against Iran

By Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:

05/23/07 "ABC News" -- -- - May 22, 2007. The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a "nonlethal presidential finding" that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions.

"I can't confirm or deny whether such a program exists or whether the president signed it, but it would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime," said Bruce Riedel, a recently retired CIA senior official who dealt with Iran and other countries in the region.

A National Security Council spokesperson, Gordon Johndroe, said, "The White House does not comment on intelligence matters." A CIA spokesperson said, "As a matter of course, we do not comment on allegations of covert activity."

The sources say the CIA developed the covert plan over the last year and received approval from White House officials and other officials in the intelligence community.

Officials say the covert plan is designed to pressure Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment program and end aid to insurgents in Iraq.

"There are some channels where the United States government may want to do things without its hand showing, and legally, therefore, the administration would, if it's doing that, need an intelligence finding and would need to tell the Congress," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official.

Current and former intelligence officials say the approval of the covert action means the Bush administration, for the time being, has decided not to pursue a military option against Iran.

"Vice President Cheney helped to lead the side favoring a military strike," said former CIA official Riedel, "but I think they have come to the conclusion that a military strike has more downsides than upsides."

The covert action plan comes as U.S. officials have confirmed Iran had dramatically increased its ability to produce nuclear weapons material, at a pace that experts said would give them the ability to build a nuclear bomb in two years.

Riedel says economic pressure on Iran may be the most effective tool available to the CIA, particularly in going after secret accounts used to fund the nuclear program.

"The kind of dealings that the Iranian Revolution Guards are going to do, in terms of purchasing nuclear and missile components, are likely to be extremely secret, and you're going to have to work very, very hard to find them, and that's exactly the kind of thing the CIA's nonproliferation center and others would be expert at trying to look into," Riedel said.

Under the law, the CIA needs an official presidential finding to carry out such covert actions. The CIA is permitted to mount covert "collection" operations without a presidential finding.

"Presidential findings" are kept secret but reported to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and other key congressional leaders.

The "nonlethal" aspect of the presidential finding means CIA officers may not use deadly force in carrying out the secret operations against Iran.

Still, some fear that even a nonlethal covert CIA program carries great risks.

"I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups within Iran," said Vali Nasr, adjunct senior fellow for Mideast studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"And this covert action is now being escalated by the new U.S. directive, and that can very quickly lead to Iranian retaliation and a cycle of escalation can follow," Nasr said.

Other "lethal" findings have authorized CIA covert actions against al Qaeda, terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Also briefed on the CIA proposal, according to intelligence sources, were National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams.

"The entire plan has been blessed by Abrams, in particular," said one intelligence source familiar with the plan. "And Hadley had to put his chop on it."

Abrams' last involvement with attempting to destabilize a foreign government led to criminal charges.

He pleaded guilty in October 1991 to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress about the Reagan administration's ill-fated efforts to destabilize the Nicaraguan Sandinista government in Central America, known as the Iran-Contra affair. Abrams was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush in December 1992.

In June 2001, Abrams was named by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to head the National Security Council's office for democracy, human rights and international operations. On Feb. 2, 2005, National Security Advisor Hadley appointed Abrams deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, one of the nation's most senior national security positions.

As earlier reported on the Blotter on ABCNews.com, the United States has supported and encouraged an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, that has conducted deadly raids inside Iran from bases on the rugged Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan "tri-border region."

U.S. officials deny any "direct funding" of Jundullah groups but say the leader of Jundullah was in regular contact with U.S. officials.

American intelligence sources say Jundullah has received money and weapons through the Afghanistan and Pakistan military and Pakistan's intelligence service. Pakistan has officially denied any connection.

A report broadcast on Iranian TV last Sunday said Iranian authorities had captured 10 men crossing the border with $500,000 in cash along with "maps of sensitive areas" and "modern spy equipment."

A senior Pakistani official told ABCNews.com the 10 men were members of Jundullah.

The leader of the Jundullah group, according to the Pakistani official, has been recruiting and training "hundreds of men" for "unspecified missions" across the border in Iran.

[SonicG]

My head is exploding a bit over this so here is some more fluff:
Understanding Iran

This is a mass political demonstration in Tehran. In the US, this would be a line for the latest iPhone.

[Sweejak]

A little follow up on chartingstocks Israeli angle

JPost Removes the Evidence and Issues a Response #IranElection - http://tinyurl.com/nv9z9g

[JackRiddler]

.

Interior Ministry source for Mousavi victory claim killed in car crash?

Rove or script?

Says Guardian Iran blog, from their Tehran correspondent Saeed Kamali Dehghan:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/200 ... n-uprising

11am:
The man who leaked the real election results from the Interior Ministry - the ones showing Ahmadinejad coming third - was killed in a suspicious car accident, according to unconfirmed reports, writes Saeed Kamali Dehghan in Tehran.

Mohammad Asgari, who was responsible for the security of the IT network in Iran's interior ministry, was killed yesterday in Tehran.

Asgari had reportedly leaked results that showed the elections were rigged by government use of new software to alter the votes from the provinces.

Asgari was said to have leaked information that showed Mousavi had won almost 19 million votes, and should therefore be president.

We will try to get more details later.

[chlamor]

"The election will make it easier to gain international consensus for harsher measures if engagement fails," a Washington Iran hand said on condition of anonymity. "This fact helps in the near-term by putting outside-in pressure on the Iranian regime to reach accommodation with the West or face serious consequences, and builds genuine consensus for tougher measures to pressure the regime."