News from Iran? Good? Bad? Who knows?

[citizen k]

[citizen k]

[Crazy_Ivan80]

they need to find some technique to lay these motards down. If the green party wants to win they'll have to fight for real cause the regime won't care about one death more or less.

That said: if there are still protests going on by the end of the week, and if they've become bigger then we might be on to something I guess. For now... we've had reports of uprisings before.

[Jaron]

I love this whole affair. Watching the Iranians squirm is too delicious.

Make no mistake everyone. We have no friends in Iran. Our enemies are fighting our enemies.

[Jos Theelen]

Are they surprised about the anger of the people?

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's state television says the supreme leader has ordered an investigation into claims of fraud in last week's presidential election.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is ordering the powerful Guardian Council to examine the allegations by pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who claims widespread vote rigging in Friday's election. The government declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner in a landslide victory.

It is a stunning turnaround for Iran's most powerful figure, who previously welcomed the results.

Mousavi wrote an appeal Sunday to the Guardian Council, a powerful 12-member body that's a pillar of Iran's theocracy. Mousavi also met Sunday with Khamenei.

Mousavi's backers have waged three days of street protests in Tehran.

[Alatriste]

Are they surprised about the anger of the people?

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's state television says the supreme leader has ordered an investigation into claims of fraud in last week's presidential election.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is ordering the powerful Guardian Council to examine the allegations by pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who claims widespread vote rigging in Friday's election. The government declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner in a landslide victory.

It is a stunning turnaround for Iran's most powerful figure, who previously welcomed the results.

Mousavi wrote an appeal Sunday to the Guardian Council, a powerful 12-member body that's a pillar of Iran's theocracy. Mousavi also met Sunday with Khamenei.

Mousavi's backers have waged three days of street protests in Tehran.

Things can be more complex than that... apparently some experts think Ahmadinejad could have fixed the elections over the heads of the mullahs, that wouldn't think of fixing them because they couldn't care less who won and perhaps would even favor Mousavi. After all he's no young fire-eater revolutionary, he is a veteran ex-Foreign Affairs Minister and Prime Minister from 1981 to 1989.

Oh, has someone posted this?

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/the-results-as-they-came-in.html

The quotient between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi votes didn't vary an iota during the whole process of 'counting' votes. The fraud has been really shameless... 

[Josquius]

That would be interesting....

[Ed Anger]

Going to bed tonight.  Fully expect to wake up to news of massacre.  Fantastically upsetting.

I'm upset....there was no massacre. 

[Sheilbh]

Apparently Khameini's called for an investigation into the election he'd earlier called a 'divine assessment'.  I wonder if he's worried by the protests or Qom?

I've read reports that Mousavi's march is still happening after apparently being cancelled.  It, depending on what you read, contains hundreds or tens of thousands of people.

[Sheilbh]

According to the BBC plain clothes militias have been authorised to use live ammunition at any demonstrations today.

Edit:  Khatami's apparently issued a statement of support to Mousavi supporters.  Rather interestingly his website front page actually has a picture of Mousavi.  The march is happening and I'm seeing more reports of 'thousands' now than 'hundreds'.

[Jos Theelen]

.

reports circulated of leaked interior ministry statistics showing him as the clear victor in last Friday's polls.

The statistics, circulated on Iranian blogs and websites, claimed Mr Mousavi had won 19.1 million votes while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won only 5.7 million.

The two other candidates, reformist Mehdi Karoubi and hardliner Mohsen Rezai, won 13.4 million and 3.7 million respectively. The authenticity of the leaked figures could not be confirmed.

[Neil]

Going to bed tonight.  Fully expect to wake up to news of massacre.  Fantastically upsetting.

I'm upset....there was no massacre. 

Indeed.  I'm starting to think that the forces behind these demonstrations are actually the worse of the two evils.

[alfred russel]

An editorial in the Washington Post makes a decent argument that the election was legitimate.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401757.html

The Iranian People Speak

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, preelection polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.


Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.

Some might argue that the professed support for Ahmadinejad we found simply reflected fearful respondents' reluctance to provide honest answers to pollsters. Yet the integrity of our results is confirmed by the politically risky responses Iranians were willing to give to a host of questions. For instance, nearly four in five Iranians -- including most Ahmadinejad supporters -- said they wanted to change the political system to give them the right to elect Iran's supreme leader, who is not currently subject to popular vote. Similarly, Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities for their government, virtually tied with improving the national economy. These were hardly "politically correct" responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society.

Indeed, and consistently among all three of our surveys over the past two years, more than 70 percent of Iranians also expressed support for providing full access to weapons inspectors and a guarantee that Iran will not develop or possess nuclear weapons, in return for outside aid and investment. And 77 percent of Iranians favored normal relations and trade with the United States, another result consistent with our previous findings.

Iranians view their support for a more democratic system, with normal relations with the United States, as consonant with their support for Ahmadinejad. They do not want him to continue his hard-line policies. Rather, Iranians apparently see Ahmadinejad as their toughest negotiator, the person best positioned to bring home a favorable deal -- rather like a Persian Nixon going to China.

Allegations of fraud and electoral manipulation will serve to further isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence against the outside world. Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted.

Ken Ballen is president of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, a nonprofit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism. Patrick Doherty is deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. The groups' May 11-20 polling consisted of 1,001 interviews across Iran and had a 3.1 percentage point margin of error.

[Jos Theelen]

Going to bed tonight.  Fully expect to wake up to news of massacre.  Fantastically upsetting.

I'm upset....there was no massacre. 

Be patient. Things can go ugly:

# unconfirmed - Mashad is violent. #Iranelection3 minutes ago from web
# have spoken with Ahwaz. am told demos are not peaceful there. #Iranelection3 minutes ago from web

[Ed Anger]

I can't follow a massacre via twitter. I do have my standards.