Iran

Commentary: U.S. dollars could kill Iran's protest movement
By Hamid Dabashi | CNN

On a number of occasions and in perfectly pitched and calibrated statements, President Obama has expressed his unequivocal support for the civil rights movement in Iran without appearing to interfere in Iranian domestic affairs.

This has been particularly admirable given the pressure that is coming his way from a U.S. Congress that -- up until the night before the Iranian presidential election -- was discussing even more severe economic sanctions on Iran, which would have hurt precisely the young men and women the legislators now seem too eager to support.

Obama can help this budding seed of hope for civil liberties even more emphatically by altogether cutting the budget "to promote democracy in Iran," evidently channeled through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Ken Dilanian of USA Today reports, "the Obama administration is moving forward with plans to fund groups that support Iranian dissidents."

This financial aid is not only a waste of taxpayer money under these severe economic circumstances, but is in fact the surest way to kill that inborn and grassroots movement. Read more.

'US forces attempt to hijack Iranian oil field'

American forces have attempted to take over an Iranian oil field near the country's western border with Iraq, a security official says.

“US forces backed by tanks entered the Mousian area of the Dehloran County, laying around 100 meters of pipeline in Iranian territory," the source, talking on condition of anonymity, said Monday. Read more.

Color Revolutions, Old and New
By Stephen Lendman

In his new book, "Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order," F. William Engdahl explained a new form of US covert warfare - first played out in Belgrade, Serbia in 2000. What appeared to be "a spontaneous and genuine political 'movement,' (in fact) was the product of techniques" developed in America over decades.

In the 1990s, RAND Corporation strategists developed the concept of "swarming" to explain "communication patterns and movement of" bees and other insects which they applied to military conflict by other means. More on this below.

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Weeks of Living Dangerously

Last week, Iran's Islamic revolutionary regime, like so many rigidified revolutionary movements before it, has used brute force to postpone its date with destiny. Demonstrators can often be beaten and chased off the streets, but no one has yet discovered a baton that can beat a set of ideas about how life should be led out of the minds of large numbers of people. This is, in essence, the story that Dilip Hiro, TomDispatch regular and expert on Iran, has to tell -- with a look back at a history about which most of us know all too little. Tom

The Clash of Islam and Democracy in Iran: The Islamic Revolution Faces the Classic Dilemma of All Revolutions
The Islamic Revolution Faces the Classic Dilemma of All Revolutions
By Dilip Hiro

By marshalling the regime's coercive instruments, Iran's 70-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, has, for now, succeeded in curbing the popular, peaceful challenge to the authenticity of Iran's fateful June 12th presidential election. But he has paid a heavy political price.

Before his June 19th hard-line speech at a Friday prayer congregation, Khamanei had the mystique of a just arbiter of authority, perched on a lofty platform far above the contentiousness of day-to-day politics. In his sermon, he asserted the validity of the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while the Guardian Council, the constitutional body charged with validating any national election, was still dealing with 646 complaints about possible election misbehavior and fraud. As a result, he damaged his status as a just ruler, a matter of grave importance since justice is a vital element in Islamic values.

Furthermore, by boycotting the June 19th congregation, former presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Muhammad Khatami, as well as Mahdi Karrubi, former Speaker of the Iranian Parliament -- all of them respected mullahs -- exposed a deep rift in the ruling religious establishment. That bodes ill for the future of the Islamic Republic.

Khamanei has won the immediate battle, but the conflict between hard-liners and reformists is far from over. Taking a long-term view, Khamanei and his hard line cohorts face a superhuman task of countering an inexorably rising trend. Quite simply, the demographic make-up of Iran favors their reformist adversaries.

PART 3: U.S. Officials Leaked a False Story Blaming Iran
By Gareth Porter* | IPS News

In March 1997, FBI Director Louis Freeh got what he calls in his memoirs "the first truly big break in the case": the arrest in Canada of one of the Saudi Hezbollah members the Saudis accused of being the driver of the getaway car at Khobar Towers.

Hani al-Sayegh, then 28 years old, had arrived in Canada in August 1996 after having left Saudi Arabia, by his own account, in August 1995, for Iran and Syria. The Canadian government charged him with being a terrorist, based on claims by the Saudi regime.

In order to be transferred to the United States without facing deportation to Saudi Arabia, where he was believed to face the death penalty, al-Sayegh had to agreed to a plea bargain under which he would admit to having proposed an attack on U.S. personnel, for which he would have to serve up to 10 years in prison.

In fact, the only thing al-Sayegh had actually admitted to, according to FBI sources, was having proposed an attack on one AWACS plane that had been turned over to the Saudi Air Force – a proposal he said had been rejected. Both before and after being brought to Washington, moreover, Al-Sayegh steadfastly denied any knowledge of the Khobar Towers bombing. Read more.

Academics' Declaration of Support for Iranian Demonstrators | Press Release

*NEW YORK, June 24, 2009 - *Today the New York-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy circulated the open letter below from academics in support of the demonstrators in Iran. The statement was initiated by two scholars in the United Kingdom, Peter Hallward and Alberto Toscano. I has been signed by individuals from several countries; the initial signers include Etienne Balibar, Paris X, Nanterre, and University of California, Irvine; Jacques Rancière, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis); Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley; Noam Chomsky, MIT, Cambridge MA USA; Rada Ivekovic, Collège international de philosophie, Paris, Université Jean-Monnet, Saint-Etienne; and Slavoj ?i?ek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and the European Graduate School. The full list of signers is below.

The "Neda video," torture, and the truth-revealing power of images
By Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com

The single most significant event in shaping worldwide revulsion towards the violence of the Iranian government has been the video of the young Iranian woman bleeding to death, the so-called "Neda video." Like so many iconic visual images before it -- from My Lai, fire hoses and dogs unleashed at civil rights protesters, Abu Ghraib -- that single image has done more than the tens of thousands of words to dramatize the violence and underscore the brutality of the state response.

For the last question at his press conference yesterday, Obama was asked by CNN's Suzanne Malveaux about his reaction to that video and to reports that Iranians are refraining from protesting due to fear of such violence. As Obama was answering -- attesting to how "heartbreaking" he found the video; how "anybody who sees it knows that there's something fundamentally unjust" about the violence; and paying homage to "certain international norms of freedom of speech, freedom of expression" -- Helen Thomas, who hadn't been called on, interrupted to ask Obama to reconcile those statements about the Iranian images with his efforts at home to suppress America's own torture photos ("Then why won't you allow the photos --").

The President quickly cut her off with these remarks: Read more.

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

Full-Spectrum Idiocy: GOP and Chavez on Iran
by Norman Solomon | Common Dreams.org

When approaching Iran, the Republican Party line and the Hugo Chavez line are running in opposite directions -- but parallel. The leadership of GOP reaction and the leadership of Bolivarian revolution have bought into the convenient delusion that long-suffering Iranian people require assistance from the U.S. government to resist the regime in Tehran.

Inside Iran, advocates for reform and human rights have long pleaded for the U.S. government to keep out of Iranian affairs. After the CIA organized the coup that overthrew Iran’s democracy in 1953, Washington kept the Shah in power for a quarter century. When I was in Tehran four years ago, during the election that made Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president, what human rights activists most wanted President Bush to do was shut up.

But Bush played to the same kind of peanut gallery that is now applauding the likes of Sen. John McCain. The Bush White House denigrated the 2005 election just before the balloting began -- to the delight of the hardest-line Iranian fundamentalists. The ultra-righteous Bush rhetoric gave a significant boost to Ahmadinejad’s campaign.

Denunciations and threats from Washington are the last thing that Iran’s reform advocates want. And Iranians certainly don’t need encouragement from Uncle Sam to do what they can to bring about democratic change. Read more.

Investigating Khobar Towers: How a Saudi Deception Protected bin Laden
A five part series on Inter Press Service

Part 1: Al Qaeda Excluded from the Suspects List
By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Jun 22 (IPS) - On Jun. 25, 1996, a massive truck bomb exploded at a building in the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which housed U.S. Air Force personnel, killing 19 U.S. airmen and wounding 372.

Immediately after the blast, more than 125 agents from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were ordered to the site to sift for clues and begin the investigation of who was responsible. But when two U.S. embassy officers arrived at the scene of the devastation early the next morning, they found a bulldozer beginning to dig up the entire crime scene.

Security forces attack Iran protesters | UPI

Iranian security forces clashed with hundreds of protesters in Tehran Wednesday, badly beating some and killing others, sources said.

"They were waiting for us," a source told CNN. "They all have guns and riot uniforms. It was like a mouse trap."

Witnesses reached outside the national Parliament building told The New York Times the confrontation was bloody and police used live ammunition. The protesters had defied government warnings and hundreds, perhaps thousands, descended on the square in front of parliament, the Times said.

A source told CNN about "500 thugs" with clubs came out of a mosque and attacked people, and the security forces were "beating women madly" and "killing people like hell." Read more.

"Give Me Liberty ..." Iranian People Demand Democracy
By Michael Collins | Election Fraud News | Op Ed News | WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

Neoconservatives and other con artists are now claiming to support the Iranian people.  Some are the same people who pushed to bomb Iran preemptively just a few years ago.  Others, who stood on the sidelines to see who would "win," are now defenders of clean elections.   It doesn't matter to the Iranian's demanding respect and self determination.  For them, the real victory will be to emerge as a free nation that is outside of the "great game" of the major powers.

The actions of the Iranian people against the stolen election June 12, 2009 serve as an object lesson for oligarchs in nations around the world, including the United States. The people are sufficiently engaged and intelligent to notice blatant political manipulations. They're willing to take to the streets and risk their lives for the absolute right of self determination.

The Iranian people know that their situation is far from hopeless. They learned that being told "there's nothing you can do" is a lie and they are demanding their rights with an adamant presence in the streets of Tehran and other cities throughout Iran.

Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, spoke at Tehran University Friday to a staged crowd, one he ordered up from the countryside. He said that the election was just fine with him. That makes sense. His "guy" won in a landslide despite the clear historical trends of Iranian presidential voting over a twenty year period.

This year's results were so clear to the vote counters; they were able to announce the tally in just hours. In past elections it took three days to count a similar number of ballots for the presidential elections. But the oligarchs knew the results in advance so why bother with counting? A Queen of Hearts move was all it took.

The people of Iran were disgusted with this. They did what men and women all over the world do after years of oppression. They took to the streets. But these were very mean streets.

By Linda Milazzo

As a critic of media, in particular of cable/satellite "news," I'm troubled by American corporate-media, specifically CNN's near non-stop coverage of the turmoil in Iran. Not because the story isn't important. It's critically important and warrants the personal coverage it's getting from the Iranian people as they bypass corporate channels to tell their stories on facebook, youtube, flickr and twitter.

Thanks to Iran's tech-savvy society, old-time corporate media is now relegated to the position of new-media aggregator, whoring its visibility to co-opt the Iranian people's new-media messages to America and the world. Old-media, and specifically CNN, are learning the difficult lesson that with or without their vast resources and state of the art studios, the Iranians' stories will be told. And they'll be told to tens of millions more viewers than cable and satellite programs tend to reach.