Everyone knows it's fraud. Everyone knew it was going to be fraudulent. That's not what's important at this point. Here's what is: http://www.eleventhdraft.com/blog?id=365

On the one hand, I don't find it so surprising at all that Ahmadinejad would have won by a healthy margin. There's a lot of irony in Mousavi's complaints in this regard, held over from when he was prime minister, and while the affluent in Tehran, the youth, and the expats may have been heavily in favor of Mousavi, the entire rest of Iran, that may well take understandable pride in the ayatollahs' stand against injustice, and resent the "international" pressure against them, very well might have voted for Ahmadinejad. There is also talk that some of his performance in the recent debates would have reminded them of certain facts being ignored by the Mousavi camp.

On the other, al Jazeera is reporting that the computerized voting will be reviewed to check the results. That can't be a good sign.

If you ask me, the whole vilification of Ahmadinejad for stuff he did not say, and for questioning what most find reprehensible to question, is completely overblown, and everyone freaking out that a figurehead who cannot do what the ayatollahs don't want him to do is some kind of a villain is stupid, and dangerous.

Well done, Brad! All afternoon I've been captivated by the news coming out of Iran (or NOT coming out), and could not help but make the same comparison. Got a chill reading reports that election monitors were barred from observing the count. (More PTSD flashback than benign chill, really.)

Truly trippy morning. I couldn't wait to see what you'd write.

In keeping with the theme of historical redundancy and stolen election questions:

1. Why did they "over-rig" this election? Did the Iranian shadow government learn nothing from observing our shadow government? It's just so weird that they put real consideration behind numbers so over the top crazy no one would believe them.

2. If Ahmadinejad is the puppet figurehead president in the scenario, who is the Blackwell?

and

3. That Abrams has some boiled-brass nuggets, don't he?

Why is everyone saying it's a fraud? Did they use voting machines from Sequoia and Diebold? In that case I can understand.

Is it the kind of "apparent fraud" like when in Hamas won major seats in the Palestinian Authority? in other words is it a fraud when "the party the US doesn't like wins"?

Will there be a call for "regime change" ... err I mean a call for Iran to stop their "weapons of mass destruction" or risk invasion?

Sure it's Ohio. It's also the Iowa through Texas Dem primaries. The problem Glenn Greewald identifies, that no one will take us seriously if we're hypocrites, will haunt us until we take our own laws seriously. Color me pessimistic.

Enough people in Iran believe the election was fraudulent to believe it could be. Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish is getting updates from Farsi readers.

Some facts about Iran's election.
Yes, they have paper ballots. hand counted.
Voters present identification at the sign in table, they get a ballot that has an identifier on it, plus they put their fingerprint on the ballot.

Oh, and women and men do NOT line up together to vote, they are segregated. As would be their ballots.

There is so much to enable voter coercion and supression it isn't funny.

Iranians do NOT have a secret ballot. Not really.

The outrage of the voters plus the violence in the streets is an indicator that something is really wrong.

I'm not kidding. I listened to a couple thousand al Jazeera reports on this, with interviews with their local bureau, actual reporters on the ground, and they reported that the computer voting was going to be checked for accuracy. I would not have mistaken such a report. So, notwithstanding paper ballots and fingerprints, there is evidence of some computerized component to this, and, as we so well know, ANYONE can hack those.

I heard a report on one of the news shows yesterday (don't recall which one because it wasn't important to me at the time) that said to the effect that voting methods were mixed with computer voting in some urban areas and hand counted paper ballots in other parts of the country.

Mahmoud Ahemednijad is George Bush of Iran who believes in winning at all costs. We know Bush won two terms frauduently & in proccess inflicting the country with great harm. How could it happen, a landslide victory for Mahmoud? Just a day before, the polsters were predicting a very very close election & even the victory for the opponent Mousavi. We have to remember elections in Iran are just a formality, offered by the elders to the popluation, a false sense of democracy. In Iran the dictatorship of theoacrcy is well known. You dont win unless you have the blessing of Ayatulllahs, the spiritual gaurdians of Iran. Its like when the popes used to have the absolute power. Its the simular situation, no difference whatsoever. Just the other day, my friends & I were betting who wins the election. We all agreed the winning odds were overwhelmingly with the ayatullah & we were right. It would be a long long time before there is even a hint of democracy in Iran. No democracy is perfect but US has limits to presidential term otherwise we could have been looking at the most stupid king George w. Bush. So prototype of Bush will survive for a long long time to come. I cant help but feel sorry for the Iranian people who were looking forward to bigger & better future for their country. It was no surprise but We must strive for hope, peace, & love but the greatest of these is love. And love conquers all.

I WOULD LIKE TO DRAW EVERYONE'S ATTENTION TO THIS POST AT A HIGHLY RESPECTED BRITISH LEFTIST BLOG.

Ahmadinejad won. I've been scouring the internet and every news outlet I can find remotely trustworthy, and, dammit, this is mostly our media on a smear campaign.

Let's see... The media is blasting fraud allegations without backing it up with any data.

I had to dig some but I found a pre-election poll that showed Ahamdinejad with twice the votes of Mousavi. Not very convincing, but plenty to cause me to hold my opinion.

Doesn't seem very similar to Ohio to me where the hard evidence was plentiful and the media completely silent. To me it's exactly the opposite - media raging and no evidence - yet anyways.

I haven't made my mind up on this yet and I'm a bit surprised that so many Brad Blogger have!

Good find 99

Onyx @ 11 said:

Doesn't seem very similar to Ohio to me where the hard evidence was plentiful and the media completely silent. To me it's exactly the opposite - media raging and no evidence - yet anyways.

Really? Are the mainstream media in Iran completely silent? Or are they about where our country's media were the next day or two after Ohio '04?

But my references, in the original article, to Ohio, were larger in regard to the way the election was run and tabulated. So where you say "hard evidence was plentiful" two days after Ohio, what "hard evidence" was that?

You see, the point is that there was very little "hard evidence", either for or against a Bush "win" in Ohio in '04 at that point, and very little either way in Iran at this point as well. Why? Because neither they, nor we, use processes that allow for full transparency and citizen oversight. Thus, it's all a guessing game. Supporters of Bush/Ahmadinejad/Kerry/Mousavi were/are able to cite "evidence" and/or offer speculative reasons why their candidates won/lost.

Might I suggest election processes that leave no room for guesswork, but rather provide documented, overseeable evidence so we can remove the guesswork from democratic election results?

99 - Wha!? Even Iranian clerics and high ranking military officials are calling this election a stinker.

(From HuffPo:) Grand Ayatollah Sanei in Iran has declared Ahmadinejad's presidency illegitimate and cooperating with his government against Islam."
and
"Former head of Revolutionary Guards contests election. Rezaei, the conservative candidate and fmr head of Revolutionary Guards, apparently publishes open letter strongly contesting iran election."

http://www.huffingtonpos...ions-viole_n_215189.html

Not only that, but I understand the most glaring anomaly from the Iranian Ministry is the numbers indicating Mousavi lost his own home town. According to every polling expert in the region, that's damn near impossible.

Meantime, reformist politicians have been arrested, observers barred from witnessing the count, news crews are having equipment and video confiscated, Iranian police are defecting to fight along side Mosavi supporters, and now it would seem like the regime is sending in thugs on motorcycles to kill kids at University of Tehran (unconfirmed). Does this sound like the behavior of a legitimate president elect to you? As for the press - CNN wasn't adequately reporting on Iran at ALL until we started a "CNNfail" thread on Twitter. (CNN has since addressed the criticism and responded with better coverage.)

Interesting note: some Iranians have posed the idea that the percentages were just "flipped" --- that Mousavi actually won the 63 percentile, and the regime was just so frightened by his margin of victory they thought little of inverting the numbers to favor themselves. Made me think if your info re: some machine tabulation is correct, then well, as you say, that info certainly lines up with all we have hurt ourselves learning about stolen elections.

Yes, 99 - I, too, would like to see more information on the numbers and to know more about how this fraud was perpetrated. I haven't been able to find much, either. But with a partial "news blackout" in the region, it doesn't seem as though that news is going to be forthcoming right away. Hell, it takes us years and years in this country to get that data.

I don't want to second guess your "highly respected British Blog", but! Twitter, where Iranians are tweeting this revolution directly, is a more...immediate source of information.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23iranelection

Technology finally rises to meet it's highest power and finest hour, IMHO. Captivating. If only we'd had Twitter in 2004...

The best on-the-ground Iranian election coverage I've found so far:

http://www.michaeltotten...9/06/insurrection-da.php

(reliable reader-supported blogger, just like someone we know...)

I believe we are victims of a purposeful campaign to misrepresent the candidates and the election in Iran, akin to the media blitz of bald-faced lies about Russia's fight with Georgia last summer, Jeannie. Robert Fisk's sources insist there was no rigging, a bunch of pre-election polls reflect Mousavi with no kind of lead as was reported here. He may have been a contender in Tehran, and with expats, and maybe largely due to propaganda from the West, but not across Iran. In the rest of Iran Ahmadinejad is revered for helping the poor. He feeds them, gets them educations, works hard to raise their prospects. The more advantaged are pissed off at him for spending a quarter of the country's money in this effort, saying it is causing inflation.

He may be a bumpkin fundamentalist who squelches the more cosmopolitan instincts of some of the people, and I certainly can't hang with the executions and the dress code stuff, but it turns out that he has gone a VERY long way to help the common man in Iran. So, in a way, personally, I'm surprised he didn't win by a bigger margin.

I have a bunch of links at my blog that point to different conclusions and they aren't flimsy... especially not those polls at the Lenin's Tomb link.

We scream about being propagandized by our own MSM, but fail to see just how propagandized [blinded] we are when the chips are down. We believe the reports of the JSOC assassination teams sent into Iran. We believe the reports of U.S. funding for terrorist groups to help destabilize Iran, bring about regime change, so Halliburton can go in and rake in more bucks there. We hear about this stuff for years, and we see Obama going right along with it, but then, when the best opportunity to create intense enmity toward the regime is at hand, suddenly we start believing the MSM and the outrageously overblown Mousavi campaign malarky we've been being fed....

A lot of very smart people are falling for it.

This is the most honest article I've seen on the Iranian election so far. Good job, I'm glad I found the Brad Blog recently.

It's interesting that Elliot Abrams said "vote fraud" and not "election fraud," and I don't think it's insignificant. He's just spreading that myth of individual voter fraud in order to overshadow his own hypocrisy with regards to the reality of systematic election fraud.

Brad - there was quite a lot of evidence of election fraud prior to Ohio 04 that was being ignored by the media. I remember the hope we all had that Ohio 04 would provide the smoking gun that the media could no longer ignore. Of course, we have all subsequently learned that the media has no interest in the truth - or have we?

I think 99 is right. Until I see more evidence I'm not going to believe any of the hype. The media allegations are too self serving to be above suspicion.

I'd like to know more about how the Iranian elections are run. Do you have anything you can fill us in with?

I find Ahmedenajad's explanation of this win eerie-rural religous communities. Sound familiar???

I have a lot of respect for Juan Cole and his knowledge of the Middle East. I tend to believe him when he said in his blog tha he thought there was mischief afoot. Check it out. It's Informed Comment at jricole@gmail.com. He is an expert, real expert on all things Middle Eastern. He calmly and logically laid out he reasons for thinking the election was stolen.

WHO THE CIA VOTE FOR? Also, apparently this Mousavi guy that the western media is so happy to portray as a "reformer" is the same asshat that ordered the killing of 30,000 political prisoners in Iran in 1988. Why is it that our government always winds up supporting murderous dictators and the like?

Also, I think the idea that any news coming out of that country is particularly reliable at this point is pretty naive. I mean twitter? Really? How the hell do we know who is tweeting what and from where? My gut tells me this is another attempted cia coup...and Brad is helping manage the perception of it as a grass roots revolution by comparing it here to the 2004 election. Tsk f'ing tsk.

Gos

I am 100% with you on Mousavi and the Twitter crap, here's proof, but I resent the living hell out of you implying that Brad is helping "manage the perception"... as though he were some agent for the the murderating fucks of the world.

PLEASE. Get a grip. Brad doesn't care if you do that to him, but I care. I have to read this stuff all the time, and I hate all these baseless and outrageously ugly accusations.

YES, Gos (and now 99) --- TWITTER. I know it sounds juvenile, but that's what I'm telling you: Twitter has come into it's own as of this moment in history as a tool for organizing collective international citizen influence.

Twitter changed the MSM media discourse, today.
(DC Technology and Politics Examiner)
"How online word-of-mouth can change mainstream media election coverage"
http://tinyurl.com/m8syqt

Twitter helped Iranians organize themselves a deafening, chilling rooftop protest last night:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WU-cxEEJ-E

Twitter allowed citizens to simultaneously flood the Ayatollah's / Ahmedenajad's State run websites and (apparently) shut them down.
(can't find the link right now, but you can try to Google them and see if they're still out of commission.)

Most importantly, Twitter is where I'm getting feeds in real time to real video posted by Iranians...and no, Gos, we can't confirm their identity --- but we can confirm their posts are coming from inside Iran, and the images they're showing us are of wounded kids.

I appreciate your position (in fact I relish your smarts) but if you can't see how this technology would've saved our asses in 2004, then you have no vision.

ah~! And this just rolled up on my Iran Election Twitter feed...
http://www.nytimes.com/2...ml?_r=1&ref=business

i wonder if there is anyway to actually re-count the votes, or if Iran has a mechanism to allow for that

Jeannie, the point is that Twitter is as excellent a tool for propaganda, and for people who wish to foment destabilization in a country that is hogging our oil. There is heavy indication and plenty of very understandable reasons why Ahmadinejad would have won that election and even by the margin reported, and there's heavy indication those kids were whipped into a frenzy to back as an Obama a man who has a CHILLINGLY totalitarian background, including helping the Reagan boys with the Iran/Contra arms deal... we're talking people who came to be known as NEOCONS. I don't know if Twitter was any part of their means, but it easily furthered their intent to foment rioting.

On top of that, they are putting out all over the intertubes fake stories about Mousavi being told he was the winner, but not to announce it --- he DID announce it and ridiculously precipitously --- and fake numbers to make the result seem yet more suspicious. It's all over the place, heavily to do with information being disseminated through Twitter. And, as we've all seen, plenty of people are swallowing that action whole... just like the chumps in front of the Evening News.

Nothing in the world saying that there aren't a number of CIA agents, and other undesirables, Twittering away the disinformation as fast as their sweaty little fingers can type.

From your NYT link:

Untold thousands used the label “CNNfail” on Twitter to vent their frustrations. Steve LaBate, an Atlanta resident, said on Twitter, “Why aren’t you covering this with everything you’ve got?” About the same time, CNN was showing a repeat of Larry King’s interview of the stars of the “American Chopper” show. For a time, new criticisms were being added on Twitter at least once a second.

I have seen gripes in a number of places that a great many of those CNNfail tweets were putting out the identical tinyurl address... which means they were all coming from one source. Doesn't matter how many thousands then, does it?

99 ~ According to the Juan Cole article linked to above by Debbie @ #20 (bad link, btw/ found it here:)
http://www.alternet.org/...n_numbers_don%27t_add_up

"...Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers..."

Ahmadinejad took Tehran?! I'm imagining that's as wildly improbable as George Bush eeking out a victory in New York City.

"Twitter is as excellent a tool for propaganda..." Okay. Maybe, 99. But not as excellent as the New York Times. Not as main-stage and dangerous as FOX NEWS. Twitter's not scrolling by my face at my GYM, so right now we're talking mostly small beans, one-on-one perpetration; not the kind of wholesale propaganda (to use a popular axiom around us election lovin' types) we're used to seeing regularly on our public airwaves from Bleck-y Glenn and the one who shall not be named.

Yes, Twitter Trolls are out there, sure, some maybe even on C.I.A. payroll --- but just because the info is not vetted doesn't mean it's not valid. It's what is born of DE-isolationism, 99. It's the collective rejection of propaganda; the re-direction of the macro focus for micro benefit. But yes, like any new medium, it's only as effective as it's participants are well-informed.

And Aye, there's the rub.

(I'm not quite sure I understand your last point about the same URLs. Are you talking about some kind of "power tweeting"? If I understand your point correctly --- doesn't really matter if it makes the tweeting trends" list, puts it on CNN's radar and causes them adjust their shitty coverage from Larry King gar-baaage to the lovely Christine Anamanamojopour curling the hairs on Ahmadinejad's chinny chin chin, am I right?)

Does anyone find it outrageous, how our media and politicians are saying anything about other country's elections, and nothing about ours?

I'm still willing to admit that I may be wrong, but 99 and I smell bullshit. Time will tell. Stay tuned.

Average of 25 pre-election polls:
Ahamadinejad - avg40.3% max 62.7% min 22.5%
Mousavi -avg37.8% max64% min 13%

The Tehran only polls showed them to be very even. In other major cities Ahmadinejad was way ahead.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/...sidential_election,_2009

Nate Silver over at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ has some interesting info. Admittedly not very well vetted though.

Jeannie, I ordinarily find Juan Cole's stuff pretty good, but I thought that piece was extremely ill-considered. He is a much-to-be-admired expert on the Middle East, but looks as though Iran might be his weak spot, or he was getting too much of the hotly-partisan outrage from people near him to think through it.

It's extremely hard work to get the straight dope on Iran, but not impossible to dig up reportage from sources with no axes to grind.

Mousavi was not leading in the polls. He was behind by 20 points. The only Iranians on the net are expats and less than 8% of their population, which are in the cities and considered privileged... Mousavi's constituency. They were saying that Ahmadinejad had ruined the economy by giving as much as a quarter of Iran's revenues to the poor. For food. For education. For things that would help them raise their prospects. There's plenty of evidence his policies aren't failing at all. They are winning him solidarity from the masses.

This privileged class is embarrassed by his fundamentalism, wanting a more cosmopolitan and less restrictive life, and DREAM that someone who speaks less antagonistically toward Israel's policies and attacks on its neighbors will stop the aggression. Their desire for these things is being used to foment this kind of fabulous PR campaign for those who wish to attack Iran, being used against them.

They are obliging ill-motivated provocateurs and so are all the kids tweeting their heads off about this. Honestly, I sometimes wonder why people get so freaked about a crackdown on the net, the whole net neutrality thing, because the propagandists are playing it like a fiddle. They would be lost without it.

And they've gone batshit crazy for texting on their cell phones there too. It's as bad there as with our kids here. Texting, tweeting, Facebook, all the social networking stuff is proving to be an indispensable tool for political gain, creating the buzz. Whatever buzz they want to create, fair or foul, gets created and the kids are marching to it like an army... like lemmings....

99, Onyx, et al.~

Listening to experts on NPR explain the pre-election polls you are citing above. Asked to explain the substantial Ahmadinejad lead, they said that these polls had been taken a month earlier, long before some of the candidates were even approved to run by the clerical hierarchy.

Noting Iran's notoriously short election season, they said there were huge fluctuations in these numbers from day to day and expressed dismay that the numbers would be cited by the Washington Post (and others) as any kind of legitimate record of consequence.

They stressed (like Brad) that while there may never be a way to verify election fraud in this case because the votes were counted in secret, and while they stressed it's very possible that Ahmadinejad might have legitimately won --- the glaring irregularities and impossible margins of victory in the urban vote deviate substantially from previous election results in those regions. Also, the percentage of votes cast for each of the candidates stayed relatively steady across the country, regardless of region/demographics (more deeply-flawed familiar fun, anyone?) Finally, the official results for the two lesser candidates were wildly different than those same pre-election polls would suggest.

Well I linked a poll taken two days before the election, I think.

And the Supreme Leader has announced they are looking into the allegations of election fraud.

Heh, gathering up all the memory cards to do this....

And so I guess we're going to see.

My main point I can't seem to stress strongly enough is that we have been sending in agents of destabilization for a long time and this IS that. I included an audio of a short interview with Sy Hersh about precisely this on that link.

I'm begging everyone not to lose sight of the malign intent that has been working full time on Iran for quite a while now, and not to just let their knees break their teeth when they jerk up and hit them in the chin over this Iranian Obama crap. The man was deeply involved in the Iran/Contra horrors and the persecution and killing of scores of Iranian leftists. He's a damn snake all dressed up in people's hopes and dreams for change, with tweets and texts dripping from his pores, for people who have no clue who he is... and for people forgetting utterly the warnings of history and of Sy Hersh.

IF the CIA wants regime change in Iran (and I don't necessarily assume that is the case, as the "devil you know and can bomb" may be much more appealing to them than the "new and willing to negotiate devil") then I would predict a 99.9% chance of a major (over 5.7 mag.) earthquake in Iran within the next two weeks.

And, of course, what the CIA wants and what the Obama administration wants may be different. In such a case, of course, the CIA wins and gets what IT wants. And, by "CIA," I don't mean the figurehead at the top, but the operational controls slightly further down and to the side, outside of the political lines of command, and not subject to changes in administrations or government rules of conduct.

Washington Post back-peddling on reliability of pre-election polls:

http://tinyurl.com/nmww6v

"...The validity of the unreleased Iranian surveys cannot be assessed in detail, but a closer look at the one sponsored by Terror Free Tomorrow and the New America Foundation reveals ample reason to be skeptical of the conclusions drawn from it.

Methodologically, this survey passes muster as it's relatively straightforward to pull a good sample of the Iranian population, using the country's publicly available population counts and listed telephone exchanges. But the poll was conducted from May 11 to 20, well before the spike in support for Mousavi his supporters claim.

More to the point, however, the poll that appears in today's op-ed shows a 2 to 1 lead in the thinnest sense: 34 percent of those polled said they'd vote for Ahmadinejad, 14 percent for Mousavi. That leaves 52 percent unaccounted for. In all, 27 percent expressed no opinion in the election, and another 15 percent refused to answer the question at all. Six Eight percent said they'd vote for none of the listed candidates; the rest for minor candidates.

One should be enormously wary of the current value of a poll taken so far before such a heated contest, particularly one where more than half of voters did not express an opinion."

"My main point I can't seem to stress strongly enough is that we have been sending in agents of destabilization for a long time..."

True, dat.

"...and this IS that."

But is it, 99? I agree with you 100% about the charade of two party rule, bogus lesser of the evils thing. But it seems to me that if there's a pro-USA, CIA puppet poon-dog, neo-con fixed Manchurian Candidate in this horse-race --- it's Ahmadinejad.

In fact, I read that some GOP members have even gone so far as to endorsed him~?!
(From HUFF PO):

The New Republic's neocon-in-chief Marty Peretz:

"...Maybe the regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers at the polls and after the polling. Still, the outcome had a sense of authenticity."

Andrew (Sullivan) writes, "Even I am a little taken aback by the neocons' desire for an Ahmadinejad victory."

They LOVE them some Crazy Iranian President Nuke-Kook. He's a GREAT catalyst for their fear-mongering. I think your supposition that Moussavi is their Preferred Prick is just plain wrong. They don't want to TALK to the Iranians, or trade them some arms for hostages behind Congress' back like in the simpler, sweeter good ol' Reagan days (I imagine that notion now seems as quaint to them as the Geneva Convention.)

No, they've made it quite clear they want to demonize them and then BOMB them. (They even make jokes about it haha hardy har ha.) And then maybe they'll sell some bombs to the rest of the 'hood so they can bomb eachother while bombing them some more.

The way I see it, 'they might've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those crazy kids...'

Jeannie

I don't think you have the first part of an appreciation for the realities in Iran, the history involved, the vicious pressures they have withstood over the past four years, including JSOC hit squads, to keep out of another of our wars of aggression, or the deadliness of the mental conditioning under which you labor... "Crazy Iranian President Nuke-Kook"? Whoa.

...

No. Wait. I was starting to try to give you a little primer, here, but you clearly haven't read any of my links and nothing I've said so far has made any sense to you. This thrilling networking movement is evidently too engaging. So, carry on. I'm going to disengage from this discussion.

99 ~ You have completely misinterpreted me and and then slapped me with uncalled for condescension. Woah, yourself.

The "kooky nukes" line was intended to argue the Neo-con-pushed notion of the man's perceived character as it benefits their own ambitions, not my own personal opinion. Maybe that was not made clear.

As to your second nasty to-wit, "priming" me because I lack the "appreciation" for the history of Iran that you clearly possess --- not only did I read every link you provided, but I believe I responded in kind with clarity of position and back up links to support my opinions.

If you think I'm not adequately absorbing your advanced intellect, 99, then as the moderator of this esteemed forum, can't you find a better way to communicate that?

Or maybe we just disagree on sources and so be it. Too bad that ends the civilized debate for you. And as Brad's follow up piece underscores, all we can really do is speculate, making your dismissal even more childish.

FWIW, 99, just wanted to make sure you saw this from Juan Cole today:

"Terror Free Tomorrow Poll Did not Predict Ahmadinejad Win"

Also, for everyone else, please see my follow up, expansion on this piece now right here: "Russian Roulette...Without the Certainty".

As always, I'll look forward to your thoughts and input.

Jeannie

Indeed I must have mistaken you. The epithet for Ahmadinejad and the sort of flip ending about the "crazy kids" who have been hoodwinked by evil people and are now hell bent on giving Halliburton its fondest wish, even if they have to die for it, pretty well made me see red. I am greatly relieved you didn't mean it as I took it. Sorry if I offended you.

Brad

FWIW, the Terror Free Tomorrow poll was extensive, on a number of issues, put Ahmadinejad ahead by 20 points, and also put him with the backing of the Iranian people well over the usual approval levels of our presidents, well over the 60% mark on a number of crucial issues.

While I usually respect Cole's stuff, on this it seems to me, after a few days of very hard work, plus the stuff I've learned over the course of most of my adult life, that he's just flat wrong.

Everyone

I am not saying the Iranian elections are pristine, or even fair, or even that there was no tampering. I'm saying Ahmadinejad had the votes. Suddenly they started giving Mousavi, the snake former PM, the Obama treatment, and throwing huge street parties with his green motif, and everyone started ignoring that Ahmadinejad still had the same lead across Iran. There has been an outrageous amount of twisting the facts that stood just three days ago... pointed efforts to fix the reporting that doesn't square with a Mousavi got robbed scenario.

It is outright horrifying to me that there are so many whose lives depend on not falling for this blizzard of a snow job.

99 said:

I'm saying Ahmadinejad had the votes.

No, you're saying you believe Ahmadinejad had the votes. Of course, that speculation is as reasonable and/or not, as any other. See my later piece on that (again, if you must).

Quit splitting hairs! You drive me nuts with that crap!

I'm saying Ahmadinejad VERY CREDIBLY had the votes, and though I've worked myself witless looking into the veracity of that claim for the past few days, it's almost on its face so believable as not to need questioning... for anybody who has been paying attention to the Iran stuff for very long.

If I'm being emphatic in a way you find irksome, imagine how irksome it is to watch so many ordinarily peacenik, anti-murderation people going off down the garden path about the Obamatization of a mass murderer of leftists who plotted with the neocon fucks to hold the hostages till after our election for the Reagan people, so they could go off and torture and slaughter a bunch of freedom fighters in Central America... Michael Ledeen's buddy... who could have had about bubkes in the way of influence over the Ayatollah's strictures on those poor kids.

Here's one of them in her own words.

I've been following the news and this thread and I haven't felt comfortable enough to make any postings. I can't speak with authority, I don't know enough. I'm going to wait it out and see what happens. I don't tweet and while I have an account on Facebook I don't know how to 'work' it so I'm blind to the live-blogging of the revolution(?) on the social networking sites. I can only read summations and logs posted elsewhere.

I know the history of Iran beginning with Shah Pahlavi and America's role in seating him and cheered the '79 revolution that un-seated the murdering, torturing b*****d. I've followed the news coming out of Iran since and have always found it tragic that deposing one tyrant led to the last 30 years of repression there.

I, like '99, read from several sources about the support Ahmedenajad enjoys for helping the downtrodden in Iraq (There's a lot of them- see note at end.)starting many months ago and know that Mousavi is a terrible choice for a reform candidate. He's a despot in his own right.

Maybe Mousavi is irrelevant to the force of history and the people that want to seize the future in Iran. He may be like Obama and Obama's historical 'daddy' Jimmy Carter: the electorate is so tired of the same old, same old, they'll vote for anyone that steps up that isn't 'them'. I know flat-out racists that voted for Obama because they weren't voting for Obama- they were voting AGAINST Bush et al, against SSDD. Or thought they were.

I don't know who actually won the election and believe we'll never know. Iran though is an urban country** just as America is, more people live in cities than in rural areas and if Mousavi was the choice of the city dwellers then there's a good chance he won. There's also about a 100% chance the election was 'rigged' in some measure. Again, I don't know who won.

That doesn't stop me from having a few impressions though so I'll comment on a couple of things.

Twitter and the blogging of the revolution: I'm for it and embrace the peoples medium wholeheartedly.

'99: "Jeannie, the point is that Twitter is as excellent a tool for propaganda, and for people who wish to foment destabilization in a country that is hogging our oil."

So is the MSM. We have seen it for years including the MSM's collusion in the theft of the 2000 election, the war of choice and so many other things listing them is redundant.

While the social networking sites are personal observations and images simply the fact that they can not be easily concentrated and centrally directed makes the flavor of the 'reporting' more reliable to me than the MSM's. While the observations are slanted by the demographics of the persons most likely to own and use these methods of communications, I don't at all think that fact negates their value or credibility so long as you keep the demographic caveat in mind.

What I would give to have had a functioning Internet and social networking capability in '68.
It could have changed history.

The electronic revolution did have an enormous impact on this last election here in the US. (Thank you Brad.) Real time updates on voting trends and complaints about problems at the polls and a network of watchdog organizations in constant contact with each other, their workers, and millions of interested citizens that write letters and make phone calls and sign petitions and generally raise hell.

That's why as much control was brought to bear on the personal electronic media as possible by the government of Iran; people being able to communicate instantly is a powerful tool, it's the peoples counter-force to every other method of information dissemination all of which are subject to control and influence by the government. It can unite.

That's why it's a big deal. That's why our government and every other government on earth wants to control it and its content. I'm thinking 'thank ghod for Twitter'.

Like 95% of humanity I'm a visual creature- things make sense visually even when words and type doesn't. Pictures are worth thousands of words so I've been keeping an eye out for pictures. Those are big demonstrations. At some point things take on a life of their own, what started as one thing becomes a vehicle for something else. I don't know, maybe something else is going on now.

Go not quite half way down the page and look at the crowd in Tehran, as far as the eye can see, split down two wide streets and off behind the trees. This is an Obama Inauguration sized crowd. There's a lot of anger and hope there. So far the death toll is 7. I sure hope it doesn't turn into another Tienanmen Square massacre. If I were the government I'd be thinking that it sure looks like an uprising.

http://www.huffingtonpos...ions-viole_n_215189.html

**
% of population urbanized, 2007 = 68
Average annual growth rate of urban population (%), 1970–1990 = 4.9
Average annual growth rate of urban population (%), 1990–2007 = 2.6

http://www.unicef.org/in...try/iran_statistics.html

Long-time independent mideast correspondent Robert Fisk quoted an Iranian source whom he described as a government opponent and reliable. The source told him that the election results were probably accurate and that outside of Tehran, the country went for Ahmadinejad. See http://www.independent.c...-democrator-1704810.html. Fisk is presently reporting from Iran and the situation seems rather violent and dangerous there.

Good comments here. I tend to agree with Onyx and 99. I normally rely on the Independent as a source for Middle East news since they've got such good correspondents. Other stories I've read suggest that Mousavi was not particularly charming or charismatic and that the support for him was really just opposition to the government.

Oh, this is rich! Someone just emailed me this link:

http://www.chartingstock...bilize-iran-via-twitter/

Ha, ha, ha... she says while reaching for her jug of ibuprofen....

re: Brad's "Terror Free Tomorrow Poll" - this poll taken about in mid-May 2009 had Ahmadinejad at 34%, Mousavi at 14%, 27% undecided and 22% either refusing to answer or not liking either candidate. I’ve seen this poll cited both as proof that the election was stolen and as proof that it wasn’t. Compare Brad’s link and http://www.counterpunch.com/roberts06162009.html.
Brad’s link is an article by someone named Juan Cole who claims to be the President of the “Global Americana Institute”, an organization that translates writings by people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington into Arabic, set up to complement a U.S. government translation project. Well, okay. But Cole then assumes that most of the undecideds were either going to stay undecided or were not saying who they wanted because they secretly favored Mousavi but were afraid to say so, and that the election would have been forced into a runoff. He says 60% of the undecideds favored political reform, but when you look closely, they weren’t asked whether they favored political reform by the pollsters, that’s just a gloss put on there by some analyst.

My own interpretation of these figures so close to the election would have been that a large number of the people polled didn’t want to give information to the pollsters, maybe figuring they were American agents or otherwise up to no good.
The 14% who wanted Mousavi were sophisticated urbanites who knew what pollsters were, and the 34% for Ahmandinejad were party line Ahmandinejad supporters. That would put Ahmandinejad ahead, with a large part of the so-called undecideds suspicious Persians who didn’t like nosy outsiders asking questions. These kind of voters would be expected to vote for Ahmandinejad if they had to vote.

Another good piece on the Twitter controversy:

http://trueslant.com/jos...re-all-wrong-about-iran/

Paul

Robert Parry and Glenn Greenwald have come out with about the same, too.

Ahmadinejad is the George Bush of Iran. Come on. Don't look at this from a Geo-Political stance. Or Economical-Geo-Political stance. Times are changing. The Growing Season is changing. We, as a Species, are Changing. So,... The question is, "Are WE WILLING TO ENDURE THE PROCESS OF CHANGE?" We will METAMORPHASIZE into the 'State-of-Being' that we NEED TO at this time. WE NEED TO NOURISH this natural 'seasonal' (cosmologically speaking) cycle NOW. We need to push for the natural flow/consequences of life - NOW.

The election results are available for all to see. In fact, pollsters before the results from America have the poll results. Check out the facts:

http://internationalinsights.blogspot.com

I really like your blog and I wanted you to know about our new website, timelines.com, where we've started a timeline about the 2009 Iranian election at http://timelines.com/topics/2009-iranian-presidential-election. Our idea is to create an interactive historical record of anything and everything, based on specific events that combine to form timelines. We're trying to achieve a sort of user-created multimedia encyclopedia, in which no event is too big and no event is too small, and where each event can contain various types of resources, such as video, images, maps, etc. It's also a good way to direct traffic to your blog because your events will pop up along with anything else that's thematically related.