Steve Weissman : The U.S. Role in Iran's 'Green Revolution'

Photo from BrooWaha.com.
Iran: Seen to Be Meddling

Our multimedia meddlers sought... to help mobilize the millions of Iranians who had already turned against the regime of Ahmadinejad and were questioning the theocratic rule of the ayatollahs.

By Steve Weissman / July 7, 2009

Between threats from hard-line ayatollahs to execute protest leaders and the media frenzy over the death of Michael Jackson, Iran's "Green Revolution" appears to have stalled. But, it's far from over.

Unless President Obama or Congress cut off their funding, our official radio and TV services, the shadowy National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department's "democracy-promoters" will all keep fighting to the last Iranian, while the CIA and Pentagon continue sending their state-sponsored terrorists into Iran. Then, as likely as not, the meddlers will hand off to the "bomb Iran" crowd, whose solidarity with the Iranian protesters extends to blowing them to smithereens.

Covert action does not go away just because TV cameras turn away. And neither should its critics, who need to explain more clearly what Washington and its allies have been doing in Iran. For most people, one question stands out: How could outsiders possibly call millions of gutsy Iranians onto the streets?

The answer is basic. Outsiders could do nothing if not for the very real discontent within Iran and the courage of Iranians to protest. Even in its heyday, the CIA had trouble making something out of nothing, though it came close in Iran in 1953 when it paid protesters to take to the streets against the nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaddeq. That was truly a rent-a-mob.

Now in the digital age, our multimedia meddlers sought instead to help mobilize the millions of Iranians who had already turned against the regime of Ahmadinejad and were questioning the theocratic rule of the ayatollahs. Much of this target audience fell among the young urban middle class, who were savvy about online, mobile and digital media. To these people, Washington provided what Peter Ackerman and Ramin Ahmadi called "a clear strategic vision and steady leadership."

This strategic vision and leadership included several elements, some of which I highlighted in earlier columns: Training sessions and field manuals on nonviolent tactics. A vast infusion of new media, especially Twitter and Facebook. And the coordinated messaging of the big western bullhorn, especially the BBC's Farsi language services, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Radio Farda, and Voice of America's Persian Service, which before the election, according to CNN, "bought extra satellite paths into Iran to avoid any government jamming."

Expatriate Iranian satellite TV, mostly from the Los Angeles area, would add to the cheerleading, as would most of the commercial mass media.

With all this in place, Washington had to answer a truly divisive question. Should the meddlers support Iranian opposition groups who wanted to boycott their country's presidential elections? Or should they covertly back former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had taken part in the creation of Lebanon's Hezbollah and the killing of Iranian dissidents? In democracy-promotion American style, Washington gets to pick which "democrats" to promote. The nod went to Mousavi.

A week before the election, Voice of America's (VOA) Persian Service reported that a hard-line ayatollah had issued a fatwa authorizing election supervisors to change votes to make sure that Ahmadinejad won. Whether the fatwa ever existed remains a mystery. But the extensive coverage that VOA gave the story laid the groundwork for the "Green Revolution" that was to follow.

Mousavi gave the signal to start. Hours before the voting ended, he loudly declared himself "definitely the winner," suggested that the government was trying to steal the election, and opened the door to major protests. This was the script, to which Mousavi stuck in the days that followed.

The Iranian government responded that Ahmadinejad had won an overwhelming majority, and the battle lines were drawn. Foreign scholars might debate whether Ahmadinejad or Mousavi won and by how much, providing ammunition for pundits on all sides. But to Mousavi and the Western meddlers, as to Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the actual vote no longer mattered, if it ever did.

The big Western bullhorn quickly spread Mousavi's claims all over Iran and the world, as did the new media, churning out tens of thousands of messages saying that the government had stolen the election and calling for huge protests in the streets. Facebook and Twitter offered an added advantage. Anyone could anonymously post messages, and who would know whether they came from Tehran, Dubai, Jerusalem or Washington?

With continuing support from both the Western bullhorn and the new media that Washington had worked so hard to promote, the "Green Revolution" took to the streets. Naturally, the protests took on an ebb and flow of their own that no one could predict or control. They are now in an ebb, but the protesters will return in time, likely with industrial action and a general strike that Western meddlers will continue to support.

But, we have an alternative. Just think how much more credibility the protesters would have with their own people if, before the next round, Washington publicly pulled the plug on all our many bureaucracies that intervene so blatantly in other countries.

President Obama has famously said that he did not want "to be seen to be meddling" in Iran's election. He would do better if, as he tried to do with torture, he made absolutely clear to Americans and the world that we should not and will not meddle, whether seen or not.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France.]

Source / truthout

For previous articles by Steve Weissman on The Rag Blog, including earlier posts on this subject, go here.

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Iran, Cyber Warfare and the CIA : The World is Watching

Twitter and the new Iranian revolution. Cartoon by Ian D. Marsden / truthout.
Iran: The world is watching

[The media] give wall-to-wall coverage of the protesters, whose heroism is very real. But the TV cameras and front-page headlines completely ignore how hard Washington worked to stir up the protests...

By Steve Weissman / June 30, 2009

When President Barack Obama warned Iran's ayatollahs that the world was watching their brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters, he touched a sacred chord for a whole generation of American activists. Back in 1968, as TV cameras broadcast dramatic images of Mayor Daley's police cracking heads at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, anti-war demonstrators famously chanted, "the whole world is watching."

In the eyes of the mass media, of course, not all protests or electile dysfunctions are equal. After 9/11, our free press largely ignored persuasive evidence that Al Gore had won the presidential elections in Florida, while TV cameras gave scant coverage to demonstrations against George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. But for those in Washington planning regime change in Tehran, the media problem was not how to convince CNN and the BBC to beat the drums for the "Green Revolution."

The problem was far trickier. How would Washington's media mavens help bring a protest to the streets? And how would they guarantee a continuing flow of powerful images and poignant words between the protesters and the watching world?

Their solution took many forms, from TV and radio broadcasting reminiscent of the cold war to the latest in Internet technology, including the widespread use of Twitter and Facebook. Since 2006, the State Department alone spent more than $200 million on the effort. The money went to its in-house Iran bashers and "democracy-promoters," the Voice of America's (VOA) Farsi language broadcasts, Radio Free Europe's round-the-clock Radio Farda and the secretive National Endowment for Democracy, which funded several other groups.

This $200 million came on top of the $400 million that Congress allocated in 2007 for regime change in Iran, some of which went for the CIA's state-supported terrorism inside Iranian borders.

Whether the overthrow of Ahmadinejad succeeds or fails, the Green Revolution will indeed have many fathers, and critics should avoid pointing the finger at only the CIA or its spin-off, the National Endowment for Democracy. Orange, Rose and Green Revolutions in other countries require coordinated US government intervention, aimed at creating what Rutgers journalism professor Jack Bratich has called "genetically modified" grassroots movements.

Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the widely reported use of Twitter, Facebook, and other of the new media's social networking tools. How did these tools come to play such a pivotal role in Iran's "Green Revolution"? In large part because Washington made a huge push to encourage their use as part of its strategy of democracy promotion, which in Iran became full-scale psychological warfare.

Meet Jared Cohen, the young State Department official who asked Twitter not to close down for maintenance during hours that Iran's protesters might need the service. He is not your everyday computer geek, who just happened to know the nice folks at Twitter.

Author of the widely acclaimed "Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East," Cohen had served as Condoleezza Rice's adviser on youth and technology, especially in the Muslim world. In that role, he worked with Twitter, Facebook, Howcast, Google, MTV, and others in an official campaign to promote online, mobile and digital networking "as a tool for youth empowerment against violence and oppression."

And not just in Iran. Speaking last December on a web chat to publicize the State Department's Alliance of Youth Movements Summit, Cohen talked the talk of the official democracy promoters. "Wherever civil society organizations exist or individuals have causes that promote non-violent youth causes, we want them to have the knowledge and information on how to develop an online component to what they are trying to achieve," he said.

With Cohen as the Alliance's international press contact, the State Department put out an online "field manual" that provided best practices, videos and steps for building these kinds of movements.

Promoting his book in 2007 to The New Yorker, Cohen gave a different impression. The State Department still had him traveling, he said. But now he was plugged into power.

"Basically, I do a safer version of what I used to do," he explained. "Now I'm in a place where I can take what young people are saying to me and work with my colleagues in Operations and in the embassies to do something that actually happens on the ground."

Cohen could not stop talking. "I always say that the largest party in every country -- the largest opposition group in every country -- is the youth party," he said.

Frankly, I was flabbergasted. Had the spirit of Abbie Hoffman and his Yippies, the Youth International Party, gone from anti-war demonstrations in Chicago to work in the very belly of the beast, all nonviolently, of course, and armed with the newest of new media? No wonder Cohen's boss Condi Rice sounded so ecstatic when she described the Internet as "possibly one of the greatest tools for democratization and individual freedom that we've ever seen."

As Rice well knew, the new media is especially great for meddling in another country, especially when Washington and its allies have so many other psywar tools at their disposal. Take, for example, The Washington Post's recent article "Persian News Network Finds New Life in Contested Iranian Election." The ayatollahs had cracked down on free speech, wrote the Post, and Voice of America was rushing to the rescue.

"What we're seeing is a new level of cyber warfare," said producer Gareth Conway, referring to the Iranian government's blocking of text-messaging services and Internet sites and Iranians' attempts to fight back. "We're trying to give viewers updates on technology, how they can continue to communicate with each other."

"As protests have erupted over the heavily disputed reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, VOA's Persian-language TV network and a similar BBC service have emerged as a critical way for Iranians to share information."

Yes, the whole world is watching, as President Obama suggests. But our supposedly free media show only half of the picture. They give wall-to-wall coverage of the protesters, whose heroism is very real. But the TV cameras and front-page headlines completely ignore how hard Washington worked to stir up the protests, and most of the supposedly progressive blogosphere wears the same political blinders. Old media or new, to a child of the cold war, the self-righteous dupery is déjà vu all over again.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France. He is also a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

Source / truthout

For previous articles by Steve Weissman in this series on the aftermath of the Iranian elections, go here.

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Still Not Much Concrete Evidence of Iranian Election Fraud

Tehran, August 19, 1953.
Tehran, June 13, 2009.

See also, In a micro-blogging world, caution needed on macro of #iranelection by Maha Zimmo, below.

AJAX REDUX: US Heavy Meddle in Iran
By Nima Shirazi / The Rag Blog / June 26, 2009

The Western press has clearly taken a side and has successfully managed to drag its uninformed audience along with it. News reports all refer to the continuing groundswell of protest to the election results as an "unprecedented" show of courage, resistance, and people power against the government not seen in Iran since the 1979 revolution.

But what we have seen this past week seems to have far more in common with the events of fifty-six years ago, rather than just thirty.

In 1953, the United States government, at the behest of Britain, tasked CIA operatives Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. and Donald Wilber to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran, in order to put an end to the process of oil nationalization by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. This nationalism "outraged the British, who had 'bought' the exclusive right to exploit Iranian oil from a corrupt Shah, and the Americans, who feared that allowing nationalization in Iran would encourage leftists around the world." The coup d'etat, which took a mere three weeks to execute, was accomplished in a number of stages. First, members of the Iranian Parliament and leaders of political parties were bribed to oppose Mossadegh publicly, thereby making the government appear fragmented and not unified. Newspaper owners, editors, columnists and reporters were then paid off in order to spread lies and propaganda against the Prime Minister.

Furthermore, high-ranking clerics, influential businessmen, members of the police, security forces, and military were bribed, as well. Roosevelt hired the leaders of street gangs in Tehran, using them to help create the impression that the rule of law had totally disintegrated in Iran and that the government had no control over its population. Stephen Kinzer, journalist and author of All the Shah's Men, tells us that "at one point, [Roosevelt] hired a gang to run through the streets of Tehran, beating up any pedestrian they found, breaking shop windows, firing their guns into mosques, and yelling, 'We love Mossadegh and communism.' This would naturally turn any decent citizen against him." In a stroke of manipulative genius, Roosevelt then hired a second mob to attack the first mob, thereby giving the Iranian people the impression that there was no police presence and that civil society had devolved into complete chaos, with the government totally incapable of restoring order. Kinzer elaborates,

They rampaged through the streets by the tens of thousands. Many of them, I think, never even really understood they were being paid by the C.I.A. They just knew they had been given a good day’s wage to go out in the street and chant something. Many politicians whipped up the crowds during those days...They started storming government buildings. There were gunfights in front of important buildings.

After all was said and done, Prime Minister Mossadegh had been deposed and a military coup returned the monarchy to Iran by installing the pro-western Mohammed Reza Pahlevi on the Peacock throne. The Shah's brutal, tyrannical dictatorship - established, supported, and funded by the United States - lasted 26 years. In 1979, the Iranian people returned the favor.

So what have we been seeing in Iran this past week?

Whereas there is scant evidence of any actual voter fraud or ballot rigging in the recent reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the popular movement we've been seeing on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere is being treated by the American media as some sort of new revolution; an energized, grassroots, and spontaneous effort to overthrow the leaders of the Islamic Republic in favor of a secular, pro-Western "democracy."

Yet, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, whereas there are surely thousands of sincere and committed activists and participants in the recent protests, what we are witnessing may very well be the culmination of years of American infiltration and manipulation of both the Iranian establishment and public.

Back in 2005, the United States government was already funding groups it designated as terrorist organizations to carry out violent attacks within Iran in order to destabilize the Iranian government. In 2007, ABC News reported that George W. Bush has signed a secret "Presidential finding" which authorized the CIA to "mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government." These operations, according to current and former intelligence officials, included "a coordinated campaign of propaganda broadcasts, placement of negative newspaper articles, and the manipulation of Iran's currency and international banking transactions."

In May of that same year, the London Telegraph reported that Bush administration zealot John Bolton revealed that an American military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.” Two weeks later, the Telegraph independently verified the ABC report, saying that, “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”

Daniel McAdams tells us that, at the time, "the president met with the Congressional Star Chamber, the “gang of 8″ House and Senate leaders, and was granted the authorization to use some $400 million for among other things, as the Washington Post reported, “activities ranging from spying on Iran’s nuclear program to supporting rebel groups opposed to the country’s ruling clerics…"

Then, in early May 2008, Counterpunch's Andrew Cockburn revealed that "Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents was 'unprecedented in its scope.'

"Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department's list of terrorist groups.

Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or "army of god," the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border - whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother-in-law's throat.

Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi Arabs of southwest Iran.

Of course, US officials denied any "direct funding" of Jundallah, but admitted regular contact since 2005 with its leader Abd el Malik Regi, who was widely reputed to be involved in heroin trafficking from Afghanistan. Funding has reportedly been funneled through Iranian exiles with connections in Europe and the Gulf States.

Furthermore, on June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker confirmed all of these reports, writing, “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and Congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.” Among the activities Hersh cited were "gathering intelligence about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program", "undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions" and "trying to undermine the government through regime change [by] working with opposition groups and passing money."

But the US campaign against Iran didn't come to a halt with the ascension of President Obama. There is no evidence to conclude that the $400 million dollars Bush signed off on has been put to different use (like, say, funding public schools or healthcare.) In early June 2008, Justin Raimondo of Antiwar wrote, "Obama, with his peace overtures [to Iran], serves as the smiley-face mask for some pretty loathsome activities. The U.S. government claims to be fighting terrorism, yet is sponsoring groups that plant bombs in mosques, kidnap tourists as well as Iranian policemen, and fund their activities with drug-running in addition to covert subsidies courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers." He continues,

"What’s going on in Iran today – a sustained campaign of terrorism directed against civilians and government installations alike – is proof positive that nothing has really changed much in Washington, as far as U.S. policy toward Iran is concerned. We are on a collision course with Tehran, and both sides know it. Obama’s public "reaching out" to the Iranians is a fraud of epic proportions. While it’s true that our covert terrorist attacks on Iran were initiated under the Bush regime, under Obama we’re seeing no letup in these sorts of incidents; if anything, they’ve increased in frequency and severity."

Days before the Iranian election, a suicide-bomber killed at least 25 people, and wounded over 125 others, inside a prominent Shi'a mosque in the city of Zahedan, in the southeast province of Sistan-Baluchistan. The rebel Sunni group, Jundallah, which is linked to the US, claimed responsibility for the blast, which was immediately followed up by attacks on banks, water-treatment facilities, and other key installations in and around Zahedan, including a strike against the local campaign headquarters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Last year, Jundallah ( which is committed to establishing a Baluchi Islamic state in southeastern Iran and parts of Pakistan and one of whose founding members is allegedly the infamously waterboarded al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) kidnapped 16 Iranian policemen and videotaped their execution. There was also recently an attempted bombing of an Iranian airplane, which took off from the southwestern city of Ahvaz on the Iraqi border, which has a heavily Arab population. These recent events add up to what Raimondo refers to as "a small-scale insurgency" arising in Iran’s southern provinces.

Both the White House and State Department immediately denounced these attacks and denied any involvement in what they called "recent terrorist attacks inside Iran." Furthermore, there were reports that the Obama administration was considering adding Jundallah to the State's Department's list of terrorist organizations. However, analyst Steve Weissman notes, "the administration suddenly backed away from making the terrorist designation or from otherwise indicating that it would stop the destabilization campaign."

(Incidentally, one of the only two provinces in Iran that went for Mousavi last Friday was Sistan-Baluchistan and crowds of about 2,000 people have taken to the streets in Ahvaz since the election.)

Support for Jundallah - which in what could be the result of a savvy public relations suggestion by the Pentagon, recently changed its name to the Iranian People's Resistance Movement - is just one way the United States has worked to foment an anti-Iranian united front within the country on the verge of the Presidential elections. As such, we are told, "the U.S. is, in effect, conducting a secret war against Tehran, a covert campaign aimed at recruiting Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities – who make up the majority of the population in certain regions, such as in the southeast borderlands near Pakistan – into a movement to topple the government in Tehran, or, at least, to create so much instability that U.S. intervention to 'keep order' in the region is justified."

Ken Timmerman, the executive director of the right-wing Foundation for Democracy in Iran, which is the Persian Service of Voice of America (VOA), "spilled the beans on activities of the other arm of US meddling overseas, the obscenely mis-named National Endowment for Democracy, in a piece written one day before the election," McAdams tells us. Timmerman apparently stated that “there’s the talk of a 'green revolution' in Tehran," prompting McAdams to "wonder where that 'talk' was coming from. Timmerman did not appear to be writing from Iran." McAdams continues,

Timmerman went on to write, with admirable candor and honesty, that:

“The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting ‘color’ revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.

“Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.”

Yes, you say, but what does a blow-hard propagandist like Timmerman know about such things? Well, he should know! His very spooky Foundation for Democracy in Iran has its own snout deep in the trough of NED’s “open covert actions” against the Iranian government.

How does the “Foundation for Democracy in Iran” seek to “promote democracy” in Iran with our tax dollars? Foundation co-founder Joshua Muravchik gives us a hint in his subtly-titled LA Times piece, “Bomb Iran.”

Additionally, Weissman warns of Timmerman's devious sincerity: "Please note that this comes from a very involved right-wing critic who personally knows the expatriate Iranian community," he writes. "It is impossible to know how much government money went to these groups, since Congress has purposely exempted the National Endowment for Democracy from having to make public how it spends taxpayer money."

Even more recently, commentator Stephen Lendman reports that former Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beig told Pasto Radio on June 15 that "undisputed" intelligence proves CIA interference in the internal affairs of Iran. "The documents prove that the CIA spend $400 million inside Iran to prop up a colorful-hollow revolution following the election" and to incite regime change for a pro-Western government.

So, are we finally seeing that $400 million pay off in Iran this past week?

There are plenty of clues that reveal the Iranian street protests we're seeing daily in the news may not be all we're told they are. Indeed, the sheer numbers of protesters are impressive and anyone who feels that an injustice has occurred should certainly take to the streets - and not be subject to any sort of police brutality - but much of what we've seen and heard in the past two weeks shows signs of orchestration and bears fingerprints of foreign manipulation.

Many of the protesters we have seen are well-dressed westernized young people in Tehran who are carrying signs written in English, reading, “Where is My Vote?” and other such slogans in English. If the young voters of Iran were addressing their frustrations to their own government, why weren't they speaking the same language? Protesters seen in many YouTube videos and interviewed on American television also speak perfect English. An early message received through a social networking site after the election, sent to the National Iranian American Council and subsequently reported by the American media, came from (allegedly) an Iranian in Tehran. It read:

“I am in Tehran. Its 3:40 in the morning. I’ve connected with you [by hacking past the government filter]. It’s a big mess here. People are yelling from their houses – ‘death to the dictator.’ They are setting up a military government. No one dares to go out. No one has seen Mousavi today. Rumor has it that they have arrested him. I don’t have an email but I will contact you again.

Help us.”

The idea of an Iranian, aware of the long history of US interference in Iranian affairs, beseeching an audience in America for "help" is, to put it lightly, dubious.

(The same should definitely be said about a recent OpEd featured in the New York Times last Sunday which was supposedly written by "a student in Iran." The article, clearly hoping to galvanize the American readership into strongly supporting pro-Mousavi protesters against the Iranian government, was almost surreal. In it, the author - curiously named "Shane M." which is perhaps the least Iranian name ever - denies the accuracy of pre-election polling by writing, "let’s not cloud the results with numbers that were, like bagels, stale a week later." Later, he describes a scene from the widespread pre-election pro-Mousavi street parties in Tehran, including this observation: "A girl hung off the edge of a car window “Dukes of Hazzard” style." What possible young "Iranian student" would casually reference bagels and Dukes of Hazzard is beyond me, but I can probably think of a few CIA agents that may enjoy both.)

As for the widespread claim, published in nearly every major newspaper, that Mousavi had been disappeared, imprisoned, or put under house arrest, it obviously wasn't true considering that the very next day Mousavi was addressing a crowd of tens of thousands in the middle of Tehran from the roof of his car.

Furthermore, the chants we hear of “death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad” don't make much sense coming from Iranian citizens. As Paul Craig Roberts points out, "Every Iranian knows that the President of Iran is a public figure with limited powers. His main role is to take the heat from the governing grand Ayatollah. No Iranian, and no informed westerner, could possibly believe that Ahmadinejad is a dictator. Even Ahmadinejad’s superior, Khamenei, is not a dictator as he is appointed by a government body that can remove him." Roberts goes on to say,

The demonstrations, like those in 1953, are intended to discredit the Iranian government and to establish for Western opinion that the government is a repressive regime that does not have the support of the Iranian people. This manipulation of opinion sets up Iran as another Iraq ruled by a dictator who must be overthrown by sanctions or an invasion.

Early reports of the Tehran rallies revealed that pro-Mousavi protesters were throwing rocks at Iranian police and security forces, as well as burning police motorcycles, city buses, and even private and government buildings. In contrast, we also heard of riot police beating protesters, gas and water cannons being used on crowds, and Basiji paramilitary groups opening fire on peaceful demonstrators. Even though Iranian officials have blamed recent street violence on Mousavi supporters and marchers point to pro-government gangs, accusing them of staging incidents in order to justify further "crackdown" of dissent, the truth may be even more sinister. As one pro-Mousavi protester, who has taken part in every single march so far this week, told Newsweek, "I think some small terrorist groups and criminal gangs are taking advantage of the situation." American money well-spent, perhaps.

According to the national intelligence services, a group of US-linked terrorists who had planned to set off twenty explosions in Tehran were discovered. Nevertheless a bomb still went off near the shrine of Iran's revolutionary founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, killing one and injuring two.

Despite the rise in violence in the past week, Khamenei has consistently differentiated between what he believes are rebel groups and non-political protesters and "the electoral fans and supporters" of Mousavi. He is quoted as saying that "those who devastate the public assets and private belongings of the people are carrying out the aggressive actions without any political purposes" and urged the defeated presidential candidates to utilize "legal venues" to voice their complaints. Khamenei stated, "the destiny of elections would be determined on the ballots, not on the palm of the streets."

Officials in the Iranian government are well-aware, and appropriately suspicious, of foreign meddling in their domestic affairs. Ali Larijani, the pragmatic, moderate conservative Speaker of Parliament and frequent Ahmadinejad opponent, said recently in a live televised speech, "those who under the mask of political fans of a certain movement or candidate impose damages to the public properties or paralyze the daily life of ordinary people are not among the protestors who want their votes to be virtuously preserved," adding that "the liberty of demonstrations should be respected, and those who are in charge of issuing certifications to legitimize the protesting rallies should cooperate and issue them constructively."

The Western media is certainly not helping matters. It should be remembered, first off, that both the BBC and New York Times played important roles in the 1953 overthrow. Bill Van Auken's The New York Times and Iran: Journalism as State Provocation tells us of the documentation of journalism as the media arm of the imperial state, including the direct military participation of one of its CIA-connected reporters in the coup against Mossadegh:

In 1953, [the New York Times] correspondent in Tehran, Kennett Love, was not only a willing conduit for CIA disinformation, but also acknowledged participating directly in the coup. He subsequently wrote of giving an Iranian Army tank column instructions to attack Mossadegh's house. Afterwards, the Times celebrated the coup and demanded unconditional support for the Shah’s regime.

The BBC is known to have spearheaded Britain's own propaganda campaign, broadcasting the code word ("exactly") that launched the coup d'état itself. Even the rise and importance of new media has to be viewed critically - something Western journalists aren't very good at. CNN recently created a new disclaimer icon to account for all the "unverified" material they've been broadcasting 'round the clock in their effort to stand with protesters and against the Iranian government.

The Iranian "twitter boom" has, to a certain extent, been engineered by a small group of anti-Ahmadinejad advocates in the United States and Israel. Whereas media organizations excitedly report about young Iranians twittering away on the streets of Tehran, it's clear that most of the activity is simply Americans "tweeting" amongst themselves. Nevertheless, the US government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime for maintenance so that tweeting from Iran could go uninterrupted. But, of course, this isn't meddling. Additionally, Caroline McCarthy of CNET News reports that "Users from around the world are resetting the location data in their profiles to Tehran, the capital of Iran, in order to confuse Iranian authorities who may be attempting to use the microblogging tool to track down opposition activity." While I'm not sure about "confusing" Iranian authorities, I am sure that actions like this serve to overhype the scope, reach, and importance of social networking and alternative media in Iranian politics and activism. The voices of the Iranian people should, of course, be heard and listened to - but the twittering mass of American, European, and Israeli support can hardly be said to speak on behalf of the Iranian public.

This disingenuous statement of President Obama may offer us some insight. In the early days of the post-election protests, he said, "It is not productive, given the history of US and Iranian relations to be seen as meddling in Iranian elections."

American meddling, Mr. Obama? Never! Especially not when our government is responsible for thirty years of sanctions, overt and covert operations designed to weaken one of the only countries that has ever successfully stood up to American imperialism in the face of aggressive efforts to foment dissent and promote regime change.

* * * * *
Please also read Jeremy R. Hammond's exceptional piece on Foreign Policy Journal, entitled "Has the U.S. Played a Role in Fomenting Unrest During Iran's Election?"

This article also appeared at Nima Shirazi's blog, Wide Asleep in America.

In a micro-blogging world, caution needed on macro of #iranelection
By Maha Zimmo / June 26, 2009

In a world when technology allows information to spread as a global wildfire and when our attentions are turned to the TinyURL, it becomes easy to miss the macro politics that may be playing out within a given political situation.

Among the calls for reform in Iran, there is great opposition and dissent amongst the reformists themselves. We need to be cautious when we are told to believe it is a case of black and white, without shades of grey, a case of Ahmadinejad vs Mousavi.

The dominant force in the opposition is the one that wishes to bring reforms to the ruling regime in Iran for the purpose of strengthening and sustaining this very regime. This is the movement that has been -- and may still be -- led by Rafsanjani and Khatemi, two past presidents who remain among the strongest pillars of the Iranian regime. To argue that this began as the platform for a ‘revolution’ is as sound as arguing that I am a brunette and therefore need a nap, thank you and good night.

The brutally violent response to the demonstrators may prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and which takes us into the beginnings of a full-blown revolution, one focused on doing away with Ahmadinejad, but not necessarily the regime itself. Some astute observers have noted that what’s happening is more like a civil rights movement than a pre-revolutionary situation.

What is not up for discussion here is whether Iran needs a revolution, as this is a call not to be made by you or I, but rather only by the citizenry of the country itself. Also not up for discussion is that we must always stand in solidarity with brutalized demonstrators of any country (regardless if they are representative of the minority or majority).

The nuances

Slowly surfacing is that there are many other groups participating in these opposition rallies (both inside and outside of Iran), who do not share the same objectives as the dominant forces in the opposition. In many instances, the variances are quite large and range from a complete reformation yet protection of the existing political system, to the fantastical demand of the return of the Shah, to the hope of overthrowing the entire regime, to the simple demand of replacing one leader by another, to completely shedding the veil of a theocracy etc., ad infinitum.

Should the current political situation become the foundation of an actual revolution, then the possible absence of cohesion among the reformists may cause chaos, instability and great civil unrest within Iran for years to come. Chaos, instability and great civil unrest are not the intent of the reformist movement; anyone who would argue that does indeed require a snooze.

For the love of conspiracy

Some might consider it a conspiracy theory the claim that many of the alleged Twitter feeds from Iran were in fact all opened on the same day and from inside of the State of Israel, the argument being that the Mossad has been partly responsible for fanning the flames that may lead to the instability of Iran. If this is in fact true, then there are two main possible explanations for this interference: (1) this is being done in order to divert attention away from Israel’s criminal actions and oppression of the Palestinian people, of which we saw even more horrible images than what we are currently witnessing in Iran; and/or (2) The destabilization of Iran, and the subsequent possibly immediate affects on Syria and Lebanon.

Some might consider it a conspiracy theory the claim that the misrepresentation of that which is being hailed as a ‘revolution,’ does in fact serve, to the greatest interest, the political machinations of the American neo-conservative movement. But before calling it a conspiracy theory, consider the reality that as I type, the pressure on Obama -- from the conservative right -- to render null his campaign promise to engage in a dialogue with Iran persists, increases and may soon become the rallying call of well-meaning everyday folk. Our cries for ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ in Iran are the same rhetoric utilized by the American right power elite when they demand that Obama “stand for democracy” and “be on the right side of history” taking a stronger stand against Iran.

Stronger stand, how? Tossing a missile or two at ‘targeted’ regime-only locations (no civilians will die, we promise) within Iran, free Iran? (we heart Google Earth); advancing the cause of freedom and democracy in the Middle East begins with ensuring the success of a free Iran?

My apologies, there. Forgive that minor lapse of memory and the fact that I have just misquoted; it appears I am in fact brunette and therefore require a nap. Because actually, the transcript of the speech reads "advancing the cause of freedom and democracy in the Middle East begins with ensuring the success of a free Iraq."

Conspiracy theory indeed. As conspiratorial as the idea of war-for-profit; as conspiratorial as the idea that torture is institutionalized behavior within the US military; and as conspiratorial as the notion that America’s is a rogue state.

The Empire always conspires, and no less so when people are taking to the streets with great courage to express legitimate grievances. But this doesn’t mean those of us opposed to the machinations of the U.S and Israeli right should be silent.

We can support the call for civil liberties and civil rights in Iran: the right to organize, to assemble, dissent, and to vote for whomever they choose. And, yes, even the right to tweet, so long as we remain vigilant about the macro geo politics as well.

[Maha Zimmo is a political analyst whose areas of concentration are the Middle East, Islam and the international legal system. She received her Master of Arts from the Department of Law at Carleton University.]

Source / Rabble

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Alan Haber : Exposing the Dark Forces

As long as these forces operate, and are not pursued, there is no democracy, whatever the window dressings.

By Alan Haber / The Rag Blog / June 25, 2009

See ‘Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?’ by Shane O’Sullivan, Below.

I was stuck by the concluding paragraph in the article below from 2006 –- about the CIA and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy -- about the relevance now of this old story. Robert Kennedy's 81st birthday would have been last Sunday

My mind was on Iran. I was thinking we (such American movement as we are) should keep the focus on the United States’ role, grievous problems with our own elections, human rights, and covert operations and operators. Then I see this article, which underscores for me an urgency here to go after and expose the dark forces in this government, past and present, continuing to operate, both the covert ones connected with assassinations and coups, etc, and the overt ones like wars of choice in Iraq, and arming Israeli attacks on Palestine.

As long as these forces operate, and are not pursued, there is no democracy, whatever the window dressings. The Iranian democracy in the streets should be a spur to our own struggle, to root out the powers behind the powers here. Full investigations, no statute of limitations on criminal politics, no praise to the secret keepers, accountability forever. Here and Iran, both. Here, as there, the powers privatize the commons and steal the national wealth.

I hope those seeking a more open society can prevail in Iran. Moussavi and the other challengers will become captive to the increasingly principled -- meaning radical -- demands of the movement. Such insurgencies were put down in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, China. In other places they overwhelmed national authority, and stirred the people's desire to be free. I heard an Iranian student say, on a phone broadcast, "This is our best chance to be free. If we fail, it will be a long time before we have a chance again."

When the freedom call merges with "god is great," it can be a powerful force indeed: an underground organized from the rooftops. The people are furious, it can lead to an awakening of consciousness, rethinking everything, until there is no going back. Iranian young people chanting and marching against the government and for respect (drawing praise from the right wing government in Israel and the American right also).

I hope the youth of Palestine and in America take it to heart, that the voice of the youth be heard.

Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?

In 1968, Robert Kennedy seemed likely to follow his brother, John, into the White House. Then, on June 6, he was assassinated -- apparently by a lone gunman. But the author says he has evidence implicating three CIA agents in the murder.

By Shane O’Sullivan

[This article was originally published by The Guardian on Nov. 20, 2006. It was reposted on The Sixties website on June 21, 2009.]

At first, it seems an open-and-shut case. On June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy wins the California Democratic primary and is set to challenge Richard Nixon for the White House. After midnight, he finishes his victory speech at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles and is shaking hands with kitchen staff in a crowded pantry when 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan steps down from a tray-stacker with a "sick, villainous smile" on his face and starts firing at Kennedy with an eight-shot revolver.

As Kennedy lies dying on the pantry floor, Sirhan is arrested as the lone assassin. He carries the motive in his shirt-pocket (a clipping about Kennedy's plans to sell bombers to Israel) and notebooks at his house seem to incriminate him. But the autopsy report suggests Sirhan could not have fired the shots that killed Kennedy. Witnesses place Sirhan's gun several feet in front of Kennedy, but the fatal bullet is fired from one inch behind. And more bullet-holes are found in the pantry than Sirhan's gun can hold, suggesting a second gunman is involved. Sirhan's notebooks show a bizarre series of "automatic writing" -- "RFK must die RFK must be killed -- Robert F Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68" - and even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember shooting Kennedy. He recalls "being led into a dark place by a girl who wanted coffee," then being choked by an angry mob. Defence psychiatrists conclude he was in a trance at the time of the shooting and leading psychiatrists suggest he may have be a hypnotically programmed assassin.

Three years ago, I started writing a screenplay about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, caught up in a strange tale of second guns and "Manchurian candidates" (as the movie termed brainwashed assassins). As I researched the case, I uncovered new video and photographic evidence suggesting that three senior CIA operatives were behind the killing. I did not buy the official ending that Sirhan acted alone, and started dipping into the nether-world of "assassination research," crossing paths with David Sanchez Morales, a fearsome Yaqui Indian.

Morales was a legendary figure in CIA covert operations. According to close associate Tom Clines, if you saw Morales walking down the street in a Latin American capital, you knew a coup was about to happen. When the subject of the Kennedys came up in a late-night session with friends in 1973, Morales launched into a tirade that finished: "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." From this line grew my odyssey into the spook world of the 60s and the secrets behind the death of Bobby Kennedy.

Working from a Cuban photograph of Morales from 1959, I viewed news coverage of the assassination to see if I could spot the man the Cubans called El Gordo -- The Fat One. Fifteen minutes in, there he was, standing at the back of the ballroom, in the moments between the end of Kennedy's speech and the shooting. Thirty minutes later, there he was again, casually floating around the darkened ballroom while an associate with a pencil moustache took notes.

The source of early research on Morales was Bradley Ayers, a retired US army captain who had been seconded to JM-Wave, the CIA's Miami base in 1963, to work closely with chief of operations Morales on training Cuban exiles to run sabotage raids on Castro. I tracked Ayers down to a small town in Wisconsin and emailed him stills of Morales and another guy I found suspicious -- a man who is pictured entering the ballroom from the direction of the pantry moments after the shooting, clutching a small container to his body, and being waved towards an exit by a Latin associate.

Ayers' response was instant. He was 95% sure that the first figure was Morales and equally sure that the other man was Gordon Campbell, who worked alongside Morales at JM-Wave in 1963 and was Ayers' case officer shortly before the JFK assassination.

I put my script aside and flew to the US to interview key witnesses for a documentary on the unfolding story. In person, Ayers positively identified Morales and Campbell and introduced me to David Rabern, a freelance operative who was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion force in 1961 and was at the Ambassador hotel that night. He did not know Morales and Campbell by name but saw them talking to each other out in the lobby before the shooting and assumed they were Kennedy's security people. He also saw Campbell around police stations three or four times in the year before Robert Kennedy was shot.

This was odd. The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and Morales was stationed in Laos in 1968. With no secret service protection for presidential candidates in those days, Kennedy was guarded by unarmed Olympic decathlete champion Rafer Johnson and football tackler Rosey Grier -- no match for an expert assassination team.

Trawling through microfilm of the police investigation, I found further photographs of Campbell with a third figure, standing centre-stage in the Ambassador hotel hours before the shooting. He looked Greek, and I suspected he might be George Joannides, chief of psychological warfare operations at JM-Wave. Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigating the death of John F Kennedy.

Ed Lopez, now a respected lawyer at Cornell University, came into close contact with Joann-des when he was a young law student working for the committee. We visit him and show him the photograph and he is 99% sure it is Joannides. When I tell him where it was taken, he is not surprised: "If these guys decided you were bad, they acted on it.

We move to Washington to meet Wayne Smith, a state department official for 25 years who knew Morales well at the US embassy in Havana in 1959-60. When we show him the video in the ballroom, his response is instant: "That's him, that's Morales." He remembers Morales at a cocktail party in Buenos Aires in 1975, saying Kennedy got what was coming to him. Is there a benign explanation for his presence? For Kennedy's security, maybe? Smith laughs. Morales is the last person you would want to protect Bobby Kennedy, he says. He hated the Kennedys, blaming their lack of air support for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

We meet Clines in a hotel room near CIA headquarters. He does not want to go on camera and brings a friend, which is a little unnerving. Clines remembers "Dave" fondly. The guy in the video looks like Morales but it is not him, he says: "This guy is fatter and Morales walked with more of a slouch and his tie down." To me, the guy in the video does walk with a slouch and his tie is down.

Clines says he knew Joannides and Campbell and it is not them either, but he fondly remembers Ayers bringing snakes into JM-Wave to scare the secretaries and seems disturbed at Smith's identification of Morales. He does not discourage our investigation and suggests others who might be able to help. A seasoned journalist cautions that he would expect Clines "to blow smoke," and yet it seems his honest opinion.

As we leave Los Angeles, I tell the immigration officer that I am doing a story on Bobby Kennedy. She has seen the advertisements for the new Emilio Estevez movie about the assassination, Bobby. "Who do you think did it? I think it was the Mob," she says before I can answer.

"I definitely think it was more than one man," I say, discreetly.

Morales died of a heart attack in 1978, weeks before he was to be called before the HSCA. Joannides died in 1990. Campbell may still be out there somewhere, in his early 80s. Given the positive identifications we have gathered on these three, the CIA and the Los Angeles Police Department need to explain what they were doing there. Lopez believes the CIA should call in and interview everybody who knew them, disclose whether they were on a CIA operation and, if not, why they were there that night.

Today would have been Robert Kennedy's 81st birthday. The world is crying out for a compassionate leader like him. If dark forces were behind his elimination, it needs to be investigated

Source / The Sixties

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Neda and the Kent State 4 : Heartbreaking Then and Now

(Above) Neda Agha-Soltan, 27, who bled to death on the streets of Tehran, Saturday, June 20, 2009. Still shot from video taken with cell phone and posted to YouTube. (Below) Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway, kneeling over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller after he was shot by the National Guard during demonstrations at Kent State, May 4, 1970. He was one of four students killed. Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by John Filo from Wikipedia.
Four dead in Ohio...
Heartbreaking then and now

Just as it is unlikely anyone will ever be prosecuted for the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, no one has ever been prosecuted for the murders at Kent State or Jackson State.

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / June 25, 2009

President Obama responded to a question at his June 23 press conference that he was “appalled and outraged” by the violence following the controversial electoral outcome in Iran.

Asked specifically about Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, a bystander at the protests whose shooting death on a Tehran street has been blamed on Iran governmental forces and is the subject of a widely-circulated video, Obama responded it is “heartbreaking.” He went on to say “I think that anybody who sees it knows that there’s something fundamentally unjust about that.”

This eminently reasonable assessment can be contrasted with official opinion in the wake of the fatal shooting of four students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. None of the four students killed by the Ohio National Guard on that day, Allison Krause, who had just turned 19, Jeffrey Miller, 20, Sandy Scheuer, 21, or William Schroeder, 19, were armed. Two, Scheuer and Schroeder, like Neda Agha-Soltan, were not participants in the demonstration, they just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then-President Richard Nixon expressed no sense of fundamental injustice. According to his official statement, “This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.” Characteristically, then-Vice President Spiro Agnew went even further, assigning blame to a “calculated, consistent, and well-publicized barrage of criticism against the principles of this nation.”

These statements are not wholly inconsistent with what Iranian Supreme Leader Sayyed Ali Khameini had to say about the protests in his country: “I have insisted and will insist on implementing the law in issues related to the presidential election, and the Islamic system and people will not give in to pressure at any cost.”

On May 15, 1970, two African-American students at Jackson State University, Phillip Gibbs, 21, and James Green, 17, were shot and killed in similar circumstances. Again, these slayings elicited no official sense of fundamental injustice.

Let us hope we now have an administration more attuned to injustice than that of Nixon and Agnew. Will the spotlight be fixed on injustice in Iran while turning a blind eye to injustice at home or elsewhere?

Just as it is unlikely anyone will ever be prosecuted for the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, no one has ever been prosecuted for the murders at Kent State or Jackson State.

Nor are there any indications that any indictments for crimes against humanity in the “war on terror” are likely.

We must insist there be no double standard. Accountability applies to our own government as well as others.

President Obama concluded his remarks about the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan with the observation, “While this loss is raw and extraordinarily painful we also know this: those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.”

[Sources: alancanfora.com; Charles A. Thomas Papers -- KSU May 4 Collection; Helen Kennedy, “President Obama Calls Iranian Martyr Neda’s Death ‘heartbreaking’,” NY Daily News, June 23, 2009; I.F. Stone, The Killings at Kent State: How Murder Went Unpunished, NY: New York Review of Books, 1970; “Leader Says People Won’t Yield to Lawlessness,” Tehran Times, June 25, 2009.]

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How to Rig an Election : See Florida, Ohio and Iran

Good question! Demonstrator at June 17, 2009, Austin rally protesting the Iranian elections. Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
OOPS! We rigged the Iran/Florida-Ohio vote count AGAIN!!

The chief difference between Iran 2009 and Ohio 2004 -- and Florida 2000 -- is in the opposition. Iran's Mir Hussein Mousavi has vowed martyrdom.

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2009

Iran's Ayatollahs have just admitted that in some 50 cities there were as many as 3 million more votes cast than there were voters in the recent presidential election.

But, they say, that's not enough to change the outcome. So, like Florida in 2000 and Ohio 2004, there will be no total recount and no new election. Election theft should be opposed, whether it's sanctioned by a supreme Ayatollah or the U.S. Supreme Court.

It's as if the Iranian government is being advised by Ohio's former Iman J. Kenneth Blackwell, who, as Ohio's 2004 Secretary of State, purged hundreds of thousands of voters, and stole, switched and disappeared enough votes to put George W. Bush in the White House for a second term. The dubious Iranian tallies look very similar to the inflated Bush outcomes in 12 Republican southwest Ohio counties, most notably Warren, Clermont and Butler. They are reminiscent of the vote counts in two precincts in Perry County that reported turnouts of 121% and 118% of registered voters.

The chief difference between Iran 2009 and Ohio 2004 -- and Florida 2000 -- is in the opposition. Iran's Mir Hussein Mousavi has vowed martyrdom.

John Kerry, trailing in Ohio by just 130,000 votes with more than 250,000 yet to be counted, walked away less than 12 hours after exit polls showed him a clear victor.

Gore fought a little, but instead of embracing martyrdom, opted for boredom, and for making sure there was no challenge in the U.S. Senate to the votes stolen.

Nationwide, Bush's alleged 3 million-vote nationwide margin in 2004, and 600 votes in Florida 2000, were as fictional as those ballots the Ayatollahs now admit should not exist.

Moussavi believes he has a date with destiny. But Kerry apparently had one on the golf course. Gore's failure to effectively respond in Florida 2000 remains an inconvenient truth.

Blackwell, Florida's Jeb Bush and Iran's Revolutionary Guard used registration tampering, disinformation, intimidation and fraud to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters before the balloting.

Blackwell and Bush then used a lethal mix of black box machines, faulty scantrons and hijacked ballots to finish the job. Blackwell worked with Diebold, ES&S, Triad, and other electronic magicians that let him disappear or switch all the votes he needed with a few keystrokes at around 2am election night. His high-tech IT henchman, Michael Connell, has since died in a mysterious plane crash.

The Times seems to finally understand the problem. In their July 22 editorial, "How to Trust Electronic Voting," they argued the following: "In paperless electronic voting, voters mark their choices, and when the votes have all been cast, the machine spits out the results. There is no way to be sure that a glitch or intentional vote theft –- by malicious software or computer hacking –- did not change the outcome. If there's a close election, there's also no way of conducting a meaningful recount."

Saddled with paper ballots that may or may not still exist, the Iranian authorities have simply trashed the whole election. "I don't think they actually counted the votes," one observer told the New York Times.

Because the American people did not take to the streets in the Iranian model, our democracy was subverted.

Thanks to Kerry and Gore, the public follow-up in Ohio and Florida was ineffective. As in Iran, the primary reporting has been largely limited to the Internet. The results -- eight years of George W. Bush -- speak for themselves.

But in the U.S., a nationwide election protection movement has arisen that protected the results in 2008, and that could make all the difference for the future of American democracy.

The Iranian people are speaking for themselves, and for the finest principles of democracy. For confirmation and inspiration, they need only look at America 2000-2008 to see the consequences of an unelected government.

[Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection. Bob's Fitrakis Files is at FreePress.org, where this article also appears. Harvey Wasserman's History of the U.S. is at harveywasserman.com.]

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Steve Weissman : U.S. and Iran: Nonviolence 101

Was there meddling in the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine in 2004-2005?
Iran: Nonviolence 101

Washington's promotion of nonviolent resistance in other countries is already casting suspicion on a number of activists and thinkers who, wittingly or not, have allowed themselves to become pawns in open -- and covert -- programs to 'promote democracy.'

By Steve Weissman / June 22, 2009

Peter Ackerman and Ramin Ahmadi called the revolution on January 4, 2006, in an article in the International Herald Tribune with the prophetic title "Iran's Future? Watch the Streets."

"Against all odds, nonviolent tactics such as protests and strikes have gradually become common in Iran's domestic political scene," they wrote. "Student activists have frequently resorted to, and the violent response of the regime and repeated attacks of the paramilitaries have not succeeded in silencing them."

Iran's medical professionals, teachers, workers, bus drivers and women were also using non-violent tactics such as protests, industrial action, and hunger strikes in their fight for equal rights and civil liberties, the authors reported.

These "uncoordinated actions" had created "a grass-roots movement ... waiting to be roused," urged Ackerman and Ahmadi. But, "its cadres so far lack a clear strategic vision and steady leadership."

Where would the Iranians find this vision and leadership?

"Nongovernmental organizations around the world should expand their efforts to assist Iranian civil society, women's groups, unions and journalists," the authors wrote. But, they left out a salient fact. In a chilling mix of Mahatma Gandhi and James Bond, Ackerman and Ahmadi themselves were already working with the United States government to engineer regime change in Iran.

A Wall Street whiz kid who made his fortune in leveraged buy-outs, the billionaire Ackerman was chair of Freedom House, a hotbed of neo-con support for American intervention just about everywhere. In this pursuit, he has promoted the use of nonviolent civil disobedience in American-backed "color revolutions" from Serbia to the Ukraine, Georgia, and Venezuela, where it failed.

Ahmadi teaches medicine at Yale and co-founded the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, using initial grants of $1.6 million in 2004 from the U.S. Department of State, according to The New York Times. Washington reportedly continued its open-handed support in succeeding years, allowing the center to publicize the abuses of the Ayatollahs in English and Farsi.

Ahmadi and the center also ran regular workshops for Iranians on nonviolent civil disobedience. These were in Dubai, across the straits from Iran. Some of the sessions operated under the name Iranian Center for Applied Nonviolence and included a session on popular revolts around the world, especially the "color revolutions."

According to The Times, at least two members of the Serbian youth movement Otpor participated, as did the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which Peter Ackerman founded and chaired. The sessions taught the Iranian participants how to use Hushmail, an encrypted e-mail account, and Martus software to upload information about human rights abuses without leaving any trace on the originating computer.

"We were certain that we would have trouble once we went back to Tehran," said one of the Iranians. "This was like a James Bond camp for revolutionaries."

No one should question the value of nonviolent civil disobedience for those who would bring down an unpopular government. Nor does the American training deny the very real grievances felt by the millions of Iranians who have taken to the streets -- or by the lesser numbers of middle class women who banged pots and pans as part of earlier CIA destabilization programs in Brazil and Chile. Even more important, no one should doubt the courage and commitment of anyone who would stand up against the Ayatollahs and their repressive state power.

But the presence of American involvement adds several dynamics of its own, which Ackerman and Ahmadi failed to explain to their Iranian trainees.

First, the Americans decide where to put their efforts -- and when to stop them. Washington does not fund or provide training and technology for non-violent revolutions against regimes it backs, as in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel or Colombia.

Second, the American meddling makes it easier for the Ayatollahs to build support within their own ranks and among a large majority of the population for whatever repressive measures they finally decide to take.

Third, the nonviolent participants know nothing of other moves that the dark side of the American government might be making at the same time, whether staging acts of provocation, or supporting terrorist activities by breakaway groups such as the Baluchi Jundallah. Nor do the vast majority of participants know that American intelligence regularly uses training sessions of all kinds to recruit individual agents.

Fourth, the Iranian activists want to win. At least some in the America government might prefer to provoke a brutal defeat, a Tiananmen Square, to further isolate Iran and bring pressure within the Obama administration for a military response to the Iranian nuclear program.

Fifth, nonviolent tactics and organizational discipline offer ways to win the support of soldiers and police officers, isolate would be provocateurs, and avoid giving the government any easy excuse to bang heads and kill people. The same techniques also give the organizers ways to turn off the protest, as appears to have happened during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

One other dynamic has more lasting effects. During the Cold War, the CIA funded and manipulated a number of liberal and social democratic intellectuals, labor unions, civil society groups and publications. The CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom and its vast network were perhaps the best known. When journalists at Ramparts and elsewhere exposed the CIA's hand, many of these individuals and groups became discredited for having allowed Cold Warriors and dirty tricksters to use them.

Washington's promotion of nonviolent resistance in other countries is already casting suspicion on a number of activists and thinkers who, wittingly or not, have allowed themselves to become pawns in open -- and covert -- programs to "promote democracy." Nonviolent activists everywhere need to draw a clear line against cooperating with governments of any stripe in this foreign meddling.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France. He is also a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

Source / truthout

Also see Iran and the USA: Who's Diddling Democracy? by Steve Weissman / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2009.

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Tangled Web : Tech and the Struggle in Iran

The War in Cyberspace
Web tangled in Iranian struggle

By Martin J Young / June 20, 2009

HUA HIN, Thailand -- As Iranians attempt to come to terms with the outcome of their recent presidential elections, battle lines are being drawn in cyberspace. The combatants are the government in Tehran with its heavy-handed censorship of the Internet and media in one corner and the ever-increasing numbers of tech-savvy opposition supporters in the other.

Iran is up there with the likes of China, Vietnam, Thailand and North Korea when it comes to Internet censorship prowess, all of which have in recent years jailed Internet users and violated the rights of online free speech. Iran has more than 20 million Internet users, ranking the country second only to Israel in the Middle East in terms of the percentage of its population using the net.

Iran employs an advanced semantic filtering system in conjunction with an official committee responsible for identifying and reporting websites that violate the government's stringent guidelines. These basically target all non-Islamic websites, women's websites, and any that appear to be promoting Western cultural influences, such as movies and music. Every Internet service provider must be approved by both the Telecommunication Company of Iran and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. An estimated 10 million websites have already been blocked, and that was before the recent elections.

The media clampdown intensified as everyone from foreign correspondents to Iranian students took to the Internet to spread the word and share the news as events unfolded on the streets of Tehran this week. Social networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube have become the favored platforms of communication as tracking users on these is not an easy task. The government's only option would be to follow in China's footsteps and block the websites entirely, which it has done for a number of them.

The US government has taken an unusual step by calling on Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance, which would cause a temporary suspension of service and prevent Iranians sharing information. The move could highlight the Barack Obama administration's acknowledgement of the power that social websites have in the organization of protests and the flow of information.

Internet users across the globe have pledged to help Iranians avoid detection and possible arrest by attempting to make it harder for the government to track them. By using proxy servers, they are able to change their web addresses or location settings to make it appear as if they are posting information from outside Iran. This gives the Iranian Internet police a tough job in tracking down the genuine bloggers living inside the country. Sympathizers are also setting up their own proxies to help Iranians bypass government filters.

A proxy is essentially a web server or network that bridges the gap between the user and the destination website by masking the Internet address of either connection. By disguising the Internet address (IP) they can make the connection appear anonymous and thus enable access to otherwise blocked websites.

Popular websites themselves have offered support by providing software and means to bypass the censors in Iran. The Pirate Bay, a high-traffic file sharing site has offered support by temporarily changing its name to Persian Bay and linking to a protest forum it helped to setup. The forum "aims to be a secure and reliable way of communication for Iranians and friends", and offers instructions on how to use proxy servers and access the Internet anonymously along side advice from techies around the world on circumnavigating government blocks.

Websites providing software to surf incognito such as the Tor Project have seen surges in traffic this week and a slew of new sites have appeared offering assistance. The Global Internet Freedom Consortium, or GIF, also provides anti-censorship software and has resumed services to Iran since the election crisis. It predominantly serves China. "Due to the dynamic situation in Iran caused by the election and its protest aftermath, the number of daily 'hits' from Iran has tripled during the past week," said GIF deputy director Shiyu Zhou. The site has experienced server overloads this week from a reported 400,000 unique users accessing it from Iran. GIF last year introduced a Farsi language version of the Freegate software and usage has since surged.

Software solutions such as these have become popular throughout Asia in recent years as more countries stifle the free flow of information over the Internet.

[Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.]

Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd.

Source / Asia Times

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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Iran and the USA : Who's Diddling Democracy?

The Persian Service of Voice of America (VOA) is said to have sided with the anti-Ahmadinejad candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. Photo by AP from BBC News.
Who's Diddling Democracy in Iran?

Does my reading of the tea leaves prove conclusively that the Obama administration was hell-bent on regime change? Not conclusively, but all the evidence points in that direction...

By Steve Weissman / June 21, 2009

Watching the protesters in Tehran, many Americans feel a strong sense of empathy, exhilaration and hope. I strongly share those feelings, especially since I know firsthand the danger the protesters face from government thugs on motorcycles, provocateurs and the secret police. But none of this should blind us to the likelihood that our own government is dangerously meddling in Iran's internal affairs and playing with the lives of those protesters.

Back in 2007, ABC News reported that President George W. Bush had signed a secret "Presidential finding" authorizing the CIA to mount covert "black" operations to destabilize the Iranian government. According to current and former intelligence officials, these operations included "a coordinated campaign of propaganda broadcasts, placement of negative newspaper articles, and the manipulation of Iran's currency and international banking transactions."

In the language of spookery, this was an updated version of the destabilization campaign that the CIA had earlier used to overthrow the progressive government of Salvador Allende in Chile.

The plan had the strong backing of Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Steve Hadley and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams. As ABC noted, Abrams had earlier pled guilty to withholding information from Congress about efforts to destabilize the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the Iran-contra affair of the 1980s.

ABC News also reported that American and Pakistani intelligence were backing a separatist militia of militant Sunni tribesmen from the non-Persian Baluchi region of Iran. The group -- Jundallah (Soldiers of God) -- conducted deadly raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan's Baluchistan Province. Funding for this was reportedly funneled through Iranian exiles with connections in Europe and the Gulf States.

U.S. officials denied any "direct funding" of Jundallah, but admitted regular contact since 2005 with Jundallah's youthful leader Abd el Malik Regi, who was widely reputed to be involved in heroin trafficking from Afghanistan.

"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 US directive, and that can very quickly lead to Iranian retaliation and a cycle of escalation can follow."

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh subsequently confirmed the story, reporting that the Presidential finding focused on "on undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change."

He also reported that the Democratic-controlled Congress had approved up to $400 million to fund the destabilization campaign. "The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations," said Hersh.

"The irony is that we're once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties," he wrote. "Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists."

Flash forward to the new presidency of Barack Obama. Did he and his CIA chief Leon Panetta cancel the destabilization program? Not that I can find. The tea leaves are murky, but they suggest that, so far at least, Team Obama remains wedded to the Bush-Cheney-Abrams destabilization of Iran.

The issue came to a head in the last few weeks. Obama wanted to bring the Iranian regime to the table, and the administration knew through scholars like Selig Harrison that the ayatollahs wanted a signal that the new president would stop supporting terrorists within Iran. At the end of May, the chance to send that signal came when Jundallah claimed credit for a suicide bombing that killed 25 people and injured as many as 125 others at a prominent Shiite mosque in the southeastern city of Zahedan.

Both the White House and State Department immediately denounced the bombing and denied any involvement in what Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs explicitly called "recent terrorist attacks inside Iran."

Several news articles then reported that the administration was considering placing Jundallah on the State's Department's list of terrorist organizations, which would have signaled a major shift in policy. But, suddenly, the administration backed away from making the terrorist designation or from otherwise indicating that it would stop the destabilization campaign.

To the contrary, in the build-up to the Iranian election, Washington sharpened its propaganda efforts. According to Ken Timmerman, the executive director of the right-wing Foundation for Democracy in Iran, the Persian Service of Voice of America (VOA) clearly sided with the anti-Ahmadinejad candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi against those dissident groups who wanted to boycott the election entirely, the position Timmerman favored.

Timmerman claims that VOA refused to give the boycotters airtime while giving extensive coverage to a secret fatwa that the Mousavi campaign claim to have discovered, a fatwa that encouraged bureaucrats at the Interior Ministry to do "whatever it takes" to get Ahmadinejad elected.

Timmerman also saw the branding of Mousavi's "green revolution" as evidence that the US government was using its National Endowment for Democracy to support the former prime minister.

"The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting 'color' revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques," Timmerman wrote on the right-wing newsmax.com.

"Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds."

Please note that this comes from a very involved right-wing critic who personally knows the expatriate Iranian community. It is impossible to know how much government money went to these groups, since Congress has purposely exempted the National Endowment for Democracy from having to make public how it spends taxpayer money. Clearly, Congress should begin to ask some tough questions about funding for Mousavi's "green revolution" before any more Iranian protesters are killed.

One other clue is worth considering. The State Department somehow knew that the social-networking site Twitter had intended to close down for maintenance earlier this week during what would have been morning in Tehran. So, as The Washington Post put it, the State Department asked Twitter to delay the scheduled maintenance "to avoid disrupting communications among tech-savvy Iranian citizens as they took to the streets to protest Friday's re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

At first glance, those of us deeply involved in the new technology thought this was great, a serious affirmation of our own importance. But, to the ayatollahs, the State Department's intervention sent a clear signal that the Obama administration was siding with Mousavi's protesters. Ahmadinejad's government, militia and police had all the internal communications they needed. Only the protesters stood to benefit.

Even more compelling, the benefit went to a particular group -- those among the protesters who speak English and particularly those Iranian-Americans working with the National Endowment for Democracy. According to news reports, Twitter does not accept input in Farsi.

Does my reading of the tea leaves prove conclusively that the Obama administration was hell-bent on regime change? Not conclusively, but all the evidence points in that direction, especially now that many extremely reputable scholars are suggesting that Ahmadinejad probably did win more than a majority of the votes cast.

Ahmadinejad is a very bad guy, as I have recently written elsewhere. But our opposition to him does not justify meddling in another country's election while proclaiming "universal democratic values."

Source / truthout / Posted June 18, 2009

The Rag Blog

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