Mana Neyestani comments on the international situation
See also Iran Analysis: Re-Assessing the Explosion at the Revolutionary Guards Base
The Latest from Iran (4 December): When Your Dad is a Political Prisoner
1930 GMT: The Embassy Attacks. In the aftermath of the storming of the British Embassy, international schools in Tehran have closed.
The French school is located on grounds of the British Embassy and children were in class when protesters moved through the compound gates. Windows at the German school nearby were shattered. Teachers at the British school had sent students home early.
Parents have been told that foreign teachers and their families have left Iran. The French school hopes to resume lessons on Sunday, and the British school in the New Year.
1900 GMT: Arresting the President's Men. The President's media advisor Ali Akbar Javanfekr, already sentenced to a year in prison for an issue of his Iran newspaper, has claimed that he was forced to give a controversial interview to the daily newspaper Etemaad.
In the interview, Javanfekr sharply criticised senior clerics and conservatives/principlists who challenged Ahmadinejad. The article led to the banning of Etemaad; the next day, Javanfekr was given his one-year sentence, and the day after that, security forces ransacked the Iran building as they tried to detain the advisor.
Javanfekr did not say who forced him to give the interview.
1850 GMT: Security Watch. Saeed Saeedfar, the head of the information centre of the Tehran police, has confirmed the presence of Special Guards at some points of city. Saeedfar insisted that this was only for safety of mourners during the religious month of Muharram, but the escalation comes two days before National Students Day with its possibility of protests.
1840 GMT: Economy Watch. The Deputy Minister of Economy, Mohammad Reza Farzin, has said 41% of economic actors in Iran avoid paying tax.
Economic analyst Hassan Mansur says the 41% includes entities controlled by the Supreme Leader but also other "powerful people". He claims the data has been known for 10 years.
1830 GMT: Drone Watch. Thanks to James Miller for taking you through the afternoon. Back to find this important development....
The Sentinel is the same kind of stealth high tech drone that was used to monitor the compound during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the sources said.
The sources confirmed the Iranians have the drone, however, they did not say that the Iranians shot down the spy plane, as was reported by Iran's official IRNA news agency.
1750 GMT: Earlier, we reported on how Iran looks pretty confident the European Union won't stop buying oil from Tehran. Well, guess they were right. Reuters reports that the EU might not be able to absorb the shock of cutting Iranian oil supply:
...But diplomats and oil industry insiders say Europe may calculate that even a small rise in oil prices as a result of an introduction of an EU-wide embargo would more than compensate Tehran for any losses from being obliged to re-route displaced supplies to Asia at discounted prices.
"Maybe the aim of sanctions is to help Italy, Spain and Greece to collapse and make the EU a smaller club," one trader joked.
1650 GMT: Journalist Dawood Khudakarami has been released on bail. He was arrested two weeks ago in Zanjan on unspecified charges. He is a civil society activist and contributes to the monthly Babraam.
1610 GMT: There's a great saying in Urdu, "A dead elephant is still worth a lot of money." Even while it's being pressured by the EU and the US, Iran is still using the few cards it has left to threaten its neighbors and far away friends. According to Israeli media, Tehran today warned Hamas that it will cut all ties with the organization if it relocated its headquarters from Damascus, amidst the continued violence in Syria. Ma'an News reports:
Citing unnamed Palestinian sources, the Israeli daily Haaretz said Iran warned it would stop supplying arms and training to Hamas after reports that the Gaza rulers were quietly relocating members out of the Syrian capital.
Diplomats and regional sources said the Hamas delegation in Damascus, which once numbered hundreds of Palestinian officials and their relatives, had shrunk to a few dozen, Reuters reported on Sunday.
Hamas officials deny there has been any change in policy and say they will not interfere in internal Syrian affairs, while Hamas leader Khalid Mashaal remains in the capital.
1550 GMT: Even though Tehran is slowly bleeding EU diplomatic staff thanks to the UK Embassy attack, don't bet on Iranian oil being cut off to the EU. Business Insider reports:.
Iran’s oil minister said he doesn’t expect the European Union, which last week expanded sanctions on the Persian state, to stop buying crude from his country.
There are “some doubts the decision will be taken,” Rostam Qasemi said in Doha, Qatar. “They are very wise.” There are uncertainties about European demand because of the sovereign debt crisis that is affecting the continent, he said.
“The risk of disruptions to oil supplies remains high, after European foreign ministers agreed on Dec. 1 to tighten sanctions against Iran and consider an embargo on Iranian oil imports,” Christophe Barret, a London-based analyst at Credit Agricole SA, said in a report. “This would introduce severe disruption to refining in several EU countries,” it said.
1522 GMT: James Miller takes the blog.
Robert Johnson, of Business Insider, has spent part of the morning looking at the claim, made by the Iranian state press, that Iran has captured a highly-classified American stealth drone. Beyond noting that the Iranian government has produced no evidence of the drone, and beyond noting that the Iranian government produced no evidence of the last drone they claimed to have shot down, and beyond noting that the Iranian government famously faked the evidence of their own military capabilities back in 2008, Johnson notes that there are major holes in this particular story. The Iranian news is claiming that they somehow jammed the signal that navigates the drone, diverting it in order to capture it. The problem? That's not how the drones work:
There are a couple of problems with this story. First, the RQ-170 is likely an autonomously navigated craft, which means there is no operator signal to jam. Second, US drones are programmed to fly a static pattern or even return to base if they lose contact with navigational signals or somehow go haywire.
Sure, backup systems fail, but what these two facts mean together is that if Iran does possess a US drone it is likely a more primitive recon drone, like the one reported missing by the US late last week.
A NATO press release reports that drone went down when operators lost control of the aircraft over "western Afghanistan," the portion of the country sharing a border with Iran.
Johnson also notes that many military-centric blogs, many run by former soldiers or military analysts, was widely dismissed the Iranian claim.
1240 GMT: Currency Watch. The Iranian rial has fallen farther in the last 24 hours, sinking to 13700:1 vs. the US dollar.
An intervention by the Central Bank last week has failed to stop the slide of the currency, which is a record low point and has now dropped almost 6% against the dollar since September.
Gholam-Reza Mesbahi Moghaddam, a leading MP on economic matters, has said the fall in the currency and rising gold prices are not due to sanctions. Claiming that Iran has sufficient foreign reserves, he called on the Central Bank to control "profiteers".
1235 GMT: Subsidy Cuts Watch. Aftab reports that monthly support payments to cover the costs of subsidy cuts will be made today.
The payments were supposed to be distributed by Saturday --- the failure to meet the deadline raised concerns that the Government might not have the necessary funds.
1230 GMT: Elections Watch. Ayatollah Reza Ostadi, a prominent cleric in the religious centre of Qom, has warned that failure to participate in elections --- for example, March's Parliamentary vote --- weakens the nezam (system).
1130 GMT: A Clash in the Southeast. Two Basij militia, linked to the Revolutionary Guards, have been killed near Iranshahr in southeast Iran, an area of Baluch insurgency.
Etedaal attributes the deaths to Sunni-Shi'a conflict.1100 GMT: The Embassy Attack. The "Occupiers of the Den of the Old Fox", the group formed in the aftermath of last week's raid on the British Embassy, has warned police against arrests and threats to Basij students.
The statement comes after Iran Police Chief Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam said the files of 12 people, briefly detained during the takeover, would be turned over to the judiciary for possible prosecution.
1015 GMT: The Embassy Attack. The Daily Telegraph offers some colourful details about the raid on the British Embassy last Tuesday:
The mob, which was several hundred strong, ripped in two a portrait of Queen Victoria by Sir George Hayter worth more than £20,000, a noted portrait artist who was a favourite of the queen’s. The head was cut out of a portrait of Edward VII, while a painting of the Queen was stolen. Other works in the embassy were Tulips and Iris by Cedric Morris, worth an estimated £20,000 and Gloucester Gate, Regent’s Park by Adrian Berg, one of Britain’s most gifted landscape painters. Both are believed to have been lost.
1005 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Journalist and author Farshad Ghorbanpour has been arrested after a raid on his house in Tehran last Thursday.
1000 GMT: Press Watch. More on the ban imposed on the cultural weekly Sokhan Tazeh, which we reported yesterday....
The newspaper, published in Kerman Province in Central Iran, has been imposed by the Ministry of Guidance and Islamic Culture for “provocative topics" and the “indecent” behavior of female journalists.
An official said, “According to the complaint filed at the court, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Batoul Hashemi, is charged with spreading lies and inciting public opinion through publishing topics that promote the practice of corruption. She also published stories that threaten national security."
In addition, the official said, “The journalists in the paper are known for not abiding by the veil and for wearing too much makeup that exceed that permitted limit.”
0840 GMT: The Embassy Attack. The regime may be scrambling amidst the blowback from last week's occupation of the British Embassy, but some politicians are still putting out a tough line --- MP Fatemeh Alia has asserted that London failed miserably in an attempt to incite other countries in a “diplomatic provocation” against Iran after the "spontaneous and sudden" protest at the Embassy.
0805 GMT: Drone Watch. Danger Room puts the Iranian claims in perspective:
Iran frequently announces it has shot down U.S. surveillance drones, but has not, to our knowledge, produced any evidence of the kills. Even if Tehran did bag itself an American war ‘bot, it might not be [the advanced] RQ-170. The editors at Press TV undermined their credibility by running the story with a photo of an entirely different drone than the Beast of Kandahar. [Note: all Iranian media ran the same stock photograph in their Sunday stories.]
Equally dubious is Iran’s insistence that the RQ-170, if that’s what it is, was forced down largely intact by an Iranian army “electronic-warfare unit.” The implication is that the Iranians somehow jammed the command signal beamed to the drone by remote operators.
0755 GMT: Students Day. Students from universities in 10 Iranian cities, including Tehran, have issued a statement for National Students Day on Wednesday: "In the name of freedom, the blood of martyrs, and detained students --- neither prison, torture, nor expulsion from university can stop the student movement."
Students from Elm-o-Sanat University in Tehran have declared, "We are faithful to our alliance with people and Iran. With patience and perseverance, we search for freedom, independence and progress, and justice for our slain colleagues."
0754 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. More than 370 academics inside and outside Iran have called for the release of detained student activists Zia Nabavi and Majid Dorri.
Nabavi and Dorri were detained soon after the 2009 Presidential elections and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Dorri originally received an 11-year term, reduced to six years on appeal.
0739 GMT: The Embassy Attack. Iran's Foreign Ministry was never happy about Tuesday's raid on the British Embassy; with the regime pulling back it looks like that its voice might finally be heard.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Sunday, after a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, that Salehi said he "was deeply sorry for what has happened" and vowed "to do everything to prevent such an incident from happening again".
0730 GMT: Sanctions Watch. Khabar Online posts the full list of the 180 individuals and companies added to the European Union's sanctions list on Thursday. Arshama3's Blog profiles 52 of them.
0515 GMT: There may be some continued fluttering in the media about the Islamic Republic's claim on Sunday that it had brought down an American drone on the Afghanistan border with cyber-warfare. The International Security Assessment Force admitted later in the day that it had lost an aircraft, flying out of western Afghanistan, and was still looking for it.
Beyond that, however, you had to make the leap to say that the drone was actually taken down by the Iranians, especially through a computer seizure of its systems. Iranian media said little after the original, co-ordinated story put out by the military; instead, it notes this morning that a lot of Arab and Western press paid attention to the report.
More effective speculation might be that Tehran learned of the lost aircraft and decided to take advantage with the cyber-warfare story, especially in the aftermath of Tuesday's occupation of the British Embassy. An EA correspondent assesses, "The regime is in deadlock because condemning embassy raid would annoy followers, approving it would be diplomatic catastrophe."
Indeed, once you got past the surface excitement of the drone tale, the important narrative was one of Iranian officials pulling back from the endorsement of the attack. Some, like Tehran Friday Prayer leader Ahmad Khatami, did public U-turns; others, like Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani, muted their earlier cheerleading. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continued to say nothing at all.
The drone alert was a convenient but short-lived --- that is, if the Iranians do not provide physicial evidence that they have the aircraft, which they claimed was intact --- diversion from the regime's predicament. Their Embassy in Britain shut down, and Tuesday's ill-considered gamble has only increased the chances of international pressure upon them, as they face a fragile economy.