2100 GMT: Chahrshanbeh Suri. An activist reports a conversation with a relative in Gisha in Tehranm, who said basiji were roaming the streets on their bikes and tried to stop people celebrating. Told of a report that said nothing political had happened tonight, the relative answered, “In Iran everything is political.”
2010 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. More temporary releases — Behzad Nabavi, a leader of the Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution Party serving a five-year term for “crimes against national security”, and journalist and economist Saeed Laylaz have been freed until 4 April. Laylaz posted $500,000 bail.
2000 GMT: Chahrshanbeh Suri Reza Sayah of CNN reports, via a Tehran witness, that police are spray painting passing cars that toss firecrackers out of windows. Basiji used tasers and batons to chase away 300 partiers near Mehr Park in Farmanieh.
2120 GMT: Mystery of Day. Iranian Labor News Agency reports that Ayatollahs Safi Golpaygani and Javadi-Amoli have met recently.
Given that these meetings between senior clerics are rare, what were the issues that brought the two ayatollahs together? And was there any connection to the clerical disquiet over the Mohammad Amin Valian death sentence?
2045 GMT: Mohareb Trial for Dr Maleki? Iranian Labor News Agency reports that Dr Mohammad Maleki, the first post-1979 Chancellor of Tehran University is being charged with “mohareb” (war against God). Maleki’s lawyer, Mohammad Sharifi said that his client, who is 76 and suffers from prostate cancer, is also charged with links to an outlawed organisation.
2200 GMT: And The Pace Accelerates. Hard to keep up tonight — Mehdi Karroubi’s Etemade Melli party has now made another move for 22 Bahman, following up the cleric’s declarations today with a list of proposals for reconciliation. We have posted them in a separate entry.
2100 GMT: An Extraordinary Offer? We have posted what we think might be a significant move by the “conservative opposition” to the President: an open letter to Mir Hossein Mousavi with the offer, “Back Khamenei and We Can Move Against Ahmadinejad”.
1950 GMT: Another Attack on Ahmadinejad’s Camp. Ayatollah Safi Golpaygani has effectively asked for the President’s Chief of Staff, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, to be put on trial. Once again, the challenge is circulated through the pro-Rafsanjani Ayande News.
1850 GMT: Spoiler Alert. And while Tehran is being encouraging about the draft enrichment agreement, the “Western” campaign to undercut it has already begun.
David Sanger of The New York Times, who seems to hang around in a hallway until a Government official tells him how to interpret a story, has fired the warning shot. After headlining, “Iran Agrees to Draft of Deal on Exporting Nuclear Fuel”, Sanger swings a journalistic hammer at the apparent success. Making clear that “Western suspicions that Iran is secretly developing a nuclear weapon despite its repeated denials”, rather than say, Iran’s approach to the IAEA over its medical research reactor, “are at the heart of the negotiations”, he “reports”:
If the 2,600 pounds of fuel leave Iran in batches…experts warn, Iran would be able to replace it almost as quickly as it leaves the country….The estimate that Iran has about 3,500 pounds of low-enriched uranium “assumes that Iran has accurately declared how much fuel it possesses, and does not have a secret supply,” as one senior European diplomat [French? See 1835 GMT] put it….[President Obama] has not made the cessation of enrichment a prerequisite to talks, and the work is still under way, in violation of three United Nations Security Council resolutions.
Perhaps needless to say, Sanger doesn’t name any of his “experts”. Because this is not an analysis, it’s a scare story. [Remember, it was Sanger who only on Monday was saying that Iran was threatening to walk out of the talks.] You Just Can’t Trust the Big, Bad Iranians.
Well, perhaps not. But I’m not sure You Can Trust the Objective New York Times either.
1835 GMT: Iran Presses Its Nuclear Advantage. Ali Aghbar Soltanieh has offered a revealing summary of the Vienna talks to the Iranian Student News Agency. First, he made clear that Tehran would be holding Moscow close as the talks progressed:
We have announced that we are willing to cooperate with Russia within the framework of an agreement. Although certain other countries, including the U.S. and France, have been mentioned in the draft agreement, the main party in the agreement will be Russia.
Then Iranian diplomats celebrated an apparent victory over France. Not only had Paris been a vehement critic of Iran’s nuclear programme in the run-up to the talks, but Iran — as our readers noticed — has a long-standing grievance against Paris over money paid for pre-1979 nuclear projects that were never completed. According to ISNA, “The French delegation apologized to Iran on Wednesday for their country’s past conduct toward Iran and asked IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei to make an effort to put France back in the draft agreement with Tehran.”
1635 GMT: Not So Quiet Anymore. This may be the most significant piece of news that will go unnoticed this week.
This morning we wrote, “Watch Qom….The Grand Ayatollahs and Ayatollahs — Dastgheib, Bayat-Zanjani, Sane’i, Safi Golpaygani — are pressing for reforms to meet the post-election challenge, and he adds that none of those clerics are fans of Ahmadinejad. Just as significant, they do not operate in a vacuum but interact with secular’ players in the political game.”
Mehr News now reports:
Majlis Cleric Committee members are going to visit Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kanni, MP Mohammad Taqi Rahbar said on Wednesday. The committee members, during their meeting, will discuss the incidents that followed up the June 12 presidential election and the proposal for the establishment of a national election committee, Rahbar, who also heads the committee, added.
The National Election Committee, put forward by 2009 Presidential candidate Mohsen Rezaei, may not be as prominent in discussions as the National Unity Plan, but it has still provoked heated opposition, both from those who think President Ahmadinejad’s legitimacy is being questioned and those who believe it would curb the powers of the Supreme Leader. Conversely, it is galvanising senior clerics who are looking to press their challenge against the post-election abuses of the regime. Read the rest of this entry »
1955 GMT: How to Claim Victory. The Times of London slaps the headline, “Iran bows to sanctions pressure to allow inspectors”, on its summary of the Geneva talks. Hmm…. There’s nothing in the article to suggest an Iranian concession to a meaningful sanctions threat, and having been up-close-and-personal with Press TV tonight, trust me, the Iranians aren’t bowing. Posturing, even swaggering a bit, but not bowing.
1945 GMT: And Now Obama. The President has given his seal of approval to the US line: a “constructive start” but if Iran does not live up to its obligations, US will move to “increase pressure”. He signalled that Mohammed El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will soon visit Iran. “Hard work lies ahead.”
1935 GMT: The Deal? Meanwhile, the Western media continues to miss the announcement, enthusiastically proclaimed by Press TV, that officials from Iran and the “5+1″ powers will have technical talks on 18 September on “third-party enrichment”.
A further signal why this is important: “Russia is ready to further enrich Iran’s uranium stocks for use as fuel in a civilian research reactor, depending on approval from the United Nations, a person familiar with the matter said today.”
1920 GMT: Hold the Line. As the US Government prepares to consider its position after today’s talks, no doubt in a domestic environment with critics screeching “appeasement”, Hillary Clinton amplified the American statement (see 1753 GMT):
It was a productive day, but the proof of that has not yet come to fruition, so we’ll wait and continue to press our point of view and see what Iran decides to do….We want to see concrete actions and positive results. And I think that today’s meeting opened the door, but let’s see what happens.
1830 GMT: Another twist in the line of Foreign Minister Mottaki over the revelation of the second enrichment plant. Having put forward the case of four Iranian officials and scientists who have “disappeared” since 2007 (see 1350 GMT), Mottaki told the Council for Foreign Relations, “We think in Pittsburgh President Obama was misled based on wrong information and wrong analysis. The wrong analysis was provided by the British. Wrong information by certain terrorist groups.”
It appears that, even though this issue has been overtaken by today’s talks, Mottaki’s statement points to a wider strategy: blame the British for being “hard-line” while praising the US as “flexible” and willing to negotiate if they are not misled by their partners (see 1710 GMT).
1723 GMT: In contrast to the forceful moves by the Iranians, the US post-talk statement is, well, weak: “[Undersecretary Burns] addressed the need for Iran to take concrete and practical steps that are consistent with its international obligations and that will build international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of it program.”
2200 GMT: We took a break tonight to recuperate from the drama of Friday. To be honest, almost all the chatter is a recycling of the events and images of Qods Day.
There are intriguing developments surrounding the clerical opposition to the Government. Mowj-e-Sabz reports that Grand Ayatollah Montazeri was forced to cancel an important annual prayer.
The Green Movement is highlighting the possibility that marjas, the highest-ranking senior clerics, will not declare that Ramadan has ended Sunday and can be celebrated with the feast of Eid al-Fitr. In particular, it is noted that the websites of Ayatollah Montazeri and of Ayatollah Sane’i have not yet declared that the Holy Month is over.
Ayatollahs Mousavi-Ardebili, Safi-Golpaygani, and Bayat-Zanjani are also declaring that they have not seen the crescent of the moon. And now Hojatoleslam Taghdiri, the head of the crescent observation committee of Tehran Province, has said that there is no way that the crescent can be observed tonight, permitting Eid al-Fitr to proceed tomorrow.
2135 GMT: The Best Rumour of the Day (1745 GMT) is now Fun Fact of the Day. Iranian state television did show tonight’s football match in black-and-white, and we’ve got the video.
2040 GMT: An Important Note to Close (For Now). I was going to hold this until morning, but as a reader has noted on the discussion thread, it is far too important a development to be treated lightly.
Advar reports what we have been observing since yesterday: there are worrying signs that the Internet is being strangled inside Iran, with slowing speeds. An EA correspondent adds reports from Iran that other services, such as Yahoo Messenger and Gmail, are unreachable and anti-filter mechanism are also almost completely down. He asks, “Could this be the start of the Government’s [next] crackdown?”
2006 GMT: I’m Going to Tell You One More Time, New York Times (1155 GMT). Your headline writer has his priorities wrong: “Amid Large Protests, Iran Leader Calls Holocaust a Lie”.
Here’s your rewrite: “Despite President’s Israel Diversion, Large Protests Challenge Government”.
(I swear that I wrote this seven minutes before reading this from the National Iranian American Council, “The NYT editors need some help today. Their coverage shouldn’t be entitled, ‘Amid Large Protests, Iran Leader Calls Holocaust a Lie’. The real headline should be ‘Thousands Protest at Rallies Despite Threats’.”)
1950 GMT: A Good Mystery to End the Night: Why Did Ali Larijani Meet the Clerics?
0445 GMT: Wednesday was a retrenching day for most parties in the Iran conflict. The Supreme Leader, inevitably, kept a low profile ahead of his big appearance on Friday at prayers in Tehran. We are none the wiser as to whether he is aligned with President Ahmadinejad’s aggressive crackdown on the opposition, is catching up with moves he did not anticipate, or is manoeuvring for position between factions within the Establishment.
Ahmadinejad’s Government, meanwhile, played the international actor by presenting its proposals for the next steps on Iran’s nuclear programme to the “5+1″ powers (US, UK, Russia, China, France, and Germany). The paper will soon be kicked back to Tehran as insufficient and even irrelevant; within hours of its presentation yesterday the ever-present “Western diplomats” were leaking to ever-present media channels that they were not happy with a sketchy five-page outline that dealt more with general global issues than with verification of Iran’s nuclear status.
The most visible move came from the Green opposition via Mir Hossein Mousavi’s statement reacting to the arrest of his aides and those of Mehdi Karroubi in the raids of the previous 48 hours. On its own, this was a “hold the line” statement: keep calm, keep alert, don’t be intimidated. The best way to read it, in fact, is next to Mousavi’s previous statement for the “Green Path of Hope”, set out just before the Government move against his offices and staff. That statement, in addition to its call for a social movement of protest, outlined nine steps to be taken to restore Iran’s political, legal, religious, and social integrity.
Karroubi, meanwhile, kept a low profile, possibly as a tactical measure, possibly because it has been enforced by the shutdown of his media outlets, and former President Khatami also made no intervention. (Nor, apart from the Green movement, did Hashemi Rafsanjani, pop up.) Instead, the chatter was about the ripples from Sunday’s meeting of prominent clerics in Qom, which including several Grand Ayatollahs. It is not definite but probable that the gathering spurring Ayatollah Golpaygani’s letter to the Supreme Leader criticising the Cabinet, which brought a firm rebuke from Khamenei, and an invitation to Ayatollah Sistani, the leading Shi’a cleric in Iraq, to discuss matters.
How much space do they have to manoeuvre? On the Government side, the most curious development was an interview with the head of judiciary, Sadegh Larijani, with criticism of those who acted “outside the law”. We initially read this as a possible alignment behind Ahmadinejad, interpreting Larijani’s outsiders as the opposition. There is, however, a question mark over this, with some Iran-watchers seeing Larijani’s statement as a reference to the security forces and military who abused detainees at prisons like Kahrizak. We will update on this later today.
2100 GMT: Chahrshanbeh Suri. An activist reports a conversation with a relative in Gisha in Tehranm, who said basiji were roaming the streets on their bikes and tried to stop people celebrating. Told of a report that said nothing political had happened tonight, the relative answered, “In Iran everything is political.”
1850 GMT: Spoiler Alert. And while Tehran is being encouraging about the draft enrichment agreement, the “Western” campaign to undercut it has already begun.
1955 GMT: How to Claim Victory. The Times of London slaps the headline, “Iran bows to sanctions pressure to allow inspectors”, 
2200 GMT: We took a break tonight to recuperate from the drama of Friday. To be honest, almost all the chatter is a recycling of the events and images of Qods Day.
2135 GMT: The Best Rumour of the Day (1745 GMT) is now Fun Fact of the Day. Iranian state television did show tonight’s football match in black-and-white, and 
0445 GMT: Wednesday was a retrenching day for most parties in the Iran conflict. The Supreme Leader, inevitably, kept a low profile ahead of his big appearance on Friday at prayers in Tehran. We are none the wiser as to whether he is aligned with President Ahmadinejad’s aggressive crackdown on the opposition, is catching up with moves he did not anticipate, or is manoeuvring for position between factions within the Establishment.
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