2240 GMT: We close tonight by posting a video of the comments of Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, defending the regime’s approach in the Presidential election and against subsequent protests, on CNN.
2155 GMT: News from Evin Prison. Another demonstration tonight by families of detainees and their supporters — Peyke Iran reports hundreds present. The website claims 23 detainees have been released to the cheers of the crowd.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is looking at a bright future under the aegis of the visionary leadership of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei and the support of a considerable number of devotees inside and outside the country…
“Ceremonies marking the 31st anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution will kick off this year at a time when Iran has made great progress in various fields of science and technology. The global powers, along with their supporters inside the country, desperately sought to undermine the principles of the Islamic Revolution.
So, Mr Firouzabadi, we pass over to you the EA All is Well Trophy Video:
2015 GMT: The speaker of the reformist minority group in Parliament, Mohammad Reza Tabesh, resigned to protest restricitons such as the filtering of the party’s website Parleman News and the banning of its reporter from the Parliament and preventing guests of MPs from entering the Parliament. (Those guests include family members of political prisoners. One delegation was turned away today.)
The Deputy Speaker and members of the party intervened and requested Tabesh to remain in his post.
The most interesting spin out of the US in recent days is in a Saturday article in The Wall Street Journal by Jay Solomon, “U.S. Shifts Iran Focus to Support Opposition”.
The headline is a bit misleading, since the core issue is whether (in fact, how rather than whether) the Obama Administration will be pursuing and presenting additional sanctions against Iran: “The White House is crafting new financial sanctions specifically designed to punish the Iranian entities and individuals most directly involved in the crackdown on Iran’s dissident forces, said…U.S. officials, rather than just those involved in Iran’s nuclear program.”
The presentation, however, is telling. For weeks, the set-up for sanctions — for example, in the articles of David Sanger and William Broad in The New York Times — has been that they were essential to punish Iran for breakdown of enrichment talks and Tehran’s move toward a military nuclear capability. Now, for the first time, the message is not just that “rights” should take priority but that there may be a change of power in Iran: “The Obama administration is increasingly questioning the long-term stability of Tehran’s government and moving to find ways to support Iran’s opposition ‘Green Movement’.”
Read it: the authority of President Ahmadinejad is no longer assumed, even bolstered, by the US approach. An Administration source declares, “The Green Movement has demonstrated more staying power than perhaps some have anticipated. The regime is internally losing its legitimacy, which is of its own doing.” Read the rest of this entry »
2330 GMT: Mahmoud Down. Signing off tonight with this news — looks like the latest victim in the cyber-war is President Ahmadinejad’s blog.
2320 GMT: Another Rights-First Shot from the Obama Administration. Despite (possibly because of) the recent sanctions-related rush of spin in US newspapers, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a moment to focus on Iran’s political conflict today, criticising the regime’s “ruthless repression” of protesters: “We have deep concerns about their behavior, we have concerns about their intentions and we are deeply disturbed by the mounting signs of ruthless repression that they are exercising against those who assemble and express viewpoints that are at variance with what the leadership of Iran wants to hear.”
2220 GMT: Have You Made “The List”? Fars News has published the names of the 60 organisations and media outlets “outed” by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence as unacceptable for contact by Iranians.
There are a lot of familiar faces, given that many of these dangerous groups were listed in indictments in the Tehran trials in August: Georges Soros’ Open Society Institute is here, as is the Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center, whose scholar Haleh Esfandiari was detained by the Iranians in 2007. Both the National Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute get a mention. So doe the Council on Foreign Relations, the Hoover Institute in California, Freedom House, and of course the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The National Endowment for Democracy, funded but not run by the US Government, also gets a citation, and Human Rights Watch is a definite no-go area.
Looks like we’ve missed out — in the United Kingdom, the conference centre at Wilton Park, where foreign agents must gather to plan regime change, is mentioned as is the “Centre for Democracy Studies”.
Just one question, if anyone at the Ministry of Intelligence is on Overnight Foreigner Watch: why does Yale get to be the one university to receive the Great Satan’s Helper prize? (And, yes, we’re already getting furious e-mails from our Harvard friends.)
2200 GMT: Have just arrived in Beirut, where I will be learning from the best specialists on the Middle East and Iran this week. Thanks to EA staff for finding journalist Maziar Bahari’s interview with Britain’s Channel 4. We’ve now posted the video of Bahari, who was detained for four months after the Presidential election.
2000 GMT: Britain’s Channel 4 News has just broadcast a moving interview with journalist Maziar Bahari who was held in Evin prison for 119 days. We’ll post a link when it becomes available. Chief political correspondent Jon Snow also referred back to his exclusive interview with President Ahmadinejad which took place in Shiraz just before Christmas. Ahmadinejad denied troops were intimidating opponents and warned the West not to assume his country was weak.
1540 GMT: I’m en route to a conference in the Middle East (more news tomorrow) so updates may be limited today. The EA team is minding the shop so keep sending in information and analysis. Read the rest of this entry »
2220 GMT: BBC Persian is reporting on the Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution. One interesting claim in the statement: anti-establishment monarchist slogans were encouraged by Government agent provocateurs in the Ashura crowd.
222055 GMT: The Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution, following the earlier endorsement of the Islamic Iran Participation Front of the Mousavi post-Ashura statement (1420 GMT), have issued their response to the declaration.
2000 GMT: The Regime’s Fist-Waving. Edward Yeranian of the Voice of America has a useful summary of today’s denunciations of protesters, invocation of “foreign agents”, and threats of prosecution from Minister of Interior Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar (1645 GMT) and the head of Iran’s judiciary, Sadegh Larijani. Press TV continues to play up the Larijani combination of assurance (“fair trial”) and warning (“investigate the events quickly and firmly”). Read the rest of this entry »
Tom Englehardt, writing at TomDispatch, goes beyond the headline “30,000 extra troops” of President Obama’s recent announcement to detail the extent of the US escalation and long-term commitment — despite Obama’s initial declaration of a “beginning to the end” of the military presence in July 2011 — to the intervention in Afghanistan (N.B.: All links in original article):
In his Afghan “surge” speech at West Point last week, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new “way forward in Afghanistan.” He spoke of the “additional 30,000 U.S. troops” he was sending into that country over the next six months. He brought up the “roughly $30 billion” it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.
Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and how expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the surge of November 2009 is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the U.S. war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media’s focus on the president’s speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those 30,000 new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what’s actually underway. Read the rest of this entry »
In The New York Times this morning, David Sanger publishes an article, “Iran Is Said to Ignore Effort to Salvage a Nuclear Deal”, which gives half the story on the current tangled state of the negotiations over uranium enrichment.
Half the story because Sanger’s story is effectively a US Government press release. Here is the narrative of unnamed officials:
The Obama Administration…has told Iran’s leaders in back-channel messages that it is willing to allow the country to send its stockpile of enriched uranium to any of several nations, including Turkey, for temporary safekeeping….But the overtures, made through the International Atomic Energy Agency over the past two weeks, have all been ignored….Instead….the Iranians have revived an old counterproposal: that international arms inspectors take custody of much of Iran’s fuel, but keep it on Kish, a Persian Gulf resort island that is part of Iran….
That proposal had been rejected because leaving the nuclear material on Iranian territory would allow for the possibility that the Iranians could evict the international inspectors at any moment. That happened in North Korea in 2003, and within months the country had converted its fuel into the material for several nuclear weapons.
2105 GMT: Mehdi Karroubi’s website Tagheeris back on-line (see 1438 GMT).
1945 GMT: We cannot corroborate but it is being reported that flyers of Karroubi’s webcast statement (see separate entry) are being put up across Tehran.
1935 GMT: Families of political prisoners have announced that they will demonstrate on Wednesday, protesting the continued imprisonment of their relatives. If the authorities do not heed the protest, the families will continue demonstrations and begin a mass hunger strike.
1925 GMT: Kalemeh, the website associated with Mir Hossein Mousavi, has published its account of the appearance of Mousavi advisor Alireza Beheshti at the Tehran Media Fair yesterday. Beheshti was with his wife and daughter, as well as supporters, when they were surrounded by 50 to 60 people who began yelling loudly against Beheshti. Kalemeh invokes the memory of Beheshti’s father, the assassinated Ayatollah, claiming that many were reminded of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq’s chant of “Down with Beheshti”. (English summary on Mousavi Facebook page) Read the rest of this entry »
2255 GMT: Steady as she goes with the Western media mulling over the significance of Iran’s delay on acceptance of the uranium enrichment deal. The truth is that, given the intracacies (and perhaps disorders) of Tehran’s decision-making system, we won’t know for a while. For now, it’s a matter of reading clues, and the strongest — with Iranian state TV putting out the line of a “positive response” — is that the Iranian Government is gradually putting the proposal through the system.
But we’ll stand by our initial projection this morning (0630 GMT): the bigger story is inside Iran. Mehdi Karroubi’s appearance at the Media Fair, with the loud and fervant chants of his supporters and the scuffles with bystanders and security forces, will ripple throughout Tehran’s political circles. Once again, Karroubi has not backed down (altogether now — Bring. It. On.), so once again the opposition movement has a boost amidst the Government’s ad hoc but still notable shows of force. Indeed, the reformists now get the convergence of the negative, with the arrest of the 60 party members and relatives on Thursday, and the positive with Karroubi’s mobilising of public sentiment.
2330 GMT: Mahmoud Down. Signing off tonight with this news — looks like the latest victim in the cyber-war is 
Tom Englehardt, 
2105 GMT: Mehdi Karroubi’s website Tagheer 
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