Starting today, Enduring America teams up with the Photography and International Conflict website of the Clinton Institute for American Studies in a special project on “The Photos of the Decade”. Each day for 10 days we will post a photograph from a year in the decade, and we will invite readers to submit their own memorable photographs. We will then continue the discussion until readers select The Photograph of the Decade.
Liam Kennedy, the Director of the Clinton Institute, writes:
These photographs depict significant moments and events in the decade 2000-2009. The selection is not intended to denote the “best” news photographs but to provide a visual iconography of the period, one which may be suggestive as much for what it excludes as it includes.
Iran will put 16 opposition demonstrators on trial, Monday, and several are to be charged with “offending God and his prophet.” Sixty journalists and intellectuals are expressing outrage over use of the charge of being “mohareb”, which carries the death penalty.
The Iranian judiciary will put 16 opposition protesters on trial, Monday, in connection with demonstrations last month on the holy day of Ashoura. Press reports and recent statements by Iranian prosecutors indicate several will be charged with the offense of “mohareb” or “making war against God and his prophet.” Conviction on such a charge carries the death penalty.
In an open letter to the Iranian judiciary, a group of 60 Iranian journalists and intellectuals, most of whom live abroad, are demanding a stop to using the religiously-based charge of “mohareb” against opposition protesters. They say in their letter, that “if protesting is making war against God, then we are all warriors.”
Austin Heap, one of the most prominent activists on the Internet and Iran (see, for example, “The Haystack Project” to provide unfiltered Web access to Iranians), writes a guest blog for Enduring America on yesterday’s diversion of Twitter users to the page of the “Iranian Cyber Army”:
There were probably a few odd text messages whizzing around in San Francisco at 11 PM on Thursday night at a place called Dyn. It’s a company that most people had not heard of, even though it powers websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo. They even have a catchy motto: “Uptime is the Bottom Line”. Now, however, a group calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army” had hacked Dyn’s servers and changed only a tiny line of text. The outcome was the “occupation” of Twitter, causing a two-hour outage of service for Tweeters around the world.
Dyn offers a service called managed DNS hosting. Essentially a yellow pages for the Internet, DNS translates lettered website names into an IP address, like phone numbers for computers. When you type in enduringamerica.com on your browser, a request is sent out to a DNS server. The DNS server responds to your browser and says, “enduringamerica.com’s IP address is XX.XX.XX.XXX”, then your browser “calls” that IP. Read the rest of this entry »
On Monday we reported the curious tale that a conservative Iranian politician had claimed in an interview that President Ahmadinejad — presumably unwittingly — had met US “spies”, posing as journalists and scholars, in one of his meetings in New York. Gary Sick, the former US Government official who is now an academic at Columbia University, follows up:
In [a post] on October 26 I denounced the fact that my fellow academic Kian Tajbakhsh was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Iran, in part because he had met with me and because I was falsely accused of being a CIA agent. I commented ironically:
I have been in meetings with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on four different occasions over the past three years. I have spent at least nine hours with him, much more than I ever spent with Kian….Iranian security officials are notably lacking in any sense of irony or humor. But I do wonder whether President Ahmadinejad is being considered for indictment because of his extensive contacts with me over the past four years.
I have now discovered that my words have proved truer than I could ever have imagined.
[On 9 November] it was reported by Scott Lucas’ blog Enduring America that the Iranian Labor News Agency features an interview with conservative activist Mojtaba Shakeri, who says that some of the journalists and scholars who met with Ahmadinejad, presumably during the President’s trip to New York, were undoubtedly CIA operatives. This in turn was picked up by the opposition press, which is accusing Ahmadinejad of consorting with CIA agents.
My ironic comment seems to have been transformed into a straight-faced criticism of Mr. Ahmadinejad with an utter disregard not only for the truth but also for any appreciation of the humor of the accusation.
It is impossible to parody a system that constantly parodies itself by its actions and words.
Tomorrow, on Qods (Jerusalem) Day in Iran, Enduring America will combine the best of all-day news coverage with quick, sharp analysis. EA’s Mr Smith will provide live analysis during the speech of President Ahmadinejad and the Friday Prayer of Ahmad Khatami. (We may also have almost-live translation.) Scott Lucas will be on March Watch and will also be reading the political developments, supported by EA’s Chris Emery and correspondents in Iran, Europe, and North America. We’ll also be gathering the best information from news outlets, the Web, Twitter, private sources, and our readers, and we’ll be linking up with some of the best blogs on Iran on the Internet..
Coverage starts at 0600 GMT (9:30 a.m. Tehran time).
Enduring America ($0/story) has taken a great interest in the case of Muntazer al-Zaidi since he was arrested and beaten last December for throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. Yesterday, when al-Zaidi was released, he claimed that he was tortured in detention, including electrical shocks and waterboarding (see Ali Yenidunya’s story this morning). So we were more than intrigued yesterday when Mr Jim Clancy, who apparently is a Very Important Anchorman with CNN International ($199/story), decided to address this sensitive topic via Twitter:
@clancycnn (15 Sept 1343 GMT): Clancy File Question of the Day: The Shoe Thrower: Hero or Hooligan? Send your thoughts EARLY and we’ll read them out on the air.
@clancycnn (15 Sept 1812 GMT) : Some great, and FUNNY tweets today on the shoe thrower! Thanks to all…there were so many good ones!
@ScottLucasUK (15 Sept 1817 GMT): Because being beaten and jailed is a real hoot….
@clancycnn (15 Sept 1924 GMT): I don’t have to agree with a point of view to appreciate it. Laughter is medicine and the shoe thrower might agree.
@ScottLucasUK (15 Sept 1933 GMT): He’s giggling most about the waterboarding….
We’ll be on limited service until Sunday, as some of us recharge batteries (and reassure loved ones that we have lives away from the Internet) and others move into new houses. Do keep checking in, however: today we’ve got a morning update from Iran, a special up-to-the-minute analysis of the division between the Supreme Leader and President Ahmadinejad, and a feature on the American detained in Iran, social scientist Kian Tajbakhsh. There’s also an article from John Matlin remembering the late, great reporter Walter Cronkite and lamenting the decline of US journalism. Mike Dunn will be minding the shop for your comments and ideas.
Thanks to all of you who, by reading, commenting, and sending ideas, have made Enduring America a success, as we celebrate another record month for pageviews.
This afternoon, the headlines have blared out about a sudden crisis within the Iranian regime: CNN “Iran’s supreme leader tells Ahmadinejad to dump deputy”; Reuters “Iran supreme leader wants vice president sacked”; BBC English “Iranian leader ‘orders dismissal’”. All the reports accurately summarise the story, in line with our updates today, that the Supreme Leader has sent a letter to President Ahmadinejad demanding the removal of the First Vice President Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai.
According to Parleman News, the Supreme Leader ordered President Ahmadinejad to remove his choice as Vice President, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, who is also the father of Ahmadinejad’s daughter-in-law: “Without any delay, the dismissal order or Mashaei’s resignation must be announced by the President.”
OK, but what’s the big deal? Better late than never to the story, right?
Well, from a political point of view, the problem with the sudden appearance of the stories is that they give a simple portrayal of a sudden dispute between Ayatollah Khamenei and the President. The true story is that the letter was sent to Ahmadinejad privately but that sources with an interest in the battle quickly leaked the news to Iranian newspapers. For the rest of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, as we’ve been noting on EA, there has been manoeuvring and clashing between the Supreme Leader’s camp, the President’s supporters, and other “conservative” factions. The significance of today is that Khamenei has raised the stakes once more by allowing the letter to go public.
None of that context, and thus analysis, is possible with the “out of the blue” narrative of the mainstream media. For example, none of the stories note that Ahmadinejad threw Khamenei’s letter back at the Supreme Leader later on Tuesday, with the President declaring that he was standing by Rahim-Mashai. Whereas CNN, BBC, etc. are at the starting gate on this story, the actual dispute is already halfway around the track.
From a media point of view, the lesson seems to go beyond the stories EA has been running about the place of “new media” in this crisis and those to come. This is no longer a question of who is more reliable because the mainstream media aren’t necessarily even in the competition.
In this case, the mainstream media only “found” the story when one of the news services (I suspect, though am not sure, that it was Reuters) lifted the news from Iranian state television and news agencies. Of course, none of the mainstream outlets have correspondents in Iran, given the Government’s restrictions, but — more importantly in this case — it appears that none of them have reporters reading the Iranian press, much of which is not run by State agencies but is linked to political factions. The story on Parleman News apparently never made it on the radar of CNN, BBC, etc. (What’s more, it appears that the mainstream outlets are not even keeping an eye on English-language websites covering Iran. The Parleman News report showed up quickly on the site of the National Iranian American Council.)
In contrast, “new media” like Enduring America or the “Green Brief” of Anonymous Iran, as well as bloggers like Nico Pitney at The Huffington Post, rely upon a web of sources who have sent in or analysed material from across not only the Iranian press but regional media and websites. The point about Twitter and other devices such as Google Reader, from my perspective, is that has made this web possible. Whereas the hardest-working journalist might be able to monitor only a handful of sources even a few years ago, now dozens quickly come into play. Thus the disadvantage for most of the new media — namely that we don’t have any money for full-time staff — becomes a marked advantage: we don’t have to rely on a Reuters to put out the story before we’ll write and publish.
This is no longer a matter of “to Twitter or not to Twitter”. The mainstream news services are no longer the gatekeepers of the stories because they are not at the gates. The sharpest, up-to-date coverage is coming from a new network of citizen journalists, activists, and even readers who are quick to pass on important breaking stories. It is that network that has presented the post-election Iran crisis as a continuing story, with ripples and fluctuations, rather than the mainstream media’s sudden ups and downs of “the Green Movement is here”; “the Green Movement is dead”; “the Green Movement is back”. And, now that the story is no longer of the Government v. the Movement but of tensions and shifts within the Government and regime, it is that network that will be the daily port of call to find out what is happening and what may happen.
Because when the gates are down, the view is less, not more, restricted.
Austin Heap, one of the most prominent activists on the Internet and Iran (see, for example, 
On Monday 
Tomorrow, on Qods (Jerusalem) Day in Iran, Enduring America will combine the best of all-day news coverage with quick, sharp analysis. EA’s Mr Smith will provide live analysis during the speech of President Ahmadinejad and the Friday Prayer of Ahmad Khatami. (We may also have almost-live translation.) Scott Lucas will be on March Watch and will also be reading the political developments, supported by EA’s Chris Emery and correspondents in Iran, Europe, and North America. We’ll also be gathering the best information from news outlets, the Web, Twitter, private sources, and our readers, and we’ll be linking up with some of the best blogs on Iran on the Internet..
Enduring America ($0/story) has taken a great interest in the case of Muntazer al-Zaidi since he was arrested and beaten last December for throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. Yesterday, when al-Zaidi was released, he claimed that he was tortured in detention, including electrical shocks and waterboarding (
This afternoon, the headlines have blared out about a sudden crisis within the Iranian regime: 
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