1930 GMT: Kill Them. Abbas Vaez-Tabasi, a member of the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts has declared on state television, “Those who are behind the current sedition in the country … are mohareb (enemies of God) and the law is very clear about punishment of a mohareb [execution].”
Today’s Show of Support for the Regime? If you believe Peyke Iran, it wasn’t much. The website reports that residents in Rasht ridiculed a demonstration of 300 plainclothes Basijis chanting slogans for the execution of reformists like Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mohammad Khatami, and Mehdi Karroubi.
1845 GMT: The Arrests Move Higher. Government forces have arrested Mir Hossein Mousavi’s chief aide Alireza Beheshti. Beheshti, the son of one of Iran’s most commemorated martyrs, Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, was also detained briefly in September when the regime tried to disrupt preparations for Qods Day demonstrations.
1830 GMT: The Karroubi Family Speaks Out (Cont.): Mehdi Karroubi’s son Taghi has added to the criticisms by Karroubi’s wife and son Hossein of regime restrictions on his father. He said that Government-provided security has stopped protecting Karroubi when he leaves the house. This is effectively a ”quasi-house arrest’.’
Tehran, October 9 – In a rare appearance during Friday prayers, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, announced that Iran’s Supreme Council has officially declared Mahmoud Ahamadinejad the 2009 Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The 18-member Council voted 26-2 (with 3 abstentions) to certify the election result in an emergency session called amid confusion resulting from the Nobel Committee’s announcement that U.S. President Barack Obama had won the prestigious award.
Saying he was both “humbled and honored” to be chosen, Ahmadinejad, who is only the third Holocaust denier to win the prize, told an adoring crowd estimated at 200,000, give or take a few “British-sponsored troublemakers”, that the announcement caught him “totally off guard”.
“I thank the members of the Nobel Committee for having the courage to overlook all the ‘death to this country, death to that country’ stuff, as well as the ‘wiping Israel off the map’ comments,” the Iranian President said to chants of “Death to Norway!”
“And I thank them for recognizing the modern Iran which, at least officially, has lived and thrived in peace with our neighbors for over 20 years, and further, has done so entirely without homosexuals.”
Ahmadinejad went on to comment about what he saw as the moment’s “most profound irony”, pertaining to the fact that Alfred Nobel, who left an endowment to fund the awards that bear his name, made his fortune as the inventor of T.N.T. “In December, in Oslo, I will most humbly and gratefully accept, on behalf of the Islamic Republic, a medal bearing the likeness of a great man – a great man whose invention sounds like a kid cracking bubble gum compared to what we’ve got in the pipeline…”
When asked for his thoughts on the announcement that Ahmadinejad had received the most votes from the Nobel Committee, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai told E! Network’s ‘The Soup’, “Not so fast.”
A couple of fine examples of how to wedge events in Iran into personal and political prejudices and agendas. In Asia Times Online, Mahan Abedin charts “The Rise and Rise of Ahmadinejad” with the claim:
[He is] the most formidable leader of a faction that has incrementally broadened and deepened the scope of its reach and influence within the regime to the point where it is now completely dominant. Factional politics in the Islamic Republic – as we know it – has collapsed….All the other factions, particularly the once-powerful Islamic left, are in complete disarray. Their leaders have been exposed as losers and their supporters have been left demoralized by the entire state machinery’s acquiescence in the final victory of the Islamic right.
UPDATE: Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News in the US, has just posted a blog which graphically illustrates the complicity of many in the US media — wittingly or unwittingly — in either missing or setting aside the main story. Instead of identifying and focusing on the main story, the content and context of the 2000 photographs and videotapes of detainee abuse, Tapper goes for the sideshow of the White House trashing of the Daily Telegraph’s interview with General Taguba.
Last month Enduring America paid a good deal of attention to the Obama White House’s decision to defy a court order and hold back 44 photographs, amongst hundreds and possibly thousands, of the abuse of detainees in US facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. We linked to Italian newspapers with a dozen of the images, posting the two most moderate — the story become our fifth-biggest in our eight months on the Web.
Last week, there was another series of developments — some illuminating, some confusing, all disturbing. It began on Thursday when The Daily Telegraph of London ran an article based on an interview with General Antonio Taguba, who led the 2004 internal investigation of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. According to the newspaper, Taguba said the photos showed “”torture, abuse, rape and every indecency”. The Daily Telegraph highlighted “a soldier apparently raping a female prisoner, a translator apparently raping a male prisoner, and instances of sexual abuse involving objects”. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, when we wrote about testimony by Philip Zelikow and Ali Soufan to a Senate hearing on torture, reader John Birch wrote perceptively, “Zelikow was testifying about the organized use of toture as an interrogation method by the CIA….The photos [Obama] held back are of the abuse and even torture of prisoners by the U.S. military.” This prompted my response, “The connection is that the authorisation of torture by the CIA and US military, sanctioned from spring 2002 by Bush officials, made its way to Guantanamo Bay and then to Iraq, including Abu Ghraib,” notably via General Geoffrey Miller.
Writing for Salon, Mark Benjamin adds an interesting dimension: Gitmo general told Iraq WMD search team to torture
[Even] before Miller met with the Abu Ghraib officials, he first made a little-known visit to the Iraq Survey Group, which was in charge of the hunt for WMDs in Iraq after the invasion. Miller told the ISG they were “running a country club” by not getting tough on detainees….Miller recommended temperature manipulation and sleep deprivation.
Gitmo general told Iraq WMD search team to torture
It’s one thing if, as former Vice President Dick Cheney keeps saying, the United States brutally interrogated people to keep our kids safe from another strike by Osama bin Laden. If folks got tortured to provide a rationale for going to war with Iraq, though, that’s a whole different story. Read the rest of this entry »
1930 GMT: Kill Them. Abbas Vaez-Tabasi, a member of the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts has declared on state television, “Those who are behind the current sedition in the country … are mohareb (enemies of God) and the law is very clear about punishment of a mohareb [execution].”
The Desperate Blogger at Salon breaks the real news
A couple of fine examples of how to wedge events in Iran into personal and political prejudices and agendas. In Asia Times Online, 
UPDATE: Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News in the US, 
Last week, when we wrote about testimony by Philip Zelikow and Ali Soufan to a Senate hearing on torture, reader John Birch wrote perceptively, “Zelikow was testifying about the organized use of toture as an interrogation method by the CIA….The photos [Obama] held back are of the abuse and even torture of prisoners by the U.S. military.” This prompted my response, “The connection is that the authorisation of torture by the CIA and US military, sanctioned from spring 2002 by Bush officials, made its way to Guantanamo Bay and then to Iraq, including Abu Ghraib,” notably via General Geoffrey Miller.
Entries (RSS)