Iran (Breaking news): "We request the people to stay calm"

[Babel-17]

Well, ok, but you're talking about a technological embargo on exports to Iran. Or selling them crippleware. Cool, but there's the matter of all that oil we buy in dollars. Hard to tell them they can't buy stuff with it.

Assuming these companies managers could convince their shareholders to forgo a legal profit, hahaha, and that Iran wouldn't sue them somehow, there's the issue of these companies doing what the politicians want. Not just allow, but want.

We need to start there imo.

[opus512]

No, I'm just talking about doing the right thing. Selling shit to the Iranian government so they can more fully and completely spy on and control their own citizens, to me, would be a no brainer not the right thing. Why couldn't they simply not take the work? Oh, right, someone else is gonna do it, so might as well be them.

Speaking of suing, it'd be sweet if some Iranian sued Nokia and Siemens in the world court for violating their human rights, heh.

But again, no one should have to tell these companies what to do and who to do it for. They should simply do the right thing, and the right thing is *not* making money off other peoples misery and oppression.

I'll never own another Nokia phone, that's for sure. I'll have to look up more on Siemens and find out what I can boycott from them and who I can tell I'm boycotting it. I've already emailed Nokia.

[Babel-17]

Woops, on closer reading I see you do say government is responsible.

Btw, someone floated the idea that the Iranian government is likely to be doing some forensics on who was doing what with whatever communication devices they had to use.

The Maximum Leader* is talking executions for protesters. Iran is going to be groaning loudly under the weight of his oppression.

Down the road, I see Iranian people who can't take it getting armed.

Barring a partial turnabout and some concessions from El Supremo*, I don't see the vast numbers of disaffected Iranians conceding the legitimacy of the current government.

*Khamenei

Edit: Crap, took too long to edit prior post, pasted it here in a new post without seeing you'd already replied. I'm tired, pulled an all nighter.

[EG]

Pandora's box is open in Iran. Executions will get him to the same place as the Shah.

[Wolfeman]

Originally Posted by EG

Pandora's box is open in Iran. Executions will get him to the same place as the Shah.

Indeed. Executions create martyrs. It may not lead to a revolution now, but later...

[opus512]

Yeah, well, this is how worried the Iranian govenrment is, they just arrested nine British embassy officials for fomenting the unrest and demonstrations.

This is classic, now that the govenrment has shut down outside communications and owns the information lines again, they can arrest the British people, then kick them out, and claim it was outsiders that were causing all the trouble. To the uninformed or those straddling the bench, this will be an easy out and then they can get back to 'normal.'

Anyone that doesn't understand this concept wasn't around to hear the Bush administration crying "9/11!" for eight years. He pulled it off here, and without near the media control Iran has.

They put this same shit down ten years ago, pretty much the same way, too. Cracking heads and arresting people. New technology just made their jobs all the easier. Now they can use face recognition to get at the leaders, which will scare anyone from doing anything in public again for a long time.

In the meantime, Iran is feeling ballsy.

[Babel-17]

The power struggle inside Iran appears to be moving from the streets into the heart of the regime itself this weekend amid reports that Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani is plotting to undermine the power of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Rafsanjani's manoeuvres against Khamenei come as tensions between the speaker of the parliament, Ali Larijani, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also appeared to be coming to a head.

In the past few days, Larijani - who was fired by Ahmadinejad as chief negotiator on nuclear issues with the west - has announced his intention of setting up a parliamentary committee to examine the recent post-election violence in an "even-handed way". In response, Ahmadinejad supporters within the parliament have discussed the possibility of impeaching Larijani.

In a move with even greater potential significance, according to several reports Rafsanjani has been lobbying fellow members of the powerful 86-strong Assembly of Experts, which he chairs, to replace Khamenei as the supreme leader with a small committee of senior ayatollahs, of which Khamenei would be a member. If Rafsanjani were successful, the constitutional change would mean a profound shift in the balance of power within Iran's theocratic regime.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009...ud-ahmadinejad

by way of http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-current-events/

[Babel-17]

Some rumors as to what's going on with persiankiwi, the twitter page, now silent, I've used in this thread.

http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-cu...-arrested.html

Probably free and alive, though somewhat on the run.

[Babel-17]

I've been aware that I've been negligent by not mentioning the downside of "the good guys" in the struggle in Iran.

I finally stumbled on a nice presentation that gets the other side of the equation out there.

Former CIA says: Stay Out of Iran’s Evolutionary Process

Mir Hossein Mousavi is a reformer and modernist, isn’t he? Perhaps not. He has always been extremely conservative in his political alignments. As Prime Minister in 1981–9, he was regarded as a hardliner. He started Iran’s nuclear program, helped found Hezbollah and may have directed the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut. He is, in reality, a defender of extremely corrupt vested interests. That he has attracted the support of the so-called "Gucci crowd" of twentyish twitterers does not mean that he has embraced western values. As president, he would not abandon nuclear energy and would not immediately begin to talk nice to Barack Obama. His reformer credentials are pretty much non-existent, the creation of a media and an engaged punditry that wants to explain the Iran crisis in terms that a European or American audience would find comfortable.

And then there is the corruption issue, Iran’s six-hundred-pound gorilla. Mousavi is heir to the corrupt Iran of the post-revolutionary period when the country was looted by the senior clerics cooperating with the business class, the bazaaris. Some intelligence sources believe that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been demonized by the western media, is actually the reformer in that he has taken on the country’s pervasive corruption with the full support of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. Massive corruption has been business as usual in Iran, frequently managed by politicians who have called themselves reformers. Another so-called reformer, who is the money man behind Mousavi, is former Iranian Majlis speaker Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, nicknamed "the Shark." Rafsanjani is a billionaire who controls large sectors of the country’s economy, to include a chain of private universities which became the source of the young organizers who brought the twitterers out on the street.

If there was one thing I learned from twenty years of experience as a military intelligence and CIA officer it is that nothing is ever what it seems. If a situation appears to be clear-cut, with good guys and bad guys arrayed against each other it is probably anything but. So maybe black and white comes out gray. All the more reason to step back. The interventionists from both left and right do not make it clear what the United States should do to help the "reformers." Perhaps that is just as well as the only options would be to hurl empty threats, start bombing, or initiate yet another CIA covert action to destabilize the regime, ignoring the lessons of the CIA’s 1953 debacle, and with the predictable and contrary result of actually strengthening the clerics and their rule.

Lol, the response to Chief Garibaldi's, uh, I mean Phil Giraldi's, other side is nicely expressed in the thread from which I swiped the quote.

http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-cu...y-process.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Giraldi

[Babel-17]

Heating up again?

http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-cu...tweets-18.html

Change_for_Iran is twittering again

1:17AM finally managed to load twitter! HTTPS protocol is still blocked by some ISP & no chance getting to twitter with apps 29 minutes ago from web

but Reza, apparently part of Change_for_Iran, has suffered.

Reza released from Hospital yesterday he is banned from university and now is a stared [marked by gov] student 26 minutes ago from web

http://twitter.com/Change_for_Iran

[Babel-17]

3:14 PM ET -- PersianKiwi reappears? Yesterday, there were reports that a reliable and prolific Iranian on Twitter known as PersianKiwi had been arrested. Readers today are directing me to the account of a new Twitter user alleging to be the same person. One of those posts today reads, "WARNING! Am Safe. Basiji corrupted my twitter acct. DO NOT SEND INFO TO ME @persiankiwi! Great danger!"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/0..._n_221946.html

Lots of info, great links!

[Babel-17]

Khamenei seems to be walking back his talk of executions for protesters.

No link handy but I read he now refers to the protesters as misguided children led astray. These astray leaders better worry though, imo.

[opus512]

And now it was the CIA that shot and killed Neda.

They'll have eyewitnesses, as they already do. They'll have an investigation, and they'll find that someone else killed her, certainly not Iranian forces. And sadly, as the Iranian government owns the media and controls it completely, many people will believe that before they believe their own government, no matter how bad we think or even know they are, did it to their own citizens.

Unless there's a coup from the inside, literally a coup with the full backing of the regular army, this revolution is dead. Anything short of being backed by the full might of the standing army will fail, because the army is the only thing that can stand up to the Republican Guard and the Basij.

[EG]

The net result of all that will be that the folks who are protesting know who did it and the rest of the world will think of the Iranian government as lying idiots. Even our own press doesn't beleve them.

[opus512]

The rest of the world has thought poorly of the Iranian government fora long time, it doesn't seem to effect them overly much. They don't care what we think of them, they only care what they can make their own countrymen think. Why the hell would Iran care what the west thinks?

The only thing that matters in Iran is what the Iranians think. That, and again, the military.

[Babel-17]

Originally Posted by opus512

And now it was the CIA that shot and killed Neda.

They'll have eyewitnesses, as they already do. They'll have an investigation, and they'll find that someone else killed her, certainly not Iranian forces. And sadly, as the Iranian government owns the media and controls it completely, many people will believe that before they believe their own government, no matter how bad we think or even know they are, did it to their own citizens.

Unless there's a coup from the inside, literally a coup with the full backing of the regular army, this revolution is dead. Anything short of being backed by the full might of the standing army will fail, because the army is the only thing that can stand up to the Republican Guard and the Basij.

Reza spoke of how they were inducing people to "confess" that they were agents of Mousavi.

# I skipped some of the incidents as Reza requested. he's very weak both mentally & physicallyabout 22 hours ago from web
#
Reza had no idea why they suddenly released him & some of his inmatesabout 22 hours ago from web
#
at night around 10PM they Released Reza & his family instantly moved him to a hospital for internal bleedingabout 22 hours ago from web
#
he promised if one of them confess in front of camera he will free them all & they will blur his face & nothing to worry!about 22 hours ago from web
#
in morning a man introduced him self as Intelligent came saying he will record their confections with cameraabout 22 hours ago from web
#
they prevented them from sleeping by kept them standing all the nightabout 22 hours ago from web
#
according to Reza some students from Polytechnic university were also thereabout 22 hours ago from web
#
and after they knew Reza is a student they moved him to a more harsh environment with some other peopleabout 22 hours ago from web
#
the man promised Reza's family they will release him if he's really innocentabout 22 hours ago from web
#
unfortunately Reza's mother told everything she knows over the phone to a man calling from Evinabout 22 hours ago from web
#
@musketeer8 better than ministry of interior it looks there are no conditions there at all!about 22 hours ago from web in reply to musketeer8
#
in last days Reza said it looked they get a little more organized and start searching for any special case in arrested peopleabout 22 hours ago from web
#
Correction: *but with new accusations, not promising them!about 22 hours ago from web
#
they ran another confession show at Evin, this time with promise of instant freedom & new accusationsabout 22 hours ago from web
#
a man came and say they will be released today and an hour later another came & say they will be in prison for 10year!about 23 hours ago from web
#
Reza said it looked like they have no idea what should they do with so much peopleabout 23 hours ago from web
#
all types of gov agents came & go in the next couple of days, moving people, forcing them to walk or just stand for a long timeabout 23 hours ago from web

# according to Reza some of the injured people already passed out and a taxi driver looked like dead by that timeabout 23 hours ago from web
#
in first day at Evin prison staff started searching for severely injured people & gave them some first aidabout 23 hours ago from web
#
and another hour passed just standing in the row at the entrance of prison & filling out formsabout 23 hours ago from web
#
it took near 3 hours to get to the prison, Reza said the driver seemed enjoys wandering in the streetsabout 23 hours ago from web
#
Reza had no idea why they select some of the people and where they moved the othersabout 23 hours ago from web
#
apparently they released some people on that night & move Reza & some of the selected people to Evinabout 23 hours ago from web
#
around 3am day 2 they started moving people in vans, Reza said a driver was talking to a Basiji about Evin prison is full and what shoul ...about 23 hours ago from web
#
Reza said some people sign them & some other just faked their signs & names, there were not enough confession papers for all peopleabout 23 hours ago from web
#
and they paid to go to streets and say things & they know they have violated national security & Islamabout 23 hours ago from web
#
the papers were prewritten confessions all in different hand writings saying the signer is a member of organization by mousaviabout 23 hours ago from web
#
He said in the second day some pain cloth people came with papers forcing people to sign themabout 23 hours ago from web

http://twitter.com/Change_for_Iran

[Babel-17]

Originally Posted by opus512

The rest of the world has thought poorly of the Iranian government fora long time, it doesn't seem to effect them overly much. They don't care what we think of them, they only care what they can make their own countrymen think. Why the hell would Iran care what the west thinks?

The only thing that matters in Iran is what the Iranians think. That, and again, the military.

And Russia, whose president applauded their democratic election.

[EG]

Originally Posted by opus512

The rest of the world has thought poorly of the Iranian government fora long time, it doesn't seem to effect them overly much. They don't care what we think of them, they only care what they can make their own countrymen think. Why the hell would Iran care what the west thinks?

The only thing that matters in Iran is what the Iranians think. That, and again, the military.

The same military that got tired of suppressing civilians for the Shah...lol

and turned on him. The question is how far can the Council push the military?

[opus512]

Originally Posted by EG

The same military that got tired of suppressing civilians for the Shah...lol

and turned on him. The question is how far can the Council push the military?

Here's a quarter, old man, buy a clue.

The council is not pushing the military, the council is pushing the citizenry. The only question is how much the military will let the council push the citizenry.

You act like the clerics have already been overthrown when in fact they are as much in power as they have ever been.

[EG]

But then not sll the clerics in Iran agree with the council on this......

Keep your quarter you might need to call someone who cares someday.