Telephones Cut Off, Mousavi Arrested, Rafsanjani Resigns

[jingofever]

Terror Free Tomorrow Poll Did not Predict Ahmadinejad Win

Noting my skepticism about the announced outcome of Friday's presidential elections in Iran, readers have been asking me what I think about this WaPo op-ed by Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty pointing out that a scientifically weighted Project for a Terror Free Tomorrow poll in mid-May found Ahmadinejad beating Mir-Hosain Mousavi by a 2 to 1 margin.

I have enormous respect for Ballen, PFTFT and Doherty & the New America Foundation.

But as a mere social historian I would say that the poll actually tends to confirm some of my doubts about the announced electoral tallies.

The poll did not find that Ahmadinejad had majority support. It found that the level of support for the incumbent was 34%, with Mousavi at 14%.

27% said that they were undecided. (Some 22% of respondents are not accounted for by any of the 4 candidates or by the undecided category, and I cannot find an explanation for this. Did they plan to write in for other candidates? A little over a quarter of respondents did say they wanted more choice than they were being given. Update: Some of this 22% refused to answer, others said they did not like any of the candidates. Ahmadinejad is unlikely to have picked up the latter, and Mousavi supporters were more likely to refuse to answer.)

Here's the important point: 60% of the 27% who said they were undecided favored political reform. As Ballen wrote at that time:

' A close examination of our survey results reveals that the race may actually be closer than a first look at the numbers would indicate. More than 60 percent of those who state they don’t know who they will vote for in the Presidential elections reflect individuals who favor political reform and change in the current system.'

That is, supporters of the challenger's principles may not quite have committed to him at that point but were likely leaning to him on the basis of his platform. They were 16% of the sample. This finding suggests that in mid-May, Mousavi may have actually had 30% support.

If Ahmadinejad got all of the other 11% among undecideds, the race would have stood at 45% to 30%.

Ballen noted in May,

'The current mood indicates that none of the candidates will likely pass the 50 percent threshold needed to automatically win; meaning that a second round runoff between the two highest finishers, as things stand, Mr. Ahmadinejad and
Mr. Moussavi, is likely.'

That is, based on his polling, Ballen did not expect Ahmadinejad to get to 51%.

In fact, the regime has announced that Ahmadinejad received almost 63% of the vote. So while Ballen's polling does suggest that it was plausible that Ahmadinejad could have won a run-off election against Mousavi, it indicated that Ahmadinejad was unlikely to win a first round.

Moreover, given the PFTFT numbers, all of the undecideds would have had to vote for Ahmadinejad in order for him to get over 60% of the total vote. That outcome seems to me so statistically unlikely as to rate as an impossibility.

Note that the regime is not merely claiming that Ahmadinejad barely avoided a run-off by getting 51% of the vote. They are saying he received nearly two-thirds of the vote. No such outcome was predicted by the PFTFT poll-- quite the opposite.

So my commonsense, non-technical, historian's comment is that the poll may well have been sound, and Ballen's original conclusions may also have been. But the tenor of his WaPo article contradicts the poll in seeming to find a 63% margin of victory for Ahmadinejad plausible on the basis of it.

Particularly puzzling is that he seems to have forgotten his own observation that the race in May was closer than it seemed, since 60% of undecideds identified with reform principles.

Finally, 42% of respondents successfully contacted declined to answer the poll. Since it is much more likely that reformists would be afraid of government reprisal and afraid of talking about their politics than that Ahmadinejad supporters would be, the possibility that declines were disproportionately pro-Mousavi voters is strong. Although Ballen says voters were willing to answer controversial questions on press freedom or voting for the supreme leader, in fact these are vague and general issues. Imagine if a woman was pro-Mousavi and the phone rang when her husband, a pro-Ahmadinejad voter, was present. She might well just hang up rather than risk a domestic squabble. The decline rate strikes me as quite large, and of a sort that might well skew the results toward Ahmadinejad supporters.

[StarmanSkye]

The article Alice posted by Robert Clark, 'Why the US Wants to Delegitimize Iran's Elections' strikes me as very insightful & apt. I esp. noted,

Think about the Iranian election from a common sense standpoint. Neither myself nor the vast majority of readers are Iranian experts. But from a common sense standpoint, if your country was under constant threat of attack, even nuclear attack, from two countries with much more powerful military establishments, as is Iran from the U.S. and Israel, would you desert your country’s best defender and elect the preferred candidate of the U.S. and Israel?

Do you believe that the Iranian people would have voted to become an American puppet state?

Iran is an ancient and sophisticated society. Much of the intellectual class is secularized. A significant, but small, percentage of the youth has fallen in thrall to Western devotion to personal pleasure, and to self-absorption. These people are easily organized with American money to give their government and Islamic constraints on personal behavior the bird.

The U.S. government is taking advantage of these westernized Iranians to create a basis for discrediting the Iranian election and the Iranian government.

On June 14, the McClatchy Washington Bureau, which sometimes attempts to report the real news, acquiesced to Washington’s psychological warfare and declared: “Iran election result makes Obama’s outreach efforts harder.” What we see here is the raising of the ugly head of the excuse for “diplomatic failure,” leaving only a military solution.

As a person who has seen it all from inside the U.S. government, I believe that the purpose of the U.S. government’s manipulation of the American and puppet government media is to discredit the Iranian government by portraying the Iranian government as an oppressor of the Iranian people and a frustrater of the Iranian people’s will. This is how the U.S. government is setting up Iran for military attack.

With the help of Moussavi, the U.S. government is creating another “oppressed people,” like Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, who require American lives and money to liberate. Has Moussavi, the American candidate in the Iranian election who was roundly trounced, been chosen by Washington to become the American puppet ruler of Iran?

I can hardly imagine the State Dept., CIA and misc. policy wonks are too stupid to realize that the persistent, virulent criticism of Iran in the western press and hostile, threatening postures by US and Israeli officials would dissuade people from voting for Ahmadinejad -- facing the kind of belligerant accusations and uncertaintly over whether the US and Israel are determined to attack Iran, Iranians would be most UNLIKELY to change their president in the midst of a potentially-unfolding, serious political, economic and military crisis. So once again, it seems the US political establishment is manipualating and exploiting events to suit a cynical and dangerous agenda.

I also found the article posted by Jack, 'Ahmadinejad Won. Get Over It' by Flynt and Hillary Leverett quite well-written and insightful also.

Thanx!

Too bad these rational analyses will undoubtedly be ignored or drowned-out by the BS claptrap the MSM will churn-out and promote, part of their civic duty as faithful Big Brother loyalists and responsible Pentagon stooges, nyet?

Shaping the American Hearts and Minds, the better to convince us no cost is too great, no amount of violence and lies shall be spared to keep us Safe and Free from Democracy...

-S

[Percival]

The more I watch this and the whole Twitter charade playing out the more I am convinced that MA actually won this election and the CIA and other western intell are behind the efforts of a small faction of westernized iranian youth to forment civil war on the streets and make it look like he stole it to further demonize him.

I am not lending support to MA in any way, but I think there is more to this than meets the eye and I think Obama is laying low because he knows whats really going on and doesnt want to call more attention to the US being involved in this.

[JackRiddler]

.

538 now presents a case for doubting the numbers, focused on Karroubi's unlikely performance compared to 2005.

Iran Does Have Some Fishy Numbers
by Renard Sexton @ 10:15 AM
Bookmark and Share Share This Content

A most strange storyline has emerged with regard to the provincial vote totals for the Iranian election. Around 1600 GMT Sunday, the ministry of Interior released the official vote totals by province. As others have mentioned, by law candidates have three days following voting to contest the result, before the final totals are approved by the Supreme Leader. As such, it is notable that both the aggregate totals and provincial totals were certified, approved and released before the three day deadline.

Another curious turn of events was that somewhere between 1600 and 2000 GMT, the provincial vote totals mysteriously disappeared from the English language (and all other languages other than Persian) versions of www.presstv.ir and other Iranian news outlets, where the interior ministry had distributed the results. As such, we are in debt to Daniel Berman and his colleagues for their translation of the official provincial numbers.

Although widespread allegations of fraud, manipulation, intimidation and other all too common elections tactics have been be common, statistically detecting fraud or manipulation is a challenge. For example, while mathematicians have been evaluating vote returns for irregularities in normal situational random number distribution , determining what the "correct" results should be is very difficult.

However, given the absolutely bizarre figures that have been given for several provinces, given qualitative knowledge - for example, that Mahdi Karroubi earned almost negligible vote totals in his native Lorestan and neighboring Khuzestan, which he won in 2005 with 55.5% and 36.7% respectively - there is room for a much closer look.

Two things are of particular interest to us, the first being whether it is plausible for Pres. Ahmadinejad to have received as high of a total as the results indicate (and the sub-question of whether it was plausible for him to have received an outright majority in the first round). The second question is whether the vote totals for his rivals are reasonable, given the fact that they have run for elected office before. Iranian politics, as in many countries, is dominated by a relatively small number of individuals who in many cases have held several of the key posts in government since 1979. Those with strong connections to founding Supreme Leader Khomeni and his associates have fared particularly well. Evaluting their support by province in previous election cycles, particularly in a Presidential race, is one way to provide some evidence for or against them.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/ ... mbers.html

[JackRiddler]

.

And now, just to make sure I've exasperated everyone...

If I lived in Iran you'd find me on the street with the hundreds of thousands now protesting for the opposition, assuming I had the same courage. They are heroes. I'd take the opportunity, once these crowds formed, to help bring the regime to its knees. I'd do this even if I thought the election results were true, and Ahmedinejad really did win 63 percent of the vote (which appears likely to me).

Because although it allows limited elections, the Islamic republic is not a democracy. It is not a legitimate government of the people. It is a theocracy born only 30 years ago in the blood of secular martyrs, in which:
- The sovereign is a "Supreme Leader" who claims absolute power by divine right and is chosen, apparently for life, by a tiny clerical patriarchy.
- The regime restricts ballot access based on strict ideological criteria.
- Women's rights and voices are brutally suppressed.
- Speech is heavily restricted.
- Popular democratic reforms advanced by elected representatives are shot down by the "Supreme Leader."
- There is a history of crackdowns and mass executions (one in which Mousavi's role is far greater than Ahmedinejad's, however).
- People are executed for adultery and homosexuality.
- The young are stifled by medieval conventions enforced by the armed and uniformed bullies of the state.

Even if a majority supports the illegitimate oppression of a minority, it's still wrong. If I were a woman forced to wear a hijab every day against my will, I would march to bring down the regime, even if 63 percent of my compatriots supported Ahmedinejad for his hardline policies. It would be like fighting for civil rights in the American South, even though the majority of the people there were for the status quo.

That being said, I am in the United States, and I know that the best thing for my country to do, both government and people, is to stay neutral in a situation in which
- we have no standing, given our history;
- our government's indisputable track record has been one of disastrous aggression against the people of Iran;
- the only things we can do will make things worse, as the opposition can only be discredited through association with Americans;
- there is a war faction among us who have been trying to instigate military action against Iran for years.

Because all of the above points about the regime can be true, and yet all of the following can also be true:
- Mousavi's claims to election victory may have been lies designed to engineer the perception of election fraud, with the intent of prompting the government's reaction.
- The origins of this crisis lie in a split within the conservative power elite of the regime.
- The CIA and Co. are no doubt trying to instigate a "Green Revolution." Please note that this does not mean the Iranian opposition is a "CIA front," or that the CIA is responsible for the upheaval. In fact, the CIA's interference could serve to damage their cause.
- The Axis-of-Evil hardliners are still among us and would like nothing better than to find the pretext for a murderous bombing campaign.

Whether it plays out in the end as an unstable stalemate, a triumph of freedom or a tragedy for the people, this can only be Iran's struggle, not our own.

.

[American Dream]

Thank you, Jack for the above statement. Very principled and thoughtful.

Here, from "Anti-Defamation" which, while not showing any smoking guns, does raise the strong possibility of a covert American involvement:

The CIA's Iranian Plan?
Is the CIA involved in Iran's recent election unrest?

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22839.htm

[ninakat]

Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran?

Why the US Wants to Delegitimize the Iranian Elections

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

June 16, 2009

Thanks for posting that article, Alice. While reading it, I kept thinking of the common sense aspect to the "stolen" election, and then Paul Craig Roberts put it into words:

Think about the Iranian election from a common sense standpoint. Neither myself nor the vast majority of readers are Iranian experts. But from a common sense standpoint, if your country was under constant threat of attack, even nuclear attack, from two countries with much more powerful military establishments, as is Iran from the U.S. and Israel, would you desert your country’s best defender and elect the preferred candidate of the U.S. and Israel?

Do you believe that the Iranian people would have voted to become an American puppet state?

I know the issue is more complex than that, but the common sense aspect holds a lot of weight IMO. Also, a poster at ICH posted the following (which I have yet to research -- perhaps someone here knows more):

Thank you, Mr. Roberts. Indeed, Mr. Mousavi is an Azeri, an important factor. It is natural for Azeris to have 'one of their own' - however, Ahmadinejad enjoyed the support of the man who has the absolute power in Iran -- Ayatollah Khamenei - An Azeri. There is no reason to think the votes were inaccurate. Many educated Iranians voted for Ahmadinejad.
Peace | 06.16.09 - 6:05 pm | link

original article here: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22844.htm

[American Dream]

Iran's Day of Destiny
Robert Fisk

Fisk witnesses the courage of one million
protesters who ignored threats, guns and bloodshed
to demand freedom in Iran

Tuesday, 16 June 2009

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 06010.html


A demonstrator who was shot during a protest demonstration in the streets of the capital Tehran today

It was Iran's day of destiny and day of courage. A
million of its people marched from Engelob Square to
Azadi Square - from the Square of Revolution to the
Square of Freedom - beneath the eyes of Tehran's brutal
riot police. The crowds were singing and shouting and
laughing and abusing their "President" as "dust".

Mirhossein Mousavi was among them, riding atop a car
amid the exhaust smoke and heat, unsmiling, stunned,
unaware that so epic a demonstration could blossom amid
the hopelessness of Iran's post-election bloodshed. He
may have officially lost last Friday's election, but
yesterday was his electoral victory parade through the
streets of his capital. It ended, inevitably, in
gunfire and blood.

Not since the 1979 Iranian Revolution have massed
protesters gathered in such numbers, or with such
overwhelming popularity, through the boulevards of this
torrid, despairing city. They jostled and pushed and
crowded through narrow lanes to reach the main highway
and then found riot police in steel helmets and batons
lined on each side. The people ignored them all. And
the cops, horribly outnumbered by these tens of
thousands, smiled sheepishly and - to our astonishment
- nodded their heads towards the men and women
demanding freedom. Who would have believed the
government had banned this march?

The protesters' bravery was all the more staggering
because many had already learned of the savage killing
of five Iranians on the campus of Tehran University,
done to death - according to students - by pistol-
firing Basiji militiamen. When I reached the gates of
the college yesterday morning, many students were
weeping behind the iron fence of the campus, shouting
"massacre" and throwing a black cloth across the mesh.
That was when the riot police returned and charged into
the university grounds once more.

At times, Mousavi's victory march threatened to crush
us amid walls of chanting men and women. They fell into
the storm drains and stumbled over broken trees and
tried to keep pace with his vehicle, vast streamers of
green linen strung out in front of their political
leader's car. They sang in unison, over and over, the
same words: "Tanks, guns, Basiji, you have no effect
now." As the government's helicopters roared overhead,
these thousands looked upwards and bayed above the
clatter of rotor blades: "Where is my vote?" Clichés
come easily during such titanic days, but this was
truly a historic moment.

Would it change the arrogance of power which Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad demonstrated so rashly just a day earlier,
when he loftily invited the opposition - there were
reported to be huge crowds protesting on the streets of
other Iranian cities yesterday - to be his "friends",
while talking ominously of the "red light" through
which Mousavi had driven. Ahmadinejad claimed a 66 per
cent victory at the polls, giving Mousavi scarcely 33
per cent. No wonder the crowds yesterday were also
singing - and I mean actually singing in chorus - "They
have stolen our vote and now they are using it against
us."

A heavy and benevolent dust fell over us all as we
trekked the great highway towards the fearful pyramid
of concrete which the Shah once built to honour his
father and which the 1979 revolutionaries re-named
Freedom Square. Behind us, among the stragglers, stones
began to burst on to the road as Basijis besieged the
Sharif University (they seem to have something against
colleges of further education these days) and one man
collapsed on the road, his face covered in blood. But
on the great mass of people moved, waving their green
flags and shouting in joy at the thousands of Iranians
who stood along the rooftops.

On the right, they all saw an old people's home and out
on to the balcony came the aged and the crippled who
must have remembered the reign of the loathed Shah,
perhaps even his creepy father, Reza Khan. A woman who
must have been 90 waved a green handkerchief and an
even older man emerged on the narrow balcony and waved
his crutch in the air. The thousands below them
shrieked back their joy at this ancient man.

Walking beside this vast flood of humanity, a strange
fearlessness possessed us all. Who would dare attack
them now? What government could deny a people of this
size and determination? Dangerous questions.

By dusk, the Basiji were being chased by hundreds of
protesters in the west of the city but shooting was
crackling around the suburbs after dark. Those who were
fatally too late in leaving Azadi, were fired on by the
Basiji. One dead, thousands in panic, we heard behind
us.

After every day of sunlight, there usually comes a
perilous darkness and perhaps it was prefigured by the
strange grey cloud that approached us all as we drew
closer to Azadi Square yesterday afternoon. Many of the
thousands of people around me noticed it and, burned by
the afternoon sun, seemed to walk faster to embrace its
shade. Then it rained, it poured, it soaked us. There
is a faint rainy season in mid-summer Tehran but it had
arrived early, sunlight arcing through the clouds like
the horizon in a Biblical painting.

Moin, a student of chemical engineering at Tehran
University - the same campus where blood had been shed
just a few hours before - was walking beside me and
singing in Persian as the rain pelted down. I asked him
to translate.

"It's a poem by Sohrab Sepehri, one of our modern
poets," he said. Could this be real, I asked myself? Do
they really sing poems in Tehran when they are trying
to change history? Here is what he was singing:

"We should go under the rain.
We should wash our eyes,
And we should see the world in a different way."

He grinned at me and at his two student friends. "The
next line is about making love to a woman in the rain,
but that doesn't seem very suitable here." We all
agreed. Our feet hurt. We were still tripping over
manhole covers and kerbstones hidden beneath men's feet
and women's chadors. For this was not just the trendy,
young, sunglassed ladies of north Tehran. The poor were
here, too, the street workers and middle-aged ladies in
full chador. A very few held babies on their shoulders
or children by the arm, talking to them from time to
time, trying to explain the significance of this day to
a mind that would not remember it in the years to come
that they were here on this day of days.

The vast Azadi monument appeared through the grey light
like a spaceship - we had been walking for four miles -
and Moin and his friends spent an hour squeezing
through a body of humanity so dense that my chest was
about to be crushed. Around the monument, the Shah had
long ago built a grassed rampart. We struggled to its
height and there, suddenly, was the breathtaking nature
of it all. Readers who have seen the film Atonement
will remember the scene where the British hero-soldier
climbs a sand-dune and suddenly beholds those thousands
on the beaches of Dunkirk. This was no less awesome.

Amid the great basin of grass and concrete that
surrounds the monument were a thousand souls, moving
and swaying and singing in the new post-rain sunlight.
There must have been at least a million, and - here one
struggles for a metaphor - it was like a vast animal, a
great heaving beast that breathed and roared and moved
sluggishly beneath that monstrous arrow of concrete.
Moin and his friends lay on the grass, smoking
cigarettes. They asked each other if the Supreme Leader
would understand what this meant for Iran. "He's got to
hold the elections again," one of Moin's friends told
him. They looked at me. Don't ask a foreigner, I said.
Because I'm not so sure that the fathers of the 1979
revolution will look so kindly upon this self-evident
demand for freedom.

True, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader - how
antiquated that title sounded yesterday - had agreed to
enquire into the election results, perhaps to look over
a polling statistic or two. But Ahmadinejad, despite
his obtuseness and his unending smile, is a tough guy
in a tough clerical environment. His glorious
predecessor, Hojatolislam Mohamed Khatami, was
somewhere down there amid the crowds, along with
Mousavi and Mousavi's wife Zahra Rahnavard, but they
could not protect these people.

Government is not about good guys and bad guys. It is
about power, state and political power - they are not
the same - and unless those wanly smiling riot police
move across to the opposition, the weapons of the
Islamic Republic remain in the hands of Ahmadinejad's
administration and his spiritual protectors. As, no
doubt, we shall soon see.

[smiths]

So far the only clear winner in this tangled morass is Twitter.
And this is illusion.
Aside from cute but trite quotes borrowed from historic soundbites like "The revolution will not be televised, it will be Tweeted," (and the annoying tendency to capitalize "Tweeted" (who capitalizes, who ever capitalized "televised"?) Twitter is not the revolutionaries' best friend. Even as I type this Iranian organizers are struggling with inauthentic messages from "the revolution" urging supporters to meetings organized by the secret police, wrestling with proxies to circumvent the secret police's internet blocking efforts, warning of "honey pot" proxies designed to lure in dissenters and record their IP address for later handling by non-cyber means, honing in on Twitter accounts with Iran locations in the profiles and generally using Twitter to spread disinformation.
Unlike the anonymous flier, a political Tweet points right back to the Tweeter. Somewhere, someone has a long, long list of IPs to take a look at when (if) all this quiets down.

[Sweejak]

So where is the outrage about Georgia? Maybe they don't twitter in English?

June 15 (Interfax-AVN) Georgian Opposition Blames U.S., French Ambassadors For Provoking Harsh Rally Dispersal.

TBILISI. June 15 (Interfax-AVN) - Georgia's opposition is waiting for a reaction from the U.S. and French embassies, which earlier criticized the opposition, to the dispersal of a peace rally on Monday.

"We are waiting for U.S. and French ambassadors (John) Tefft and (Eric) Fournier to make statements," a leader of the Republican Party, Tina Khidasheli, told journalists.

The opposition claims that the U.S. and French ambassadors' recent statements criticizing the opposition, provoked the government into harsh treatment of demonstrators. These diplomats, Khidaisheli said, are to blame for an outbreak of tensions following their "irresponsible statements."

Dozens of demonstrators, among them women and elderly people, were injured and dozens of others arrested and "are being beaten in a detention prison," when a rally near the Interior Ministry building in Tbilisi was broken up.

Human Rights Commissioner Sozar Subari was not allowed into the detention facility, Khidasheli claimed. Police seized reporters and cameramen's cassettes and cameras, she said.

[Sweejak]

Iran’s Pre-Political Revolt

What is being challenged is the reactionary social and political form the Iranian system has assumed under Ahmadinejad and the most conservative clerics. The Islamic state itself is not, or at least not yet, in real danger

... It might be called a pre-political revolt. The countries this kind of revolt will eventually affect most, after Iran, will be Saudi Arabia and the other Muslim countries that are at the same time rich and repressive and suffer hypocritical male ruling elites.

... Popular demonstrations and uprisings forced the shah out twice – once to be restored to power by the CIA in the 1950s, and again in 1979, when he had to be flown out of the country by the United States. The Ayatollah Khomeini flew in to replace him, promoted by the power of tape-recorded sermons passed hand to hand by the young people of another generation, stifled by another repressive regime.

http://original.antiwar.com/pfaff/2009/ ... al-revolt/


And I have to pass this one along:

I Love the Smell of Vindication in the Morning Matt Barganier Andrew Sullivan Christopher Hitchens Iran War party http://tinyurl.com/nqzya4

[SonicG]

More on Twitter- More grist for the mill. Not sure why this is on a stock market site and I haven't delved into the comments but it looks pretty non-sus.
Proof: Israeli Effort to Destabilize Iran Via Twitter #IranElection

Right-wing Israeli interests are engaged in an all out Twitter attack with hopes of delegitimizing the Iranian election and causing political instability within Iran.

Anyone using Twitter over the past few days knows that the topic of the Iranian election has been the most popular. Thousands of tweets and retweets alleging that the election was a fraud, calling for protests in Iran, and even urging followers hack various Iranian news websites (which they did successfully). The Twitter popularity caught the eye of various blogs such as Mashable and TechCrunch and even made its way to mainstream news media sites.

[Sweejak]

No evidence as far as I can see. All those things cited are not unusual for any twitter user.

1. They each created their twitter accounts on Saturday June 13th.

I created my account on the day that the mil said twitter was dangerous.

3. “IranElection” was each of their most popular keyword

To initiate a search on twitter people will add the tag #iran, or #earthquake.

5. Half of them had the exact same profile photo

Firstly, it's not a photo and while it may be a little weird is it weird that almost everybody at a political convention has the same button.

6. Each had thousands of followers, with only a few friends. Most of their friends were EACH OTHER.

Friends with each other! And, there are various softs that will get you lots of followers, and if someone were to search using #iranElection these guys would come up, probably just how the JPost writter found them in the first place.

The only thing I find mildly suspicious is the speed with which the JPost picked up on it


Still I wouldn't doubt that there are all sorts of agenda driven tweets by individuals and organizations, I just don't find this evidence compelling.

[Sweejak]

I'll remember this when they shut down twitter here.

U.S. State Department Told Twitter To Maintain Service During Iranian Election Protests

http://tinyurl.com/kpjnde

[JackRiddler]

.

I watched this on HBO last night:

http://www.letterstothepresidentmovie.com/

"Letters to the President"

SYNOPSIS:

Running time 72 minutes.

This is an observational verité film about President Ahmadinejad’s regime in Iran. Allowed to travel on several of the President’s populist trips to the countryside, the filmmaker (the only foreigner given such access) shows Ahmadinejad to be different than he is portrayed by the international media: much less the fiery dangerous leader than an ordinary but charismatic politician. During his trips, the President receives many letters – the government claims ten million – from poor Iranians asking for help. The film takes these letters to the President as its narrative thread, and as a device to provide a glimpse into an Iran that is usually not open to outsiders. While not finding evidence for the government’s claim that its charity resolves the problems of most letters, the film does show that promises and propaganda almost always kindle the sometimes desperate hope of the poor. A hope that finds different outlets, particularly for the religious poor, who turn to belief in a Shia messiah, the Mahdi, who will come at the end of time to bring the world justice. At the holy Mosque where the Mahdi will one day reappear, the poor write letters to the Mahdi, put them in a wishing well, hoping their prayers might be answered.

The HBO version is under an hour, and doesn't include the Mahdi stuff.

Here's what you see: The crowds that gather for Ahmedinejad on his appearances in the provinces are enormous and very emotional. People really do seem to love him and identify with him as one of their own. Always appearing genuine, humble and warm, soft-spoken, he shows great personal concern to everyone he meets and plays to Iranian patriotism and pride, evoking defiance of imperialism and religious feeling. One is left with no doubt of his personal sincerity. People eat it up! They crowd around his entourage, trying to pass letters. Some of these give no more than their name and phone number. A team at Ahmedinejad's offices works around the clock to answer the letters and direct requests to appropriate agencies. Whether or not these responses are effective, the fact of getting any answer serves to bind people's hopes to the president. Quite a few skeptics are shown, especially in Tehran, where most of the people interviewed are disaffected about the stifling medievalism and laugh at the idea of sending their problems to Ahmedinejad. Everyone interviewed complains about the country's enormous problems and the price of rice, and lay blame on the government, but at the same time most of them do not blame Ahmedinejad and believe he is fighting for the poor. They even take him as an anti-establishment figure.

The point being, this is effective political outreach. This is what Ahmedinejad has been doing in the four years after his election, before the impressive Mousavi surge of the last few weeks.

If forced to bet, at this point I'd say the election results were real. There are several suspicious circumstances, above all the lightning-quick announcement of the results and the lack of transparency, also the suspiciously low Karroubi vote. But the election night call for Ahmedinejad followed Mousavi's own claim of a landslide victory, which suggests the authorities were responding to shut down the impression Mousavi was trying to create. On what basis was Mousavi claiming the win?

Let's look again at a typical argument being advanced for fraud based on statistical anomalies, that of Nate Silver of 538:

In the first round of voting in 2005, the three conservative candidates for Iran's presidency -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ali Larijani and Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, got a collective 41 percent of the vote. Last Friday, ostensibly, Ahmadinejad got 63 percent of the vote. Where exactly did those extra votes come from?

Ignoring that in the 2005 runoff, Ahmadinejad (as the sole conservative candidate against the remaining opponent, Rafsanjani) got 62 percent of the vote, roughly the same result as in 2009. Once that share of the people voted for him, it may have become much easier to do it again. They had four years to look back on it and judge whether they regretted it. Who is to say they did not come to agree with their own decision (people tend to do that!).

The implicit presuppositions here are that people will vote the same way in each election, with only small shifts. But sometimes there are big shifts. Where did Ronald Reagan's extra votes in 1984 as opposed to 1980 come from? Unfortunately, more people decided to support him, because they decided they liked what he was doing despite a record that I suspect Nate Silver would agree with me was already horrible.

One way to address this question is by means of multiple regression analysis. We can take the vote shares for the seven candidates in 2005, and compare in each of Iran's 30 provinces to the share of the vote received by each of the four candidates this year. I will weight this regression by the square root of the number of votes in each province, to give more emphasis to those with larger vote totals.

And another way is to look at the actual development of Iranian politics in the last four years, since it's not a static situation, and barring fraud all mathematically measurable changes follow from real-world shifts in opinion, of the sort that are constantly happening everywhere.

The other implicit presupposition here is that Ahmedinejad's support should fade while he is in office, especially if conditions worsen during his tenure. But that's not a natural law. Even if things get worse, blame is fungible. Westerners tend to look at the Iranian economic problems and blame Ahmedinejad and the regime. Ahmedinejad however may be successfully (even correctly) shifting the blame to fluctuations in world prices for food and oil, or the sanctions campaign against Iran, and Iranians may come to see Ahmedinejad as their man against the corrupt elements of the larger regime.

This effect can also work with the Karroubi voters in his home provinces. They were a reform-minded faction in 2005 who seem to have shifted to Ahmedinejad in the 2009 elections, at least based on statistical analysis. What if they've come to see Ahmedinejad as the best hope for at least economic reform against the rest of the regime? This may look ridiculous to us, but perhaps is no more ridiculous than the widespread idea among Americans that the latest candidate on horseback financed by the same banks and arms-makers as always is actually an outsider running against Washington corruption.

Statistical analysis doesn't cut it if it isn't wed to an understanding of the largely emotional and often irrational shifts among the people on the ground.

Once again, none of this is to take away from the courage of those who are now protesting for their most fundamental rights as human beings in Tehran. Their greater cause in demanding individual freedoms is right, even if the proximate motivation of the supposed election fraud turns out to be wrong.

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