The Iran Thread

[Venom'sDad]

Jesus Stormin... I like you; but open your eyes.

 

[StorminNorman]

LOL, yes - please tell me how your eyes are any more open than my open. Please explain to me how your opinion is anyone more valid than mine?

The idea that there is absolutely no difference between Ahmendinijad is absolutely ridiculous - if that was truly the case, then why would the government rig the election?

 

[Venom'sDad]

What evident do you have that the elction was rig.... because Western Media says it is... FoxNews perhaps.

 

[StorminNorman]

How about logic?

The speed in which the votes were counted, the percentages of which the votes came and how the votes broke down area by area is incredulous.

 

[Venom'sDad]

Logic??? Baseless. OK man... your logic is full of assumptions.

 

[StorminNorman]

You're not worth my time.

 

[voyzovrezon]

I'm reminded of 2004 here in the U.S. Despite the numerous protests and rallys for John Kerry, Bush still won. Was the election stolen? There's no solid proof of that on a national scale, although there were reports and lawsuits of voting machine tampering in some cities.

Perhaps the incumbant won in this case too. I read one article where a woman said she was voting for Ahmadinejad because he is a conservative and she mentioned her support of his stance on the habib. She was dressed in all black of course.

I couldn't find that article, but found THIS.

Maybe the silent majority kept him in power. Well, for what power he has over the Allatolyah.

 

[StorminNorman]

I'm reminded of 2004 here in the U.S. Despite the numerous protests and rallys for John Kerry, Bush still won. Was the election stolen? There's no solid proof of that on a national scale, although there were reports and lawsuits of voting machine tampering in some cities.

Perhaps the incumbant won in this case too. I read one article where a woman said she was voting for Ahmadinejad because he is a conservative and she mentioned her support of his stance on the habib. She was dressed in all black of course.

I couldn't find that article, but found THIS.

Maybe the silent majority kept him in power. Well, for what power he has over the Allatolyah.

Trying to compare those two elections is utterly ridiculous.

The Devil Is in the Digits

By Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco
Saturday, June 20, 2009 12:02 AM

Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran -- where he is thought to be highly unpopular -- and even Tabriz, the capital city of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi's native East Azarbaijan province.

Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad's vote share across Iran's provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections.

These pieces of the story point in the direction of fraud, to be sure. They have led experts to speculate that the election results released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed doors. But we don't have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what happened. Here's how.

We'll concentrate on vote counts -- the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces -- and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi's actual vote count in Isfahan), we'll focus on digits 7 and 9.

This may seem strange, because these digits usually don't change who wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

So what can we make of Iran's election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran's government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates -- Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai -- is reported to have received in each of the provinces -- a total of 116 numbers.

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year's U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.

But that's not all. Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran's vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.

Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 percent. And while our first test -- variation in last-digit frequencies -- suggests that Rezai's vote counts are the most irregular, the lack of non-adjacent digits is most striking in the results reported for Ahmadinejad.

Each of these two tests provides strong evidence that the numbers released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior were manipulated. But taken together, they leave very little room for reasonable doubt. The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.

Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia University, will be assistant professors in New York University's Wilf Family Department of Politics this fall.

Here is more evidence of fraud:

Saturday, June 13, 2009
Stealing the Iranian Election

Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.

4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.

5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.

But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.

As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.

The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.

This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.

The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election.

This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players.

More in my column, just out, in Salon.com: "Ahmadinejad reelected under cloud of fraud," where I argue that the outcome of the presidential elections does not and should not affect Obama's policies toward that country-- they are the right policies and should be followed through on regardless.

The public demonstrations against the result don't appear to be that big. In the past decade, reformers have always backed down in Iran when challenged by hardliners, in part because no one wants to relive the horrible Great Terror of the 1980s after the revolution, when faction-fighting produced blood in the streets. Mousavi is still from that generation.

My own guess is that you have to get a leadership born after the revolution, who does not remember it and its sanguinary aftermath, before you get people willing to push back hard against the rightwingers.

So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two.

What I've said is full of speculation and informed guesses. I'd be glad to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be.

But no, lets assume that the Iranian government played fair. Lets assume that all the statical analysis is wrong because, after all, the Iranian government doesn't seem like the type of government to oppress people, right? It's not like they are slaughtering innocent people just for protesting, thrown journalists in jail or arrested teachers.

 

[Venom'sDad]

But no, lets assume that the Iranian government played fair, lets assume that all the statical analysis is wrong because, after all, the Iranian government doesn't seem like the type of government to oppress people? After all, it's not like they are slaughtering innocent people just for protesting.

Again... False Flag, to format a U.S./U.K. back revoultion in Iran. Same technique is being employed. This is about ousting the Ayatollahs and installing a Monarchy/Government that is friendlt to the West. An overthrow of an elected regime to install a puppet regime. Watch out for the underlying sentiment of a third party/individual to bring Iran to the Global Community. Obama Admin. are smooth tacticians.

 

[StorminNorman]

Again... False Flag, to format a U.S./U.K. back revoultion in Iran. Same technique is being employed. This is about ousting the Ayatollahs and installing a Monarchy/Government that is friendlt to the West. An overthrow of an elected regime to install a puppet regime. Watch out for the underlying sentiment of a third party/individual to bring Iran to the Global Community. Obama Admin. are smooth tacticians.

 

[Venom'sDad]

LOL... unbelievable.

 

[Hobgoblin]

Norm, if you want to reply to a post, have something to say. Answering with is just rude.

 

[Arc-Light]

Again... False Flag, to format a U.S./U.K. back revoultion in Iran. Same technique is being employed. This is about ousting the Ayatollahs and installing a Monarchy/Government that is friendlt to the West. An overthrow of an elected regime to install a puppet regime. Watch out for the underlying sentiment of a third party/individual to bring Iran to the Global Community. Obama Admin. are smooth tacticians.

Good point..........if the Ayatollahs are still in power, then Iran will never truly change.

 

[BestGirl]

Iranian protester pleads for U.S., world to intervene

An Iranian student protester in Tehran made a passionate plea for help from the world community this morning in a phone call to CNN’s “American Morning.”

For safety reasons, CNN can only identify the student by his first name, Mohammad. He’s been a part of the protests and a target of the violence there. Below is an edited transcript of the interview.

John Roberts: What is the scene like on the streets? Are there more demonstrators out there on the streets? Or is it much quieter than it has been in recent days?

Mohammad: Hello. Actually I participated in Saturday’s demonstrations in parts of Tehran. What I saw, I saw thousands of security officers that tried to break up the crowd. They used canisters and batons and water cannons against us. They attacked us. And we also in response attacked them. We attacked them by throwing stones. And we built trenches in the streets and actually defended too.

Roberts: So there was quite a large confrontation going on there over the weekend. But can you tell us what the scene is like on the streets today?

Mohammad: Today was a long day in Tehran. And yesterday there weren’t any organized rallies in Tehran. Because we take orders from our leader Mr. Karroubi and Mr. Mir Hossein Moussavi. The connections, the communication is very difficult, more than even you can imagine in Tehran. But I myself haven’t received any orders from our leaders yet. But as soon as I get any order, I will participate in any demonstration that they tell us.

Kiran Chetry: When you say receiving orders, tell us how the protests are organized. How are you guys called to go and where?

Mohammad: Actually, I’m a regular person. I’m not behind the scenes. I cannot tell you exactly how these demonstrations are organized. But as I know, as people said, there is a council, a group of Iranian reformists who organize these demonstrations and they tell us in any way that they could and we just follow.

Chetry: Do you get it on your cell phone, text messages, are you able to use the internet?

Mohammad: Actually, they reduce the internet speed. We have severe problems with the messenger software and every software like messengers. This is arranged by making calls, messages, calls to his friends or her friends and try to gather as much to tell as he or she can.

Roberts: Mohammad, we have been talking this morning about what the students are fighting for and whether the students are fighting for something different than the older more established political candidates like Moussavi. Are the students seeking regime change? Are they looking to bring down the Ayatollah and completely change the form of government there in Iran? Or are you looking for – as has been suggested – more civil rights, more freedoms within the context of the existing regime?

Mohammad: Yes. Let me tell you something. For about three decades our nation has been humiliated and insulted by this regime. Now Iranians are united again one more time after 1979 Revolution. We are a peaceful nation. We don’t hate anybody. We want to be an active member of the international community. We don’t want to be isolated. Is this much of a demand for a country with more than 2,500 years of civilization? We don’t deny the Holocaust. We do accept Israel’s rights. And actually, we want — we want severe reform on this structure. This structure is not going to be tolerated by the majority of Iranians. We need severe reform, as much as possible.

Roberts: Interesting perspective this morning from Mohammad, a student demonstrator there in Tehran.

Mohammad: Excuse me, sir. I have a message for the international community. Would you please let me tell it?

Roberts: Yes, go ahead.

Mohammad: Americans, European Union, international community, this government is not definitely — is definitely not elected by the majority of Iranians. So it’s illegal. Do not recognize it. Stop trading with them. Impose much more sanctions against them. My message…to the international community, especially I’m addressing President Obama directly – how can a government that doesn’t recognize its people’s rights and represses them brutally and mercilessly have nuclear activities? This government is a huge threat to global peace. Will a wise man give a sharp dagger to an insane person? We need your help international community. Don’t leave us alone.

Chetry: Mohammad, what do you think the international community should do besides sanctions?

Mohammad: Actually, this regime is really dependent on importing gasoline. More than 85% of Iran’s gasoline is imported from foreign countries. I think international communities must sanction exporting gasoline to Iran and that might shut down the government.

http://amfix.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/22/iranian-protestor-plea/

Interesting, but not surprising, that he asks for sanctions but no invasion. His demand that gasoline be barred from the country sounds reasonable. Who sells Iran its gas?

 

[StorminNorman]

Norm, if you want to reply to a post, have something to say. Answering with is just rude.

Anyone insinuating that the current Iranian government is simply a victim of American/British subterfuge deserves to be treated rudely.

is a valid response. It's the sort of appropriate response to anyone who makes outlandish claims.

In fact there is very little difference between and

Jesus Stormin... I like you; but open your eyes.

They both condescending, dismissive posts.

 

[Marx]

Let's ALL keep this civil and respectful guys.

 

[Ahura Mazda]

Again... False Flag, to format a U.S./U.K. back revoultion in Iran. Same technique is being employed. This is about ousting the Ayatollahs and installing a Monarchy/Government that is friendlt to the West. An overthrow of an elected regime to install a puppet regime. Watch out for the underlying sentiment of a third party/individual to bring Iran to the Global Community. Obama Admin. are smooth tacticians.

In what world is the current regime an elected regime. This is not free choice and I take offence when people wright such idiotic statements.

The people are given very little choice and they certainly do not participate in the vote for the true power in Iran.

This is not an elected regime by any standards.

 

[Venom'sDad]

This is the very definition of an elected regime. A Supreme Leader choose the candidates and the people vote for either candidate.

 

[BlackLantern]

How about logic?

The speed in which the votes were counted, the percentages of which the votes came and how the votes broke down area by area is incredulous.

When the Iranian state TV is reporting that a mere 4 hours after polls were closed over a million votes were hand counted....it raises a flag in my brain

 

[Ahura Mazda]

This is the very definition of an elected regime. A Supreme Leader choose the candidates and the people vote for either candidate.

The political system of the Islamic Republic is based on the 1979 Constitution. The system comprises several intricately connected governing bodies. The Supreme Leader of Iran is responsible for delineation and supervision of the general policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran.[121] The Supreme Leader is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, controls the military intelligence and security operations; and has sole power to declare war or peace.[121] The heads of the judiciary, state radio and television networks, the commanders of the police and military forces and six of the twelve members of the Council of Guardians are appointed by the Supreme Leader.[121] The Assembly of Experts elects and dismisses the Supreme Leader on the basis of qualifications and popular esteem.[122] The Assembly of Experts is responsible for supervising the Supreme Leader in the performance of legal duties.

After the Supreme Leader, the Constitution defines the President of Iran as the highest state authority.[121][123] The President is elected by universal suffrage for a term of four years and can only be re-elected for one term.[123] Presidential candidates must be approved by the Council of Guardians prior to running in order to ensure their allegiance to the ideals of the Islamic revolution.[124] The President is responsible for the implementation of the Constitution and for the exercise of executive powers, except for matters directly related to the Supreme Leader, who has the final say in all matters.[121] The President appoints and supervises the Council of Ministers, coordinates government decisions, and selects government policies to be placed before the legislature.[125] Eight Vice-Presidents serve under the President, as well as a cabinet of twenty two ministers, who must all be approved by the legislature.[126] Unlike many other states, the executive branch in Iran does not control the armed forces. Although the President appoints the Ministers of Intelligence and Defense, it is customary for the President to obtain explicit approval from the Supreme Leader for these two ministers before presenting them to the legislature for a vote of confidence.


This is what you call an elected regime.

 

[BlackLantern]

so the current President would only sit for 4 more years?? somehow I don't see him stepping down

 

[ChrisBaleBatman]

I'm just wondering, what CAN we do?

I mean, do we even have the soldiers to spare if we even wanted to step in with our military?

 

[BlackLantern]

Our forces are stretched too much RIGHT NOW....this is something that the people of Iran need to do...they need to dig in and get ready for a long, long struggle

 

[StorminNorman]

I'm just wondering, what CAN we do?

I mean, do we even have the soldiers to spare if we even wanted to step in with our military?

I would take people from Iraq and put them into Iran.

I believe this has the ability to be one of the most important events in the decade.

 

[Raiden]

I would take people from Iraq and put them into Iran.

I believe this has the ability to be one of the most important events in the decade.

But those Iraq troops are already going to go to Afghanistan. If we go into Iran it'd have to be a full committment, and I just don't think U.S. can afford to be involved in another war right now.