CIA attempts to topple Ahmadinejad at SCO Yekaterinburg summit

[Magda Hassan]

As for western 'democratic standards'. Are we really in any position to lecture others?

The arrogance of America and others in the west leaves me virtually breathless when it comes to the way they lecture and harangue other nations from their self proclaimed elevated position of moral superiority.

But I suppose we must understand that "democracy" for these people is, in reality, a successful fiction papering over the slime of dictatorial realities.

And speaking of slime, does Kissinger still have a French war criminal arrest warrant outstanding on him anyone know?

I'm not sure about France with Sarkozy acting as US proxy but I am sure it is still current in Spain.

[Peter Presland]

Trust the heroic BBC to use a gnarled old war criminal to make the case...our license fee at work yet again. Did they pay money to this mass murderer, I wonder?

The BBC indeed. Just have a listen to the first 30 seconds of this. It's the intro to the BBC Radio 4 Flagship 'World This Weekend' program from last Sunday. For those without the BBC iPlayer installed, here's a transcript:

Shaun Ley: "The World This Weekend, this is Shaun Ley. Hello. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has used a news conference this lunchtime to describe his re-election as President of Iran as an epic moment. There have been more protest by opposition supporters and criticisms from Iran’s neighbours."
Daniel Ayalon, Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel: "It is now high time for the international community to stop immediately the very dangerous and relentless campaign of Iran to achieve nuclear capabilities."
Shaun Ley: "That’s the view from Israel. We’ll be hearing a US perspective and the son of the former Shah joins me live."

That's a good example of the BBC's idea of balance. I've caught snatches from BBC R5 all week (wife listens to is as background) The son of the former Shah has been featured relentlessly. I've yet to hear a single word suggesting, either that it's none of our damn business, or that the election results could possibly be anything other than an outrageous fraud.

It's the same with the rest of our MSM - they speak with one voice on the subject - so much so that its down-right scary. Regimented newspeak in fact. And I've no doubt most of our population consider themselves well informed on the issue as a result

We are being set up for something here.

[Mark Stapleton]

It's the same with the rest of our MSM - they speak with one voice on the subject - so much so that its down-right scary. Regimented newspeak in fact. And I've no doubt most of our population consider themselves well informed on the issue as a result

We are being set up for something here.

WW3?

[Magda Hassan]

From Mossadegh to Ahmadinejad
The CIA and the Iranian experiment
by Thierry Meyssan*
The news of alleged election fraud has spread through Tehran like wildfire, pitching ayatollah Rafsanjani’s supporters against ayatollah Khamenei’s in street confrontations. This chaotic situation is secretly stirred by the CIA which has been spreading confusion by flooding Iranians with contradicting SMS messages. Thierry Meyssan recounts this psychological warfare experiment.




In March 2000, the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted that the Eisenhower administration organized a regime change in 1953 in Iran and that this historical event explained the current hostility of Iranians towards the United States. Last week, during the speech he addressed to Muslims in Cairo, President Obama officially recognized that « in the midst of the cold war the United States played a role in the toppling of a democratically elected Iranian government » [1].
At the time, Iran was controlled by a puppet monarchy headed by the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He had been placed on the throne by the British who forced his father, the pro-Nazi Cossack officer Reza Pahlavi to resign. However, the Shah had to deal with a nationalist Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh, with the help of ayatollah Abou al-Qassem Kachani, nationalized the oil resources [2]. Furious, the British persuaded the United States that the Iranian dissent needed to be stopped before the country became communist. The CIA then put together Operation Ajax to overthrow Mossadegh with the help of the Shah, and to replace him with Nazi general Fazlollah Zahedi who until then was detained by the British. Zahedi is responsible for having instituted the cruelest terror regime of the time, while the Shah would cover his exactions while parading for Western ‘people’ magazines.
Operation Ajax was lead by archeologist Donald Wilber, historian Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of president Theodore Roosevelt) and general Norman Schwartzkopf Sr. (whose son with the same name lead Operation Desert Storm). This operation remains a textbook example of subversion. The CIA came up with a scenario that gave the impression of a popular revolt when in reality it was a covert operation. The highpoint of the show was a demonstration in Tehran with 8 000 actors paid by the Agency to provide credible pictures to Western media [3].
Is History repeating itself? Washington renounced to a military attack on Iran and has dissuaded Israel to take such an initiative. In order to « change the regime », the Obama administration prefers to play the game of covert actions – less dangerous but with a more unpredictable outcome. After the Iranian presidential elections, huge demonstrations in the streets of Tehran are pitching supporters of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ali Khamenei on one side, to supporters of defeated candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on the other. The demonstrations are a sign of a profound division in the Iranian society between a nationalist proletariat and a bourgeoisie upset at being held back from economic globalization [4]. With its covert actions, Washington is trying to weigh on the events to topple the re-elected president.
Once again, Iran is an experimental field for innovative subversive methods. CIA is relying in 2009 on a new weapon: control of cell phones. Since the democratization of mobile phones, Anglo-Saxon secret services have increased their interception capability. While wired phones’ tapping requires the installation of branch circuits – and therefore local agents, tapping of mobile phones can be done remotely using the Echelon network. However, this system cannot intercept Skype mobile phones communications, which explains the success of Skype telephones in conflict areas [5]. The National Security Agency (NSA) therefore lobbied world Internet Service Providers to require their cooperation. Those who accepted have received huge retribution [6].
In countries under their occupation —Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan—, the Anglo-Saxons intercept all telephone communication, whether mobile or wired. The goal is not to obtain full transcripts of any given conversation, but to identify « social networks ». In other words, telephones are surveillance bugs which make it possible to know who anyone is in touch with. Firstly, the hope is to identify resistance networks.
Secondly, telephones make it possible to locate identified targets and «neutralize» them. This is why in February 2008, the Afghan rebels ordered various operators to stop their activity daily, from 5PM to 3AM, in order to prevent the Anglo-Saxons to follow their whereabouts. The relay antennas of those that refused to comply where destroyed [7].
On the contrary, with the exception of a telephone exchange which was accidentally hit, Israeli forces made sure not to hit telephone exchanges in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead from December 2008 to January 2009. This is a complete change in strategy. Since the Gulf War, the most prevalent strategy was colonel John A. Warden’s « five circles theory »: the bombing of telephone infrastructures was considered a strategic objective to both confuse populations and to cut communication lines between commanding centers and fighters. Now the opposite applies: telecommunication infrastructures must be protected. During the bombings in Gaza, the operator Jawwal [8] offered additional talk time to its users – officially to help them but de facto serving Israel’s interests. Going one step further, Anglo-Saxons and Israeli secrets services developed psychological warfare methods based on an extensive use of mobile phones. In July 2008, after the exchange of prisoners and remains between Israel and Hezbollah, robots placed tens of thousands of calls to Lebanese mobile phones. A voice speaking in Arabic was warning against participating in any resistance activity and belittled Hezbollah. The Lebanese minister of telecommunications, Jibran Bassil [9], files a complaint to the UN against this blatant violation of the country’s sovereignty [10]. Following the same approach, tens of thousands of Lebanese and Syrians received an automatic phone call in October 2008 to offer them 10 million dollars for any information leading to the location and freeing of Israeli prisoners. People interested in collaborating were invited to call a number in the UK [11].
This method has now been used in Iran to bluff the population, to spread shocking news and to channel the resulting anger.
First, SMS were sent during the night of the counting of the votes, according to which the Guardian Council of the Constitution (equivalent to a constitutional court) had informed Mir-Hossein Mousavi of his victory. After that, the announcing of the official results — the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with 64 % of cast votes — seemed like a huge fraud. However, three days earlier, M. Mousavi and his friends were considering a massive victory of M. Ahmadinejad as certain and were trying to explain it by unbalanced campaigns. Indeed the ex president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was detailing his grievances in an open letter. The US polling institutes in Iran were predicting a 20 points lead for M. Ahmadinejad over M. Mousavi [12]. M. Mousavi victory never seemed possible, even if it is probable that some fraud accentuated the margin between the two candidates.
Secondly, Iranian citizens were selected or volunteered on the Internet to chat on Facebook or to subscribe to Twitter feeds. They received information —true or false— (still via SMS) about the evolution of the political crisis and the ongoing demonstrations. These anonymous news posts were spreading news of gun fights and numerous deaths which to this day have not been confirmed. Because of an unfortunate calendar overlap, Twitter was supposed to suspend its service for a night to allow for some maintenance of its systems. The US State Department intervened to ask them to postpone it [13]. According to the New York Times, these operations contributed to spread defiance in the population [14].
Messages describing death threats, police bursting into homes, etc. sent by authors who cannot be indentified or located. Simultaneously, in a new type of effort, the CIA is mobilizing anti-Iranian militants in the United States and in the United Kingdom to increase the chaos. A Practical Guide to revolution in Iran was distributed to them, which contains a number of recommendations, including:
set Twitter accounts feeds to Tehran time zone;
centralize messages on the following Twitter accounts @stopAhmadi, #iranelection and #gr88 ;
official Iranian State websites should not be attacked. « Let the US military take care of it » (sic).
When applied, these recommendations make it impossible to authenticate any Twitter messages. It is impossible to know if they are being sent by witnesses of the demonstrations in Tehran or by CIA agents in Langley, and it is impossible to distinguish real from false ones. The goal is to create more and more confusion and to push Iranians to fight amongst themselves.
Army general staffs everywhere in the world are closely following the events in Tehran. They are trying to evaluate the efficiency of this new subversion method in the Iranian experimental field. Evidently, the destabilization process worked. But it is unclear if the CIA will be able to channel demonstrators to do what the Pentagon has renounced to do, and what they do not want to do themselves : to change the regime and put an end to the Islamic revolution.

Thierry Meyssan
Journalist and writer, president of the Voltaire Network.





English version by J.C.


[1] « Obama Speech In Cairo », Voltaire Network, 6 June 2009.
[2] « BP-Amoco, coalition pétrolière anglo-saxonne », Arthur Lepic, Voltaire Network, June 10 2004.
[3] On the 1953 coup, the reference work is All the Shah’s Men : An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer, John Wiley & Sons éd (2003), 272 pp.
[4] « La société iranienne paralysée », Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 5 février 2004.
[5] « Taliban using Skype phones to dodge MI6 », Glen Owen, Mail Online, September 13 2008.
[6] « NSA offering ’billions’ for Skype eavesdrop solution », Lewis Page, The Register, February 12 2009.
[7] « Taliban Threatens Cell Towers », Noah Shachtman, Wired, February 25 2008.
[8] Jawwal belongs to PalTel, Palestinian billionaire Munib Al-Masri’s company.
[9] Jibran Bassil is one of the main leaders of the ‘Courant patriotique libre’, the nationalist party of Michel Aoun.
[10] « Freed Lebanese say they will keep fighting Israel », Associated Press, July 17 2008.
[11] The author of this article witnessed these phone calls. Also see « Strange Israeli phone calls alarm Syrians. Israeli intelligence services accused of making phone calls to Syrians in bid to recruit agents », Syria News Briefing, December 4 2008.
[12] Quoted in « Ahmadinejad won. Get over it », Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, Politico, June 15 2009.
[13] « U.S. State Department speaks to Twitter over Iran », Reuters, June 16 2009.
[14] « Social Networks Spread Defiance Online », Brad Stone and Noam Cohen, The New York Times, June 15 2009.


http://www.voltairenet.org/article160670.html

[Magda Hassan]

Following is an enlightening article showing the same agents using the same tactics in the colour revolutions so beloved by the empire. Serbia, Georgia, Kyrgistan, Iran. It is all the same.


Iranian “Otpor” activist Iranian Coup d’État: Shade of Green and the Same Clenched Fist

We know Washington is orchestrating and funding coup d’état presently taking place in Iran, among else because it was reported back in 2006 that United States decided to use covert means to remove Ahmadinejad from power, from within — it is much cheaper, safer and entirely pain-free for the Empire, in comparison to an open warfare.
We also know pro-US activists in Iran have been receiving “aid from the West” since 2004, when the so-called “Iran Human Rights Documentation Center” based at Yale University, received $1 million from “a smaller American government aid program intended for Iran’s opposition inside the country”.
In 2006 Bush administration demanded $75 million from the US Congress “to encourage opposition to Iran’s ruling mullahs”.
Washington also ran and sponsored secret workshops since April 2005 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where paid Iranian “activists” were being trotted for instructions on how to topple Ahmadinejad.
One of the trainers Washington brought over to Dubai to teach young Iranians how to destroy their country and hand it over to the Empire on a silver platter, is no other than the US State Department’s traveling revolution salesman, Otpor activist Ivan Marovic.
“The content of the workshop consisted of explaining the principles of mobilizing the population in the situation where fear is high and there are tensions in the society, meaning they are facing a political crisis.
“We discussed how to overcome that crisis without destruction of property and loss of human life. These are nonviolent strategies of civic mobilization. This is a standard workshop based on the examples from Otpor, our fight against Slobodan Milosevic,” Marovic said.



Serbian Otpor logo


Now in Iran




Recycling Revolutions, Cutting on Design and Printing Costs

Yet, the U.S. president claims he knows nothing about this.
Obama says he “saw on television” that Iranian protesters, fashioning their “peaceful demonstrations” after Serbian Otpor — trained and financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), US Agency for International Development (USAID), Freedom House and other Washington-based institutions specializing in toppling the governments which refuse to be subjugated by the United States — intend to remove Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from power.
Obama says he’s “deeply troubled”. So are we.

Kmara, Georgia


Pora!, Ukraine


KelKel, Kyrgyzstan


Oborona, Russia




Following the Same Script

Just like Otpor and so many color revolutions and “popular movements” after October 2000 (which used elections as a trigger), Iranian demonstrators are following a foolproof script — starting massive riots over the claim elections were rigged and they have been cheated (”Where is my vote?”)
Eagerly backed by the ready chorus of zealous Western news agencies, with 24/7 media coverage repeating the same scenes over and over, drumming it up in every corner of the world (unlike the popular movements entirely unpopular in the West, such as months-long massive street protests attempting to topple Washington-installed Gyurcsany of Hungary or Georgia’s Saakashvili, which received almost no coverage by the Western MSM), Iranian demonstrators are instructed to keep insisting “their” president is not the one who won the elections (Ahmadinejad), but the man Washington wants to install (Mousavi, a US puppet predictably hailed by the Western mainstream media as a “pro-reform” candidate). Like Otpor in Serbia in 2000, they demand recount of the votes or, even better, brand new elections. In either case, an “independent”, Washington-funded body will be tasked with declaring preferred candidate a winner.
Although advertising their state coup as a “nonviolent movement”, Iranian protesters, like Otpor, Kmara, Pora and others before them, are attacking and provoking security forces, throwing stones at them, ganging up on lone policemen, getting up in their faces, swearing at them and mocking them while on duty, in order to provoke violent reactions in front of cameras and to destroy an aura of respect and authority security forces commonly have among the ordinary people, who haven’t been paid by the Washington to demolish every institution of their state under the present government.
And, like many times before, the state — unwilling to use force against the masses — is losing again.






Now, if United States was a democracy and if its media was free, we could hope Obama will eventually be informed about this too by his state television. But as it is, the US president is destined to remain more ignorant about the world he lives in than we are.
http://de-construct.net/e-zine/?p=6589

[David Guyatt]

It's the same with the rest of our MSM - they speak with one voice on the subject - so much so that its down-right scary. Regimented newspeak in fact. And I've no doubt most of our population consider themselves well informed on the issue as a result

We are being set up for something here.

WW3?

I hope to hell not Mark. But it seems to me that's a chance that might well have been factored into the war game scenario.

But the basic aim is the overthrow (sorry, "regime change') of Iran along the lines of the overthrow (sorry, "regime change") of Saddam in Iraq. Eliminating the principal threats to Israel in the Middle east is the name of the game.

[Magda Hassan]

Eliminate the threats to Israel and encircle Russia and China.

[Peter Presland]

Here is a good example of what I mean by the general population considering themselves well informed on Iran through the medium of our MSM. Iain Dale is one of the top 3 political bloggers here in the UK. He would describe himself as 'libertarian centre-right'. He roots for Camerons Tory Party and his all-time political heroes are - wait for it - Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan !!!

In spite of that he is a genuinely nice, personable, sociable guy. Honest he is. I used to have quite a bit of contact with him through his blog comments but was forced to give it up as a waste of time. He is a consummate 'Westminster Village' insider; knows most of our middle-senior rank politicians personally and is privy to all the latest political tittle-tattle. Proud of his country; wants 'democracy' for everyone - at the point of a gun if necessary; heart bleeds for the downtrodden (but with the usual blindspots when it comes to Palestinians and almost any other repressed and disenfranchised indiginous people) - etc etc. He's not paid to have these opinions. He's not in hoc to covert forces pushing an agenda. He just genuinely believes - totally - in the USA/UK being a power for good in the world, struggling valiantly against the forces of evil and vilified for it by assorted 'leftists', anarchists, general uneducated rif-raf and of course the 'TERRORISTS'. I kid you not - a busy fool to put it at its most charitable in fact, but right up there among the mover and shakers in this country but totally blind to their real hidden agendas.

So, that being the case - and with him representing of much of intelligent upper middle-class opinion in this country - what the hell chance is there that the mass of western populations will EVER be anything but sufficiently compliant for the perennial Deep State to continue on its merry way promoting the polar opposite of what he honestly believes is going on?

More to the point; what can anyone do to reverse the near inevitability of it all?

Anyway - here is his latest blog offering on Iran. Do read it. It is childlike in its utter credulous naivity, but that is what we are up against:

Over the last week I have been perplexed, and a little appalled, at the response of both the British and American governments to what has been going on in Iran. Their attitude has been totally 'hands off' on the basis that they don't want to interfere in the internal affairs of another country. And yet Britain and the US are supposed to be beacons of democracy and free thought - countries who have been known for spreading the gospel of freedom all round the world.

Think back to the early 1980s. Did Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan stand on one side when Solidarity was in its infancy? Did they think that uttering words of support might be damaging? No, not a bit of it. They recognised the importance of sending a clear signal that those who were fighting oppression and dictatorship were in their thoughts.

I thought of that when I listened to David Miliband's weasel words last week. And when Barack Obama couldn't bring himself to say what the leader of the free world should have said.

And then on Thursday David Cameron uttered the words I was expecting to hear from Obama: "The protesters should know this - we are on their side". Well, hallelujah.

At least one politician said what other were too weak to.

[David Guyatt]

So, that being the case - and with him representing of much of intelligent upper middle-class opinion in this country - what the hell chance is there that the mass of western populations will EVER be anything but sufficiently compliant for the perennial Deep State to continue on its merry way promoting the polar opposite of what he honestly believes is going on?

It is utterly pitiful that anyone with half a brain can buy into the very obvious deep politics that surround them. But I think we all know many bright people who are deadly anxious to remain as blind as possible, as doing otherwise would so upset their foundations that they would crumble.

What I have noticed however is that there is a growing trend of disbelief in the various phantasmagoria daily perpetuated by our beloved MSM. And the political class are now so mired in stink that even Houdini couldn't restore trust in them. Thank goodness.

[Paul Rigby]

Now, if United States was a democracy and if its media was free, we could hope Obama will eventually be informed about this too by his state television. But as it is, the US president is destined to remain more ignorant about the world he lives in than we are.

http://de-construct.net/e-zine/?p=6589

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Whoever...1-240.html

June 22, 2009 at 08:05:01

The CIA and US Media Roles in Destabilizing Iran

by Michael Green

While everyone who writes about the recent Iranian election has very strong opinions, very few have very many, if any, firm facts. Even such a seemingly solid article by Mr. ZMag, Stephen Zunes, i.e., "Has the Election Been Stolen in Iran?" Posted on June 13, 2009, Printed on June 14, 2009,
http://www.alternet.org/story/140626/ makes broad claims and assertions of patent theft without citing a single source or providing a satisfactory example of any of his claims. I have emailed Professor Zunes for solid examples and have asked him how he obtained so much information so quickly, but have not had a reply (his sites advises that he typically cannot answer all inquiries). For example, Zunes writes from the omniscient perspective:

At the same time, the predictions of knowledgeable Iranian observers from various countries and from across the political spectrum were nearly unanimous in the belief that the leading challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi would defeat incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decisively in yesterday’s presidential election, certainly in the runoff if not in the first round. This also appeared to be the assumption among independent observers in Iran itself.

So overwhelming were the signs of imminent Ahmadinejad defeat and so massive was the margin of his alleged victory, the only reasonable assumption was that there has been fraud on a massive scale.

Not only is this fascinating claim not documented or sourced, but also Zunes seems oblivious of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund sponsored nationwide public opinion survey taken in Iran during an interim circa four weeks prior to the election -- flawed and fallible and incomplete as it is -- showing Ahmadinejad ahead in the very areas where he is reported to have triumphed and Zunes asserted that he could not have won, e.g., northern Tehran; Azeri strongholds. Now that the Rockefeller poll is out, Zunes has taken no notice of it but has instead spiffed up and reposted his original piece on many sites including Huffington Post, and written another piece entitled "Iran's Stolen Election Has Sparked an Uprising -- What Should the U.S. Do?" for Huffington Post that reiterates without any evidence that there was a "clumsy effort by Iranian authorities to steal last Friday's election" It begins, "As the fraudulent outcomes in the presidential races of 2000 in the United States and 2006 in Mexico demonstrate, elections can be stolen without the public rising up to successfully challenge the results."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zu...15472.html

So here is one of ZMag's progressive stars denouncing the theft in Iran and comparing it to the US election theft of 2000, which prompted me to ask what Zunes had said of the US 2000 and 2004 presidential thefts when they were occurring and where the sources of his information would not have been so dubious as they appear to be in Iran.

Fortunately, Zunes has a list of his recent articles, one category of which is "Electoral Politics," that answers those questions. According to his own website, which has articles dating back to 1998, Zunes wrote nothing about the 2000 election theft. As for the 2004 gross theft, Zunes did publish a November 5, 2004 Common Dreams article entitled "Some Potentially Positive Developments from a Disastrous Election" that made no mention of mass-disenfranchisement and accepted the integrity of the count in full. It began, "No progressive should be happy with the results of the presidential election. However, it is hard to predict what the longer-term impact on American politics of a particular presidential election result might be. ...[So] we should keep in mind that there are a number of ways that Bush’s re-election could conceivably prove more beneficial in the longer term than had Kerry been elected." No subsequent Zunes article on electoral politics has a title even remotely suggesting electoral fraud.

So, here is Zunes on the spot declaring fraud for Iran but silent about fraud in the US in 2000 and 2004 except just now, and only with respect to 2000, to illustrate how what he says is happening in Iran has a precedent. Unless Zunes has hard data that he has chosen not to share with his public, he is either a very dim-witted progressive academic, or he has another agenda. He does not appear to be dim-witted. http://67.199.81.153/linkstorecentpublications.html

Paul Craig Roberts, the kind of former WSJ right-winger I would not normally touch with a ten-foot pole, makes the interesting factual claim that Mousavi declared his victory before the polls even closed, which (if true) may explain the otherwise puzzling fact -- on which Zunes relies for his allegation of fraud -- that the Khamenei government was so quick to declare Ahmadi-Nejad the winner without (at that moment) providing a district-by-district count. Roberts writes,

The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted. However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the preemptive declaration of victory and the announcement of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote. It is amazing that people don’t see through this trick. "Are the Iranian Election Protests Another US Orchestrated ‘Color Revolution’?" http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22875.htm

Regrettably, Roberts does not source his key factual claim, but confirmation may be found in early claims of victory by both factions even before the votes are fully counted. The interesting fact is that "Reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi has reportedly announced that he has won by a substantial margin" since the reported totals, such as they were, did not reflect this claim. We would still like to know who first declared victory. http://www.casavaria.com/cafesentido/200...-election/

More importantly, Roberts links to a Lew Rockwell blog that notes that the day before the Iranian election, neoconservative columnist Kenneth Timmerman was already reporting a likely upcoming "green revolution" in Iran.

Arch neo-conservative Kenneth Timmerman spilled the beans on activities of the other arm of US meddling overseas, the obscenely mis-named National Endowment for Democracy, in a piece written before the election, stating curiously that “there’s the talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.” Interesting. I wonder where that “talk” was coming from. Timmerman did not appear to be writing from Iran.

Stephen Lendemann's excellent article referenced below details efforts of the US intelligence community declared several years ago to destabilize Iran with covert operations, and links them to the 1953 CIA sponsored coup against the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh who had reclaimed Iran's oil for its own people. A video link from Information Clearing House provides a laundry list of these operations and televised pronouncements of intent to destabilize Iran http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22839.htm. Bill Van Auken has documented journalism as the media arm of the imperial state in The New York Times and Iran: Journalism as state provocation, including the direct military participation of one its CIA-reporters in the 1953 coup against the democratically elected government of Mohamed Mossadegh:

In 1953, their [NYT] correspondent in Tehran, Kennett Love, was not only a willing conduit for CIA disinformation, but also acknowledged participating directly in the coup. He subsequently wrote of giving an Iranian army tank column instructions to attack Mossadegh's house. Afterwards, the Times celebrated the coup and demanded unconditional support for the Shah’s regime.

Let me elaborate on the "media's" active participation in coups abroad by quoting a footnote about the 1953 Iranian coup from an unpublished (and unpublishable) manuscript:

[fn] Harrison Salisbury's book [Without Fear or Favor: An Uncompromising look at The New York Times] is brilliantly executed disinformation, and though arguing this would take us astray, one clear example is too good not to mention. In a subchapter entitled "The Gruson Affair," Salisbury details how CIA Director Allen Dulles tricked NYT publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger into withdrawing Sydney Gruson, his most knowledgeable reporter on Guatemala, from that country just before the illegal 1954 CIA coup, by maliciously maligning Gruson as a likely subversive. (pp.494-499). By contrast, the equally illegal CIA coup against Mossadegh led by Kermit [Kim] Roosevelt is mentioned twice only in passing. Salisbury makes no mention of the NYT coverage of August 23, 1953 that distorts the CIA's coup into a coup by Mossadegh against the Shah, which supposedly forced the Shah to flee his country temporarily. In fact, the Shah fled after his CIA-back coup momentarily faltered before Roosevelt put more muscle into the effort. The Times reports that as Mossadegh gained control, "Communist and nationalist mobs raced through Teheran streets screaming 'Death to the Shah!' Statues of the monarch and his father were pelted and desecrated, then toppled from their pedestals. The Mossadegh press screamed for 'revenge' and the 'gallows.'" In fact, Kermit Roosevelt hired and paid for both those mobs and the presses that reported on them in order to turn the population against Mossadegh. The Times can now admit this without noting its prior deceit through its foreign correspondent, Stephen Kinzer, when it no longer matters. Here is Kinzer gushing with admiration for the CIA coup.

The way that Kermit Roosevelt organized this [the coup] was really brilliant. He had people writing articles in the press condemning Mossadegh. Four-fifths of Iran's newspapers were actually in the pay of the CIA. And those papers were printing stories every day about how Mossadegh was a communist. He wanted to destroy the monarchy. He was undermining the Iranian Army. And just for good measure because they were capital crimes in Iran, he was a Jew and a homosexual. And these articles were printed the next day in papers that were under the control of the CIA. In fact, these papers were so eager to print what the CIA wanted that they didn't have enough reporters to produce all this stuff and the CIA actually had people here in the United States, in Washington, writing these articles and sending them to Iran by plane. Kinzer's book is All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003. The quote is from a speech made by Kinzer about his book given September 17, 2003 at the Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, California, memorialized on a CD from Los Angeles Sound Posse. The Times newspaper account from 1953 clearly comes directly from Kermit Roosevelt, who memorialized his own fiction in his first-person account, Countercoup, that represented the Shah as acting against a Mossadegh-led attempted communist takeover.

Stephen Lendemann has also noted how the pseudo-left propagandists have jumped on the "Iran election fraud" bandwagon in order to destabilize the country:

The Nation magazine has had a shameful record since inception. In more recent years, it called the US-led NATO Serbia-Kosovo aggression "humanitarian intervention." Initially it supported the Afghanistan war and the Iraq war in its run-up and early months. In 2000 and 2004, it ignored blatant electoral fraud for George Bush. It attacks Hugo Chavez, and was hostile to Jean-Bertrand Aristide during his years as Haiti's President. It called the 2008 US presidential campaign the "Obama Moment" for his "historic candidacy" and keeps supporting him despite his brazen betrayal of voters who elected him.

Now it's at it again in a June 13 Robert Dreyfuss article headlined, "Iran's Ex-Foreign Minister Yazdi: It's a Coup" in which (without no substantiating evidence) he called the election "rigged," referred to Ahmadinejad as "radical-right," and said "his paramilitary backers were kept in office." Now "Iran's capital (is) steeped in anger, despair, and bitterness" as he almost cheerled for a "color revolution" with comments like:

For years, the hardline clergy and their allies, including Ahmadinejad, have feared nothing more than an Iranian-style 'color revolution.' Now, Mousavi - with solid establishment credentials, an Islamic revolutionary pedigree second to none, and an outspoken pro-reform message - finds himself at the head of a green parade" in contrast to "Ahmadinejad's Red Tide," a reference to "the red-armband-wearing, virtual fascist movement in support of reelecting" him. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Iran-s-...9-283.html

I draw your attention to the reliance of Robert Dreyfuss, a contributing editor to The Nation, on former foreign minister Yazdi as a reliable source that the election was rigged for a specific reason. Nearly thirty years ago Dreyfuss outed Yazdi as a trained agent of the Central Intelligence Agency:

The other arm of Khomeini's revolution was the coterie of experienced, Western-trained, intelligence agents who clustered around the clergy. These are today's surviving secular office-holders: Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, Ibrahim Yazdi, and Abolhassan Bani-Sadr.

Directions from Washington and London came via the "professors," men such as Professor Richard Cottam of the University of Pittsburgh.

Cottam had met Yazdi in Iran as early as the 1950s, when Cottam was a field office for the CIA attached to the U.S. embassy in Teheran. Cottam also met and guided another member of the future leadership of the Iranian revolution, Ghotbzadeh. For the next twenty years, the Pittsburgh professor joined Yazdi and Ghotbzadeh for strategy sessions in the United States, Europe and Iran. Yazdi and Cottam were so close that Yazdi's wife once described Cottam as "a very close friend of my husband, the one person who knows more about him than even I do." ...

In 1963, Yazdi worked to found the Muslim Brotherhood's American Branch, the "Muslim Student Association." By now a political operative, Yazdi had also set up the Iranian Students Association and later the Young Muslims Organization.

In 1964, he left the United States for Europe, spending about three years in France, West Germany, and the American University of Beirut, a bastion of Anglo-American intelligence in the Middle East. ...(Robert Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini, New Benjamin Franklin House, 1980, pp. 24-27)

So here is the farce of objective Nation contributing editor Robert Dreyfuss pretending to rely on the objective assessment of the current Iranian election by an Iranian former foreign minister whom Dreyfuss has formerly outed as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency -- don't worry, nobody will remember because that was flushed down the Orwellian memory-hole. That the CIA had overthrown the Shah and installed the Ayatollah Khomeini was very little known outside of the agencies that did so. I learned details of this coup years ago via an Iranian who was part of the democratic revolutionary forces to suppress which the Ayatollah was installed. After the Embassy was taken, CIA documents were seized and some of them sold to the public. This fellow bought them and subsequently had to flee Iran.

Surprisingly, though, the story of the CIA and British intelligence's overthrow of the Shah is also told by Robert Dreyfuss in Hostage to Khomeini, 1980. Dreyfuss rewrote the history of the Shah's overthrow in The Devil's Game, 2005. In Hostage to Khomeini, Dreyfuss details how and why the CIA and the US military installed the Ayatollah and how Carter was manipulated into setting up the taking of the U.S. embassy -- Dreyfuss even quotes the NYT to show how Carter knew that giving sanctuary to the Shah would lead to seizure of the embassy. But now, as a Nation contributing editor, this time around Dreyfuss wrote, "Never did a revolution catch the United States more by surprise than did the one that swamped Iran in 1978-1979." p. 214.

Why the change? The obvious and most reasonable conclusion is that Dreyfuss is an intelligence agent or asset. Dreyfuss's earlier book was published by New Benjamin Franklin House, a Lyndon LaRouche affiliate. One of the functions LaRouche served for the USG intelligence community was to advertise obscurely a covert operation that they dearly wished to keep secret, but to wrap it with the noxious LaRouchian ideology and nimbus so that anyone else respectable who revealed it could be smeared and dismissed as touting a crazy LaRouchian idea.

The Nation has a very long and dishonorable history of taking a "liberal" posture in order to channel political dissent back into the existing systems of establishment power and to legitimize that establishment. One of its particular tasks is to deny the existence of major USG domestic covert operations, especially since its editorial staff and some of its writers are engaged in at least the propaganda cover for such. I won't detail its history here except for one of its more recent efforts that prompted me to cancel my subscription to The Nation in 2006.

The Nation published CIA author Max Holland's smear against early JFK researcher and Warren Commission critic, attorney Mark Lane, author of the best seller, Rush to Judgment. Holland, who is a published author on the website of the Central Intelligence Agency, falsely and maliciously claimed that Lane had taken KGB funds to finance his "conspiracy interpretation" of the Kennedy assassination. My recollection -- I can't readily find the cites -- is that The Nation initially refused to accept rebuttal letters from the victim and his supporters until Lane threatened a lawsuit, at which point letters were accepted but -- as Ralph Schoenman advised me -- his initial letter, which I have, spelling out a vast number of intelligence links to the JFK assassination and main stream media was refused.

In lieu of that letter I offer the bromide that the apple, or applet, does not fall far from the tree. In this case the applet is Katrina vanden Heuvel, long-time editor of The Nation, and daughter of William vanden Heuvel, former president of the International Rescue Committee. For an exposition of the ties between the International Rescue Committee and the CIA and their joint and mutually supporting efforts on behalf of U.S. foreign policy, I recommend Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA, 1995, by Eric Thomas Chester, publisher M.E. Sharpe.

Katrina is not William, but William vanden Heuvel assumed the Presidency of the International Rescue Committee in 1961 and while in Berlin January 1963 as IRC president, passed money to Egon Bahr, Willie Brandt's closest confidant, to fund digging escape tunnels from the West into the East, a clear act of provocation at a time when Kennedy was pursuing détente with the Soviet Union.

William vanden Heuvel got his start in U.S. intelligence under Office of Strategic Services founder "Wild Bill" Donovan:

In an effort to widen its base of support, the Committee began recruiting from among Wall Street's power brokers. William vanden Heuvel began his career as a young corporate lawyer with William Donovan's law firm, a firm that had been the starting point for many of the highest officials in the OSS during WWII. When Donovan traveled to Thailand as US ambassador, a post he held from July 1953 to August 1954, vanden Heuvel accompanied him as personal confidant and special assistant. Upon his return from Thailand, Donovan became a key participant in the Committee. ... (Pp. 197-198)

Thus did Katrina's father launch his career under William Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, the WWII forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. Now Katrina runs The Nation, which repeatedly stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Agency, and mainstream media, to deny domestic covert operations, including election theft by means of systematically rigged vote counting.

Finally, for those of you who still want to bring out a hanky and urge the U.S. to send some humanitarian intervention to Darfur or some other location of U.S. fomented tragedy abroad, I recommend the following moralistic analysis by Lori Price that may succeed in persuading you that the only motive from which the U.S. never acts is disinterested concern for the welfare of others.

'Hello, Pot? This is Kettle. You're Green.' --US Hypocrisy Toward Iran By Lori Price, http://www.legitgov.org http://www.legitgov.org:80/price_us_hypo...10609.html