This article originally appeared on Dissected News, where James will be live-blogging the events surrounding the anniversary of the June 12th election in Iran.
For weeks, I had been following the lead-up to the June 12th, 2009 election in Iran. The mainstream news had hit me with a bombshell: a growing number of Iranians hated their government, wanted diplomatic and trade relations with the United States, and might oust hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the upcoming election. It was time to consult the Internet.
I discovered the Tehran Bureau, an independent group of Iranian-Americans who were breaking down complex and paradoxical information for the Average Joe. I was hooked. With a new American President, and the prospect of a new Iranian President, peace and international cooperation might have been right around the corner.
It hasn't played out that way. The evidences points to a rigged election, an attempt by Ahmadinejad (and possibly the Supreme Leader) to show dominance and avoid a run-off election, or an outright defeat. My hopes for a new tomorrow were dashed...for about a day or so.
The Iranian people took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands (Time estimated two to three million protesters), braving beatings and arrests to voice their desire for freedom and democracy. Using Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook, the images of the protests were escaping even the tightest government censorship. For hours, I was glued to the images of the protesters. It started on June 13. The rallies grew, and the police retaliated the next day. Still, the protests continued, their voices grew louder, and by June 15th a sea of green could be seen assembling peacefully in Iran, and at one point the line of protesters was at least five miles long. Even though I had attended Barack Obama's inauguration a few months earlier, I was still blown away by the size of the crowds, who bravely protested despite the violence. Like the song says, "I know change gonna come."
On June 16, 2009, I logged on early and read an article describing how people could help the Iranian protesters by changing our Geotag location in Twitter to Iran to hide the identities of the protesters. Within hours, thousands of others had done what I had done. Soon, my email inbox, my twitter screen, and my internet browser were scrolling information as fast as the user-interface in the Matrix movies. Within days, I had Tweeted news of the protests, analyzed Youtube videos protests, and helped pinpoint where Iranians were being attacked by government supporters. I had even received emails of the location of Iranian tanks, which I put on Twitter, which someone from Germany put on a Google map, and now I could see a satellite image of downtown Tehran with the location of tanks, roadblocks, and riots; all from halfway across the world.
I don't want to overstate the importance of Twitter (or my involvement), here. It was always clear that getting information out of Iran with Twitter was easier than getting information into Iran, and after a few days both activities became a lot harder to do. Iranians spies followed our profiles, IP addresses were tracked, websites hacked, blogs filtered, Facebook and Youtube blocked, and the internet slowed. Still, the information poured in. The Green Movement seemed unstoppable.
Large shows of resistance still reared their head, like on the 40th day after the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, when protesters gathered en masse in Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery. Soon, the government censorship of the internet increased, as the Green Movement planned its next steps, and as it became clear that official election results would not be effectively overruled by forces within the government, the amount of information I received slowed to a trickle. Though there were almost daily protests, they were smaller in number.
It's been a long, interesting, and tumultuous year in Iran, but the Green Movement is far from dead, or even asleep. Rather, it has been waiting for June 2010 to pounce. We'll have to wait to see who is the Caspian Tiger in Iran, the government or the people. If I were a betting man, I'd say that the next year may give us the answer.
Follow James Miller on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dissectednews
"I've read your sorry piece and it doesn't compare favorably with http://www.dissectednews.com/2010/05/who-really-won-the-disputed-iran-election.html."
Au contraire. You haven't read my piece. I, however, have read, very thoroughly, the one you cite. It's not impressive to anyone who, like I, has looked into this.
Being disappointed with the election outcome is one thing. Claiming it was "stolen" is different. For that, people expect one of two things: (1) evidence to support your conclusions; or (2) valid reasons for saying it's impossible to prove one way or another. When I started looking into this, I felt - and still feel - it is appropriate to challenge the result if it simply can't be either validated or invalidated. What I don't think is intellectually honest - or democratic (remember "democracy"?) - is to continue to argue the point when one finds that it indeed the election CAN be validated.
That's all you're doing. Unless you're content to convince people who just nod their heads and don't think any more deeply than you do, you really ought to take a look at what I've written. It's very carefully laid out, you'll find: clear arguments, lots of supporting data. Very, very difficult to get around.
The pre/post election polling data cited have been specifically argued against in my article, and I nothing new disputes any one my findings on that front.
An area where our two pieces completely clash is in the use of Benford's law. You, and others, have cited different studies that had different methodologies and yielded much different results than what I cite. The differences are in the sampling size, when Benford's is applied, and on which digit. I have consulted a team of statisticians at a major university, and they will walk me through some of the finer points.
This leaves me with two final points until I finish my analysis: 1) The certainty of the Leverett's conviction that the vote was rigged, often before much of this analysis was available, is as disturbing as their writing off of the human rights violations, the real story of the last year. 2) Iran is far from a free society, and those who have attempted to make it that way have paid with their blood.
Thanks for the feedback.
The mind reels at the fundamental contradiction between reason and absurdity that is eab's essay. Or as in 'Moby Dick' http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/marmoby.html [the quote is found in the middle of the essay]
"Characterizing Ahab, Melville has hit upon the central philosophical conflict of modernity: "all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad." "
By the way, does your name mean we "were everywhere," as in "now we are not." Or does it mean "we're everywhere," suggesting you still are? Are unsure whether you're still there? I'd consider "weareeverywhere" if you think you might still be there.
"How absolutely funny that you even dare to use "cliche" when that's the third time you've linked the exact same link."
I keep hoping you'll take a look at it. Each time, your response remains at the same sophomoric level, and thus I can tell you haven't.
You, and everyone else, is entitled to his opinion. But you ought not try to pass it off as anything more than just uninformed opinion until you've actually done at least a bit of homework. Clearly you've not spent much time, if any, actually looking into this. Whether you will or not, maybe others will:
http://iran2009presidentialelection.blogspot.com/
You lack substance and repetition isn't helping.
Ignore what happened before, during, and after the election. Ignore the mass demonstrations, the show trials, hauling off the former Vice Prez off to jail, the lack of transparency in the system on the best of days- in short ignore the political crisis that the sham system set off with the sham election. Then you pretend like we're investigating Iceland or Norway and not somewhere that's not even close to being a democracy and then cherry pick factoids like a sophist while ignoring the political atmosphere in its totality and history. I've read your sorry piece and it doesn't compare favorably with http://www.dissectednews.com/2010/05/who-really-won-the-disputed-iran-election.html. Nor does it compare well with reality.
With all due respect, you come across as a mindless stringer of cliches. You may simply not be bright enough to improve on what you written, but if you consider yourself to be so, I strongly recommend you take a look at my article and reconsider whether what you've written is supportable. You may still conclude that it is, though it will take a lot more work for you to articulate it in light of what I've written.
http://iran2009presidentialelection.blogspot.com/
Nobody but God can KNOW. Humans can only examine what evidence is out there: what procedures were supposed to be followed, were they followed, were Mousavi's observers able to detect fraud and, if so, did they report any?
I did this and more, and turned up nothing. Over 40,000 Mousavi representatives were approved to observe voting and vote counting. Not one complained on election day that he'd been turned away or blocked from observing. Mousavi later insisted this had happened many times, but he never said where or to whom.
Allegations of ballot-box stuffing were similar. Mousavi alleged that hundreds or thousands of ballot boxes were stuffed, but he declined to identify even one. There are statistical methods for ferreting out ballot box stuffing, but one must know which ballot boxes to test.
Most compelling: for the first time, the government reported counts for each ballot box, not merely for districts, counties and provinces. Not one Mousavi representative disputed the count at his polling station, nor did any of them contend the Interior Ministry later reported a different vote count for his polling station. There were 45,692 polling stations - each with a local count known to observers and an official count reported by the Interior Ministry. All that was necessary was to compare the two. No discrepancy has been reported, for any polling station. I found that persuasive.
Please read my article:
http://iran2009presidentialelection.blogspot.com/
Or maybe, just maybe, the Ministry of Interior which was packed with Ahmadi goons and gets to count the votes with little to no oversight did what it was supposed to do. In a system structured to be anti-democratic, which engaged in anti-democratic activity before, during, and after* the election, you'd have us believe that all is well.
Way to ignore the fraud that is IRI.
*Unless rapes, shootings, and jailing of protesters is democratic in your upside down world along with arrests of journalists and shutting down of newspapers.
The evidence actually points in exactly the opposite direction, overwhelmingly so:
http://iran2009presidentialelection.blogspot.com/
Arrest suntanned women: http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/women-with-suntans-face-arrest-in-iran/19457436
Ban books about religious and ethnic minorities: http://www.rferl.org/content/Books_About_Zen_Bahai_Faiths_Banned_At_Tehran_Book_Fair_/2038046.html
Execute the highest percentage of citizens, most of whom never received fair trial. Also, shooting citizens in the street, the arrests, the nighttime raids, the beatings...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/faraz-sanei/remembering-irans-rights_b_563238.html
I could go on. This is why they march in the streets. There's plenty of evidence of fraud, as I've pointed out, but the real fraud is the murder of students, the persecution of minorities, and the raids on the universities. The election was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
The earth isn't flat, and never was, nor does the sun orbit the earth, nor is it unique in the galaxy.
But, as with creationalists, trying to enlighten you is ultimately an exercise in futility, because as soon as you see a fact or logical argument you don't like, you either dismiss the fact, or spin off on a tangent to avoid having to face the weakness in your viewpoint.
Those who believe that the Iranian election was rigged = 9/11 conspiracy theorists.
9/11 conspiracy theorists, riggers, creationalists and the ilk all share one characteristic. No matter how often you show them the facts, and how slowly you walk them through, step by step the flaws in their arguments, and the flaws in the shields they through up to protect themselves from the facts, they will find a way to avoid coming face to face with those facts, and then proudly announce that they have won because they have managed to remain ignorant of their defeat.
As for the 'greens' (not to be confused with the environmental movement in Iran, who will have to find something new to call themselves now that that term has been coopted) they remain a fringe player, handicapped in showing any growth by the now prevalent identification between them and the anarchists, criminals, and others who trashed downtown Iran, and who still show up (and are welcomed by those identified as green leaders) to their protests.
The "Green movement" is, as the Iranian newspaper Resalat claims, a foreign-backed color revolution and part of a "soft war" against Iran to destabilise it in advance of any possible military action. I think this should be pretty obvious to all. Why else would the corporate media have been such an enthusiastic supporter of a party involved in a domestic political dispute. The manufactured Neda incident, and her subsequent mythologisation as the iconic figure of the "struggle for freedom" testifies to this.
Arch-neocon Mike Ledeen said he remained in contact with people from Mousavi's office when the latter was premier during the 1980s and the two men conspired to bring about the Iran-Contra affair.
Much of the mainstream media has oversimplified Iran to the point where it is a caricature. It is covered by broadcasts as an aggressive nation engaged in unmitigated terrorism and a relentless pursuit of a nuclear weapon. As I make occasional contact with the few western journalists who are still in Iran (at great personal risk) I can attest that the (under)coverage of the Green Movement is an attempt to change that perception, to tell a different story.
Let's just assume (without evidence of it) that the CIA, or whatever, helped create the Green Movement. Isn't the mission of the Green Movement to establish greater transparency, a stronger democracy, human rights and personal freedoms for all? Yes, those are the goals, so would they be any less relevant?
The American revolution was successful, in part, because the French wanted to gain power against England and, in part, because New Englanders didn't want to pay taxes. Did that make the goal of a representative democracy free from tyranny any less valid? Does that nullify the worth of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, or the Declaration of Independence?
Where is the evidence of foreign interference "creating" the Green Movement? I haven't seen it. As a matter of fact, the Iranians in the Green Movement contacted people like me, not the other way around.
But we can agree on this, I hope. Mike Ledeen is poison.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh
Not to mention leader of the Jundallah terrorist organization has admitted to recieving US help in its attack on Iran.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy0DY6D9-uI
http://www.dissectednews.com/2010/05/radiation-sickness.html
Viewpoint 1) Iran is a militant state, an enemy to the free world and a sponsor of terrorism, and Iran constitutes an existential threat to the U.S., so we should do everything we can to stop them from getting the bomb.
1A – Bomb Iran
1B – sanction Iran
1C – Zionism. The U.S. and Israel really are a united front against Islam, and they should conquer the world together.
Viewpoint 2) Everything the U.S. says and does is the product of a Zionist, Pro-Israel, hyper imperialist agenda, and this is no different. Therefore, we should do nothing.
Viewpoint 3) Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, so leave them alone.
3A – Ahmadinejad is misunderstood. Last year’s election in Iran was valid (au contraire, mis amigos). The U.S. are the terrorists.
3B – There is no evidence. This is just like Iraq’s WMDs.
Viewpoint 4) Ahmadinejad is a real criminal/swell guy, but Israel has nukes and so should Iran.
Here is the problem. There is an element of truth in all of many of these statements (in the core of them, not necessarily the radical fringe), but there is as much (or more) misinformation and manipulation. None of the conventional wisdom works anymore, but the U.S. had an opportunity to change the tune when it came to Iran. And the blew it.
Also, the link to Iranian.com falsely claims that Neda was a 16 year old girl who was walking with her father and was demonstrating at the time: Actually she was 26 and was in a sidestreet when she was killed. The scale of disinformation meant that Iranian.com felt it had to set things right:
http://www.iranian.com/main/2009/nov/no-rest-or-peace
You WANT to believe that Ahmadinejad is a "ruthless unelected dictator" because it fits in with your own political outlook. You CHOOSE to ignore the fact that this "Green movement" never had majority support and that it was not entirely peaceful either - rioting elements triggered much of the harsh reaction against it - the attack on the Basij HQ being one such incident.
http://www.dissectednews.com/2010/05/who-really-won-the-disputed-iran-election.html
Yet I am the one who is accused of recycling the same arguments. Right...
Also, some of the people associated with this organization that attacks me for being a biased propagandist have defended the murder of Neda on web forums (http://www.iranian.com/main/blog/hateiri/neda-16-year-old-girl-murdered-animals).
And what they are doing is ignoring the article that I actually wrote here, which is not about the election results but rather about the bravery of the resistance to a ruthless dictator, and the brutality of the crackdown that has followed. Distraction politics at its best.
Thanks again.
Twon wrongs don't make a right, but there has to be issue of proportionality. The vast majority of Iranians were unaffected by the election unrest. The way the media makes it out, everyone in Iran is afraid of being tortured, raped or executed - this is complete nonsense. Most Iranians are in fact worried about the impact of any more sanctions and the subsidy reforms that the government will start in September. Compared to what we just saw in Thailand or Kyrgyzstan, and the military firing live ammo at protestors in the streets, what happened in Iran was not nearly as bad.
James Miller doesn't seem concerned about what goes on in pro-American regimes.
Compared to the brutality and murder meted out on the streets of Bishkek and Bangkok, underreported by the western media,Iran's unrest is little more than a rowdy affair. The vast majority of Iranians have moved on from last summer's rioting and the "green movement" is really a non-entity these days.
Btw, as an Iranian, I find the use of green alone to be very offensive - it is the flag of Libya or Saudi Arabia - two Arab regimes I don't want to be identified with.
Colors don't offend me a bit. Expecting me not to speak of Iran's crack downs and the human rights violations there, because there are other places in worse conditions does offend me. Two wrong don't make it right. If you feel the coverage in those areas is not enough, please do report them and blog about them, but don't try to deny what happens in Kahrizak and Evin, and please don't ask me to either.
The fact of the matter is that no matter if AN actually won or not, there is clear evidence of tampering with the vote. That is the point that is being made.
What some would have us do is ignore the doubt, claim certainty in an uncertain situation, take issue with the fringes of an argument in order to dispute the whole thing, ignore the videos of the protests, the massive crowds, the bullets fired into crowds, and the beatings of unarmed civilians. Oh, they might point to some stone throwing or less than peaceful elements of the Green Movement (that exist, though half or more of those incidents were self defense), but they'll ignore the video of thousands marching in silence.
I'm not certain of the results. I am certain that no one should be, however. Certainty of the disputed election should trigger somebody's propaganda alarm. And democracies don't need restrictions on freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.
Thanks for the article.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/652.php?lb=brme&pnt=652&nid=&id=
For a proper statistical analysis of the data, readers should look at Thomas Lotze's excellent analysis that refutes all the flawed claims made about fraud:
http://thomaslotze.com/iran/index.php
It is also highly amusing that Miller think the election was rigged because only 4 out of 475 candidates were approved and allowed to debate on national TV ( even though the corporate media excludes all minor candidates in the United States). If Mousavi had won, he would be hailing it as a democratic verdict.
I have never seen so many sore losers after any election than the one in Iran.
http://www.dissectednews.com/2010/05/who-really-won-the-disputed-iran-election.html
you will find that the results gathered from the world public opinion poll may not be as accurate as you think. James has gone out of his way to show the inconsistencies and the problems with such a poll as was done by the University of Maryland. Think of it this way: If you lived in a country where you were going to be persecuted for disagreeing with the government, when America calls you and asks you if you voted for the incumbent, would you respond truthfully?