"Shots fired at huge Iran protest"

"The Guardian Council has 10 days to decide whether to ratify the result of the election or to call another vote. It has asked the losing candidates to provide evidence of electoral fraud.

So there are legal means to reverse the situation.

But this would be a massive upheaval and a great defeat for the president and the Supreme Leader - so it's very unlikely.

This said, I can't see the demonstrations dying down. They are more likely to gain momentum and spread as people are angered by the clampdown.

The Supreme Leader is above the law and he may decree a compromise. He may argue that Islam or the country is under threat."  BBC

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Ha'aretz says that Ross is no longer going to be working at State.  He will go over to the White House.  Good, he can be watched more closely there.  The FBI is still smarting over their defeats in the AIPAC espionage and Larry Franklin cases.  They can keep track of Ross, his Israeli friends and whatever it is that passes across his desk.  In case you have not heard, Franklin's sentence was reduced to next to nothing by the same federal judge who ruled that the AIPAC men were not Israeli spies because for that to be true the government would have to prove that they knew that giving away American classified documents would be damaging to the US.  Hmm!  Does that apply to people who spy for some country other than Israel?  Like China, maybe?

The Iranian election?  I have no idea if the election was rigged.  I lack the data to know that.  There are various ways to rig elections.  One way is to buy votes more or less openly in Lebanon.  The price of oil has been going back up, so I suppose more Saudi money was available for that task.  Yup.  The best government that money could buy... Will the Iranian masses stand up to the IRGC, the Basiij, police, etc.?  Who knows at this point?  Now we will learn if they will be all they can be.

I stand by my opinion that with or without Ross, Israeli agitprop and information operations in America are so successful in creating their own image of Iran that war has become a virtual certainty once the process of indoctrinating Americans is complete.  pl

 

Comments

[Fred]

CNN has already started to frame the issues. All we need now is the parphrased Beach Boys hit from '79, "Bomb Iran" playing on FM radio.

As to Ross, it looks like Obama has managed to move him right out of power. The question is can Obama stop the pro-war steam roller - which looks increasingly doubtful.

[lina]

Don't you think after the WMD fiasco with Iraq, Americans would be a bit more resistant to indoctrination?

[curious]

Venezuelan gambit.

WHAT DID I TELL YOU?

Obviously people are not listening. We'll here come the roller coaster ride.

They better have that camera and scope ready. And most discipline police online. The big riot about to come.

Next come the disinformation war on Iran and international media. From there you can see if it's CIA or Israel operation. (BBC/VOA=CIA, AP/neocon papers ==israel, if it is both, it's coordinated. Use google to track the newspaper who print if first.)

[johnf]

>once the process of indoctrinating Americans is complete.

The anti-Iranian pro-war hysteria has now been going on for - what - five years? If the American public are not convinced by it now - when are they ever going to be?

[Bill Wade, NH, USA]

President Obama is scheduled to speak on this today at 5PM EDT.

[Yohan]

Number of Americans who say U.S. should support Israel drops from 71% to 44% in one year

[R Whitman]

I do not think Obama has the balls for a pre-emptive war. He certainly does not have the backing of his political party.

[N.Z.]

"I do not think Obama has the balls for a pre-emptive war. He certainly does not have the backing of his political party."

In my humble opinion I do not think Americans are ready for another preemptive war to appease a Zionist agenda .

What we see going in Iran is a covert operation in lieu of an open war. "The Silent American" a must see movie 2001

[J]

Colonel,

I pose the question again -- how (in a non-violent way) do we the U.S. citizenry rid ourselves of the AIPAC/Israel yolk of slavery that now has its strangle hold on our U.S. governmental apparatus and policy decision making? How?

Israel and their AIPAC hoard have taken what was once an affair of the heart and have turned it into a violent and twisted chiller nightmare for our U.S. and the Mideast.

[Clifford Kiracofe]

War...?

It was a cakewalk for Cheney-Shultz to get us into a preventive war against Iraq. All they had to do was unleash their Neocon phalanx and let the "pro-Israel" (ie Zionist) controlled/owned US electronic and print media do the rest. Xanax for the Decider-Cowboy in chief and...voila.

Three quarters of the Senate and three quarters of the House dutifully voted FOR authorizing the President to use force, ie. for war against Iraq. IMO, they would do it again in a heartbeat for war against Iran. Thus, Col. Lang's concerns seem well grounded in political reality.

Americans have been out in Iran since at least the early 1800s. Back then some of our merchants traded out of Muscat (now Oman) with Iranian coastal villages. In the 1830s, a few hardy US missionaries made it out to Urmiah to work with local Christians (NOT to convert Muslims) and US educators and doctors over the course of the 19th and early 20th century had a constructive cultural and humanitarian engagement with Iranians and Iran.

Our diplomatic relations with Iran go back to the 1850s with respect to commercial arrangements.

So let us ask ourselves just why are we being today led around by the nose by Israel and its US lobby?

Is Iran's nuclear program a threat to the US? No, we can vaporize them anytime we take the notion.

Are Hamas and Hizbollah a threat to the US? No, they are Israel's problem.

The US has a range of national interests in the Middle East region which is vast. We have to deal with Turkey, we have to deal with Egypt, we have to deal with the Gulfies, and we have to deal with Iran.

There is Pakistan, there is Afghanistan, there is the global narco-terrorism axis and a number of other significant issues that cannot be dealt with without some cooperation from Iran...like Iraq.

It seems logical that every effort will be made by the malevolent "Zionist entity" (and others) to prevent the US from attempting a serious engagement with Iran.

The failure of an attempt for the serious engagement the President has himself boldly and correctly outlined as a goal would IMO lead to conditions facilitating the war of which Col. Lang has been giving clear and explicit warning.

[Fred]

" balls for a pre-emptive war"? If he does not think pre-emptive war against Iran is in the US national interest why the hell would he start one?

[meffie]

Whitman, if it takes "balls" to start a pre-emptive war let's hope that Obama has more brains than balls. And doesn't have any major blind spots. Or that he has the balls to use his brains. I can't believe he would get sucked into war with Iran.

[PirateLaddie]

Well, the Franklin decision should be good news for Kendall Myers. Wonder if they'll apply it to Pollard, Hansen, et. al., maybe even backdate it to the Rosenbergs?
More in line with the comments, a democratic change in Iran won't sit well with the Zionists -- snuffing alternatives to middle east despots is how they've kept our love all these years. That, plus withdrawals from the Holocaust account (now pretty much depleted, I would hope), encouraging "christianist cowards" who buy the Rapture, and a stranglehold on the talking head scene pretty much covers the waterfront.

[zanzibar]

"Israeli agitprop and information operations in America are so successful in creating their own image of Iran that war has become a virtual certainty" - PL

If we can be so easily propagandized yet again into a destructive war of choice to the detriment of our national interest, despite the recent strategic debacle in Iraq - what can one say?

I suppose it is the Peter Principle as it applies to nations.

We have voluntarily dismantled our industrial base, debased our currency, lived well beyond our means while saddling our children with enormous debt and now print humongous amounts of money to sustain the illusion of "wealth". And all this as 80 million boomers start wanting to collect on their retirement and medical promises over the next 25 years. The Chinese, our primary strategic competitor waits patiently with a smile as they watch us self-destruct.

Is there any historical precedent where the preeminent nation state self-destructed without its competitors having to fire a single shot? What has happened to our national character that we allow our elites to loot us and are apathetic to the willful destruction of our republic and its founding principles?

[MRW.]

I've been watching the tweets. A group of Iranian kids identified as being incountry were available Saturday. Then half of them made their accounts private on Sunday, no doubt to protect themselves.

Then the Twitter world became enamored with two of them who seemed to be able to tweet non-stop 24 hours a day in emotional English idioms that jarred my ears. One created his account June 11, the other June 12. The accounts that went private had long-standing accounts. I checked. I went right back to their first tweets. Other tweeps urged everyone to follow them. Their followers swelled, and they became the ‘voices of Iran’ non-stop, as if a cadre was using the same name.

One of these two wrote on Saturday: “Now that every comm. network is down in #Iran, I announce the #REVOLUTION!” Hunh? And this same guy before the election: “Mohsen Makhmalbaf: Ahmadinejad's election video was a copy of #Hitler's.” The Iranians dont use Hitler as a symbol of evil the way we do; they have their own SAVAK monsters to refer to, and that would make sense to Iranians in Farsi. Here’s the page the last tweet linked to: http://www.mowj.ir/ShowNews.php?7120

But they were the only two who, in referring to the riot police who were overheard to speak Arabic, surmised that they could be Hezbollah from Lebanon. Except that if they were Hezbollah, they would be Ansar-i Hezbollah, the "semi-official, paramilitary organization in Iran which carries out attacks on those whom it perceives to be violating the precepts of Islam," and the government. The Iranian group.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iran/ansar.htm

I did some research and apparently the Hezbollah of Lebanon went to fight in Iran in 2004. So maybe I am making something out of nothing. But as the hours wore on late Sunday, something about this demonstration is making me uncomfortable. Another Color Revolution. Using the psychic space of Twitter. If the position of president were supreme, I wouldn't have this gnawing doubt. The Supreme Leader, on the other hand, rules no matter what president is in power. Mousavi, while an attractive candidate to the west as an architect, painter, and intellectual, is nonetheless highly conservative, holds very conservative views about women (more so than most) and ruled over a restrictive regime during the 1980s, and slaughtered 30,000 Iranians who rose up against him. So what's the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi? Especially if they take their marching orders from Supreme Leader Khameni. (Sp?)

Something about all this makes me highly circumspect. And I can’t put my finger on it. Cui bono?

[Babak Makkinejad]

zanzibar:

You asked: "Is there any historical precedent where the preeminent nation state..."

There are at least 2:

Spain under Olivares
Iran under Shah Sultan Hussein

[zanzibar]

Thanks Babak. I will read up on the 2 cases.