Iran video links not shown on MSM. Warning very graphic videos

Iran Links- Warning-some very tough video and pictures

Iran is entering Hell

Hat tip: Doug for videos below:





It was not what the civilized world was waiting to hear but once again we heard it. Once again we learn that there are no moderates in the Iranian straight jacket of governance. 

Iranians are trapped in a religious sewer of repression. The sins of the fathers visited upon them.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, told the students to end their protests. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was staying. No more discussion. 

At this time, the black shirts, the paramilitary Basij militia, are descending on Iranian cities like Mordor's Orks. It is hard to imagine there will not be slaughter as idealism gets bludgeoned by thuggery. 

Iran will show to the world it's true axis of evil.

Too bad that. 

Maybe next time. 

Never give up your guns.

Basij Repellant

The Pathos of the Mundane

The broken galley of the Air France disaster, found mostly intact, floating in the Atlantic.

Tragedy and pathos walk the same path; it leads to pity, but it takes the mundane objects of daily living to enhance the tragedy of a loss. We all experience the soft sorrow and sentiment of the little silly things you cannot bear to discard after the loss of a loved one. They remind us of the soft pleasures of the more mundane parts of a life. That is part of the power of this photo. It makes the tragedy personal. It somehow draws us into the terrible ending of that broken flight.

Enlightenment can be the compensation for sorrow and loss. A broken galley floating in the sea personalizes the terror of those lost and their terrible last moments.

Non-Chinese need not apply.

‘Buy China’ policy set to raise tensions
By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing
Published: June 16 2009 16:13

China has introduced an explicit “Buy Chinese” policy as part of its economic stimulus programme in a move that will amplify tensions with trade partners and increase the likelihood of protectionism around the world.

In an edict released jointly by nine government departments, Beijing said government procurement must use only Chinese products or services unless they were not available within the country or could not be bought on reasonable commercial or legal terms.

The government also said it was launching an investigation in response to complaints from domestic industry associations which accuse local governments of favouring foreign suppliers in procurement related to the country’s Rmb4,000bn ($585bn, €421bn, £356bn) economic stimulus package.

“From a domestic political perspective this makes some sense because local governments do tend to favour foreign products in some categories,” Dong Tao, chief China economist for Credit Suisse, said. “But given how important free trade is for China’s economy this is not the right message for them to be sending to the rest of the world right now.”

Just a few months ago Beijing was raging against a proposed “Buy American” clause included in the US economic rescue package.

“Some countries raised clauses to prioritise the purchase of products of their own countries in their economic stimulus packages,” Yao Jian, a Chinese commerce ministry spokesman, told reporters in February. “We express deep concern about these [measures] ... under the current financial crisis, measures issued by all countries should not cause negative impacts, and especially they should not send out wrong messages.”

Most economists agree China’s economy is starting to recover as a result of its aggressive stimulus package but the country is still struggling with unemployment and fears widespread layoffs could lead to serious social unrest.

“The whole world is dying to see China spread its orders around and save their economies,” said Mr Tao. “But what this policy reflects is heightened anxiety about these job pressures and the potential for social unrest.”

The edict was issued jointly by the legislative office of the State Council, China’s cabinet, the national development and reform commission (the country’s powerful state planning agency) and the ministries of industry and information, supervision, housing, transport, railways, water resources and commerce.

The new edict bans local governments and departments from discriminating against domestic suppliers in their procurement. Foreign companies operating in China argue that the opposite is in fact true and that they have been largely cut out of procurement related to the government’s stimulus package.

“We are puzzled by this discussion, especially since most European companies operating in China are locally incorporated and have not benefited directly from the government’s stimulus package,” said Joerg Wuttke, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China. “Requiring government procurement to favour Chinese goods and services certainly won’t help to address China’s trade surplus of €170bn.”

Trade data in recent months show import volumes, particularly of raw materials, have stabilised and started to increase strongly, while exports have stabilised but remain very weak following precipitous drops in both exports and imports since the fourth quarter of last year. China’s trade surplus rose 15.7 per cent to $88.8bn in the first five months from the same period a year earlier.

“Any movement – overt or subtle – to discriminate against foreign products and services is protectionist and an inefficient use of stimulus funds,” said James Zimmerman, partner with the international law firm of Squire Sanders & Dempsey in Beijing.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

"If the Iranian security forces are now taking the middle ground, then Ahmadinejad is truly in trouble."

Seven men killed by the Basiji at the end of Monday's march, were secretly buried by police in Cemetery 257

Robert Fisk: Fear has gone in a land that has tasted freedom

In defiance of the ban on foreign reporters, The Independent's Middle East correspondent ventures out to witness an extraordinary stand-off on the streets of Tehran

Wednesday, 17 June 2009 The Independent

The fate of Iran rested last night in a grubby north Tehran highway interchange called Vanak Square where – after days of violence – supporters of the official President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at last confronted the screaming, angry Iranians who have decided that Mirhossein Mousavi should be the president of their country. Unbelievably – and I am a witness because I stood beside them – just 400 Iranian special forces police were keeping these two armies apart. There were stones and tear gas but for the first time in this epic crisis the cops promised to protect both sides.

"Please, please, keep the Basiji from us," one middle-aged lady pleaded with a special forces officer in flak jacket and helmet as the Islamic Republic's thug-like militia appeared in their camouflage trousers and purity-white shirts only a few metres away. The cop smiled at her. "With God's help," he said. Two other policemen were lifted shoulder-high. "Tashakor, tashakor," – "thank you, thank you" – the crowd roared at them.

This was phenomenal. The armed special forces of the Islamic Republic, hitherto always allies of the Basiji, were prepared for once, it seemed, to protect all Iranians, not just Ahmadinejad's henchmen. The precedent for this sudden neutrality is known to everyone – it was when the Shah's army refused to fire on the millions of demonstrators demanding his overthrow in 1979.

Yet this is not a revolution to overthrow the Islamic Republic. Both sets of demonstrators were shouting "Allahu Akbar" – "God is Great" – at Vanak Square last night. But if the Iranian security forces are now taking the middle ground, then Ahmadinejad is truly in trouble.

As the fume-filled dusk fell over the north Tehran streets, the crowds grew wilder. I listened to a heavily bearded Basiji officer exorting his men to assault the 10,000 Mousavi men and women on the other side of the police line. "We must defend our country now, just as we did in the Iran-Iraq war," he shouted above the uproar. But the Ahmadinejad man trying to calm him down, shouted back: "We are all fellow citizens! Let's not have a tragedy. We must have unity."

Clearly the decision of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to instruct the Council of Guardians to recount Friday's election vote had done nothing to dispel the suspicion and anger of the reformist opposition in Iran.

First it appeared that the council would examine every election result. Then only a few. Then Iranians were told that it might take 10 days to learn their decision. It was as well, perhaps, that Ahmadinejad had flown to Yekaterinburg for the Shanghai summit to bore conference delegates with his speeches instead of the Iranian people whom he believes he represents. But on Vanak Square last night, all this meant nothing.

Plain-clothes cops – perhaps at last realising the gravity of a situation which their own obedience to Ahmadinejad's men had brought about – persuaded middle-aged men from both sides to meet in the centre of the road in the middle of Vanak Square's narrow no-man's-land. The Mousavi man, in a brown shirt, placed his hands around the arms of the bearded Iranian official from the Ahmadinejad side. "We cannot allow this to happen," he told him. And he tried, as any Muslim does when he wants to show his desire for trust and peace, to kiss the side of his opponent's face. The bearded man physically shook him off, screaming abuse at him.

The two rows of police were now standing shoulder to shoulder, their linked arms holding both mobs back, as they stared at their own comrades opposite with ever increasing concern. An American-Iranian a few metres away, shouted at me in English that "we've got to prove they can't do this anymore. They can't rule us. We need a new president. Either they get their way or we get ours".

It was frightening, the absolute conviction of these men, the total refusal to accept any compromise, one side demanding obedience to the words of Ayatollah Khomeini and loyalty to the ghosts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the other – emboldened by their million-strong march on Monday – demanding freedoms, albeit within an Islamic Republic, which they had never had before. Maybe they now have the police on their side; if last night's example was anything to go by, either some senior officer – or perhaps the cops themselves, appalled at their behaviour over the past four days – decided that the special forces would no longer be patsies to the frightening power of Ahmadinejad's ever-loyal bullies.

Only hours earlier, seven men killed by the Basiji at the end of Monday's march, were secretly buried by police in Cemetery 257, a large graveyard close to the Khomeini shrine, where the founder of the Islamic Revolution lies beneath a mosque of golden cupolas and blue-tiled walls. No such honours for the seven victims of the Basiji. They lay beneath a covering of earth, no markers on their graves, no word sent to their families of their fate.

But the pro-government newspapers in Tehran did report their deaths and one even gave its front page to the outraged condemnation of Tehran University's Chancellor at the Basiji intrusion onto the campus on Sunday night, when the security forces killed seven young men, wounded several others and smashed and looted the university dormitories. Farhad Rabar said he would pursue the killers through the courts, adding that "the invasion of the University of Tehran, which is the symbol of higher education... has caused a wave of sorrow and anger in me".

Is it too late to end this fratricidal violence now? For each side, the integrity of their cause is fast becoming more powerful than rational dialogue. The freedom which Mousavi's supporters have tasted – to ignore and disregard and despise the clerical autocracy which has so humiliated them – is now so intoxicating that they are confronting their political enemies in the street with a strange, unnerving, but genuine humour.

At one point last night, men and women wearing the green ribbons of Mousavi's election stood on the pavement beside that chilling 100 metres of no-man's-land next to chadored ladies clutching the Iranian flag – Ahmadinejad's patriotic symbol. They even chatted about the outcome of this fearful confrontation between their two sides.

It was a different narrative three hours earlier when Ahmadinejad's men and women held their own demonstration in Val-y-Asr Square. No word was said of Monday's opposition mass rally, nor of the street demonstrations in the cities of Shiraz, Mashad, Babol and Tabriz. Indeed, most Iranians have no knowledge of these events; Ahmadinejad's censors have seen to that. The banners were predictable. "Death to the Traitor" – Mousavi, of course, was the "betrayer" of the Republic. "Death to anyone who is against the Supreme Leader" – which was a bit odd because neither Mousavi nor his millions of supporters are against Ayatollah Khamenei (albeit that the two men dislike each other); it is Ahmadinejad for whom they have a visceral hatred and whom they are trying to depose.

The former parliamentary speaker, Gholamali Haddadadel, spotted Mousavi's weakest argument when he addressed a crowd that could not have been more than 5,000 strong. "Does Mousavi know how many people voted for Ahmadinejad in the rural areas and in the villages?" he asked. "Iran is not just Tehran. We know that Mr Mousavi got 13 million votes, but Mr Ahmadinejad got 24 million." But of course, those are the very statistics which Mousavi and his allies dispute. Preachers and Sayads lectured the little multitude, their bodyguards – even paramedics – keeping careful watch over them. There was a famous Iranian religious singer to preach to this banner-shrouded audience.

It was on my way out of Val-y-Asr that I noticed a truckload of men, all dressed in camouflage trousers and white shirts, many carrying police clubs, setting off to north Tehran. They were followed by the newly energised Islamist demonstrators, off on the four-mile trek up to Vanak. Two conscript soldiers were standing amid the Mousavi supporters there when an old man asked their advice. Should he stay if the Basijis break through the cordon? "The Basijis beat people hard – very hard," one of the soldiers said. And he patted the old man on the shoulder and shook his head.

And the plot thickens:

Iran, an analysis you will not find on MSM

Here is all you need to know about the Iranian vote. There were forty million paper ballot votes cast. The so-called vote count was done in four hours. Not possible.

The Obama speech was a pebble thrown into a lake created by eight years of George W Bush.

The short analysis is this is a military coup by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and a counter revolution by the students. My anarchical heart is routing for the students. My street smarts tell me thay have a steep wall to climb, with a short ladder. No one can predict where this is going. All of us can hope.
________________

The Ministry of the Interior was rumored to have authorized the use of live ammunition as the regime struggled to maintain control.

Supporters of Mr Mousavi, fought running battles with the police and Basiji, who have flooded into Tehran.

In one incident a witness told The Times how she watched from her car as riot police on six motorbikes opened fire on youths walking under a bridge after the rally.

“The riot police started shooting them with big guns,” she said. “It wasn’t like the films where there is just a small hole — the shooting was blowing off hands, limbs. It was terrible, terrible.”

The regime showed its first sign of alarm when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, who at the weekend hailed the result as a “divine assessment”, instructed the Guardian Council of 12 senior clerics to investigate allegations that the election was rigged. However, the move was seen widely as a ruse to buy time.

Freedom for Iran

I am fascinated about what is happening in Iran. The main stream media coverage is disgustingly vapid. They really are contemptible. The Iranian government is doing their best to cut communications between the students, but videos and photos are getting out. I selected three that I feel are representative of the scope and tenor of the revolution. Now if only a face and a voice steps forward.

West fooled again in Iran , but so was Sadegh Ghotbzadeh صادق قطب‌زاده

I was fascinated by Sadegh Ghotbzadeh. He was all over US television in the late 70's, urbane, witty, perfect English and the Iranian face seen by most Americans.

He was spokesman for everything.

He was also consumed by the revolution, tortured, forced to give false testimony, tried and shot. He has no grave and precious little video to recall who he was.

Once again Iranian Revolution stands.

No wishful thinking will make it go away. There is no internal actor tall enough, broad enough and bulletproof enough to make it go away. Obama may be as surprised as was poor old Sadegh at the enduring power of the mullacracy in Iran. He shouldn't be, but once again in his short rookie presidency he will have to backtrack on his new hopeful and changed way of doing business.

A Little history on Sadegh Ghotbzadeh

_______________________

Around the World; Iran Legislator Accuses Ghotbzadeh of a Plot

NY Times
Published: April 16, 1982

Teheran newspapers quoted a member of the Iranian Parliament today as having said that former Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh had planned to blow up Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's house with rockets.

The legislator, Movahed Savoji, was quoted as having told a rally in the city of Qum on Wednesday that the former minister had rented a house 150 yards from the Ayatollah's residence for that purpose.

Mr. Ghotbzadeh was arrested in Teheran last week and Iranian judicial authorities have accused him of leading a monarchist group plotting to kill Ayatollah Khomeini. According to the newspapers, Mr. Savoji said the monarchist group under Mr. Ghotbzadeh's direction had placed explosives in the house that were meant to go off before the rocket attack.

Mohsen Rezai, commander of Revolutionary Guards who arrested Mr. Ghotbzadeh in his house, said the former Foreign Minister had been arrested while smoking opium, the newspapers said. Mr. Ghotbzadeh faces a firing squad if convicted in the plot.

From Wikipedia:

Background

As a student Ghotbzadeh was active in the Student Confederation of Iran. He attended Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service 1959-1963, but was dismissed before graduating due to his skipping studies and exams to lead protests against the government of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, including storming a posh party put on by the Iranian Ambassador to the United States, the son-in-law of the Shah.[citation needed]

He was a supporter of the National Front of Iran and the Freedom Movement of Iran and was a close aide of Ayatollah Khomeini when Khomeini was in exile in France. He accompanied Khomeini on his travel back to Iran on February 1, 1979. After the Islamic Revolutionaries took power, Ghotbzadeh was appointed as managing director of National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT) and tried to overhaul it to be in line with Islamic teachings, purging royalist, women, and leftists.[1] This was criticised by a group of Iranian intellectuals and also the Interim Government. He was appointed as Foreign Minister after Abolhassan Banisadr resigned as acting Foreign Minister amid heated disputes on the fate of the American hostages. He was "quoted by Agence France Presse saying that he had information that presidential candidate Ronald Reagan was `trying to block a solution` to the hostage crisis. ... Two friends of Ghotbzadeh who spoke to him frequently during this period said that he insisted repeatedly that the Republicans were in contact with elements in Iran to try to block a hostage release."[2] He later resigned when his diplomatic approach to resolve the crisis ended in a deadlock.

[edit] Arrest and execution

In April 1982, he was arrested along with a group of army officers and clerics (including son-in-law of religious leader Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari), all accused of plotting the assassination of Khomeini and the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. He denied the accusations but confirmed the existence of a plot to change the government, then led by Ali Khamenei as President. Ghotbzadeh's confessions came only after severe torture on the part of the Iranian government.

Further rumors include the story that Ayatollah Khomeini initially did not want to execute Ghotbzadeh; he was persuaded to do so after hearing a tape of Ghotbzadeh in prison agreeing to pay money and provide contact information of his allies in France in exchange for his freedom.[citation needed] Ghotbzadeh supposedly told this to a fellow prisoner specifically hired to entrap him.[citation needed] The veracity of these rumors is unknown.

At an April 1982 "press conference", hojjat al-Islam Mohammad Reyshahri, the chief judge of the newly created Military Revolutionary Tribunal, explained the plot with "an elaborate chart full of boxes and arrows linking Qotbzadeh and the royalist officers, on one side, to `the feudalists, the leftist mini-groups, and the phony clerics` and other side, to the `National Front, Israel, the Pahlavis and the Socialist International.` The last four were linked to the CIA."[3]

Ghotbzadeh was shot by a firing squad after a 26-day trial before the Military Revolutionary Tribunal found him guilty and sentenced him to death
________________

June 14, 2009
The West fooled itself Iran would allow reform
Amir Taheri Times on line

Barack Obama found it “exciting” and Hillary Clinton saw it as “a positive sign”. Others, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security adviser, went further and praised it as a “vibrant democracy”. A variety of useful idiots at home and abroad expressed similar illusions about the Iranian presidential election on Friday.

Many had hoped the exercise would dislodge President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the maverick who has vowed to chase the United States out of the Middle East, wipe Israel off the map and prepare the ground for the hidden imam, Shi’ite Islam’s “end of times” figure of retribution. In the event, the election turned out to be a choreographed affair designed to reinforce Ahmadinejad’s position as the leader of “resurgent Islam”.

Officially put at 85%, voter turnout was the highest in Iran’s history. Ahmadinejad won with 63%, collecting more votes than any of his predecessors. The results were arranged to give him a two-thirds majority among all categories of voters – men, women, young and old, poor and middle class, and in all of Iran’s 30 provinces. Whoever wrote the script also made sure that his three rivals, all veterans of the Khomeinist revolution, were roundly defeated even in their respective home towns.

Only one candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the former prime minister, has tried to contest the results. Some analysts had tipped Mousavi, a cousin of the “supreme guide” Ali Khamenei, as the likely winner and the ideal partner for President Obama in his quest for unconditional talks with Iran. By midday Saturday it was clear that Mousavi would not try to rock the boat. Rather than calling his supporters into the streets, he wrote a letter to his cousin, pleading for “action to avoid injustice”. Ahmadinejad’s camp responded by announcing a rally in Tehran today to celebrate his victory.

Ahmadinejad’s narrative was simple. He presented himself as a man of the people with a mission to restore the purity of a revolution sullied by corruption and hypocrisy. He portrayed a ruling elite that spoke of the “downtrodden” but lived in palaces, of mullahs who spoke more of contracts and deals than of faith and doctrine.

Branded “a dangerous masquerade” by Mousavi, Friday’s election should end illusions about the possibility of changing the regime’s strategy through internal evolution and peaceful action. Ever since the mullahs seized power in 1979, Iran has suffered a crisis of identity, torn between its ambitions as a force for messianic revolution on the one hand and its interests as a nation-state on the other. Mousavi had incarnated the hope of Iran reaffirming its identity as a nation-state. Ahmadinejad’s victory symbolises the determination to emphasise the revolutionary aspect of Iran’s identity, even if that means sacrificing some of its interests as a nation-state. Iran may continue behaving like a cause rather than a country.

Ahmadinejad will have to cope with the deep divisions in the ruling establishment that he has brought to the surface. During his campaign he portrayed the terms of his two predecessors, Mohammad Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani, as “murky periods” when some mullahs and their associates “plundered” the nation’s wealth and kowtowed to “imperialist powers”.

The president has a mandate to purge the regime of its allegedly corrupt elements who tried to form a united front to defeat him. By focusing on an internal purge, Ahmadinejad may want to ease tension on the foreign policy front.

The United States under Obama is bending over backwards to open a dialogue with the Islamic republic. In his Cairo “address to the Muslim world”, Obama implicitly accepted Iran’s right to seek a nuclear capability. “No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons,” he said. Since then Obama and Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state, have tried to repackage the Iranian nuclear issue not as a problem in itself but because it might trigger “a nuclear arms race in the Middle East”.

It is possible that Ahmadinejad, radical rhetoric notwithstanding, may try to ease tension with Washington provided he is allowed to pursue his nuclear ambitions. Days before the election he dispatched Manouchehr Mottaki, his foreign minister, to Paris to ask President Sarkozy to broker a telephone conversation between Obama and the Iranian leader. Paris and Washington dismissed it as “electoral opportunism”.

Ahmadinejad has won a massive victory over his rivals in the Establishment. But the Khomeinist regime remains deeply unpopular, especially among young Iranians, who account for two-thirds of the population. Yesterday Tehran and other cities witnessed antiregime demonstrations, mostly young people shouting, “Shame on you Ahmadinejad! Quit the government!” Although small and isolated, these protests could in time grow into a mass movement. Iran is also heading for economic meltdown, with a daily loss of 1,000 jobs and inflation of more than 20%. Ahmadinejad’s election slogan is “Ma mitavanim” (We can), like Obama’s “Yes we can”. Iran’s leader has been true to his slogan by showing he can fix the election results to the last detail. But can he cope with a restive population, a divided establishment and an economy heading for deep recession?

Amir Taheri is an Iranian journalist and author