The Situation Now (wed 7am)

Continuation of previous thread:
http://iran.whyweprotest.net/showthread.php?t=104

In this thread -- what's the news from today, twitter etc.

What can I do?

What can I do on twitter. How will I know the legit bloggers? (don't tell me, don't blow anyone's cover..) I changed my timezone and location on twitter. I don't know which or what to retweet, cuz I've heard not to really do that all that much because I may hurt the cause.

I don't know anything about DDOS. I don't know how to make a proxy to send to someone who needs it, and even if I did, I wouldn't know who to send it to.

Please, help a world citizen do what he/she can. And continue to tell the stories of what's going on. I will continue to post tweets that may or may not be true, just because it needs to be done.

Stay safe tonight. Stay safe..

Here they found some of the votes in the garbage. This is a copy of one.

http://img1.tinypic.info/viewer.php?file=pmt0hhrerb341ctdc3ul.jpg

for people who don't read Farsi, it is basiclly a ballot with the name of one of the reformists on it, found in the garbage. Just going to prove that the election was rigged.

go watch the twitter feeds for any news that seems reputable.
Search the #IranElection or #iran9 or #iran or a bunch more.

Here's some tools:
http://iran.whyweprotest.net/showthread.php?t=61

Go to google news and search for any recent news that is important (not the same old newswire stuff).

Careful. There can be legitimate reasons for this, before people jump off without all the facts. I don't know how voting / polling places are in Iran, but there are always mistakes or people get another ballot (maybe that is not allowed). Was it in the garbage? Was it a bag of them or just one? Maybe it was stuck in one of the voting lock boxes, or maybe it was taken home by someone.

No, this was posted on a site here:
http://balatarin.com/permlink/2009/6/17/1621997

Again, for people who don't read farsi, it says a worker on one of the streets in Tehran (i think) found thousands of these along with his workers, he managed to grab around 5 of them, and the picture i posted is just ONE of those.

This isn't a mistake, or an invalid ballot. Either way, if it was, it WOULDN'T be on the side of the road.

hi guys-- tnx alot for ur support

hi
i m from iran, last nit was pretty quiet, just some Allo Akhbar,
n a few people gathered at a junction near our place,(we live in Saadat Abad)
bt Kaj Sq. was good , i jst heard from a friend that was a big gathering ovr ther
n they said
TA AHMADI NEJADE HAR SHAB HAMIN BASATE
the nit before last nit , was a big fight between us n the Guard n Basij
n we hit n they hit back , they even broke 2 houses n went in , but nobody was captured
n a friend of mine was stuck outside of locked houses during their attack , they hit him so bad, n they took him to hospital n we went there to take him home,
nurses told us the no. of death is 20 n no. of injured people 50 , 20 of them are from Basij
stay together till freedom

Good luck... from north america.

fark user Tatsuma update

www.fark.com has been great following twitters, news and setting up proxies, they are on about their 12th 1000+ post discussion thread since #iranelection
user Tatsuma has been compiling summary information which is great background and worthwhile reading for anyone new, copypastad in full below from the latest fark thread:

fark user Tatsuma update

fark user Tatsuma update continued:

Gmail, Yahoo, ISPs and phone lines works.
but internet connections works a lot slower.

And these are not true.

Support from the end of the world

I'm chilean

I'm from latinamerica -I'm not christian nor catholic- to be honest, I don't beleive in any kind of divinity. I say so just to manifest my position...
Whatever yours is...you gotta fight for it. I have read, deeply worried, the news in this forum, and all I can say, all I can think of really, is that you have all my hopes in you, young persian people.
Don't let corrupt goverment and religious elites control you. Stay sharp. Resist and be clever. Is not going to be easy - never is- but you have to know that the world is watching and I, in my humble position from Chile, totally suport the spirit of dissent and confrontation that springs from you.
Mucho animo y fuerza

Why would you say that? I read them myself from original iranian twitter sources, unless you have evidence otherwise?

Greetings

World hears you.
support and greetings from Poland, Europe

They only wants dismissal of Ahmadinejad for his illegal acts.
No one talks about appointment of Ayatollah Montazeri as the Supreme Leader. Or other cases that said there.
I live in Iran. and i was out there yesterday.

And this is a complete joke. Those people (Army Generals) are very very trusted by government. High ranking army generals approved by Khamenei himself.

support from LA

peace bros!

Contact in Iran

my friend will keep me posted with pictures and news from the riots. He is active in the protest and has inside info on the situation.
I asked him to send me pictures but they have intentionaly slowed down the speed of the internet connection so we'll see what happens. But this is what he has to say about several of the events:

The eight people that have died, where walking home from the quite riot and on the way home they saw the temporary office stationed by the "komite". So they stood there saying "Allah Akbar" (god is great or something) and a one of the officers without any consent started shooting at all of them.

There will be another gathering at the "25 Shahrivar and 7 Tir area", tommow at 5, Tehran time.

Ahmadinejad has ordered the basij and any other forces to wear the green stripe so the media wont be able to tell people form the special forces. Also, the V finger gesture is used by the people which means victory, and Ahmadinejad has made a poster doing that figure with his finger to portray as if people are associating that sign with him. Fucking bastard.

Also, ahmadinejad has declared he is a "seied" now, which means a decedent of the muslin profit, and this is because Mousavi is a "seied". People have made a slogan (Shab gozasht, sobh shod ahmadinejad seied shod) which means this night passed, morning came and ahmadinejad became a seied.

cheers.

Watching and waiting

All we can do is watch and wait as those in the front lines do what needs to be done in a peaceful march. Keep up the fight for the truth and don't let your voices be silenced, when one falls 2 others take his/her place. The world is watching and many support your cause.

From the U.S.

Make of this what you will
Audio from Iran
http://smallworldnews.tv/?p=33

re:counterpunch artcle

As much as I respect counter punches writing, I have to take a little bit of issue with the tone of the article, and especially with the facts presented.

Although BAllen's survey does indicate that Ahmadenijad was leading by a somewhat similar margin as the final ballots (supposedly) showed, there is still a matter of 27% of the respondents who declined to state which candidate they would support. Now, if you have one candidate who is favored by the government, backed up with local militia thugs who will visit your house and break your Windows if you don't vote for the preferred candidate, this explains the high proportion of decline to state votes. There is a good analysis of this survey at the website http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/did-polling-predict-ahmadinejad-victory.html

although I can certainly believe that the United States could have played a role in backing the opposition candidate, and perhaps exaggerating the amount of support he had nationwide, there are an equal number of facts to support the idea that vote rigging or vote exaggeration by the conservatives is possible. I know I saw a link on twitter with screenshots given of the election from two different time periods, showing that the total votes that a candidate got went down by approximately 49,000 in that time. Note that I am not talking about percentage of votes which can vary -- this was the total number of votes of one of the candidates dropping nearly 50,000 in a four-hour time. That, to me is very suspicious. not to mention the fact that the incumbent won in every single province, including all of the challengers home turf, sometimes by absurd majorities compared to 2005 results. And finally, the turnout was so high a percentage, and the last time participation was this high was in the 90s when the reformists won the election with Khatami. so together, these various facts put a lot of holes in the arguments detailed by counterpunch, and it looks less and less like an orchestrated effort by the US solely, with no corresponding equal (or even greater) guilt on the part of the hardline elements in the Iranian government. Furthermore, I do not believe for a minute that Moussavi is a pawn of the CIA. If anyone could be accused of being a lackey for the West, that would be Rafsanjani, but even he isn't quite the same type of personality that the US tends to rely on as an imperialist puppet.

I have no doubt that the will of the majority of people of Iran was violated on June 12, but unfortunately stolen elections are nothing new, as we in the US discovered in 2000 and in 2004. However, this means that we must always support anyone trying to get information out to the rest of the world about the real truth of the matter and not the propaganda laden rhetoric from both sides (US and Iran, liberal and conservative).

Keep up the great work, stay safe, and keep resisting!

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/17/2601139.htm

'Sheer intimidation, and it worked'

By Middle East correspondent Ben Knight

Posted 52 minutes ago
Updated 45 minutes ago
ABC Middle East correspondent Ben Knight files a story from Tehran

Climate of fear: Middle East correspondent Ben Knight files a story from Tehran (ABC TV)

* Video: Inside Iran (ABC AP APNC)
* Related Story: Iranian protesters plan fresh demo
* Related Link: YouTube video: Gunmen shoot at Iran rally
* Related Link: Tweeting from Tehran: social media and the Iranian election

Middle East correspondent Ben Knight has left Iran after the country tightened its controls on foreign journalists. This is his story of how the election aftermath unfolded.

A few hours ago, the ABC's Middle East cameraman Brant Cumming and I left Iran after a nine-day assignment.

We're now sitting in Doha airport, and I'm feeling a mix of relief and regret.

Iran has been a frightening place to be over the past few days.

After that incredible final week leading up to the election, when people took joyfully to the streets and expressed themselves as never before in Iran, it was as though someone suddenly turned on the house lights at the cinema after the movie had ended and harsh reality snapped back.

It began just hours after the polls closed. We had been told that the main opposition challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was about to hold a press conference.

We would not be allowed in. His minders were concerned about being seen to cosy up to Western journalists, but we could film from outside.

So we went. And we filmed the crowd of supporters outside the campaign office, watching them as the reality dawned on them that the election was gone.

I've done this many times in Australian elections. But never before have the riot police turned up and without warning, charged the party faithful with tear gas, sending them stampeding into each other in panic.

It was utterly unprovoked. All they had been doing was standing on the road. I didn't know it then, but it was the first strike of the government's failed attempt to crush the opposition from the moment the election was over.

A dangerous challenge

I spoke with Iranians who were there and others who had heard about it. They all agreed that this was it - it was over.

No one would dare challenge this result. They all knew too well what would happen if they did.

But that's exactly what we saw the next day.

As we were driving back to the hotel from an interview, we stumbled across the beginnings of the first demonstration, held in front of the Ministry of Information.

We grabbed the camera and the tripod and did what we would normally do - ran towards it to start filming.

But we only got about 100 metres before a motor scooter carrying two men pulled up in front of us.

The man at the back introduced himself as a member of the Iranian secret police, asked for our ID and told us firmly that the area was forbidden.

We decided not to waste time arguing or risk arrest but to head back to the hotel, to shoot the protest from one of the upper floors.

But as we walked back, some of the protesters tried to drag us back to film what was happening. Then another civilian put his hand over the lens.

As we walked into the foyer of the hotel, another secret police officer was waiting for us, demanding to see what we had shot.

Once we'd dealt with that, we went up to the 11th floor to watch. We saw riot police on motorbikes swarming like ants into the crowd.

One officer would control the bike while the other sat on the back, swinging truncheons at whoever they passed. Other police on foot weighed into protesters as well, chasing them down the street.

From there, of course, the violence only got worse - culminating in the death of eight civilians in Tehran on Monday night.

But by then, the protesters had already shifted tactics. Not only were the protests getting bigger, they were also largely peaceful.

The police had changed tactics too, allowing the protests to go ahead without the usual response of violent dispersal.

But at the same time, we were starting to feel more and more uncomfortable.

In the space of 24 hours, we heard three separate references from senior Iranians, from Mahmoud Ahamdinejad down, blaming 'foreign media' for inciting the clashes.

It was bullshit, but it was dangerous bullshit.

Reporters under fire

Unlike other conflicts we've seen (and we've both covered some major conflicts) we felt we were now a target; both of Mr Ahmadinejad's supporters, and the police.

It was confirmed when we found out other reporters had been attacked while out covering the story.

George McLeod from the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper came back to the hotel with red welts on his throat after being detained by police.

He'd also been stabbed in the stomach with plastic bottles. I tried hard to picture what that meant, but I couldn't.

I figured it wasn't a pleasant experience.

Tim Marshall from Sky TV was hit and knocked into a deep gutter, gashing his leg. He was limping around in hotel slippers when I saw him last.

Then we were told by other reporters that there had been armed police roaming the hotel foyer.

I have no doubt that the authorities were trying to frighten us out of the country. And it was working.

Every time we walked out of the front door of the hotel, carrying our camera and tripod, and standing out like dog's you-know-whats, we felt less and less comfortable.

I felt safer in Beirut in May last year when Hezbollah and the Sunni militia were shooting it out in the streets.

As long as I didn't go chasing the bullets, I felt like no-one was actually aiming at us. We were not part of the conflict.

This was different.

The bureau's cameraman, Brant, has been in far more dangerous places than I; Baghdad, South Ossetia, Afghanistan, and more. But even he was spooked by the sheer sense of menace in the city towards us, which didn't help my mood at all.

We felt like we were dodging secret police, riot police, religious police, regular police, or the Basij militia wherever we went.

Yet everywhere we went, the camera would attract a crowd of a dozen curious locals in the space of 30 seconds.

Forbidden media

We perfected the art of shooting a piece to camera in one take, or squeezing off some interviews with people in minutes, before jumping back in the taxi and moving off again.

Then, on the day after the eight civilians were killed, our Iranian translator took a phone call with a message from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, which oversees the foreign media in Iran.

All press cards had been cancelled; journalists were banned from covering any unauthorised gatherings; and we were to work only in our offices or hotels.

The message was clear enough. But then this bit was added on the end: 'The police are no longer in charge of the city; it is now under the authority of the Revolutionary Guards.'

It was obviously sheer intimidation. And to be brutally honest, it worked.

I've always felt anger that the warlords of places like Sudan make the place so utterly dangerous that few journalists will go there, giving them freedom to do as they please.

I knew that this was what the Iranian authorities wanted. But with only one day left on the visa, and confined to our hotel room, Brant and I decided it was simply time to go.

As we drove out to the airport at one o'clock in the morning, the streets were quiet. But then we passed another of those motorcycle goon squads, out looking for trouble.

This time, the guys on the back were holding two truncheons - one in each hand.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/17/2601139.htm

Jesus.

Anyone else think it's going to get a hell of a lot worse?

Yes, i think it will get much worse!

The world is watching. Good luck to the Iranian people working for democracy.

Just saw two Iranian-american students on CNN.
Pro-Ahmedinijad man backed protest ban, said election was true and vote was fair.
Pro-Opposition pointed out irregularities in vote counting, called for re-vote.

A woman also appeared by voice from Tehran: said she would trust a recount because Moussavi Opposition party is devoted to the Muslim clerics.

Support

I second the above entry. Our hearts go out to the Iranian people.

The only problem I had with the woman was that she was an admitted Pro-Ahmedinijad. That makes me not really want to believe what she says or that she is in danger because she was probably being told to say all those things to Rick Sanchez.

A few qeustions - why are the people wearing green? I know it is for Mousavi -but it also is a symbol for Islam!

Do the people really think Mousavi is much better than Ahmadinejad? Mousavi has his supporters in younger Iranian - who don't know what he've done! He is exactly the same as the others.
If the people want to finish this regime - than Mousavi is not the answer!

Why don't the Iranian use our real flag? The one we have had for long long time - before the mullahs came and changed it to "Allah"?

paracomb trientow

They want Mousavi because he's the better of the 2 not because he's the best person, also I doubt if a change of regime is such a good idea right now, if not managed properly it could put the country at risk weaken which would have been dangerous if Bush was still president, I really hope they don't stop until a revote, best thing would be for Khamenei to be replaced by whoever thats got a half working brain and Mousavi as the president

Montezari would be a great replacment for Khameni, and if mousavi becomes president, he can begin shifting the power away from the religios clerics towards politicians and intellectuals.

To the people of Iran from a citizen of USA

Keep going Iranian people. Stay peaceful and peaceful change will come. No matter what, you have the right of peaceful protest and to demand basic human rights and freedoms.
The people of the United States support this change. People are quiet here, because we know the Fascist Govt will use USA support as a pretense to hurt you. You can be sure we will support a new and free Iran even if we disagree on some issues. Good luck!
Geoff

Fascism

Imagine what they are doing with men and women in the jails, when they torture and murder openly. I cold never imagine they are such an animals. I did even liked some of the regimes policies. Now they showed their real face.

Take the cue from Montazeri. Religion and compassion are your biggest non-violent weapons of protest. Do your best to express the idea that the Basij, policemen, etc. are your countrymen and brothers under Islam. You need all the solidarity you can get, and if you can successfully convert any opponents, victory for the people will be inevitable. Good luck.

Another message from the USA

YOU are the face of freedom and true courage on this planet today. Unarmed people standing up to gun-wielding thugs with government power are a true sign that the dream of freedom and prosperity for all people is alive and well!

Do not give up. Victory is yours if you have to courage to accept it! Show Ahmedinijad what you showed the world at Ninevah, and leave no stone of his power atop another!

Thread closed.

Continues here
http://iran.whyweprotest.net/showthread.php?t=626