[cross posted at NPR Check]

[cross posted at NPR Check]

The Iranian underground rock band, Kiosk. The featured singer--that's the guy with the huge grey 'fro--is Mohsen Namjoo, recently sentenced (in absentia) to 5 years in prison for “an insulting, sneering performance of Koranic verses with musical instruments.” . Fortunately, he and all the other musicians on this track now live outside Iran.

Most Americans have no idea where or what Balochistan is. And the news that 14 Baloch activists were hanged by the Iranian government on July 14th after a monkey court trial for alleged terrorism has largely escaped the notice of the U.S. media.

It would have escaped my notice, too, but I have a personal connection to the Baloch, whose ancestral territory overlaps the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. In 2006, I travelled with friends to Quetta, Pakistan.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Last week digby posted on a report that the CIA is now looking to recruit Wall Street financial analysts to offer their guidance on economic matters. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the CIA's retirement program is a government pension and not a 401(k). She followed up this week by pulling a May 2006 Business Week article from Dawn Kopecki back from the memory hole. The BW piece reports on a 1977 amendment to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that allows the president to exempt companies from accounting and reporting requirements in the name of national security. (Think presidents Bush or Obama have considered national security at stake during the economic crisis?) One of the comments to the article is fascinating:

[cross posted at NPR Check]

According to Renee Montagne, "Europeans are reacting with outrage over events in Iran...and demonstrators in major capitals have taken to the streets." Wow! European protests are so important that NPR quickly puts a reporter on the story and has her on the scene. Eleanor Beardsley checks in from the outskirts of Paris at one of the demonstrations, complete with ambient sounds of protesters and speakers.

Here's the video:

My friend who did his thesis on Iran said the police staying neutral was one of the key factors for the success of the Iranian revolution against the Shah. A BBC roundup:

Iran's most senior dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri calls for three days of national mourning for those killed in street protests, Reuters news agency reports

* Former pro-reform President Mohammad Khatami calls for the release of detained activists

* Iran police chief Gen Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghaddam warns any further unrest will be confronted "decisively"

* Iranian officials again attack the UK for "interfering".

Reuters

Pro-reform clerics in Iran stepped up criticism of the authorities on Sunday after more than a week of unprecedented popular defiance against the leadership of the Islamic Republic.

EDITORS' NOTE: Reuters and other foreign media are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran.

But in an indication of their determination to crack down hard on demonstrations which culminated in the death of at least 10 people on Saturday, authorities dismissed the protesters as "terrorists" and rioters.

They also detained the daughter of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani during an opposition rally in Tehran on Saturday, according to state media.

 Read more…

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

M.E. Dabiri:

A white-haired man emerged from the mosque to tell his wife who was standing in line in front of me, "There are about fifty people ahead of us."

As we entered the mosque, a guard who was standing at the door, looked down at the girls and said, "You have come to vote, too?"

I was essentially witnessing a nation voting for the first time in 2,500 years.

See here.

Yay!

I don't know this technology well enough. We have server bandwidth. Can we donate some? How? Readers?

Mahablog

...I admire the protesting Iranians. At least they give a damn. Here, politicians steal critical elections and we shrug our shoulders and pretend it didn’t happen. ...

... It’s been, what, seven months since the November elections? And has Al Franken been seated in the Senate yet? The endless dispute has nothing whatsoever to do with determining the will of the people, of course. It’s about using the courts and anything else to block the will of the people and advance a minority, extremist agenda.

My dear friend C. just wrote this email to me. C. is a Haitian activist and socialist. She was in Chile during the CIA throwdown of Allende, and she's been working for Haitian human rights, and for women's issues, all her life. In her email ,she hits precisely the idea that has been floating through my mind all day:

Iranians are giving us a lesson in democracy at work. I'm think about the 2000 elections in the US. Nobody protested and power was given to the presumed winner even with evidence of wrongdoing and denials of people votes.

Indeed. How different things would have turned out if we'd shown the bravery in 2000 that the Iranian people are showing now!

President Obama's global agenda, part two: Iran

Via the great Avedon, from letters in the IHT:

Are we really asked to believe that a theocratic Islamic government in Iran would drop a bomb in the Jerusalem vicinity, and risk destroying the third holiest Islamic shrine in the world?

Simple answers to simple questions:

The New York Times is reporting that Admiral William Fallon, the top commander in the Middle East, is retiring early.

As you probably already know Admiral Fallon has been at the center of recent controversy for opposing any war with Iran. So, naturally, having said something so sane and sensible, he must be driven out of his job.

See the NYT article.

AL gets letters:

A friend writes from Tehran:

Here the political weather is terrible. You might know that the parliamentary election is near and the reformist nearly are not allowed to be involved. About 80 per cent of reformist candidates has been labeled as unqualified by the Government. Mr Khatami and Rafsanjani had a meeting with the Supreme Leader but it had no fruit. We are waiting for much worse days.

The Iranian film festival has been just finished with no movie by great directors of the country. All movies were about Islam, religious rites and Imams. Good for Ahmadinejad!

I love my country but i really hate it. That’s iranian life. Always dealing with dilemmas.

To which I'd like to respond:

And the Jackass Texan.

From Navy Times:

The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”

Now you tell us. Not that anyone is really covering it in the major media.

Everything that comes from Chimpy's administration and his SCLM sternographers, that is. Via Uruknet, comes this Times report which should tell you a thing or two about the Iranian "threat:"

Marie Colvin
THE HEAD of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps slipped into the green zone of Baghdad last month to press Tehran’s hardline position over the terms of the current talks with American officials, it was claimed last week.

Iraqi government sources say that Major-General Mohammed Ali Jafari, 50, travelled secretly from Tehran. Jafari appears to have passed through checkpoints on his way into the fortified enclave that contains the American embassy and Iraqi ministries, even though he is on Washington’s “most wanted” list.

 Read more…

And you America doubters-in-chief thought it would stop the drumbeat to war.

Watch as Bush explains it all, nice and slow for all the haters in the house:

I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace.

[...] I believed before the NIE that Iran was dangerous and I believe after the NIE that Iran is dangerous.

And I have said Iran is dangerous. And the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world. Quite the contrary.

How could it be read any other way?

A lot of folks are chattering about a fresh poll from Zogby, in which 52% of the respondents were favorable to an attack on Iran. I've seen other numbers in other polls, some with support for an attack in the low 20s. Obviously, an attack is a stupid idea neither the nation nor the military can really afford, and would have all sorts of horrible consequences; there is also no real threat from Iran, unless by threat you mean "brown not-xtians making lots of money selling oil."

In a preview of corps coverage for 2008, we get this from Murdoch's Times of London:

Israelis ‘blew apart Syrian nuclear cache’
Secret raid on Korean shipment

Gee, I guess Bush must have butchered the negotations with Dear Leader after all. Incredible.

Anyhow, that's the headline. But if you read the details, there are a lot of questions about the crucial details that would lend substance to the headline. Which I imagine the self-correcting wankosphere is busy filling in right now. Gee, it's almost like they're trying to keep us in a constant state of shock, isn't it?

The Israeli government was not saying.... The Syrians were also keeping mum.... Andrew Semmel, a senior US State Department official, said Syria might have obtained nuclear equipment from “secret suppliers”, and added that there were a “number of foreign technicians” in the country. ... But intelligence sources suggested it was a highly successful Israeli raid on nuclear material supplied by North Korea.

Of course, from Whitewater and Iraq onward, we've seen plenty of disinformation take root in Fleet Street, and then spread to WaPo and the Times, so color me skeptical. (And the 101st Fighting Keyboards are, naturally, creaming themselves.)

The Observer's coverage is a little less breathless:

[Dept. of You-Can't-Make-This-Up]
On the very same day the 5th Munitions Squadron loaded six nuclear warheads on a B-52 for transport out of Minot AFB (don't worry, five showed up in Barksdale) they released this press release:

"Advanced Cruise Missiles carry a W80-1 warhead with a yield of 5 to 150 kilotons" and are being flown over your head right now.