Author's posts
Jun 18 2009
Does U.S. Poll Rule Out Fraud In Iran?
Western media, along with thousands of Iranians protesting around the world, have formed a rough consensus over the six days since Iran’s Presidential Election that Ahmadinejad’s victory was the result of widespread fraud.
However, a recent Op-Ed in the Washington Post references a rare public opinion poll in suggesting that the election may indeed have been fair.
While there is not enough information to determine whether or not the election was rigged, this poll certainly doesn’t rule out the possibility. If only because the poll’s authors concluded prior to the election that the very same data predicted a relatively close vote.
Yet today, those same authors are claiming that their figures demonstrate the validity of Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory.
Real News Network – June 18, 2009
Does U.S. poll rule out fraud in Iran?
Authors of heavily-quoted poll changed their conclusion to support validity of Ahmadinejad landslide
Jun 17 2009
Open Civil War Between Iranian Elite Factions?
Crossposted from Antemedius
Roving correspondent for Asia Times and analyst for The Real News Network Pepe Escobar explains how once again US Foreign Policy and meddling is backfiring and may lead to an US/Israeli attack on Iran, in Part 2 of a two part conversation with Real News CEO Paul Jay:
Real News Network – June 17, 2009
Struggle within Iranian elite,Pt.2
Pepe Escobar: Aggressive US and Israeli policy strengthens hand of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard
Jun 17 2009
A Teach-able Moment for The Left
The Dawning Age of Obama as a Potentially Teach-able Moment for The Left
by Paul Street, May 30, 2009
Five Key Lessons Beyond the Gnashing of Radical Teeth
LEGITIMATE LEFT ANGER
There has been a lot of left-wing teeth-gnashing over the policies of the United States’ fake-progressive president Barack Obama. Left-progressives’ anger with the Obama administration is understandable given the new White House’s actions to (for example):
* Significantly expand the reach and intensity of imperial violence (replete with the mass slaughter of civilians and the related escalation of targeted assassinations) in South Asia.
* Promote a notorious assassin and death-squad leader (Lt. General Stanley A McChrystal – former chief of the military’s special Joint Special Operations Command) to the position of Commander of U.S. Forces in the newly merged “Af-Pak” war theater. [1]
* Sustain the criminal occupation of Iraq beneath rhetoric of withdrawal. [2]
* Increase “defense” (empire) spending, consistent with the following statement in a report issued by the leading Wall Street investment firm Morgan Stanley one day after Obama’s presidential election victory: “As we understand it, Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend.”[3]
* Revive military commissions.
* Continue the practice of renditions.
* Maintain secret prisons for persons “held on a short-term, transitory basis.”
* Continue the unspeakable torture of prisoners by an “extrajudicial terror squad” (Jeremy Scahill’s description of the Pentagon’s sadistic “Immediate Reaction Force” in Cuba) at Guantanamo Bay. [4]
Jun 15 2009
Leaked Results Give Ahmadinejad Third Place In Iran Election
Unverifed ballot counts for the Iran election have been reported on Iranian blogs and websites, in spite of Iranian government claims that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with a 2-1 margin, according to a UK Telegraph report:
The statistics, circulated on Iranian blogs and websites, claimed Mr Mousavi had won 19.1 million votes while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won only 5.7 million.
The two other candidates, reformist Mehdi Karoubi and hardliner Mohsen Rezai, won 13.4 million and 3.7 million respectively. The authenticity of the leaked figures could not be confirmed.
Mr Mousavi has accused Iran’s government of “fraud” after Mr Ahmadinejad was declared on Saturday to have 62.6 per cent of the vote, making him the landslide winner. The capital has been rocked by disturbances for the last three days.
Jun 15 2009
Iranian Filmmaker Says Mousavi Was Told He Won
Iranian filmmaker Makhmalbaf reports on phone call from Ministry of Internal Affairs to Mousavi HQ
Bio: Persian: (born May 29, 1957, Tehran) is an Iranian film director, writer, editor, and producer. He is currently the president of the Asian Film Academy. Makhmalbaf’s films have been widely presented in international film festivals in the past ten years. The multi-award-winning director, belongs to the new wave movement of Iranian cinema. Time magazine selected Makhmalbaf’s 2001 film, Kandahar, as one of top 100 films of all time. In 2006, he was a member of the Jury at the Venice film festival.
Makhmalbaf’s Interview on Radio Farda
June 13, 2009, 12:00 AM
Translated for The Real News Network
Makhmalbaf:
Yesterday, twenty agents in civilian clothing attacked press offices of Mousavi’s campaign at Gheitarieh. They broke all communication devices and attacked the campaign staff, including Mr. Kharazi and Mr Amirzadeh. They beat up the staff and when the people confronted them, they fired tear gas at the crowd. These were agents in civilian clothing! Then the agents attempted to runaway. About seven of them were captured by the people and were kept at the campaign headquarters. Next the police arrived at the headquarters and demanded to have custody of the seven captives and said “We would punish these lawbreakers ourselves.” . “No, we need this to be court documented; we know that after the election, you will lose them”, said Mr. Amirzadeh.
[I think here he is referring back to before this recording begins. This has to do with the reports from the early counts at the polls indicating that Mousavi is the winner]
The Ministry of Internal Affairs contacts press offices of Mousavi’s campaign to prepare a message for declaring victory on Sunday which is Hazrate Zahra’s birthday. Mr Mousavi said that “within the next couple of hours I will declare victory and the celebrations would be on Sunday, which is Hazrate Zahra’s birthday and Mother’s Day [in Iran]”. Afterwards Mr. Khamenei is notified that Mr Mousavi has won the election. At first he says fine, you can communicate this to the people, but the message propagation and broadcasting should be well managed [and controlled].
Jun 06 2009
Middle East Reactions To Obama’s Cairo Speech
Pepe Escobar’s commentary on the speech:
Real News Network – June 5, 2009
Peace be upon Barack
Pepe Escobar: Commentary on Obama’s speech to the Muslim World
Jun 05 2009
Crisis at the VA as Benefits Claims Backlog Nearly Tops One Million
Crisis at the VA as Benefits Claims Backlog Nearly Tops One Million
by Jason Leopold, June 5, 2009
During the past four months, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) backlog of unfinished disability claims grew by more than 100,000, adding to an already mountainous backlog that is now close to topping one million.
The VA’s claims backlog, which includes all benefits claims and all appeals at the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) and the Board of Veterans Appeals at VA, was 803,000 on January 5, 2009. The backlog hit 915,000 on May 4, 2009, a staggering 14 percent increase in four months.
The issue has become so dire that veterans now wait an average of six months to receive disability benefits and as long as four years for their appeals to be heard in cases where their benefits were denied.
Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minnesota), a member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said during a hearing in March that the VA is “almost criminally behind in processing claims.”
Overhauling the VA represents one of the most daunting challenges facing the Obama administration after years of mismanagement and neglect by the Bush administration, which stacked the agency with political cronies and kept the agency underfunded, wrapped in bureaucratic red tape and placed the interests of veterans last on a list of priorities.
Indeed, one of the VA’s biggest failures during the Bush administration’s tenure was its inability to fully implement critical components of the Mental Health Strategic Plan (MHSP) at regional offices throughout the country.
The MHSP, unveiled in 2004, would have provided veterans who show signs of being at risk of suicide or are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with immediate mental health care and eliminated the waiting period for receiving treatment.
But according to a November 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), spending for the program was substantially less than what the VA had proposed – leaving untreated tens of thousands of veterans who were at risk of suicide.
Jun 02 2009
The End Of The Beginning?
Note: I repost this every now and then – it was my first essay here at DD nearly two years ago and was originally posted at Talkleft in 2006. With so many new people here lately I thought it’s time to post it again, this time with some new additions at the end of it…
In the nineteen sixties and seventies the western world was in the throes of a cultural and psychological revolution of awareness that at times threatened to bring down the governments and destroy the societies of some of the most powerful countries on earth, and terrified many who were unable to step outside of the structure and limitations of the worldviews they had constructed for themselves in the course of their lives.
Questioning cultural norms and prejudices and searching for alternatives that better respected and valued human beings and their relationship with the larger society and with the natural world as the basis and reason for societies actions and existence rather than society and the state and the status quo as the determining factors of how people should interact with each other, were the drivers behind this revolution.
The insecurity of many in the face of insistent and deep questioning that in a religious context would have been labeled blasphemy and heresy caused knee-jerk fear reactions that in many arenas turned into violent confrontations, particularly but not only race riots and countless smaller horrors of the racial Civil Rights Movement, and in the struggle for equality under law and social systems of more than half the population in the Gay and the Women's Liberation Movements, and what was often termed a Sexual Revolution, all of which had been percolating and growing for many years and all of which naturally contributed to making up the more encompassing psychological or awareness heightening Cultural Revolution of the times.
Noted philosopher Alan Watts in the nineteen sixties in “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” described our situation, our human condition, this way: