The New Editor - Iran

Iran Sentences Filmmakers to "Propaganda Against the System"

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 10:28:00 -0700

Two Iranian filmmakers -- and supporters of the Iranian 'Green Revolution' -- have been found guilty of "propaganda against the regime."

Time magazine's Richard Corliss reports:

[Iranian filmmaker and 'Green Revolution' supporter] Jafar Panahi ... was sentenced to six years in jail after an Iranian court found him guilty of "colluding in the gathering and making of propaganda against the regime." He was also forbidden from filmmaking for 20 years. [Fellow Iranian filmmaker Mahmoud Rasoulof was also sentenced to six years in prison for "propaganda against the regime."]

To his credit, Directors Guild of America President Taylor Hackford has come to the defense of Panahi and Rasoulof, according to Variety's Dave McNary.

Iran broadcasts missile launch on state television

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 12:10:00 -0600

From the Telegraph:

Television images showed the sand coloured Qiam (Rising) blasting into the air from a desert terrain, amid chants of "Allahu Akbar"...

Nothing to worry about here, folks. Move along....

Iran Bars Music Education in Private Schools; Will Spend $1.5 Billion to Promote 'Moral Conduct'

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:12:00 -0600

Business Weeks' Ali Sheikholeslami reports:

Iran has barred private schools from teaching music, saying it clashes with the establishment's Islamic values, following a push to enforce moral standards that may lead to a national dress code for university students.

"The use of musical instruments is against the principles of our value system," Ali Bagherzadeh, head of the private- schools office in the Education Ministry, said in a phone interview from Tehran today. Iran's 16,000 private schools have 1.1 million students, the Islamic Republic News Agency said.

Iran has set aside $1.5 billion to promote "moral conduct," including enforcement of its dress code for women, "to solve the cultural and social ills" in society, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar said on May 10. His comments followed the introduction of a code of conduct at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences that bans loud laughter, nail polish, high heels and immodest clothing for women and men.

The Fruits of Weakness

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Sun, 23 May 2010 00:03:00 -0600

Charles Krauthammer:

It is perfectly obvious that Iran's latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran's nuclear program.

It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.

But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran's program.
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Given Obama's policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally. Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the United States retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela, why not hedge your bets? There's nothing to fear from Obama, and everything to gain by ingratiating yourself with America's rising adversaries. After all, they actually believe in helping one's friends and punishing one's enemies.

Three Charged in Plot to Send Parts to Iran for Potential Nuclear Weapon Use

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:39:00 -0700

The Los Angeles Times' Scott Glover reports:

Three men, including an Iranian-born chemical engineer living in Glendale, have been charged in a scheme to smuggle sophisticated industrial components into Iran that could be used in the development of a nuclear weapon, authorities said Wednesday.
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Authorities allege that the men were attempting to smuggle high-grade vacuum pumps and other items into Iran in violation of federal trade laws and U.S. sanctions against the country. Investigators? suspicions were heightened by the great lengths to which the defendants went to hide their alleged activities.

?These were educated men,? said Louis Rodi, a top supervisor in the Los Angeles ICE office. ?These individuals knew what they were doing.?

According to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Jiraiir Avanessian, 56, of Glendale was paid several hundred thousand dollars to ship ?high dollar vacuum pumps and pump related? equipment to Iran.

Iranian journalist gets prison term, desert exile

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:35:00 -0700

Iran's obstreperous midget president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn't get mad, he gets even.

From AP:

An Iranian journalist lost an appeal Sunday against his conviction on charges of spreading propaganda against the ruling Islamic establishment and was sentenced to six years in prison and five years of internal exile in a remote desert town.

The court also confirmed a lifelong ban on political activity for the prominent reporter, Ahmad Zeidabadi, who was also once a student activist.

Zeidabadi was among more than 100 political figures and activists tried together in the aftermath of Iran's disputed presidential election, which the opposition says was rigged to give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad another term in office.

Iran's Explosive Deceit

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:03:00 -0700

From a Times of London editorial:

Winston Churchill described the actions of Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The nuclear diplomacy of Iran is constructed more simply: it is one lie after another. Western diplomacy has proved susceptible to the tactic. A US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in December 2007 concluded that Iran was "less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005". Documents obtained by The Times reveal that this assessment was worthless.

The information comes from Iran?s most sensitive nuclear project. It concerns a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator. This is the component of a nuclear weapon that triggers the explosion. The plan was initiated in the very year that the NIE delivered its reassuring message.
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The discovery is an indictment both of Iran's duplicity and of the West's complacency.

Read the whole piece.

Huge Intelligence Scandal: Will All the Pundits Who Relied on the Discredited 2007 NIE on Iran now admit that they were wrong?

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:07:00 -0600

Fat chance.

Ron Rosenbaum:

Will all the pundits who relied on the discredited 2007 NIE on Iran now admit that they were wrong? That they bought into and kept citing, without any serious questioning, the now clearly politically skewed analysis in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate of that year? You remember: the considered consensus wisdom of the entire U.S. intelligence community, which misled the world into believing there was nothing to worry about Iran's nuclear program, that it had virtually ceased. When, in fact, out of the three components of a nuclear weapons program, at most one might have been suspended, if that.

Will the congressional intelligence committees demand to know how such a deliberately misleading report was being leaked and fed to the public by half-baked pundits even after (we now learn) some part of the "intelligence community" knew -- before the the NIE was issued -- about the secret nuclear fuel facility we're now reading about?
...

Shouldn?t the journalists who were conned by the 2007 NIE (just about all of them), fooled again so soon after the Iraq intelligence fiasco, be doing everything they can to see who suckered them and why? Or are they afraid it will just further expose their ignorance?

It?s a huge intelligence scandal and we should demand answers because the Iranian preparations for nuclear war were given a free ride and we may never know -- until it's too late -- just how terrible the consequences will be.

Of course politics had nothing at all to do with this... Read the whole piece.

6 Mousavi supporters reportedly hanged

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:25:18 -0600

The Jerusalem Post's Sabina Amidi reports:

As the Iranian authorities warned the opposition on Tuesday that they would tolerate no further protests over the disputed June 12 presidential elections, a report emerged of the hangings of six supporters of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Speaking after Iran's top legislative body upheld the election victory of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sources in Iran told this reporter in a telephone interview that the hangings took place in the holy city of Mashhad on Monday. There was no independent confirmation of the report.

Where's The UN On Iran?

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:03:00 -0600

Claudia Rosset:

People are being killed in Iran. Where is the U.N.? What institution could be better positioned to relieve President Obama of his worries about America standing up unilaterally for freedom in Iran? The U.N. is the self-styled overlord of the international community, committed in its charter to promote peace, freedom and "reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights."

Iran's regime is already in gross violation of a series of U.N. sanctions over a nuclear program the U.N. Security Council deems a threat to international peace. The same regime has now loosed its security apparatus of trained thugs and snipers on Iranians who have been, in huge numbers, demanding their basic rights. Surely top U.N. officials such as Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon should be leading the charge for liberty and justice, with the strongest possible criticism and measures against the Iranian regime.

But that's not happening. While Iranian protesters have been risking their necks to try to rid their country of a malignant despotism, the U.N. has hardly even qualified as voting "present."

Iran's Struggle, and Ours

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:04:00 -0600

Senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and national correspondent for The Atlantic Robert D. Kaplan:

The Middle East has entered a period of deep flux, to be further amplified by elections in Iraq later this year and the seating of a pro-Western government in Lebanon. Because of its central geographic and demographic position astride the energy-rich Middle East -- not to mention the attractive force of Persian culture seeping far into Central Asia -- Iran, ironically, has a better chance to dominate the region under dynamic democratic rule than it has ever had under its benighted clerisy. And that could be very good for the United States.

Unimaginable Horror in Tehran Today

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:09:34 -0600

Steve Schippert: (Warning: very graphic images at link)

Iran has executed its Tiananmen Square. Baharestan Square has become synonymous with barbarity, cruelty, massacre and inhumanity.

An Iranian blogger (whose URL I will not publish) live blogging from Baharestan Square in central Tehran today captures but brief glimpses of the unimaginable horror that took place today. Bus loads of protesters were stopped and unloaded from their buses by "black-clad police" and literally herded. When the massing was sufficient, as the barely controllably distraught Tehran caller to CNN described first hand, hundreds of the regime's Basij thugs poured out of an adjoining mosque and commenced a massacre with axes, clubs, guns and gas.

From the live blogger's eyewitness account:

More than 10.000 Bassij Milittias get position in Central Tehran, including Baharestan Sq.
Army Helycopters flying over Baharestan and Vali Asr Sq.
The streets, squares and around BAHARESTAN (Approx. South-eastern of Tehran) is swarming with military forces, civilian forces, the security motorists
The croud have moved to the south of baharestan, the situation is bad, the shooting has started
In Baharestan Sq. in the Police shooting, A girl is shot and the police is not allowing to let them help
In Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping people like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher

This is the Iranian regime, wading into its own unarmed people and axing them to death, bludgeoning women (seen as the greatest threat to the regime) and throwing them to their deaths from pedestrian bridges. The same Iranian regime whose embassy officials are invited to American embassies around the world to celebrate on July 4th, of all things, a successful revolution.

Report: Neda Soltan's family 'forced out of home' by Iranian authorities

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:28:11 -0600

If true, it's almost as if the mullahs and the Iranian midget Ahmadinejad are purposely trying to screw up their international image -- but it's not too surprising.

From the Guardian: (via Hot Air)

The Iranian authorities have ordered the family of Neda Agha Soltan out of their Tehran home after shocking images of her death were circulated around the world.

Neighbours said that her family no longer lives in the four-floor apartment building on Meshkini Street, in eastern Tehran, having been forced to move since she was killed. The police did not hand the body back to her family, her funeral was cancelled, she was buried without letting her family know and the government banned mourning ceremonies at mosques, the neighbours said.

"We just know that they [the family] were forced to leave their flat," a neighbour said. The Guardian was unable to contact the family directly to confirm if they had been forced to leave.

Iran Charging 'Bullet Fee' for Victims' Families

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:41:00 -0600

The family of a 19-year-old boy killed during the demonstrations in Iran was charged a $3,000 'bullet fee' -- a 'fee' for the bullet Iranian security forces used to kill the boy -- before they could claim the body.

It tells you everything you need to know about Iran's leadership.

The Iranian Uprising

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:50:15 -0600

Nico Pitney is live blogging the carnage in Iran.