Another day, another gigantic crowd of Iranians demanding democracy.  We seem to be stuck in some sort of staring contest, both sides waiting for the other to blink.  The showdown may come tomorrow, when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will be leading the nation in prayers, which may provide fodder for a confrontation, although Moussavi appears to be trying to avoid the confrontation.  The protesters in Iran have been amazingly well-disciplined so far, showing no signs of non-instigated violence.  This is more than can be said about the Iranian parliament, apparently:

After Ansari, Abutorabi took the floor again and continued questioning the plainclothes security forces once again. At this point Hosseinian, Koochakzadeh, and resaee, the three biggest supporters of Ahmadinejad in the parliament, started a verbal argument which ended with a number of physical fights. As a result a number of pro and ant Ahmadinejad members of the parliament join the fight and start slapping and pushing each other.

In the end, the anti Ahmadinejad block claims that they will expose the identities of those behind the plainclothes security forces.

Keep in mind that the pro and anti Ahmadinejad blocks belong to the same political party! I think the government is starting to crack up from the inside.

Rafsanjani is still quiet, with no news about the unconfirmed emergency meeting of the Assembly of Experts.  Meanwhile, state run news agencies are trying to undercut his legitimacy by attacking his character, and making sure his relatives are displayed prominently in their coverage of rallies.

A new video out shows some of the violence that occurred at Tehran University a few days ago:

Meanwhile, in Washington, Barack Obama is still being attacked for not vocally backing the protesters in a significant way, even though Bush’s former negotiator on Iran is apparently on Obama’s side:

“President Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to see an aggressive series of statements from the United States that would put the U.S. in the center of this, and I think President Obama is avoiding that quite rightly,” Burns said.

Obama said he respects Iran’s sovereignty and that “this is not a dispute for the U.S. to be the center of. It’s up to Iranians to decide who Iran’s future leaders will be,” Burns said.

Obama “demonstrated clear sympathy for the reformers,” the former ambassador said. “I think the fact that he’s been low-key about it and the fact that he is saying denial of rights and violence are of a concern to him, and that he was inspired by the reformers, is, I think, the right thing to say.”

I’ll end with another dispatch from Lindsey Hilsum at Channel 4 News:

Amazing sight from today’s protest in Iran:

Lindsey Hilsum continues her stellar reporting, recapping today’s events, despite a government crackdown on foreign journalists:

One more thing that I will reluctantly post is this video. I’m warning you that it is extremely disturbing and I will not be watching it again. It does, however, provide an isolated example of the brutality that has occurred over the past few days.

According to the AP:

Iranian authorities are restricting all journalists working for foreign media from firsthand reporting on the streets. The rules cover all journalists, including Iranians working for foreign media. It blocks images and eyewitness descriptions of the protests and violence that has followed last week’s disputed elections.

The order issued Tuesday limits journalists for foreign media to work only from their offices, conducting telephone interviews and monitoring official sources such as state television. It comes as foreign reporters in Iran to cover the elections began leaving the country. Iranian officials say they will not extend their visas.

Iranian state-run media is reporting that many opposition leaders have been arrested “with explosives and guns.”

Luckily, we still have Twitter to get the real story.  If you want to help the people in Iran access it, here’s instructions on how to set up a proxy server (Windows, Mac, Linux).

In its purest, and most ugly form.

Despite many hot-headed remarks from several members of Congress, Obama wisely stays out of the fray.  This neuters any possible propaganda from Ahmedinejad and others that the unrest is being stoked by outside forces, specifically the United States.

Obviously, all of us have been watching the news from Iran. And I want to start by being very clear that it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be, that we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes — the United States can be a handy political football, or discussions with the United States [can be].

Having said all that, I am deeply troubled by the violence I have been seeing on television. I think that the democratic process, free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent, all those are universal values, and need to be respected. And whenever I see violence perpetrated on people who are peacefully dissenting, and whenever the American people see that, I think they are rightfully troubled.

Here’s the video of a Basiji shooting into the crowd, killing at least one person:

That’s the early word via NIAC:

“Reliable news from Iran has arrived that after the death of one person by Basij, the Basij base in Azadi Sq. has been burned down and the commander in that base has been killed.” [The fire is being confirmed by an eye-witness.]

The Basij is kind of like an Iranian secret police.  From Wikipedia:

a volunteer-based Iranian paramilitary force founded by the order of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on November 1979. The Basij are subordinate to, and receive their orders from, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Also, here’s a couple of good reports from Lindsey Hilsum of Britain’s Channel 4 News:

UPDATE:

It appears the AP has confirmed this story:

Gunfire from a pro-government militia killed one man and wounded several others Monday after hundreds of thousands of chanting opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad marched in central Tehran to support their pro-reform leader in his first public appearance since disputed elections. [...]

Later, a group of demonstrators with fuel canisters set a small fire at a compound of a volunteer militia linked to Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard as the crowd dispersed from the square. As some tried to storm the building, people on the roof could be seen firing directly at the demonstrators at the northern edge of the square, away from the heart of the rally.

It seems the Basij is responsible the most egregious violence.  From what I have read, the uniformed Iranian police mostly stood idly by after it became clear that hundreds of thousands had showed up to demonstrate.

It appears that hundreds of thousands showed up for the unsanctioned march organized by Moussavi:

You can real-time updates from those in Iran using this twitter search.

Also, as a side note, I was actually excited to get in my car this morning, because I was sure NPR would be covering this (unlike CNN).  A false hope.  The only thing that was mentioned was Khameini’s call for an investigation, which, to me, just looks like a smoke-screen tactic.

It seems that the only place to find news about this is to get it raw from twitter, or to check with Andrew Sullivan, the NYTimes Lede blog, or the NIAC blog, who have all done an excellent job covering the story.

There are several reports that the dorms at Tehran University have been stormed.  Many students have been injured.  It appears the same has occurred at Isfahan Technical University:

A website I’ve been checking all weekend, tehranbureau.com, has been shut down by the government.

It appears the protestors have been out all night:

Things are starting to get really ugly. There’s also been multiple reports of armed guards blocking entrances to hospitals, not letting the injured through.

It’s now morning in Iran. Moussavi has been trying to organize a march in the afternoon. There’s conflicting reports that he has secured a permit to do so. Regardless, you can expect that the streets will be filled tomorrow.

People of Iran, we are watching. Stay strong.

I only read about it before, but Christiane Amanpour…you go girl:

Also.

Now I remember who Mahmoud reminds me of…

(Sorry, too easy.)

Shouts of “Allahu Akbar” echo in the night.  This is apparently just like 1979:

Meanwhile, the BBC fills the gap of MSM TV coverage. Watch as the protesters scare off a member of the secret police from confiscating their camera:

This may be the last report like this we see. It’s becoming more dangerous by the minute to be a foreign journalist in Iran.

It looks like it’s more than just the people of Iran who are up in arms. I’ve been surfing twitter for the past hour and have discovered an interesting mod-mentality trend going on.

It seems that people are actively spreading the word to use a service called pagereboot.com. The service is simple: Supply a url and a timer on which to refresh that url. You leave the service open in your browser and it automatically refreshes that site, thus overwhelming the web server so much that it takes down the site.

The movement on twitter has successfully taken down the official website of Ali Khamenei and the official blog of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It seems like Iran has pissed off a lot of people.

With a service so simple to create and use, and the movement of thousands of people on the internet, Cyber-Warfare is easier to implement and execute than normal previous forms of warfare. What does this mean for the future of the world?

It seems things have now spread to all major cities.  This video is from Esfehan:

Some foreign journalists are being told to leave the country, and many domestic journalists have been arrested.  A dKos diarist claims to have received the “real” election results from an insider in the Interior Ministry:

Unofficial news – reports leaked results from Interior Ministry:
Eligible voters: 49,322,412
Votes cast: 42,026,078
Spoilt votes: 38,716
Mir Hossein Mousavi: 19,075,623
Mehdi Karoubi: 13,387,104
Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad (incumbent): 5,698,417
Mohsen Rezaei (conservative candidate): 3,754,218

If this is true, it would explain the comical rigging of the vote that occurred.  People have said that you can only really swing an election about 5% and keep the appearance of legitimacy.

Some are saying that this may be a secular coup, not necessarily originating from the clerics.

Iran is no longer a theocracy. To blame this on “The Mullahs,” or worse, Iran’s “Right-Wing” is to fundamentally misunderstand what is taking place there. This is a secular power grab done under the guise of Islam and revolution. The perpetrators are the enemies of western rapprochement, and the proponents of economic isolation. The Revolutionary Guards benefit from Iran’s economic isolation, much like the mafia benefited from prohibition and other criminalized behavior. As any stereotypical movie gangster might say, “why ruin a good thing?”

I believe we are witnessing the disposal of Islamic pretense, and in fact a more honest and apparent Iranian police state. How that affects their place in the region and the world is still to be determined.

Time will tell, I guess.

Meanwhile, most of the faculty at Sharif University have resigned in protest.  The scenes portrayed by various videos coming out show some sort of surreal Mad-Max-type landscape, with thugs roaming the streets on motorcycles, beating protesters with batons, and trash cans ablaze.

Gunshots rang out in another video.

Stay strong, people of Iran.  Our hearts are with you.

In the Name of God

Honorable people of Iran

The reported results of the 10th Iranians residential Election are appalling. The people who witnessed the mixture of votes in long lineups know who they have voted for and observe the wizardry of I.R.I.B (State run TV and Radio) and election officials. Now more than ever before they want to know how and by which officials this game plan has been designed. I object fully to the current procedures and obvious and abundant deviations from law on the day of election and alert people to not surrender to this dangerous plot. Dishonesty and corruption of officials as we have seen will only result in weakening the pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran and empowers lies and dictatorships.

I am obliged, due to my religious and national duties, to expose this dangerous plot and to explain its devastating effects on the future of Iran. I am concerned that the continuation of the current situation will transform all key members of this regime into fabulists in confrontation with the nation and seriously jeopardize them in this world and the next.

I advise all officials to halt this agenda at once before it is too late, return to the rule of law and protect the nation’s vote and know that deviation from law renders them illegitimate. They are aware better than anyone else that this country has been through a grand Islamic revolution and the least message of this revolution is that our nation is alert and will oppose anyone who aims to seize the power against the law.

I use this chance to honor the emotions of the nation of Iran and remind them that Iran, this sacred being, belongs to them and not to the fraudulent. It is you who should stay alert. The traitors to the nation’s vote have no fear if this house of Persians burns in flames. We will continue with our green wave of rationality that is inspired by our religious learnings and our love for prophet Mohammad and will confront the rampage of lies that has appeared and marked the image of our nation. However we will not allow our movement to become blind one.

I thank every citizen who took part in spreading this green message by becoming a campaigner and all official and self organized campaigns, I insist that their presence is essential until we achieve results deserving of our country.

[ verse from in Quran: Why not trust in God, who has shown us our ways. We are patient in face of what disturbs us. Our resilience is in god. ]

Mir Hossein Mousavi

Nate pushes back on the graph I (and everyone else) posted earlier:

Likewise, there was more wave-to-wave variation in the Ahmadinejad-Moosavi results than the statistical analysis I cited above seems to imply. Ignoring votes for minor candidates, Ahmadinejad won a high of 70.4 percent of the votes in Wave 1, and a low of 62.3 percent in the votes newly added in Wave 6. By comparison, Obama’s share of the newly-added votes in our experiment ranged from 56.4 percent in Wave 3 to 44.7 percent in Wave 4. That’s slightly more variance than we saw in the Iranian results but not much.

To be clear, these results certainly do not prove that Iran’s election was clean. I have no particular reason to believe the results reported by the Interior Ministry. But I also don’t have any particular reason to disbelieve them, at least based on the statistical evidence. If Moosavi truly did have the support of a majority of Iran’s citizenry, the best evidence we will have of that is what happens in the streets of Tehran over the next days and weeks.

Some are taking issue with his analysis, saying that he essentially chose states at random for his US analogy, whereas the Iranian votes came in regionally.  This would be more like Obama winning 57% of the vote in the South, as well as 57% in the Northeast.  This doesn’t happen.

Finally, Ahmadinejad supposedly won Tehran with over 50% of the vote. (?!?!)  And even more ridiculous, he won Tabriz with 57% of the vote, which is the home of Moussavi’s own ethnic group (Azeri).

This was rigged.