by all indications there is some CIA/special forces agenda to use the Baluchis & facilitate militant activities (like this Jundullah thing). So what's going on with that?
--
Hongpong.com

background articles in comments

Iran begins voting for new president(AJ wins)

Tehran Down the House

...Rafsanjani in that he's said to have resigned from Chairmanship of the Expediency Council, but not from the Assembly of Experts. I'd give a buck right now for more insight into the internal dynamics of the Assembly...

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

read this
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/iranian-election

between ahmadinejad and bush the lesser? Eyes set close together, the shit eating grin, like some overgrown rat staring at a hunk of cheese.

Two of a kind, though either would be loathe to admit it.

I did inhale.

CNN - Demonstrators on Monday defied a government decree that had declared their rallies illegal and began to gather at Tehran University for a third day of protests.
{snip}
Earlier Monday, Iran's government had rejected a request by opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi to hold a nationwide march to protest the results of the country's presidential election, Iranian media reported.
{snip}
But Moussavi's supporters, in messages on social-networking sites, indicated the rallies would continue with or without the blessing of the administration. Tens of thousands of people around the world championed them on social-networking Web sites and urged friends to wear green in solidarity.

CNN - Media rights group Reporters Without Borders is urging nations to not recognize the results of Iran's presidential election, citing censorship and a crackdown on journalists.

The nongovernmental group, which advocates freedom of the press, said it has confirmed the arrest of four reporters by Iranian authorities, including one who won the organization's press freedom prize in 2001.

In addition, the France-based group said, it has no information on 10 other reporters who have either gone into hiding or have been arrested.

"A democratic election is one in which the media are free to monitor the electoral process and investigate fraud allegations, but neither of these two conditions has been met for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's supposed re-election," the group said Sunday in a statement.

Independent observers were not allowed to observe the voting on Friday, and foreign reporters have been blocked from covering the ensuing demonstrations by supporters of Ahmadinejad's rival Mir Hossein Moussavi, who are claiming ballot fraud.

by all means protest the treatment of journalists but it is incredibly stupid for them to involve themselves in the election

Media group asks nations not to recognize Iran results

CNN.com

(CNN) -- Media rights group Reporters Without Borders is urging nations to not recognize the results of Iran's presidential election, citing censorship and a crackdown on journalists.

The nongovernmental group, which advocates freedom of the press, said it has confirmed the arrest of four reporters by Iranian authorities, including one who won the organization's press freedom prize in 2001.

In addition, the France-based group said, it has no information on 10 other reporters who have either gone into hiding or have been arrested.

"A democratic election is one in which the media are free to monitor the electoral process and investigate fraud allegations, but neither of these two conditions has been met for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's supposed re-election," the group said Sunday in a statement.

Independent observers were not allowed to observe the voting on Friday, and foreign reporters have been blocked from covering the ensuing demonstrations by supporters of Ahmadinejad's rival Mir Hossein Moussavi, who are claiming ballot fraud.

Foreign news Web sites, such as that of the BBC, have been blocked, and the satellite broadcast of the Voice of America partly jammed, the group said.

Reporters for an Italian station, RAI, and for Reuters were beaten by police in the capital, Tehran. A CNN producer was also hit with a police baton.

Iranian authorities closed Al-Arabiya's Tehran bureau for a week without explanation, the Arabic network said Sunday. Two reporters were attacked outside Moussavi's headquarters on Friday, according to Reporters Without Borders.

The Web sites of pro-opposition supporters are inaccessible, and the government also has periodically shut down access to social networking sites, making it difficult for information to reach the outside world.

"An election won by means of censorship and arrests of journalists is not democratic," the group said.

Sun, 06/14/2009 11:03pm
the cable - Brief Iran Update.
Iranian opposition presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi is planning a march of his supporters at 4 p.m. Monday in Tehran, Iranian sources said. He apparently went to see the supreme leader Sunday to seek a permit for it, but one hasn't yet been obtained. If he is prevented from getting permission, he has said he plans to march to the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomenei, an act that Iranians say the authorities of the Islamic Republic would be disinclined to prevent.

Iranian sources said former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is in Qom, seeking to persuade clerics not to certify the Iranian elections.

Another presidential candidate, Mohsen Rezai, the former head of the Revolutionary Guards, issued a statement today saying he wants to have the ballots examined, Iranian sources said.

Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held a press conference and victory rally Sunday, attended by tens of thousands, as sporadic protests and demonstrations and clashes with the police continued, much of it recorded on Twitter.

Many foreign journalists in Iran on 10-day visas to report on the elections are being told to depart and that they cannot get their visas extended. Several reporters and camera-people were apparently roughed up covering various protests, Iranian sources said, and Ahmadinejad blamed foreign news organizations for the demonstrations. News site Tehranbureau reported it had been taken off line by denial of service attacks, and Iranians said Al Arabiya's office in Tehran had been shut down for a week.

The Iranian ambassador to Germany has reportedly been summoned by the German government to protest the treatment of demonstrators, as well as German reporters covering the election in Iran.

Other signs of civil disobedience continued.

"Over the past two evenings, the air in Tehran has been filled with loud cries of ‘Allah-u Akbar' following a request to this end by Moussavi's supporters," a person in Tehran informed an Iran-oriented list Sunday. "Tonight, the chanting started at around 9 pm local time, and has been escalating since. People in all parts of town are reporting the same phenomenon in their neighbourhoods. Amidst the chanting, you can also hear loud bangs, which are either bullets or teargas being fired ...

Iran Updates (VIDEO): Live-Blogging The Uprising - A plea from Mousavi. Andrew Sullivan passes along a telephone plea from Mousavi, via his contacts at BBC Persia:

I AM UNDER EXTREME PRESSURE TO ACCEPT THE RESULTS OF THE SHAM ELECTION. THEY HAVE CUT ME OFF FROM ANY COMMUNICATION WITH PEOPLE AND AM UNDER SURVEILLANCE. I ASK THE PEOPLE TO STAY IN THE STREETS BUT AVOID VIOLENCE.

bbc - I will leave a message for His Excellency President Ahmadinejad to look into this. However, part of the difficulty is that the winner's power base is far more rural with few internet responses reach BBC and thus BBC's imbalanced comments may have been unintentional than provocative.

Otherwise, BBC column's responses may seem from Iranian perspective intentionally unbalached and seeking a political twist to the events.

It is also important to recollect that this was an important election and there is a need to deflate excess euphoria the lively campaings had stimulated. There is a certain justification for jamming if the media like BBC becomes unduly focused to the post-election riots and demonstrations. Indeed, the heated exchanges were rather expected.

It is important to prevent unfortunate situation like in Kenya recently when the winners and opposition were grid-locked to a dysfunctional electorate conflict.

The situation in Iran has not been like in case of Zimbabwe where there were a sustained obstruction of opposition to access media, in Iran the debates have been open including impartial TV access to opposition. Therefore, the feelings of undue inference and conspiracy from outside media is unlikely to get too much support and this soon dies out.

BBC should do a fact finding missions to those regions which voted for the winner too rather than focus on the riots.

However, it is very important to maintain a credible and accurrate vote counting systems and perhaps get international monitors to assist on non-biases. The monitoring of elections should be left for unbiased bodies rather than media whose focus, need is often on visualisation of things.

Veli Albert Kallio
Fellow of Royal Geograhpical Society
Member of His Excellency President Ahmadinejad's Personal Facebook

CNN - Iran's supreme leader has ordered an investigation into allegations the country's presidential vote was marred by ballot fraud as chaos following hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declared victory continued for a third day.

The country's government-funded Press TV reported Monday that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had asked for the investigation.

going thru the motions?

Monday June 15 2009
ANNA JOHNSON

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) Iran's state television says the supreme leader has ordered an investigation into claims of fraud in last week's presidential election.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is ordering the powerful Guardian Council to examine the allegations by pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who claims widespread vote rigging in Friday's election. The government declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner in a landslide victory.

It is a stunning turnaround for Iran's most powerful figure, who previously welcomed the results.

Mousavi wrote an appeal Sunday to the Guardian Council, a powerful 12-member body that's a pillar of Iran's theocracy. Mousavi also met Sunday with Khamenei.

Mousavi's backers have waged three days of street protests in Tehran.

Jun 16, 2009

Rafsanjani's gambit backfires
By M K Bhadrakumar

Iranian politics is never easy to decode. The maelstrom around Friday's presidential election intrigued most avid cryptographers scanning Iranian codes. So many false trails appeared that it became difficult to decipher who the real contenders were and what the political stakes were.

In the event, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei won a resounding victory. The grey cardinal of Iranian politics Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been dealt a crushing defeat. Is the curtain finally ringing down on the tumultuous career of the "Shark", a nickname Rafsanjani acquired in the vicious well of the Iranian Majlis (parliament) where he used to swim dangerously as a political predator in the early years of the Iranian Revolution as the speaker?

By the huge margin (64%) with which President Mahmud Ahmedinejad won, it is tempting to say that like the great white

sperm whale of immense, premeditated ferocity and stamina in Herman Melville's epic novel Moby Dick, Rafsanjani is going down, deeply wounded by the harpoon, into the cold oblivion of the sea of Iranian politics. But you can never quite tell.

The administration of President Barack Obama in the United States could see through the allegorical mode of the Iranian election and probably anticipate the flood of destruction that would follow once vengeance is unleashed. It did just the right thing by staying aloof, studiously detached. Now comes the difficult part - engaging the house that Khamenei presides over as the monarch of all he surveys.

First, the ABC of the election. Who is Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmedinejad's main opponent in the election? He is an enigma wrapped in mystery. He impressed the Iranian youth and the urban middle class as a reformer and a modernist. Yet, as Iran's prime minister during 1981-89, Mousavi was an unvarnished hardliner. Evidently, what we have seen during his high-tech campaign is a vastly different Mousavi, as if he meticulously deconstructed and then reassembled himself.

This was what Mousavi had to say in a 1981 interview about the 444-day hostage crisis when young Iranian revolutionaries kept American diplomats in custody: "It was the beginning of the second stage of our revolution. It was after this that we discovered our true Islamic identity. After this we felt the sense that we could look Western policy in the eye and analyze it the way they had been evaluating us for many years."

Most likely, he had a hand in the creation of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Ali Akbar Mohtashami, Hezbollah's patron saint, served as his interior minister. He was involved in the Iran-Contra deal in 1985, which was a trade-off with the Ronald Reagan administration whereby the US would supply arms to Iran and as quid pro quo Tehran would facilitate the release of the Hezbollah-held American hostages in Beirut. The irony is, Mousavi was the very anti-thesis of Rafsanjani and one of the first things the latter did in 1989 after taking over as president was to show Mousavi the door. Rafsanjani had no time for Mousavi's anti-"Westernism" or his visceral dislike of the market.

Mousavi's electoral platform has been a curious mix of contradictory political lines and vested interests but united in one maniacal mission, namely, to seize the presidential levers of power in Iran. It brought together so-called reformists who support former president Mohammad Khatami and ultra-conservatives of the regime. Rafsanjani is the only politician in Iran who could have brought together such dissimilar factions. He assiduously worked hand-in-glove with Khatami towards this end.

If we are to leave out the largely inconsequential "Gucci crowd" of north Tehran, who no doubt imparted a lot of color, verve and mirth to Mousavi's campaign, the hardcore of his political platform comprised powerful vested interests who were making a last-ditch attempt to grab power from the Khamenei-led regime. On the one hand, these interest groups were severely opposed to the economic policies under Ahmadinejad, which threatened their control of key sectors such as foreign trade, private education and agriculture.

For those who do not know Iran better, suffice to say that the Rafsanjani family clan owns vast financial empires in Iran, including foreign trade, vast landholdings and the largest network of private universities in Iran. Known as Azad there are 300 branches spread over the country, they are not only money-spinners but could also press into Mousavi's election campaign an active cadre of student activists numbering some 3 million.

The Azad campuses and auditoria provided the rallying point for Mousavi's campaign in the provinces. The attempt was to see that the campaign reached the rural poor in their multitudes who formed the bulk of voters and constituted Ahmadinejad's political base. Rafsanjani's political style is to build up extensive networking in virtually all the top echelons of the power structure, especially bodies such as the Guardian Council, Expediency Council, the Qom clergy, Majlis, judiciary, bureaucracy, Tehran bazaar and even elements within the circles close to Khamenei. He called into play these pockets of influence.

Rafsanjani's axis with Khatami was the basis of Mousavi's political platform of reformists and conservatives. The four-cornered contest was expected to give a split verdict that would force the election into a run-off on June 19. The candidature of the former Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Mohsen Rezai (who served under Rafsanjani when he was president) was expected to slice off a chunk of IRGC cadres and prominent conservatives.

Again, the fourth candidate, Mehdi Karrubi's "reformist" program was expected to siphon off support from Ahmedinejad, by virtue of his offer of economic policies based on social justice such as the immensely popular idea of distributing income from oil among the people rather than it accruing to the government's budget.

Rafsanjani's plot was to somehow extend the election to the run-off stage, where Mousavi was expected to garner the "anti-Ahmedinejad" votes. The estimation was that at the most Ahmedinejad would poll in the first round 10 to 12 million votes out of the 28 to 30 million who might actually vote (out of a total electorate of 46.2 million) and, therefore, if only the election extended to the run-off, Mousavi would be the net beneficiary as the votes polled by Rezai and Karrubi were essentially "anti-Ahmadinejad" votes.

The regime was already well into the election campaign when it realized that behind the clamor for a change of leadership in the presidency, Rafsanjani's challenge was in actuality aimed at Khamenei's leadership and that the election was a proxy war. The roots of the Rafsanjani-Khamenei rift go back to the late 1980s when Khamenei assumed the leadership in 1989.

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Iran's Khatami supports peaceful protest

TEHRAN, June 15 (Reuters) - Reformist former president Mohammad Khatami criticised Iranian authorities on Monday for denying permission for a rally in Tehran and said the country's disputed election last week had dented public trust.

Khatami said supporters of defeated election candidate Mirhossein Mousavi had a right to peaceful protest, and said he would have joined them if the Interior Ministry had given permission for their planned rally to take place.

"I was determined to take part in today's peaceful demonstration and speak to you and express my practical protest to the unkindness done to the people and the revolution," Khatami said in a faxed statement.

Despite the ban on a rally "you and we will nevertheless continue our movement in this course and would expect that the clear demands of Mr Mousavi, which is the demand of all of us, will be heeded," he said.

Mousavi has appealed the Iran's watchdog Guardian Council to annul the result.

Khatami, who served as president from 1997-2005, remains popular in Iran and publicly backed Mousavi's election bid. Mousavi was soundly defeated by hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Friday's election, but has rejected the result as a "dangerous charade".

"What took place in the course of the recent presidential elections produced a blemish in the public trust, and led to ... natural and emotional reactions," Khatami said.

"... Your cheerful and joyous presence through peaceful means, which you have observed, is your right," he said, urging Mousavi supporters to ensure their protests were legal and remained calm.

..
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abc.net.au - Tens of thousands of Iranians have defied a government ban to join a mass opposition rally in protest of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed election win.

Shouting "Allah Akbar" (God is great), the protesters marched towards Tehran's Revolution Square, where defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was expected to address them and call for calm after two days of violent unrest in the capital.

But they have been confronted by supporters of Mr Ahmadinejad riding motorcycles and armed with sticks.

Reuters - Tens of thousands of supporters of defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi gathered for a rally in downtown Tehran on Monday, defying an Interior Ministry ban, a Reuters witness said.

"The street is fully packed," the witness said, adding the crowd was waiting for Mousavi and other pro-reform leaders who back his call for the annulment of the official result of Friday's election, which showed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won.

Wearing Mousavi's green campaign colors and photographs of him, they chanted: "Mousavi take back our votes."

Several kilometers of a central Tehran thoroughfare were packed with people taking part in the rally, the witness said.

"Where are the 63 percent who voted for Ahmadinejad?" they chanted, referring to his official election tally.

"If Ahmadinejad remains president we will protest every day," they shouted. "We fight, we die, we will not accept this vote rigging," was another chant in the crowd.

As a police helicopter flew overhead, the crowd booed.

..... Western experts now agree that even during the tenure of moderate president Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), the nuclear program continued to advance. And in any case, the person who really decides on the nuclear issue is not the president but the spiritual leader. One of the president's advisers even made it clear recently, in an interview with Reuters, that the spiritual leader will continue to shape his country's nuclear policy, regardless of the election results.

Ahmadinejad, with his Holocaust denial and his long series of provocations, drew most of the attention, but apparently had less influence on the nuclear program. There are even senior members of the Israeli defense establishment who share the public stance of former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, who claimed that the Iranian president's behavior, perceived in the West as quasi-lunatic, advanced Israel's security interests.
More

_{Tolerating prostitution is tolerating abuse and torture of women and children.}

Parisa Hafezi | Tehran | June 16

Reuters - Iranian demonstrators called for more mass protests on Tuesday, a day after hardline Islamic militiamen killed a man during a march by tens of thousands against a presidential election they say was rigged.

The Iranian capital has already seen three days of the biggest and most violent anti-government protests since the 1979 Islamic revolution after hardline incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared winner of last Friday's vote.

"Tomorrow at 5 p.m. (1230 GMT) at Vali-ye Asr Square," some of the crowd chanted at Monday's march, referring to a major road junction in the sprawling city of some 12 million.

Further protests, especially if they are maintained on the same scale, would be a direct challenge to authorities who have kept a tight grip on dissent since the overthrow of the U.S.-backed shah after months of demonstrations 30 years ago.

snip

Demonstrators filled a broad avenue in central Tehran for several kilometres (miles) on Monday, chanting "We fight, we die, we will not accept this vote rigging", in support of Mirhossein Mousavi, the defeated moderate candidate.

[emphasis added]

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“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

Ann Johnson and Brian Murphy | Tehran | June 15

AP - In a massive outpouring reminiscent of the Islamic Revolution three decades ago, hundreds of thousands of Iranians streamed through the capital Monday, and the fist-waving protesters denounced President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim to victory in a disputed election.

Standing on a roof, gunmen opened fire on a group of protesters who had tried to storm a pro-government militia's compound. One man was killed and several others were wounded in the worst violence since the disputed election Friday.

Angry men showed their bloody palms after cradling the dead and wounded who had been part of a crowd that stretched more than five miles (nearly 10 kilometers) supporting reform leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

The huge rally — and smaller protests around the country — reinforced what has become increasingly clear since the election: the opposition forces rallying behind Mousavi show no signs of backing down. Their resolve appears to have pushed Iran's Islamic establishment into attempts to cool the tensions after days of unrest.

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“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

Posted at 21:19 by HTML Mencken

War is the goal of the neocon collective; more subhuman than subhuman is their motto. Always has been, always will be. Neocons have to have an external enemy, legitimate or manufactured: it gives them political power and gives them — for lack of a better phrase — personal fulfillment. War is the force that gives meaning to their lives, makes them feel part of something important. Some people collect stamps, others like to attend church; neocons fap to destruction wrought by America or Israel on “eeevildoers,” preferably dusky and Muslim.

Everyone decent reacts to the flood of news out of Iran with despair at the chaos, sympathy for the protesters, and anger toward the regime. So far, the American government has reacted cautiously and correctly. (The same, alas, cannot be said of the EU.) Everyone decent wants a legitimate, democratic Iran reformed indigenously. Everyone, that is, but the neocons, who take to geopolitical tragedy the same way that Friedmanite crapitalists take to natural disasters and buzzards take to fresh roadkill. (This tendency, by the way, explains why Richard Cheney would desire another 9/11.) Ahmadinejad’s Rove-eque campaign and Bush-esque “victory” is a perfect tragedy by which they hope to exacerbate the already considerable tensions between Iran on one side and Israel and America on the other.

Neocons want, in the old commie phrase, to heighten the contradictions. Daniel “Crack” Pipes openly roots for Ahmadinejad:

more with lotsa links

AP - An opposition activist spreads word of an upcoming protest in the streets of Tehran. Another posts pictures of clashes between demonstrators and police.
As Iran's government cracks down on traditional media after the country's disputed presidential election, tech-savvy Iranians have turned to the microblogging site Twitter.
Its use to organize and send pictures and messages to the outside world — in real time as events unfolded — was a powerful example of how such tools can overcome government attempts at censorship.
"When I'm not connected to Twitter it means that I'm disconnected from the world because the state TV doesn't report many things!" wrote one Twitter user who identifies himself as "hamednz" and communicated with The Associated Press through e-mail. His profile says he lives in Rasht, a city to the north of Tehran near the Caspian Sea.
Like all the Twitter users in Iran who agreed to be interviewed for this story, hamednz did not want his identity revealed for fear of retribution from government authorities.
In Iran, as in many still-developing countries, Internet usage is mostly still a phenomenon of the affluent, the youth and city-dwellers — meaning Twitter and other networks are used mostly by the young and liberal — and may overemphasize their numbers while ignoring more-conservative political sentiments among the non-connected.
Supporters of reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi are more likely to use Twitter and Facebook. Poorer, less-educated voters have flocked to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

{SNIP- article continues with interesting observations}
But some experts warn of overestimating Twitter's role. Censorship adds another layer of technology that people have to overcome.
For people following events in Iran from abroad on Twitter, it's easy to think that everyone is an outraged Mousavi supporter.
"If you follow Twitter you will think that Tehran is going through another .... revolution," said Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian blogger and activist who often uses Twitter. "And that's not the case."

BBc
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/8102400.stm

Iran's powerful Guardian Council says it is ready to recount disputed votes in Friday's presidential poll.

Moderate candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has contested President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election, alleging widespread fraud.

The BBC's Jon Leyne in Tehran says the council's announcement is a complete U-turn. The official results sparked three days of huge protests.

Iranian radio says seven people were killed during demonstrations on Monday.

The Guardian Council said the votes would be recounted in areas contested by the losing candidates.

Our correspondent says this could effectively allow the defeated candidates to challenge all the votes.

New demonstrations have been called by supporters of both President Ahmadinejad and Mr Mousavi and are due to take place in Vali Asr Square in central Tehran.

Monday's protest involved hundreds of thousands of people and was one of the largest since the Iranian revolution 30 years ago.

The radio report said the attack occurred at the end of the "illegal" rally as people were heading home "peacefully".

"Several thugs wanted to attack a military post and vandalise public property in the vicinity of Azadi Square," the radio said referring to the site of the protest.

"Unfortunately seven people were killed and several others wounded in the incident."

Our correspondent says that in light of what he saw of the vast and largely peaceful protests this seems an unlikely version of events.

Dozens of opposition activists have been arrested since the protests began.

A number of senior reformist politicians, including former Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi and Mousavi ally Saeed Hajarian, were detained overnight, reports said.

Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty | June 15

WaPo - The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, preelection polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.

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[Comment: Highly interesting additional datapoint - I wouldn't accept the results without significant qualifications (look through the toplines in the results pdf to see what I mean), but highly interesting. ~ JPD]

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass