you linked to from the self-professed Ahmadinejad supporter Afrasiabi.
You link to Mousavi supporters.
a pretty unfair dig at "Irak" which, for all its faults as presently constituted, is undoubtedly at home to a far more democratic govt than Iran
The de fact government of Irak is the US, notelected by Irak's population.
but, be that as it may, here's a few counter-claims (some of which i have linked to before on this thread, in fact, or linked to similar sorts of pieces from some of the same commentators). as per with your gracious caveats re *if/but/maybe* etc, i post all these in the same agnostic spirit.
All but one of these sources are old (from June), written before the official Mousavi complaint, so they are irrelevant. Why? Because my post above was explicitly about the lack of convincing arguments for fraud two months after the election, and in particular about the official Mousavi case for fraud: surely Mousavi's complaint would contain just about anything that he would find convincing as a proof for fraud.
If it's not in Mousavi's complaint, then it seems safe to say that we can forget about it. Moreover, they are based on sources financed by the empire (e.g. the Christan Science Monitor quotes the Chatham House study -- for those who don't know, Chatham House is a branch of the UK government currently headed by
DeAnne Julius a former CIA and oil-industry worker). Why am I not surprised about your sources.
In contrast, the FP piece by BY Mehdi Khalaji and Robert Pastor is from August. Good start! Unfortunatly that's about the only positive thing I can say about it. Let me add a bit of context:
Mehdi Khalajiworks for and is paid by the neoconservative
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a branch of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Members of the WINEP include G W Bush and
Richard Perle.
Some source!
I'm not sure why I should be bothered to dissect propaganda material, but here we go.
Khalaji and Pastor do not say what sources their piece is based on, in particular they don't discuss if it's based on Mousavi's official complaint. That's a bad sign, but I'm generous and assume that it is. So let's look at it in detail. What are the points the authors put forward in defense of their claim that Ahmadi-Nejad "stole" the elections? There are 5 (written in bold):
- While some polling stations were still open, the Interior Ministry declared Ahmadinejad the winner by a landslide.
Afrasiabi's reply: by all indications Mr. Mousavi, [...] improperly declared himself the "definite winner" exactly one hour after the voting had stopped.
- Only half of Mousavi's observers were permitted to observe polling stations in the capital city of Tehran; they had even less access in the rest of the country.
Afrasiabi's reply: Mousavi alone had more than forty thousand representatives at nearly ninety percent of the voting centers and, yet, his complaint to the oversight Guardian Council refers only to the few hundreds who were not allowed to monitor the balloting, without bothering to mention that nearly all his eyes and ears who monitored the process failed to report and document any major irregularities. According to the election officials, Mousavi had lodged complaints about merely 89 centers, indeed a minuscule number compared to more than forty-five thousand such centers throughout Iran.
- None of the observers were permitted to see whether the ballot boxes were empty when the vote began. Nor were they permitted to accompany the mobile ballot boxes, which collected nearly one-third of the votes. And no Mousavi or impartial observers accompanied the ballot boxes from local wards to the provincial committees and finally to Tehran for the count.
This is not dealt with by Afrasiabi, so here's my (3BNP) reply: This is the 'Vote Stuffing' argument. I see two problems with it: First, creating and faking more than 10 Megavotes is a substantial process, involving a substantial number of people (hundreds?) for a substantial number of times. The US and exil Iranians would dearly love to present such a person to the world media, and richly reward him/her. So there would be a major incentive to defect. Why has nobody come forward? Second, what about the public recounts in the presence of Mousavi observers (please correct me if I'm wrong)? Why did they not turn up discrepancies between the number of votes cast at a given polling station and number of votes in the box? To be sure, one can think of reasons how this (second point) could happen, e.g. recounts were held only where no forgery took place, polling stations don't keep track of who voted, or falsified that track record too.
- Before the election, the reformists' Committee for Safeguarding the Votes expressed concern that 54 million ballots were printed -- millions more than for past elections and 8 million more than the number of eligible voters. Moreover, some ballots did not have serial numbers. About 40 million people voted, but no one accounted for the other 14 million ballots.
3BNP's reply: None of this is necessarily indicative of fraud. Since Iranians can vote wherever they want with proper identification, it is surely sensible to have sufficiently many ballot papers, more thank registered voters in the area where a ballot station is located. This has been discussed many times.
- These accusations of fraud are credible. Even the conservative Guardian Council has acknowledged that as many as 3 million votes might have been fraudulent.
Afrasiabi's reply: for sure the 2009 presidential elections was not problem-free and the government conceded the irregularity of excess votes in some 50 towns affecting 3 million votes. But, in some areas where this occurred such as Yazd or Shemiranat, Mousavi actually won, and mostly this phenomenon was attributable to summer travel
affecting Caspian resort towns -- there are no registered voters in Iran, and Iranian voters can vote anywhere with proper identification.
I am not able to judge the accuracy of Afrasiabi's text. In the interest of fairness, let me link to the following HuPo
reply by "Mousavi fan"
Josh Shahryar/. Again, all I can say that the evidence either way is contradictory.
Here's what I believe to have taken place: (1) there was an attempted coup d'etat (A. Evans piece spins a consistent story of why); (2) there was
also irregularties with voting and voting counts (this is I guess the novelty of my position, that I believe in a coup d'etat and in serious problems with the voting process), though how substantial they were I am unable to say at this point; (3) a substantial number of Iranians did vote for Ahmadi-Nejad, possibly more than for Moussavi; (4) there is substantial outside interference with Iranian politics, primarily from the Empire, but also from other players like China and Russia, primarily because of Iran's ressource wealth, strategic location (both geographically and because it is the center of Shiism), it's large (and by regional standards) well educated population; (5) the current regime is illegitimate in the eyes of a substantial number of Iranians and there are substantial powerstruggles going on behind the scenes between the ruling elites, both of which currently cancel each other out and stabilise the existing order, but could in the short or medium term lead to a sudden imposion of the current regime;
Once again: all of what I said above is based on the flimsy evidence that is available to me, in particular on the inability of the Mousavi camp to substantiate their claims of electoral fraud (and I acknowledge that it would be somewhat difficult for them to do so). I will adapt/change/throw away this belief if/when new evidence arrives.
when a lot of the rest of us have been willing to discuss a brutal post-election crackdown from an undemocratic regime,
I'm interested in truth.
I'm not interested in what a mouth piece for the communist international has to say.
