Ahmadinejad wins re-election

Merko said:
Basically, there are two ways to steal an election. You can do it openly, or you can try to conceal it. If you try to conceal it, why not try to conceal it well?
Click to expand...

I haven't followed this election closely. The last time I followed a fraudulent election closely was in the early '80s when Ferdinand Marcos (Phillipines) tried to claim an election victory over Corazon Aquino. He tried to conceal it, but he didn't do it well. Why not? Because there was no way to do it well. Everyone knew Aquino would win a fair election, and any claim to the contrary was laughable.

There's no point in "doing it well". The real message is that the government is going to tell people what the answer is, and use fear and intimidation to enforce the result. Being blatant about it might even be useful. Perhaps by being absolutely shameless in your fraud, you will quickly be able to identify your opponents who jump all over it. Then, you can beat them into submission publicly, and dare anyone to be the next one to try to complain.

Besides, dictators tend to think they can declare what the truth is. They're an arrogant bunch.

As I said, I don't know much about this election, but the comments from various radio sources today, and in this thread, suggest that the Iranian government is simply lying about the result. Is there any source outside of the Iranian government that is calling these election results credible?
 
Last edited:
The most important battle in the war against islamic extremism right now isn't being fought by Americans and British in Iraq, Canadians in Afghanistan or Pakistanis in Swat Valley, it's being fought by Iranians in the streets of Tehran.

And I fear our side may lose.
 
Sword_Of_Truth said:
The most important battle in the war against islamic extremism right now isn't being fought by Americans and British in Iraq, Canadians in Afghanistan or Pakistanis in Swat Valley, it's being fought by Iranians in the streets of Tehran.
Click to expand...
You left a couple of nationalities out there... why?

Anyway, my question is this: should this battle be left to the "Iranians in the streets"? Or would rigged elections be a convenient excuse for an attack on Iran "to bring democracy"?
Should we just wait and see what the inquiry ordered by Khamenei finds (where it is already beginning to be pretty clear what it ought to find, if it were aiming for the truth?)
 
The recent EP ballot in denmark was done with pen and paper. I was a volunteer at a locat voting site.

At the end of the day we piled the votes on a table and started seperating them into piles by party. Then we counted each pile, the final tally fit the number of voters cards and x´s in the voter list.

The civil servant in charge of the election site then phoned in the result.
Next morning the votes were counted at city hall and distributed by candidate.

No voting site have an exact mach to the national result, byt there are alot of vitnesses who have a close guess.

The simplest way of faking it would be to ignore the final tally, and declare the decired result.
That means leaving scared witnesses all over the place.
I guess they will start popping up soon.

I wonder why Sceptic and others have not taken the line that students are not all of Iran and their demonstrations have gotten the reactionaries off the couch to set things strait. You cannot have both a dictatorship faking the election and a population of muslim reactionaries.
 
brumsen said:
You left a couple of nationalities out there... why?

Anyway, my question is this: should this battle be left to the "Iranians in the streets"? Or would rigged elections be a convenient excuse for an attack on Iran "to bring democracy"?
Click to expand...

That's what happened in Panama when Noriega stole the election. However, Iran is not Panama. Iran is not even Iraq. An attack on Iran would be a daunting task, and would bring widespread condemnation from the whole world.
 
brumsen said:
Anyway, my question is this: should this battle be left to the "Iranians in the streets"? Or would rigged elections be a convenient excuse for an attack on Iran "to bring democracy"?
Should we just wait and see what the inquiry ordered by Khamenei finds (where it is already beginning to be pretty clear what it ought to find, if it were aiming for the truth?)
Click to expand...

Yes. I believe that if outside powers were to intervene, it would be disastrous. The regime is already blaming the discontent on the US and Western media. If we want the uprising to have any legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranians, it has to be an internal affair.
 
updated 5 minutes ago
Huge protest in Iran; council probes vote

Hundreds of thousands of people jammed the streets of Tehran in support of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi. Moussavi appeared at the demonstration to address what CNN's Christiane Amanpour said was a largely peaceful crowd. Later, there were reports of a shooting. full story

Click to expand...


Any live coverage about this on CNN/US right now?
 
Cleon said:
Quite a bit, as I linked to earlier.
Click to expand...


After finding and listening to an audio-live-stream, the scheduled Situation Room is running. But I keep listening... Thanks, Cleon. :)
 
This is going to turn into another Tiananmen Square tomorrow.

There is no way the clerics are going to surrender power.
 
Alferd_Packer said:
This is going to turn into another Tiananmen Square tomorrow.

There is no way the clerics are going to surrender power.
Click to expand...

I´m afraid you are right.
It is not just a dictatorship, it is a godgiven one, so opposition got it comming for their blasphemi.
 
ravdin said:
Yes. I believe that if outside powers were to intervene, it would be disastrous. The regime is already blaming the discontent on the US and Western media. If we want the uprising to have any legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranians, it has to be an internal affair.
Click to expand...

Absolutely.
 
Alferd_Packer said:
This is going to turn into another Tiananmen Square tomorrow.
Click to expand...

Hopefully not. The situations aren't really analogous.

There is no way the clerics are going to surrender power.
Click to expand...

Unlikely. However, they're not going to surrender it to the president and the Revolutionary Guard. If this fix was arranged by them (the "coup d'etat" scenario) and not by the Supreme Council they'll have to be put in their place. The simplest way to do that is to annul the election.
 
Evidence of vote rigging.

MARK COLVIN: In a sense the problem is not that Ahmadinejad lost the election; the problem is that we will never know whether he did because he just didn't want to take the risk of having a proper count. There's very strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that now isn't there.

BEN KNIGHT: What people are saying is that it's the consistency of the two to one margin that has caused; well, scepticism probably seems too weak a word; but people are saying we just saw millions of votes coming in, in a matter of minutes, we saw the information ministry delivering these results before the polls had even officially closed. And if you have…

MARK COLVIN: And they had said beforehand that it would probably be at least 24 hours before the votes really started coming through.

BEN KNIGHT: At least. We were expecting a result on Sunday morning. And there you had one simply just, you know, hours, just a couple of hours after dark.

People have been looking at the results area by area and another aspect that's caused some scepticism is that if you have a look at the home town results of the other three candidates, you still get basically the same margin; two-to-one Ahmadinejad to Mousavi and the other two candidates in single figures.

Now if you look at say Mehdi Karroubi, who was one of the reformist candidates; in his home town, the margin is exactly the same. People are sceptical about that because of the strong family bonds and tribal bonds in that area. It's not consistent.

MARK COLVIN: And what's more he has a party with 400,000 members and they say that his vote was only 320,000.

BEN KNIGHT: But as you say, we'll never know. Iran does not allow election monitors in. One of the complaints that was made by the Mousavi campaign was that there scrutineers were barred from they said at least 250 polling places.

But I think they know and I think everybody else knows that calling for an investigation is useless and this I think, is why you are seeing this direct action on the streets. People here know that it's the only way that they are going to make themselves heard.
Click to expand...

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2598847.htm
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom