50 Days In Iran

People will be free. 

300 protesters have been killed
by Iranian security forces

Iranians defy crackdown with fresh protests, as president dismisses US vow to ‘free Iran’

Ebrahim Raisi declares streets ‘safe and sound’ while shopkeepers strike and student demonstrations sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death reach 50th day

Iranian students protested and shopkeepers went on strike despite a widening crackdown, according to reports on social media, as demonstrations that flared over Mahsa Amini’s death continued for a 50th day.

Saturday’s protests came as President Ebrahim Raisi said Iran’s cities were “safe and sound” after earlier dismissing a pledge from the US president, Joe Biden, to “free Iran”.

The Islamic Republic has been gripped by protests that erupted when Amini died in custody after her arrest for an alleged breach of the country’s dress code for women.

As the working week got under way, security forces adopted new measures to halt protests at universities in Tehran, searching students and forcing them to remove face masks, activists said.

But demonstrators were heard chanting “I am a free woman, you are the pervert” at Islamic Azad University of Mashhad, in north-eastern Iran, in a video published by BBC Persian.

“A student dies, but doesn’t accept humiliation,” sang students at Gilan University in the northern city of Rasht, in footage posted online by an activist.

In the north-western city of Qazvin, dozens chanted similar slogans at a mourning ceremony 40 days after the death of demonstrator Javad Heydari – a custom that has fuelled further protest flashpoints.

The Norway-based Hengaw rights group said people were observing a “widespread strike” in Amini’s home town of Saqez, in Kurdistan province, where shops were shuttered.

A video aired later by Manoto, a television channel based abroad and banned in Iran, appeared to show students locked inside Islamic Azad University in north Tehran.

The continuing unrest came as Iran’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard on Saturday launched a new satellite-carrying rocket, state TV reported.

Iranian state TV said the Guard successfully launched the solid-fuelled rocket it called a Ghaem-100 satellite carrier and aired dramatic footage of the rocket blasting off from a desert launch pad into a cloudy sky. The report did not reveal the location, which resembled Iran’s north-eastern Shahroud Desert.

The state-run IRNA news agency reported that the carrier would be able to put a satellite weighing 80kg into orbit about 500km from Earth.

The US state department called the launch “unhelpful and destabilising”. Washington fears the same long-range ballistic technology used to put satellites into orbit could also be used to launch nuclear warheads. Tehran has regularly denied having any such intention.

Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights said on Saturday that at least 186 people had been killed in the crackdown on protests, a rise of 10 from Wednesday.

It said another 118 people had lost their lives in separate protests since 30 September in Sistan-Baluchistan, a mainly Sunni Muslim province in the south-east, on the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

An official in Kerman province admitted the authorities were having trouble quelling the protests that erupted after Amini’s death on 16 September.

“The restrictions on the internet, the arrest of the leaders of the riots and the presence of the state in the streets always eliminated sedition, but this type of sedition and its audience are different,” Rahman Jalali, political and security deputy for the province, was quoted by ISNA news agency as saying.

Iran has sought to blame its arch-enemy the US for the protests, with Raisi on Saturday saying Washington had failed in its attempt to repeat the 2011 Arab uprisings in the Islamic Republic, Iranian media reported.

Raisi earlier dismissed Biden’s pledge to “free Iran”, retorting that Iran had already been freed by the overthrow of the western-backed shah in 1979.

“Our young men and young women are determined and we will never allow you to carry out your satanic desires,” he told a gathering commemorating the November 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran by radical students.

Biden had said on Friday while campaigning in US midterm elections: “Don’t worry, we’re gonna free Iran. They’re gonna free themselves pretty soon.”

US national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, played down Biden’s remarks, saying: “The president was expressing our solidarity with the protesters as he’s been doing, quite frankly, from the very outset.”

On Friday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform, Binance, acknowledged funds belonging to or intended for Iranians had flowed through its service and may have run afoul of US sanctions.

That's Pretty Fucked up Right There

"The Morality Police" - is there any construct of government more ridiculous than "Morality Police"?

Take a hard look at what the GOP has been peddling the last 40 years, and then tell me there's a big difference between what they want to do, and what the god-knobbers in Iran are doing right now.

(pay wall)

‘Bloody Friday’: Witnesses describe the deadliest crackdown in Iran protests

The shooting started in Zahedan before Friday prayers had ended.

Thousands of worshipers had gathered on Sept. 30 in the Great Mosalla of Zahedan, a large open-air space in the southeastern Iranian city, when a handful of young men broke away and began chanting slogans at a nearby police station. One man, 28, said his 18-year-old brother was among them. He spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The young man followed his brother, pushing his way through the crowd, and stumbled on a shocking scene: Police and plainclothes security agents were firing at the protesters from the rooftop of the police station and other buildings. Security forces also began firing into the Mosalla, where people were still praying.

“They were shooting a lot, and this way and that way, I saw people get shot and fall,” the young man said in a telephone interview from Zahedan. “Many people were shot, and they were crawling on the ground toward buses or other cars to hide behind them. I just wanted to find my brother and get out.”

What happened that day — already known in Iran as “Bloody Friday” — is by far the deadliest government crackdown against protesters since demonstrations began sweeping the country nearly a month ago. Internet service has been cut or severely disrupted in the region over the past two weeks, along with the cellular network, making it difficult to piece together how the violence unfolded. The Post interviewed two witnesses to the Sept. 30 crackdown, including the young man, who described security forces using deadly and indiscriminate force against peaceful demonstrators.

The Post could not independently confirm their accounts, but their stories were corroborated by local activists and lined up with the findings of rights groups.

The Friday protest in Zahedan had been announced on social media earlier that week, in solidarity with the uprising that has gripped the nation since the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in the custody of the “morality police” on Sept. 16. But the protesters, many of them ethnic Baluch — a minority group that lives mostly in southeast Iran and across the border in Pakistan — had local motivations as well.

They were infuriated by reports that a 15-year-old girl had been raped in police custody in the city of Chabahar in early September. This Baluch girl was their Amini, another young woman who they believed had been abused by state security forces. The crowd that day was chanting “Death to the dictator” and “The rapist must be punished” when security forces opened fire.

The 28-year-old man frantically dialed his brother’s phone and eventually found him behind a white Peugeot. They ducked down and made their way out of the area, positioning themselves between a line of cars and a border wall of the Mosalla. The brothers had run only a short distance when they saw a mutual friend, whom they beckoned to escape with them. Then gunshots rang out again.

“[Our friend] was shot twice in the back, only two or three meters away from me,” the young man said in an exhausted voice. “One of the bullets hit near his heart. He was martyred right there.”

“From the evidence we’ve gathered, what happened at Mosalla was a massacre,” said Mansoureh Mills, an Iran researcher at Amnesty International, which has counted at least 66 people killed that afternoon. Other human rights groups put the death toll even higher.

“The killing of children and people who were praying … I can’t see how it could be called anything else,” Mills said.

The Iranian government ramped up its use of force against protesters after an order issued by the country’s highest military body on Sept. 21 to “severely confront troublemakers and anti-revolutionaries,” according to a leaked document obtained by Amnesty and reviewed by The Post.

The security forces appear to be enforcing this broad order with an even heavier hand in ethnic-minority areas such as Baluchistan, as well as Kurdistan in western Iran, where Amini was from and where the protests started.

The Baluch, like the Kurds, have long been neglected by the Iranian government. The area where most of them live, Sistan and Baluchistan province, is among the poorest in the country. The Baluch and the Kurds are also predominantly Sunni communities in a country ruled by a theocratic Shiite government.

The state’s response in these areas “has been particularly brutal,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group. He warned that the government crackdown “was further exacerbating the risk of continued turmoil.”

After the initial shooting around the police station, security forces also fired on crowds gathered around the Makki Mosque, a short distance from the Mosalla. Bullets riddled the front of the mosque and tear-gas canisters were fired into the prayer space, activists said, including the women’s section, where mothers were sheltering with their children.

By this time, the young man and his brother had gathered a group of protesters to carry their friend’s body to the Makki Mosque. A helicopter circled overhead, the young man told The Post, and gunmen inside periodically fired into the crowd. They were “shooting from above, and we had to go inside the mosque,” the man recalled.

Many of the dead and wounded had been taken into the mosque by midafternoon; protesters threw rocks at security forces to keep them away, witnesses said. So many people were wounded that there was a shortage of blood at local hospitals, activists reported.

A 60-year-old man who lives in the Shirabad neighborhood in north Zahedan received news that his 25-year-old son had been fatally shot, and that his body was at the mosque. The man made his way there with great difficulty, asking others to help carry his son’s body home.

“When we wanted to take my son’s body out, two people were shot in front of me right at the door of the Makki Mosque. One was shot in the head and the other was shot in the chest,” the father said in a telephone interview from Zahedan, sharing his story on the condition of anonymity. “We waited until sunset before we could leave.”

State media announced that three members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were also killed that day. Among them was Col. Hamid Reza Hashemi, a deputy intelligence commander for the Guard Corps in Sistan and Baluchistan, according to the semiofficial Tasnim News Agency.

The government has sought to blame the violence on Jaish al-Adl, a local militant group, but the group has denied any role in the protests, and the activists and witnesses interviewed by The Post say they did not see any armed protesters in the crowd. In a statement the day after the attacks, the commander of the Guard Corps, Gen. Hossein Salami, vowed revenge for the security personnel who had been killed.

“Salami’s statement is a threat against the people,” said Abdollah Aref, director of the Baluch Activists Campaign, an advocacy group based in Britain. “What they’re saying is if you come out into the street, then we’ll shoot you and kill you.”

The young man and his brother made it home safely that Friday, but violence followed them. As protests continued in their neighborhood over the next several days, security forces responded with deadly force.

“They would wear local Baluchi clothes so they wouldn’t be recognized and people wouldn’t think they’re linked to the government,” the man said. “They would come in civilian cars and civilian clothes, shoot people, and leave.” 

Quick Check

I've been wondering why nobody's squawking about the effects the Iran Deal might have on oil prices - 

Oil prices fell further Thursday a day after U.S. benchmark crude tumbled below $50 a barrel for the first time since April as bloated U.S. inventories and the prospect of increased Iranian crude shipments fueled concerns about swelling supplies even as demand is waning.

"We've had a lot of supply," says Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis for the Oil Price Information Service. "Now the worry is that demand is going lower."

West Texas crude for September delivery fell 67 cents, or 1.4%, to $48.53 a barrel after dropping 2.3% on Wednesday. That's down about 20% from a recent peak of $61.01 in late June.

The Obama administration's proposed nuclear deal with Iran would lift sanctions and could allow that country to ship significantly more oil, adding to a recent surge in supplies from Saudi Arabia and Iraq. A Senate hearing on the agreement is scheduled for Thursday.

- and there it is.

(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

Scott Walker's been the most adamant about how the deal's so bad he's trying to figure out how to start bombing Iran the day after he's elected.  I guess maybe all that Koch money really is speaking pretty loudly.  Who doesn't see that BTW?

So now the notion pops into my feverish little noggin - Obama (and Kerry - full props for a guy I never tho't was the real thing, but anyway) Obama more or less neutralizes Iran basically by bringing them over to the good guys' side and getting them to promise they'll play nice for now; he precludes (at least for a while) that we'll get suckered into another clusterfuck war in western Asia, which makes it harder for War Incorporated to make money; and he puts the mechanism into motion that should drive Big Oil's profits down; which makes it a little less profitable for Wall Street; etc etc etc.

It just seems like it all adds up to one big old-fashioned bitchslap for an extraordinarily shitty system of legalized bribery that's had a stranglehold on our little experiment in self-government and produced a dumb-n-numb electorate that keeps sending Coin-Operated Politicians back to the trough at the expense of the people who keep saying they're fed up with sending Coin-Operated Politicians back to the trough...

Or maybe it's just a one-off stop-gap thing, and Obama's not the fucking genius I'd like to think he might actually be.

A guy can dream tho'

And just remember - ya heard it here first, muhthuhfuckuhs.

Iran's Unclear Ambitions

From The Agonist today:

Over at Nuclear Diner, veteran Los Alamos nuclear engineer Susan Voss analyzes the amount of 20% enriched uranium Iran has made to date and concludes "The 98 kgs is more than needed for one core for TRR but a reasonable amount if the Iranians are planning on producing a batch of fuel for the TRR rather than producing it every 5-6 years when it is needed." It's exactly on par with the batch of three full fuel cores Argentina supplied Iran in 1992 which is estimated to run out this year.

So, it's probable that all the talk about this material being for bomb production is just warmongering hype.

Bonus: Gareth Porter talks to former top Iranian nuclear negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who tells Porter that France and Germany were prepared in spring 2005 to negotiate on an Iranian proposal to convert all of its enriched uranium to fuel rods, making it impossible to use it for nuclear weapons, but Britain vetoed the deal at the insistence of the United States.

That last bit seems pretty important. I wonder why The US would want to make it nearly impossible for the French and the Germans to prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb(?)  Hmmm.

Here We Go Again - Maybe

Are we ginning up another war here?  I think prob'ly not.  This looks a lot like the kind of theater that gets put on when you're trying to work some of the levers internal to some other country.

(hat tip = Democratic Underground)



Of course, you can always count on Droopy Dog Lieberman to pretend Congress has anything at all to do with setting Foreign Policy; and the Press Poodles on DumFux News will run with it, especially when they can bring on a right-wing jughead to talk shit about Obama.

But this actually brings to mind a different point for me.  If you look at Americans who're likely to support the Iran-Must-Not-Go-Nuclear approach, I'll bet ass-wipes to Benjamins that demographic is gonna match up almost perfectly with people who say everybody's a lot safer when everybody owns a gun.  When a neighboring country owns nukes and ballistic missiles, how is that fundamentally different from your next-door neighbor owning shotguns and assault rifles?

Sully Wises Up

One thing I really like about Andrew Sullivan is that he allows himself to learn, then he adjusts his view according to the new information.

Here's his post from today, citing Juan Cole's assessment of Iran's nuclear capabilities and apparent strategy.

BTW: You can get to Cole's blog here.  It can be dense and difficult, but the guy knows his shit.