It is helpful to know how politics in Iran work:
Also it's a mistake to assume that Mousavi really did win. However, how can you trust a government that shoots it's own people.
It is a lot more complicated there than in the states. All power ultimately lies with the clerics and the Supreme Leader.
It's kind of unreal watching this from afar a few days before the election, during the election, and now the aftermath/uprising/revolution of the election. There are a few users doing status updates many times per hour giving a play by play account of what's going on inside Iran. This is all being done while circumventing government firewalls by the use of proxies which they get from americans/brits that are sent to them through direct message through twitter.
Of course twitter may not be as reliable as we would like but you come to trust a few users as they back up what they said with picture and video. This is better (not necessarily more accurate) than more credible news sources like CNN. (Credible being a loose term--do we really need to hear what Letterman said about Palin on CNN/MSNBC/FOX NEWS?)
http://twitter.com/persiankiwi and http://twitter.com/StopAhmadi have been the most accurate and consistent sources of information for me when it comes to twitter and the real time events. They have been posting almost non stop for the past 3 days. It is almost like a soap opera/ movie as events unfold. They post of shootings, fires, riots, friends being lost, upcoming protest events, where tanks are, and help to find proxies.
It's also important to note there are two kinds of police in Iran, you have the normal police, like what we have here, and they have respected the protesters and have not incited violence. But you also have the riot police which are called the Basij which to quote wikipedia
"Currently Basij serve as an auxiliary force engaged in activities such as law enforcement, emergency management, the providing of social service, organizing of public religious ceremonies, and more controversially morals policing and the suppresson of dissident gatherings.[3] They have a local organization in almost every city in Iran.[4]"
and
"GlobalSecurity.org reports that the Basij appear "to be undergoing something of a revival under the administration of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad."
The basij are the cause of the violence in Iran, they are answerable only to the Supreme Leader.
My mind is getting overwhelmed with that to share. Take a look at these pictures and videos:
The Basij firing on people in the crowd
(click to expand)
The crowd of people was 5 miles long, French press estimated it at 2 million people.
They busted in Iran and hauled off upwards of a 100 people. Those people are missing. When they came in they smashed computers and took flash drives, memory sticks, cameras and smashed computers to stop the spread information.
more pictures
I'm not one to sit around and circle jerk twitter, but with out them a lot of the information we are getting wouldn't be able to get out of Iran. Tonight we learned that twitter was going to be going through routine maintenance at 9:45 PST for 90 minutes. This is during the middle of the day in Iran! Wouldn't the Iranian Goverment love for them to be shut off from the outside world during this time. With enough people calling/tweeting/emailing twitter and their hosting provider they listened to us and postponed the maintenance.
It is interesting to me that before this weekend the only talk of Iran has been about it's nuclear programs or it's involvement in Iraq. I'm happy to see that it has switched to people wanting their freedom back. 80% of the people in Iran are under the age of 30. They are just like you and I.
Please stay informed:
The Atlantic with Andrew Sullivan is live-blogging
Huffingtonpost with Nico Pitney is live-blogging also Read More
