Iran Problems Not Over

The CBC report says that Iranian opposition will continue to challenge election results: Mousavi. The ABC writes Eyewitness: Massacre in Baharestan Square.

The Iranian authorities have come down so hard and cut off so many avenues of reporting that it is hard to judge the reliability of information coming out of Iran, or to determine if it is coming from actual witnesses, or from people with an agenda.

In the early days there were still enough journalists on the ground to evaluate the raw data based on comparison to the professional reporting. Lately you can’t be sure if some of the reports aren’t agitprop designed to inflame the situation.

The election was a sham. I have been voting for forty years, so I have a really good feel for how long elections like Iran’s take, and they announced the results too quickly. They don’t have the requisite number of elections to find the “magic precincts” that will predict an election with minimum returns. They don’t have exit polling to give them an idea of what happened. They waited a couple of hours and announced a result – just not possible.

Now, there is no good way of weighing the value of reports. Statements are appearing on web sites, but the web sites could be hacked. Tweets are coming from all over, but you can’t verify that the person using that ID yesterday is the same person using it today. We just don’t know.

Before the Hedgemony I would have had the feeling that at least the government would have a good idea what was going on based on technically resources and satellite data, but all of that has been so politicized that I don’t think it can be trusted anymore. At this point I don’t think that anyone, even the people in charge in Iran, really know what is happening.