HT Dr. Zin - Regime Change Iran

A must read!

RBT

*****

The transition of Iranian totalitarian theocracy to messianic Islamofascism

Alex Alexiev, Center for Security Policy:

President Ahmadinejad’s recent calls for the annihilation of Israel have provided much needed clarity to a reality the West, rhetoric apart, has often refused to acknowledge let alone do something about. While his genocidal threats against a fellow-member of the United Nations should serve as a wake up call to people of good will anywhere, other less well-known tirades may tell us more about why the fanatics in Tehran feel they can spew hatred with impunity and why the terrorist regime in Iran has become a clear and present danger that could no longer be ignored by civilized nations.

“Europeans are like yapping dogs, kick them once and they run away,” Ahmadinejad recently opined, while simultaneously dismissing the United States as a “superpower made of straw.” Such rants are seldom paid much attention in the Western media, which tends to treat them as unfortunate noise that is best ignored. The “yapping dogs” remark, for instance, was not made public in Europe until four months after it was actually made. This is unfortunate, because such ravings can tell us more than the reams of sober Western punditry generated on the subject of late. They should also make us think through the implications of such views both in terms of the threat this regime poses and what policies could best counter it.

It may be useful to begin with the simple proposition that, looked at from the vantage point of Iran’s Islamist regime, Ahmadinejad’s outbursts may in fact be a rational assessment of actual European and U.S. policies as opposed to their rhetoric vis a vis Tehran. READ MORE

To start with neither Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons nor Ahmadinejad’s threat to wipe out Israel are either new or unprecedented. Iran has been pursuing nuclear capabilities for many years and extremely bellicose tirades against Jews and the West have been a regular staple of the mullahs’ rhetoric since Khomeini. Just a few months after 9/11, for instance, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the number two in the Iranian regime then and now, and a man often approvingly characterized as “pragmatic” in the Western media, urged the Muslim world to annihilate Israel with nuclear weapons, assuring them that they will only suffer “some damages” as a result of a nuclear exchange.

Despite such vitriol, Europe has, by and large, chosen to ignore the fact that Iran is a designated terrorist state and a key sponsor of terrorism. To this day, the Tehran controlled Lebanese Hezbollah, for instance, is not to be found on the EU list of terrorist organizations, ostensibly because it also provides “social services.” Instead, the Europeans have focused on business better than usual and today hundreds of EU companies do some $15 billion of export business with Iran that is growing at 25% per annum. Germany alone exported $5 billion worth of goods to Iran in 2005, a 30% increase from 2004. And these EU exports, which represent 44% of Iran’s total, are mostly in the strategic oil and gas, petrochemical and telecommunications sectors and cannot be easily replaced by Russian or Chinese goods. Fully 75% of the machinery and technology that keeps Iran’s economy - and oil and gas exports - going is of EU provenance. This has made business with Europe an absolutely indispensable economic prop for the regime. Moreover, much of it is done with the direct support and encouragement of European governments in the form of export credit guarantees and bilateral agreements in direct contravention of U.S. declared policy on dealing with terrorist states. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, wittingly or not, European governments are helping keep the mullah regime in power.

Which brings us to the “superpower made of straw.” Unlike the Europeans, the United States has taken the Iranian terrorist regime seriously and President Bush declared the country one of the axis of evil. Even before that, in 1996, the U.S. Congress unanimously passed tough legislation known as the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) authorizing sanctions against companies and individuals doing business with the Iranian regime, especially in the oil and gas sector. Yet, despite the fact that ILSA was extended for another five years in 2001 and the countless violations of its provisions in the meantime, Washington has never imposed sanctions on any company doing business in Iran, except a few Chinese arms dealers.

Thus, at least in the regime’s view, U.S. implicit threats to Iran have to date proven to be little more than empty rhetoric. There is no reason to expect that they‘ll be taken any more seriously in the future than they have been in the past unless Washington finally decides to up the ante. And unless it does, the United States will soon face an unpredictable terrorist regime armed with nuclear weapons and a Middle East profoundly destabilized and on the verge of nuclear war.

Perhaps, as many hope, with the referral of Iran to the UN Security Council, the Europeans will finally prove Ahmadinejad wrong and show some bite along with the “yapping.” Unfortunately, given past experience and the large European economic interests involved, the odds of that happening are not very good. Nor is it likely that Russia and China will suddenly decide to abandon their long-standing efforts to obstruct American policy and strike their own lucrative deals with Tehran. Indeed, just days after Russia’s voted to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov stated publicly Moscow’s strong opposition to “any possible sanctions” against Iran.1

Washington’s current hopes to prevent Iran from going nuclear with the help of the UN will yet again prove illusory. This does not mean that America must face this daunting task alone, for in facing the warmongers in Tehran we have the most powerful of potential allies – the Iranian people. The first and most important step though is to realize that the status quo is simply no longer acceptable and it will not really get better until there is a regime change in Tehran.

Before getting into a discussion of how regime change could best be accomplished, however, it is important to briefly discuss the evolution of the regime in Iran into a ticking time bomb and an imminent threat to world peace.

From Totalitarian Theocracy to Messianic Islamofascism

From its very beginning, Khomeini’s revolution was based on the essentially totalitarian concept of vilayat-e faqih (rule of the jurisprudent), which simply meant absolute political power for a “supreme leader” and a small clique of top clerics. Though claiming to derive its legitimacy from Islam and having a version of Islamic fanaticism as its ideological banner, this system had much more in common with the Nazi Fuehrer prinzip and the Bolshevik “vanguard party” concept than with anything found in the Quran or the Twelver Shia doctrine. Indeed, it followed the organizational and operational modus operandi of its totalitarian confreres to the letter, complete with a “cult of personality” of the leader and brutal suppression of the rule of law, dissent, freedom of speech and basic human rights by means of a typical totalitarian security services network and extrajudicial violence. It also followed closely the totalitarian economic model in its socialist version, with 70% of the economy controlled by the state, central planning, five-year plans etc.

Overtime, the system became progressively ossified and corrupt and failed to perform economically. Timid half-baked reform experiments under President Khatami predictably came to nothing, yet, despite being tightly controlled, threatened the absolute power and economic privilege of the clerics. The ruling oligarchy responded by putting an end to even the pretense of reform and toleration of reformists and opted out for a new wave of wholesale repression, euphemistically dubbed the “Second Islamic Revolution.” All the while, the regime continued to blame the Great Satan and evil Zionists for its own failures with the time-tested “externalization of evil” propaganda tactic of totalitarians.

The result has been the near complete stifling of dissent in Iran. Reformists have been prevented from contesting elections, most reformists publications have been banned and many hundreds of journalists, bloggers and non-conformists have been jailed on trumped up charges and often tortured. Since the arrival of Ahmadinejad on the scene, this process has been accelerated and led to the thorough purge of suspected reformists from all levels of government and their replacement with hard-line zealots.

The growing tendency of the regime to seek greater ideological conformity and use repression as a first resort in its efforts to deal with the palpable discontent of Iranian society, has dramatically enhanced the political clout of the most reactionary parts of the regime’s support structures in the security, intelligence and paramilitary vigilante baseej forces and their hardline Islamist mentors. It is these circles that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged from and represents.

While this group of extremists is a zealous defender of the Islamist regime, their views are even more radical than those of most regime clerics in virtually all aspects and they see themselves as the true representatives and guardians of Ayatollah Khomeini’s legacy. In this respect, they implicitly and sometimes quite explicitly, criticize the clerical establishment for not being radical enough in pursuing the goals of the Islamic revolution as they see them.

Two areas of particular relevance for our discussion here are their attitudes toward the West and the messianic nature of their beliefs.

Guided by the teachings of their ideological godfather – the ultra-hardline Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi and the “Westoxication” conspiracy theories of Ahmad Fardid, a third-rate Persian follower of Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger, these zealots exhibit a pathological hatred of the West and its civilization and a firm belief in the inevitability of an apocalyptic struggle between Islam and the West that will usher in the final triumph of Islam worldwide. By itself, this fervent fantasy is hardly new, but its current interpretation by Ahmadinejad and the extremists now in power in Tehran is novel and highly disturbing. For they have combined it with the messianic Shiite belief in the reappearance of the Hidden Imam and appear to believe that the final violent confrontation with the enemies of Islam is not only close at hand, but that it could be speeded up and that it is the religious obligation of the Iranian people to do that through the “art of martyrdom.” And martyrdom in Ahmadinejad’s fantasy world is no longer just about individuals but about the whole nation. “A nation with martyrdom knows no captivity,” he exalts and warns that those who undermine this “principle … undermine the foundation of our eternity.” The way to avoid this great misfortune is simple in his view and he urges the Iranians to follow those who are “doing their best to pave the way for the urgent reappearance of the Hidden Imam.” How long that will take is also no secret and Ahmadinejad is on record saying that he expects the Imam to appear in two short years. What exactly “paving the way” for the Messiah’s appearance involves is not clear from the ravings of these lunatics, but for the civilized world to assume that these fantasies are totally unrelated to Tehran’s quest for nuclear weapons would be folly. Recently, a religious scholar and disciple of Ahmadinejad’s mentor Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi, better known to Iranians as “Professor Crocodile,” publicly justified the use of nuclear weapons against the enemies of Islam in what regime opponents saw as a new effort by the hardliners to “prepare the religious grounds for the use of these weapons.”2

There are many in the West that are already dismissing these ominous threats as empty bluster and yet again urging dialog and calling for more tolerance of the intolerant. For them, it may be instructive to see how some prominent Iranians who are far from being friends of the West or enemies of the Islamic republic perceive these trends. Abdul- Karim Soroush, the most prominent Iranian philosopher still living in the country, for instance, sees a “hidden fascism” on the march and believes that the current Tehran rulers are going “even further than the Taliban,” while, in the words of former president Khatami, they aspire “to imitate Bin Laden” and “compete with the Taliban in calling for violence and in carrying out extremist crimes.”

Toward a Strategy for Regime Change

If the analysis above has any merit, the West is now facing an imminent and acute threat from a terrorist regime armed with a culture of death and a messianic belief in the virtue of apocalyptic violence. And soon to be armed with nuclear weapons. While there is some benefit in getting international and United Nations acknowledgment of this reality, to wait for a highly unlikely solution of the problem by them would be tantamount to a dereliction of duty. It will either not happen or will be dragged out to the point of becoming meaningless. What needs to be done immediately is for the United States to formulate and begin executing a comprehensive strategy that aims to prevent or delay as long as possible the acquisition of a nuclear capability by Iran as the first step and effect regime change in Tehran as the ultimate objective.

As any sound integrated strategy it should consist of a military contingency plan and coordinated but independent plans for economic and political warfare against the Tehran regime.

The Military Option - A discussion of the military dimension of such a strategy is beyond the scope of this essay and the competence of its author, except for pointing out that regardless of the technical feasibility of a strictly military solution, it should not be taken off the table as an option and a political lever. It is also imperative for any military option to include plans to surgically decapitate the regime and its key supporters with as little collateral damage as possible. At the very least, targets should include the top leadership and the regime’s key support structures and instruments of political oppression such as Republican Guard, Baseej and intelligence headquarters and essential installations.

The Economic Option- The economic dimension of such a strategy is essential and clear cut. Iran is a terrorist state and anybody that contributes to its economic and therefore political well-being ought to be subject to sanctions under existing American law. An effective sanctions regime that will bring an end to European strategic exports may by itself critically undermine the regime’s economic viability and seriously affect its political stability as well. An effective economic strategy to undermine the regime need not be just a government affair. Many if not most of the large European companies that currently prop Tehran economically, both do a large amount of business in the United States and have billions of dollars invested in their stock by American funds and individuals. This is especially true of the 100 largest U.S. pension funds to say nothing of the hundreds of American mutual funds and a grass roots campaign to divest from these companies will in short order force them to choose between the American market and doing business with terrorists. 3 It will not be a difficult choice to make. In fact, such a campaign already exists but it needs much greater public support to be effective.

The Political Warfare Option

The greatest promise for regime change in a democratic direction lies in a well-designed campaign of political warfare toward that end. The nearly complete absence of willingness on the part of the U.S. administration to engage in a systematic political warfare effort is our greatest policy failure to date in Iran and, indeed, in the war on terror as a whole. In fact, the very term political warfare has disappeared from our lexicon, except when used to describe campaigns against domestic political opponents. Yet, political warfare is and has always been an indispensable instrument of national power in times of serious international conflict and the United States has traditionally engaged in it, more often than not with considerable success, as in the Cold War. It is of particular relevance in conflicts of ideological nature like the current one that cannot be won by military means alone. Instead, what we claim to be doing or are at least interested in doing is something called “public diplomacy” an ill-conceived and futile exercise in political correctness unlikely to provide any meaningful contributions to U.S. foreignpolitical desiderata.4

Unlike public diplomacy, which seems to pursue the objective of convincing our enemies that we are decent and well-meaning people or provide answers to questions such as “why they hate us,” political warfare is about identifying an enemy’s internal weaknesses, analyzing them carefully and developing an integrated strategy to exploit them through the various instruments at the nation’s disposal. It is a strategy that holds especial promise in dealing with opponents that run politically oppressive and economically failing regimes that lack legitimacy and the support of large parts of the population. In Iran’s case, the regime’s vulnerabilities are numerous and glaring. It is a country where a significant segment of society has no illusion as to the reactionary nature of the regime and would support the democratization of the country. It is also a country with a large, well-educated and, for the most part, democratically-oriented diaspora in the West which could serve as the catalyst in a democratization effort.

Given these existing conditions, in order to be effective, a political warfare campaign would have to be in sync with the quintessential interests and aspirations of the Iranians themselves and help them understand that while the mullah regime presents a problem for the West it presents an existential threat to the socio-economic future and the physical security of its people. A sophisticated political warfare campaign would necessitate a detailed study of the regime vulnerabilities and formulating a set of key messages to be delivered with the appropriate instruments. This is clearly beyond the scope of this essay, but the few examples below should provide a sample of what possibilities exist.

The nature of the conflict – It is of the utmost importance for the U.S. working with democratic opposition groups in and outside of Iran to explain to the Iranian people the nature of the current conflict with the Tehran regime. First and foremost, it must be made abundantly clear that neither Washington nor anybody else in the West has any objections against the peaceful use of nuclear energy by Iran. This is a key point because the regime has had some success in convincing public opinion in Iran that the opposite is true. Secondly, it needs to be constantly reiterated that the regime’s nuclear weapons ambitions coupled with its messianic warmongering present a real danger of nuclear conflagration of which the Iranian people will be the real victim. Finally, a clear message, should also be relayed that in any potential conflict it is the reactionary mullah regime and the regime alone that is the enemy and main target.

Islam or Islamist ideology – Iran is an Islamic republic with a government ostensibly based on shari’a and Twelver Shia precepts as a source of its ideological legitimacy. While this is the theory, the reality is a theocratic, totalitarian regime based on the absolute supremacy of the clerics under Khomeini’s invention of the vilayat-e faqih, or the dictatorship of a supreme Islamic leader and a small mafia around him made up of corrupt clerics and a pervasive secret service and paramilitary vigilante groups. It is every bit as totalitarian as the Nazi and Soviet models except that it uses religion rather than secular ideology as a source of legitimacy. But it is at great odds with the Shia religion and that is a significant vulnerability that should be exploited for the purposes of delegitimizing the regime.

It is a historical fact that in Twelver Shia Islam direct involvement in politics by the Islamic establishment has historically been frowned upon. Thus the vilayat-e faqih model and its various nostrums directly contradict age-old Shia traditions. Many Iranian theologians and ayatollahs, such as Ayatollah Montazeri, have openly spoken about this and publicly urged the separation of religion and state, as have other prominent Shia clerics like grand ayatollahs Ali Sistani and Al-Fayad in Iraq. This key fault-line needs to be analyzed and a campaign to exploit it organized with the help of prominent Shia scholars.

The economics of poverty – Iran is currently enjoying windfall profits from its oil exports campaign already exists and has scored some success but much greater public support could and should be mobilized in order to make it truly effective.5 because of exorbitant prices, but take away the oil (which accounts for 90% of exports) and you have a failed state economically that compares very unfavorably in terms of economic development to Shah’s period. Even with the oil windfall, there has been no reduction in poverty, which afflicts 40% of the population and unemployment among the young averages 35%. Things are especially dire under shari’a for young women who are easily the best educated in the Middle East, yet are openly discriminated against and have an unemployment rate of 50%. The prospects of the massive youth cohort are anything but bright - a reality the 70% of the population under 30 know only too well. Moreover, with half a million youths, many of them college educated, joining the ranks of the unemployed each year, things are set to get worse.

Iran is also stymied by the continued practice of ossified Marxist economic dogmas in the form of central planning and five-year plans that a recent study called a “costly exercise in futility.” And like in the Soviet economy of yesteryear, the large number (over 40%) of state-owned firms that operate in the red year in year out drag the whole economy down and suffocate the private sector. Overall, it would not be very difficult to make the case that, like everywhere else it has been imposed, the Islamist regime has already proven an economic failure with all this implies for the socio-economic prospects of the Iranian people. While official statistics are far from reliable, a recent parliamentary research report indicated the percentage of people living under the poverty line at 50% of the rural population and 20% among city dwellers. As in other states that have succumbed to extremism and despite its huge oil wealth, poverty seems to be the only certain product of Islamism in Iran. This is a particularly pertinent message for the large number of poor people in the country that have placed their faith for a better life in Ahmedinajad.

Regime Corruption – Pervasive systemic corruption at all levels of government may be the single greatest vulnerability of the clerical regime today. This is so because not only is the wide-spread corruption a much discussed public knowledge, but because it is associated with the ruling clerical establishment in the mind of the public. This explains, at least partly, the victory of Ahmadinejad, who campaigned on an anti-corruption platform against Rafsanjani, who was widely seen as a poster child of high clerical corruption.

The problem, in short, is that after 26 years in power, the ruling Islamist establishment has built a vast system of economic spoils designed to benefit them directly. It is a parasitic system that functions in ways remarkably similar to the Soviet nomenklatura and like it is immune to reform because reform would threaten the collapse of the regime that underpins it. This is one reason, why nothing will change under Ahmadinejab, despite his promises.

Just two examples would suffice to indicate the magnitude of the problem. Following the overthrow of the Shah, the royal family’s vast holdings were incorporated into semigovernment foundations designed ostensibly to promote public welfare and philanthropy. With 30% to 40% of the entire economy’s assets under their control, these “bonyads” have been transformed into huge holding companies that dominate most of the manufacturing and trade sectors and operate by rules of their own to avoid taxation, competition and regulations to which private companies are subjected. Not surprisingly, virtually all of the bonyads are indirectly owned by the top clerical nomenklatura. This explains why despite hundreds of court cases of flagrant embezzlement and corruption, few have resulted in any convictions since invariably the defendants turn out to be related to the high and mighty.

A similar corrupt scheme is at work in the lucrative oil and gas sector where hundreds of nominally private companies owned by the clerics have positioned themselves as the compulsory partners of foreign investors in the sector and the beneficiaries of huge commissions, a practice identical to the one perfected by the royal family in Saudi Arabia.

There are also numerous other real and potential fault-lines and specific target audiences that could and should be addressed in an integrated political warfare campaign. These include ethnic issues, women, students and youth, private business, the poor etc. To take just the first of these, it has become increasingly evident that the regime’s brutal treatment and discrimination of sizable ethnic and religious minorities such as the Iranian Kurds, the Arabs in oil-rich Khuzestan, Baluchis, Turkmen and others has given rise to the kind of ethno-religious alienation that could easily lead to the breakup of the multiethnic country in which the dominant Farsi make up only half of the population. It should be made clear to the Iranian people, that only the replacement of the current dictatorship by a democratic regime acceptable to all could prevent these dangerous centrifugal tendencies.

To effectively reach the intended audience, a campaign of this kind would need to develop appropriate communication instruments and strategies but this should not be difficult. Open societies enjoy an unbeatable advantage over closed, dictatorial ones in this respect as the Cold War struggle proved conclusively. It is also the case that technological progress in the form of the Internet and satellite television and radio have made communications virtually impervious to jamming and totalitarians that are trying to keep information out are fighting a losing battle. In just one example, it is now believed that there are over 100,000 active blogs in Iran with the vast majority of them antiregime, prompting an irate ayatollah to call blogging “a Trojan horse with enemy soldiers in its belly.”

To sum up, Iran and its warmongering Islamofascist regime present a clear and present danger to the West and to its own people. It is a danger that must and could be dealt effectively with an integrated military, economic and political warfare strategy by the US and allies that is long overdue. A successful outcome would dramatically improve the prospects of the democratic project in the Middle East and beyond; the failure to do that will likely bring us to the threshold of nuclear conflagration and signal a seminal defeat for the Free World in the war on terror.


1 Interfax News Agency, Moscow, Feb. 15, 2005

2 Roozonline.com, Feb. 16, 2006 as translated in Memri Special Dispatch #1096, Feb. 17, 2006, www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD109606

3 A recent study has found out that the top 87 US pension funds have invested a staggering $188 billion in foreign companies that do business in terrorist states. See Christopher Holton, Stop Investing in Terror, in
Frank Gaffney, War Footing, Naval Institute Press, 2005,pp.59-74.

4 For details on the failures of “public diplomacy” see Michael Waller et al., Chapter 8, “Wage Political Warfare” in Frank Gaffney, War Footing, Naval Institute Press, 2005

5 See www.divestterror.org

Link to the Original

HT Business Online (London, UK)

With friends like the French who needs enemies.

RBT

*****

Saddam ‘tried to bribe French politicians’

By Fraser Nelson
19 March 2006

EVIDENCE that Saddam Hussein was seeking to bribe French politicians during an election campaign has been uncovered among the millions of captured documents the Pentagon agreed to declassify last week.

Memos released without translation by the American government also show Iraqi intelligence checking rumours of Al Qaeda’s presence in Iraq – which weakens claims Saddam was co-operating with Osama bin Laden.

The documents instead suggest Al?Qaeda had no formal relationship with Saddam’s regime – and that his officials were anxiously investigating rumours that Iraqis were leaving the country to fight with the Taleban during the Afghanistan campaign.

ABC News, which has translated some documents, has released a record of a conversation with an Afghan informant who claimed Bin Laden and the Taleban were in contact with Iraq and recently visited the country.

The Afghan also said “Bin Laden’s group” agreed to co-operate to attack targets inside the US and that, if the Taleban were linked to the “destructive operations” of 11 September 2001, Iraq and Afghanistan may be hit by the US military.

This repeats the controversial claim that Saddam was in contact with bin Laden. But ABC News said it was of “limited evidentiary value” because the information came from an unnamed Afghan informant rather than an identifiable Iraqi official.

It is on stronger ground with a memo on election campaigns in France. A document which the Iraqi intelligence service classifies as “secret” orders the translation of important parts of a 1997 report about donating to political parties.

This strengthens suggestions that several former French politicians – some linked to Jacques Chirac – were being bribed by Saddam through the United Nations’ now notorious oil-for-food programme.

Another memo, dated a fortnight before the war, shows Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s son, directing the transfer of 448 Kuwaiti prisoners to media outlets to be used as human shields during the US attack.

Link to Original

HT Ray Robison via The American Thinker

More info that tends to confirm Bill Tierney's translation of the Saddam tapes.

RBT

*****

BINGO!!!

UPDATE!!! Now we are talking....

ISCG-2003-M0007379

bottom page 6.

MALE 2: It got cold in here.

MALE 6: Plasma systems in general are made of several things. They're usually simple if it's for research purposes. A simple and inexpensive system and can be made in any simple factory. We can do a simple research, and the system can change from a research system, if the research was good, and the requirements are available, turn into... [audio blank 31:28 to 31:45]

Male 2: they can let us know if they disagree, and if they do agree, which is better, they can also come to us so we can reach a clear plan. Thank you my brothers from the Military Industry for the valuable information that you provided, and at the same time we got to see you and get to know you.

BINGO!!!

These are military scientists talking about the transfer of technology to who? Well since it is the military, clearly the conversation went into a military application of plasma.

There are no other annotated blank spots on this translation. The blank spot occurs right when the military scientist speaker says where the application will be transferred to. Oddly enough, the "It got cold in here" comment is very out of place if you read the rest of this transcript. There is no other single out of place comment. When you are in a military briefing and the information about to come out is classified, you say, "this is classified" so that anyone who doesn't have the right clearance can leave.

"It got cold in here" sounds like a warning that a classified subject was approaching so shut off the mike. I know this sounds crazy, but it is too much of a coincidence.

An out of place comment, followed by a mention of transfer of plasma technology, that is cut off in mid statement because the microphone was shut off (if the tape had stopped there wouldn't be a time gap) , followed by a thank you to the military scientists. This is 99.9% proof that Tierney was right and they were performing plasma experiments to go into weapons testing, most likely nuclear. The rest of the conversation is kept "in the clear" but applies to that program.

Now I am convinced that Bill Tierney was accurate.

[...]

Read it All

HT Dean's World

RBT has long maintained that Islamofascism is no different than other religious cult movements we are all familiar with e.g., David Koresch and the Branch Davidians (Waco) and Jim Jones and the Kool-Aid Bunch.

Islamofascism's misogynistic, pedophilic, male hegemonic theocratic rule, and other pathological cultural behaviors have roots that predate the Islam. These roots extend back to the nomdic Bedouin tribes of of the Arabian, Syrian, or No. African deserts.

This Medieval fanatical ideology of hate and is now being spread worldwide by Iranian (Shiia) and Saudi (Sunni) petrol dollars. The Shia and the Suni are trying to out do each other as to who is the most devote follower of true Islam.

This ideology has no place in the modern world and is doomed to failure like other ideologies of Communisim, Nazism, Maoism, and Fascism. These failed ideologies don't recognized the universal truth of the FREE WILL OF MEN AND WOMEN

RBT

*****

Cults Vs. Religions
Dean

[...]

Ann and several of her commenters were asking what separates a cult from a regular religion, with several of them saying things like "Christianity and Islam are cults" or "a cult is just a religion you don't like."

Well, people could say that but I had to take exception, because if you look at real, serious cults, they're much more than that. As I noted in Ann's comments, there really is a difference between a religion and a cult, and I speak as an atheist. Cults are seriously dangerous in ways everyday religions simply are not.

If you want a very good description of the cult phenomenon that isn't just a religious indictment, see Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman's book Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change. Siegelman and Conway are communications theorists, and it's not even clear what religious affiliation they have, if any. They merely do a very thorough breakdown of what serious cults look like, as opposed to how everyday religions are organized and behave. They go into far more detail than I do here, but signs of cults include:

1) Forbidding you from having friends or even spending much time with relatives who are not members of the cult.

2) A living figure, or figures, to whom absolute obedience is expected.

3) Classic hypnotherapy-style brainwashing techniques, to change your personality and encourage absolute obedience.

[...]

5) Gradually taking more and more and more of a member's income until ultimately they are giving most of their livelihood, or all of it, to the cult.

6) Threatening the life of those who leave the cult.

[...]

There's more. But honestly, cults are serious business and do not come down to just being "religions I don't like." Snapping is a fascinating book and quite worth reading.

Read it All

HT Baron Blog* via Instapundit

*****

Why we fight with one arm tied behind our backs

As a postscript to Michael Ledeen's House testimony on encouraging peaceful revolution in Iran, here's a post from Belmont Club's Wretchard. It features three writers, of different views, whom I respect greatly: Oxford Prof. Timothy Garton Ash, who did such brilliant reporting and writing on the peaceful revolutions in eastern Europe; Col. Austin Bay of Texas, whose always incisive analysis is informed by his service as a reservist in Iraq; and Richard Fernandez (Wretchard), a native of the Philippines and student of history who now writes from Australia. Only in the blogosphere: an interchange between Oxford, San Antonio, and Sydney.

[...]

Writers, artists, and filmmakers should be encouraged to travel to and fro, carrying ideas in both directions. Women's movements in Iran, representing half the population systematically discriminated against, should be supported by women's movements in Europe. Iran's Islamic thinkers and jurists, both reformist modernizers and conservatives, should be engaged in dialogue by theologians and scholars from other faith traditions. All this should be done less by our governments than by our own societies, and not just by America and Britain–traditionally distrusted by many Iranians–but by all European countries, working separately and together. We need a European Iranpolitik.

"The underlying reason why America is doing so poorly in the field of 'information warfare' against the jihad is that its traditional organs of articulation–the academy, media, Hollywood–are largely hostile to the war on terror itself. It's conceivable that an Iranian might flee persecution only to be taught at a U.S. university that he ought to embrace it by the many academic departments whose point of view is exactly that. In a fundamental sense, the war on terror is twinned to the greatest single issue dividing the left and the right, which is whether the United States, as a nation, is legitimate or whether, as some would maintain, it is Amerika: an abomination whose demise must be hastened by any means necessary."

Read it All

* Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications—including the Economist and the New York Times.

HT Instapundit

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY:

Declassified Truth

Posted 3/16/2006

[...]

The government is finally getting around to unloading some of Saddam Hussein's secret documents. A look at just a few pages already leads to some blockbuster revelations.

In the early stages of the war that began three years, the U.S. captured thousands of documents from Saddam and his spy agency, the Mukhabarat. It's been widely thought the documents could shed light on why Saddam behaved as he did and how much of a threat his evil regime represented.

Yet, until this week, the documents lay molding in boxes in a government warehouse. Now the first batch is out, and though few in number, they're loaded with information.

Among the enduring myths of those who oppose the war is that Saddam, though murderous when it came to his own people, had no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorist designs outside his own country. Both claims now lie in tatters.

[Instapundit] It's funny that these documents are getting so little attention from the press.

*****

[RBT] Here's some more excerpts:

Now come more revelations that leave little doubt about Saddam's terrorist intentions. Most intriguing from a document dump Wednesday night is a manual for Saddam's spy service, innocuously listed as CMPC-2003-006430. It makes for interesting reading.

Here, for instance, are the marching orders for Directorate 8, the Mukhabarat's "Technical Affairs" department: "The Eight Directorate is responsible for development of materials needed for covert offensive operations. It contains advanced laboratories for testing and production of weapons, poisons and explosives."

[...]

Even as the media studiously avoid these new documents — just as they avoided 500 hours of Saddam's personal tapes showing his scheming on WMD — it's clear the U.S. did the right thing in invading Iraq and taking out a formative terrorist threat.

Saddam had close ties to al-Qaida. That's not just our opinion, but also that of the 9-11 Commission Report that so many in the media have selectively cited to bolster the case against the war.

[...]

Read it All

All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:

1. IRAQ - French Oil Concerns in bed with Saddam
2. IRAQ - ABC News Buries the Lead
3. ATHENA - DOCEX goes public on a grand scale...
8. Saddam's Docs - Bingo!
9. Saddam's Docs - Leads to Some Blockbuster Revelations
10. Iraqi Gen Sada interview on The Mike Rosen Show...
34. MORE SADA Part II-Saddam ordered WMD strike on Israel
35. IRAN - Covert ops and disinformation aimed at Iran
36. UPDATE - SADDAM'S WMDs IN SYRIA

HT Expose the Left via Tony in Colorado

The rescheduled interview with Iraqi Gen Sada, Saddam's Secrets by Mike Rosen aired on March 14th, 2006.

Ian Schwartz at 'Expose The Left' has posted audio of the
BEST interview yet of former Iraqi General George Sada,
author of 'Saddam's Secrets'.

Former Iraqi General Georges Sada, who was a military adviser to Saddam Hussein appeared on The Mike Rosen Show (850 AM KOA) Tuesday March 14th, 2006. He is described as an expert airforce pilot who played a large part in saving coalition pilots' lives in Gulf War I. Sada explains what happened to the WMDs prior to the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003, stopping Saddam's planned all-out chemical weapons attack on Israel, saving the downed coalition pilots of Gulf War 1 from execution among other interesting topics.

See these two articles at 'Expose The Left' for the audio and all related links.

Saddam General Explains Saddam's 'Secrets' — WMDs, Bombing Israel, and Genocide (AUDIO) (Part 1)

http://exposetheleft.com/2006/03/15/sada-interview/

MORE: Fmr. Saddam General Sada Talks About Attack Against Israel and Use of WMD (Parts 2 and 3)

http://exposetheleft.com/2006/03/15/sada-interview-2/

Each audio segment is about 20 minutes in duration.

*****

Podcasts of The Mike Rosen Show can also be found at:

http://www.850koa.com/cc-common/podcast/single_podcast.html?podcast=rosen_podcasts.xml

Update:

The Big Picture has a video of Gen Sada at his appearence at the Wednesday Morning Club in LA on March the 16th:

Video: Iraqi General General Georges Sada Describes Saddam's Decision to Hide the WMDs

Yesterday Iraqi General Georges Sada spoke at the Wednesday Morning Club in Los Angeles. I got some video of him describing his first-hand experience with regard to Saddam's decision to hide the Iraqi WMDs.

[...]

See the Video

Update:

Security Watchtower has a review up on Gen. Sada's book

HT FrontPageMagazine.com

RBT received this from the author. I'm posting it in its entirety because of the critical info it contains.

RBT

*****

Getting Iran Wrong – Again
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 16, 2006

When making a revolution, allies matter. So do enemies. If you can’t identify your friends and target your enemies, you’re better advised to do nothing.

And that is just what our enemies hope we will do.

Washington Post reporter Karl Vick, reporting from Tehran this week, trumpeted that the new U.S. strategy to help pro-democracy groups inside Iran “could backfire,” by tainting activists as American agents.

“We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush,” he triumphantly quotes an Iranian “human rights activist” as saying.

The only problem is, the “human rights activists” and “pro-democracy” folks Karl Vick quotes are nothing of the sort. They are members of the discredited “reformist” movement, which ruled Iran from 1989 until last year.

The reformist movement is not happy with the election of Iran’s current president, Revolutionary Guards officer and former Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Their candidate was Hojjat-ol eslam Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who as Majles speaker in 1986 launched Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program, then lavished it with money during his eight years as president from 1989-1997.

The only change the reformists want to see is an end to Iran’s isolation and to U.S.-led sanctions, so the regime can be free to develop nuclear weapons in peace. In other words, they are a shill for the regime.

America’s enemies are very eager for us to get it wrong. And the Islamic Republic of Iran is a sophisticated enemy. Their intelligence services were trained by the KGB at the height of the Cold War. We should never forget that.

The Soviets mastered the use of “active measures,” aimed at planting disinformatzia and bogus stories to discredit the enemy, and maskirovka, strategic deception. They taught those techniques to the Islamist intelligence service in the early 1980s. Iran’s conspiracy-minded clerics and spymasters turned out to be star pupils.

Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright fell for Iran’s strategic deception campaigns repeatedly. So did the Europeans, who believed all during the 1990s they could engage in “constructive engagement” with a regime whose sole goal was to acquire European technology to build better missiles and nuclear weapons.

Today, the Washington Post is falling for it, too. They are following the lead of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which in 1997 allowed a newly-created “surrogate” Radio Free Iran to be transformed into “Radio Khatami.” (Known officially as Radio Farda (“Tomorrow”), the radio got its nickname because of its sycophantic treatment of Rafsanjani’s “reformist” successor, Hojjat-ol eslam Mohammad Khatami.)

It’s absolutely critical that we get Iran right. On one side, we have a fake Iranian “resistance” group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, which has jinned up a massive lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill. They are hoping to convince Congress to get the administration to lift the State Department’s designation of the group, which dates from 1994, as an international terrorist organization.

“Imagine the message that would send to the Iranian people,” one administration official who is appalled at the MEK lobbying efforts told me. “So we’re telling them they should be ruled by some crazy terrorist cult?” As I reported?recently, the MEK helped bring Khomeini to power in 1979, but had a falling out two years later over how to share power. Call them Iran’s Trotskyists, if you will.

On the other hand, you have the “reformists,” the Rafsanjani-Khatami clique that ruled Iran until just last year. On their watch, regime intelligence officers brutally hacked to death the leading anti-regime activist in Iran, Darioush Forouhar, and his wife, Parvaneh. They sent out hit squads that murdered more than 200 Iranian dissidents overseas. They murdered Iranian journalists, tortured Iranian students, closed universities, and machine-gunned demonstrators.

And yet, the Washington Post calls members of this failed “reform” movement “human rights activists.”

So, apparently, did the State Department, misled as ever by the Council on Foreign Relations and its acolytes. State careerists chose self-styled “reformists” to take part in workshops aimed at training Iranians in the history of non-violent conflict that were held last year in Dubai.

This is a recipe for failure. Iran’s “reformists” are not America’s friends, nor are they the people we should be supporting inside Iran. Once again, strategic deception is at work.

There was a real reformist movement at one point, but it didn’t last long. It emerged in the early months after Khatami’s first election in 1997, but was crushed by Khatami himself when he put down the July 1999 student rebellion at Tehran University.

A key leader of that movement was Mohsen Sazegarah, a founder of Iran’s dreaded Revolutionary Guards corps. After leaving government in the late 1980s, he published newspapers that were repeatedly shut by the regime. After two stints in jail, he left Iran last year and told me flat out that the reform movement was “dead.”

“This is the first time in our history that the Iranian people are turning to a foreign country for help,” he told me. “I think the United States government can help the Iranian people very much.”

That is a message Iran’s leaders – and the anti-Bush crowd here at home – don’t want Americans to hear. So their latest strategy is to undermine the just-announced U.S. policy of spending $75 million to help the pro-democracy movement inside Iran.

Sazegarah believes the main tool the U.S. should use is political recognition of the opposition. He urged a boycott of last year’s presidential elections, as a first step toward convincing the international community to reject as illegitimate Iran’s Stalinist-style elections. The reformists, on the contrary, are still hoping to change the face of the current regime, to make it more palatable to the West.

The CIA has also fallen for Iranian maskirovka, repeating year after year in unclassified intelligence assessments that “no viable opposition” exists in Iran.

This is strategic deception at its best. You’d think that the few Cold Warriors left at Langley would teach their younger colleagues the old Soviet tradecraft.

In fact, the Tehran regime is going to extraordinary lengths to discredit, dismember, and discourage real opposition inside Iran. Not only are they murdering opposition leaders wherever possible, but they coopt activists during torture sessions in jail, then set them up with “false flag” organizations to discredit the real opposition leaders who remain underground.

The message is clear to the meek and the merely disorganized: oppose us if you dare.

And yet, despite this extraordinary level of intimidation, demonstrations erupt in one Iranian city or another virtually every week, but they get little coverage in the Western media.

On March 12, for example, violent clashes rocked the predominantly Kurdish city of Piranshahr, near the border with Iran, as angry residents attacked government buildings, banks, security patrol cars and trucks. The protests followed the murder of a town resident by Islamist militiamen and the refusal of the local authorities to restitute the body to his family.

On March 8, thousands of women demonstrated peacefully in Tehran’s Laleh Park to commemorate international women’s day. Digital video images, sent via the Internet to Iranians overseas, showed the brutal crackdown by regime security troops, led by an intelligence officer in civilian clothes. Hundreds of women were beaten and at least sixty were jailed, but little mention of the crackdown appeared in the West.

On February 13, Revolutionary Guards troops stormed a Sufi Muslim shrine in Qom, razing it to the ground and arresting upwards of 1,000 Sufi worshippers. Even Radio Free Europe acknowledged that the “scale and violence of the crackdown on the Sufis is unprecedented in the Islamic Republic.” The regime’s actions were strongly condemned by Ayatollah Ali Hossein Montazeri, a respected cleric who has been under house arrest since losing a power struggle to become Supreme Leader in 1989.

In recent months, anti-regime riots have erupted in Ahwaz, along Iran’s southern border with Iraq; in Iranian Kurdistan to the northwest, and in Iranian Balouchestan, along the border with Pakistan.

Concerned about the rising tension and the efforts by Iranian journalists to report on it, the regime apparently sabotaged a government C-130 packed with nearly a hundred Iranian journalists on December 12, killing everyone on board. (One journalist managed to call his wife on his cellphone shortly before the crash to report the crazed behavior of the pilot – a young replacement who boarded the plane under official escort shortly before takeoff).

No opposition in Iran? Here is a country that is falling apart. Since September, Tehran’s bus drivers have been on strike to receive back pay and better work conditions, and have braved regime hooligans day after day. In January, workers from the Miral Glass factory walked out, also to protest not being paid.

Every time there is a soccer match, tens of thousands of Tehranis take to the streets, chanting anti-regime slogans. The events have become so notorious as anti-regime protests that the regime has tried to outlaw them, without success.

Disinformatzia and maskirovka. The Islamic Republic’s massive strategic deception is aimed at making the West believe this crumbling regime stands on solid ground, and that any Western challenge to Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be met with a stinging defeat.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

This time around with Iran, we need to get it right. The lives of millions of people depend on it.

[...]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21673
--
Kenneth R. Timmerman
President, Middle East Data Project, Inc.
Author: Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran
Tel: 301-946-2918
Reply to: timmerman.road@verizon.net
Website: www.KenTimmerman.com

Here's a site with extensive information on H5N1 flu strain:

www.fluwikie.com

Wizbang is running a post that the death rate from the avian flu could be as high as 50%

RBT

HT The Weekly Standard - Little Green Footballs

Finally
Though crucial details have yet to be resolved, the Bush administration has decided to release the documents.
by Stephen F. Hayes

03/13/2006 5:20:00 PM

The Bush administration has decided to release most of the documents captured in post-war Afghanistan and Iraq. The details of the document release are still being worked out, according to officials with knowledge of the discussions. Those details are critical. At issue are things like the timeframe for releasing the documents, the mechanism for scrubbing documents for sensitive information, and most important, the criteria for withholding documents from the public. But some of the captured files should be available to the public and journalists within weeks if not days.

President George W. Bush has made clear in recent weeks his displeasure with the delays in getting the information out to the American public. On February 16, one day after ABC News broadcast excerpts of recordings featuring Saddam Hussein and his war cabinet, Bush met with congressional Republicans and several senior national security officials and said three times that the documents should be released. "This stuff ought to be out," he told National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley. "Put this stuff out." It seems Bush will soon get his wish.

[...]

Read it All

HT Foundation for Democracy in Iran

Regime fires on crowds in western Iran city

March 12, 2006: Violent clashes in Piranshahr. Violent clashes rocked the predominantly Kurdish city of Piranshahr, near the border with Iraq, as angry residents attacked official buildings, banks, security patrol cars and trucks, according to the Students Movement Coordinating committee, SMCCDI. The riot took place following the murder of a resident by Islamist Militiamen, and the refusal of the local authorities to restitute the body of the victim to his family.

Security forces closed all accesses to the Governor's Office and opened fire on the crowd. Several demonstrators were injured and one has been reported in critical condition Additional troops were sent from the neighboring cities in order to control the situation which remains tense. The residents are requesting the public trial of agents involved in the murder and the shooting.

Kenneth R. Timmerman
Executive Director
Foundation for Democracy in Iran
www.iran.org
Reply to: exec@iran.org

www.iran.org

HT FrontPageMagazine.com via Dr. Zin Regime Change Iran

This is a must read!

RBT

*****

ElBaradei's Blindness

Kenneth R. Timmerman, Frontpagemag.com:

Iran now has the materials to make up to ten nuclear weapons, the U.S. envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency told a closed-door meeting in Vienna yesterday. That stunning statement, by U.S. ambassador Gregory L. Schulte, not only turned heads; it changed minds.

It was also a conservative statement. In fact, nuclear experts tell me, if Iran had used the equipment the IAEA knows Iran imported from the nuclear black market of Pakistani nuclear dealer Dr. A.Q. Khan, it could have produced enough weapons-grade uranium for between twenty to twenty-five bombs – even as the IAEA was inspecting Iran’s declared nuclear sites. And some sources believe Iran has purchased actual weapons from Ukraine and North Korea recently on the black market.

Schulte’s closed-door summary of Iran’s latest violations of its Nonproliferation Treaty commitments contained three bombshells:

* Iran now has a stockpile of 85 tons of uranium hexafluoride gas, “which if enriched could produce enough material for about ten nuclear weapons,” Schulte said.
* Iran has told the Agency it now intends to install 3000 centrifuges at Natanz this fall in order to enrich the uranium gas. This is far in excess of anything the IAEA has publicly reported so far.
* IAEA inspectors have now concluded beyond any doubt that a 15 page document discovered recently in Iran was “clearly intended for highly-enriched uranium, and refers to ‘hemishells,’” Schulte said. “IAEA inspectors seem to have no doubt that this information was expressly intended for the fabrication of nuclear weapons components,” he added. Iran, predictably, “refuses to turn this document over to the Agency, and won’t reveal when it was received.”

[...]

Read it All

HT Publis Pundit

Rocketsbrain thinks this would be a good use of the State Department's new money to support a regime change in Iran. Unfortunately this may take too long considering the Mullahs' pot may boil over this month.

Please consider giving what you can. RBT hasn't checked the validity of the donations sites though. Check the site for NITV first we probably be best.

RBT

*****

Support NITV - The Main Iranian Opposition Communication Tool!

SMCCDI (Urgent Action)
Mar 11, 2006, 21:25

Dear Freedom Lovers, Dear friends of the Iranian people,

One of the main bridges of communication with Iran, which is the Los Angeles based "National Iranian TV" (NITV), has been forced to cut off its satellite broadcasting due to financial problems.
Such a bad timing couldn't have come at a worst time, as; the well trusted and popular NITV has prepared, since months, the ground for massive demonstrations at the occasion of the banned "Tchahar-Shanbe Soori" (Fire Fiest) on March 14th.

At this time, NITV programs can only be seen via Internet by visiting: http://www.pamtv.us But only less than 10% of Iranians, living inside, have access to Internet and in many areas the accesses are controlled or blocked by the Islamic republic regime.

The interruption of NITV's satellite programs would for sure harm the grass root movement and the activities of underground groups which have placed many hopes in this satellite TV network for massive mobilization and a better coordination.

NITV has also granted its airtime in the past to groups, such as, SMCCDI and thereby helped create a bridge between the opposition groups and the people of our nation who are struggling for liberty and a just system of government that has no place for theocrats or any religious political ideology associated with a future Iran.

For in this struggle we are engaged in, the leaders of the disreputable and wholly unpopular Islamic Republic regime are the tyrants and terrorists in our people's midst, sponsoring it abroad, conducting it at home, and staining the honor of our nation with the blood of our countrymen, as well as, the blood of the innocent throughout the entire world.

We ask from all people of good will to help out financially as able to do so, to support directly NITV as quickly as possible so it can resume its satellite broadcast programming for Iran. Such noble action is vital and of the most importance, especially, with the approach of key dates which are the celebration of Iran's National Heritage Ceremonies qualified as "pagan" by barbarian Islamists.

We call on the US Legislative body and the State Department to consider immediate proper measures to support this trusted and irreplaceable digital tool which is necessary in the freedom process of Iran. These legitimate aspirations for liberty cannot be obtained in isolation or silence, and NITV is essential to the contact that we and other non-violent opposition groups have inside Iran.

With this line of communication re-opened, we can better defeat the deception tactics of the Islamic Republic regime, and better inform the people.

There are 2 ways you can forward your financial support:

1) Bank wire or transfer:
Wells Fargo Bank
215 Alamo Plz # A
Alamo, CA 94507
Phone: +1 (925) 820-9164
Account holder: NITV
Account # 8581272179
Routing # 121042882

2) Direct online donation:
Via the well trusted Paypal and by visiting the NITV website located at: http://www.nitv.tv/en/


Don't let down, thousands of Iranians who are looking to NITV, for an effective coordination and loud expression of their rejection of the Islamic regime, at the occasion of the banned "Tchahar-Shanbe Soori".

NITV's contact references are as follow:
21050 Irwin Street
Woodland Hills, CA 91367 (USA)
+1 (818) 716-0000 Phone
+1 (818) 716-0023 Fax
http://www.nitv.tv/

Thank you for your consideration and support in this most urgent matter!

Millions of Iranians are looking for this light in the darkness of Iran!!

You're their only hope!!!

United We Stand!
Divided We Fall!


The "Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran" (SMCCDI)

Source: SMCCDI

HT Love America First

Iranians Are Preparing to Turn a National Ceremony(Chahar Shanbe Sori چهارشنبه سوری) to a Protest Against the Regime

See the Article in Persian ديدن مقاله به فارسي


According to an Iranian Based Blog چهارشنبه سوری Many in Iran this year are trying to turn Chahar Shanbe Sore( The last Wednesday of the year in the Persian calendar which is a Fire Festival for and it is been cherished as part of the Persian culture for thousands of year ) which is on March 14/ 24 Esfand in Persian calendar to a protest against the dictator regime of Iran.

On this Blog we read about the times and the places for the demonstrations also the bloger is alsking from every one to spread the word on this event also the freedom movements in Iran!

Minwhile According to a pool conducted inside of Iran(See the Link ) Many in Iran also do not support the Nuclear path that the regime of Tehran is taking.

Link