THE U.S. NED AGENCY, NIAC AND IRAN

"... One mechanism by which the U.S. interferes in the internal political affairs of other nations is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-governmental agency with funding from both Congress and private individuals whose purpose is to support foreign organizations sympathetic to U.S. foreign policy goals...

"The idea behind NED was to create an organization to do overtly what the CIA had long been doing clandestinely, and the organization has developed its own history of foreign interference. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” acknowledged Allen Weinstein, one of NED’s founders...

"NED is also active in Iran, granting hundreds of thousands of dollars to Iranian groups. From 2005 to 2007, NED gave $345,000 to the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation (ABF). The group claims “no political affiliation” on its website, but is named for the founder of the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance (NAMIR), an opposition group to the clerical regime founded in 1980...

"Another recipient of NED grants is the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which received $25,000 in 2002, $64,000 in 2005, and $107,000 in 2006. The 2002 grant was to carry out a “media training workshop” to train participants representing various civic groups in public relations. The 2005 money was given in part to “strengthen the capacity of civic organizations in Iran,” including by advising Iranian groups on “foreign donor relations.” The 2006 grant was similarly designed to “foster cooperation between Iranian NGOs and the international civil society community and to strengthen the institutional capacity of NGOs in Iran.” The group’s president is Dr. Trita Parsi, whose parents fled political repression in Iran when he was four. He studied for his Doctoral thesis at the Johns Hopkins’ School for Advanced International Studies under Professor Francis Fukuyama.

"Fukuyama wrote in 2007 that “Ahmadinejad may be the new Hitler,” but that the use of military force against Iran “looks very unappealing,” and that airstrikes “would not result in regime change,” which was “the only long-term means of stopping” Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. The NIAC similarly opposes the use of military force against Iran, and instead “supports the idea of resolving the problems between the US and Iran through dialogue in order to avoid war.”

"Following the Iranian election and subsequent violence, NIAC issued a statement saying that “The only plausible way to end the violence is for new elections to be held with independent monitors ensuring its fairness...”

"NIAC president Trita Parsi explained the goal of the U.S. policy by saying, “The administration is trying to make regime change through democratization the policy, instead of making confrontation by military means the policy..."

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2009/06/23/has-the-u-s-played-a-role-in-fomenting-unrest-during-irans-election/

ANALYSIS OF VOTE FRAUD IN IRAN

• In two conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of
more than 100% was recorded.
• At a provincial level, there is no correlation between the increased
turnout and the swing to Ahmadinejad. This challenges the notion that
Ahmadinejad’s victory was due to the massive participation of a
previously silent conservative majority.
• In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that
Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, all former
centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former
Reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two
groups.
• In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and
Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas.
That the countryside always votes conservative is a myth. The claim
that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces
flies in the face of these trends.

The summary of "Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election", published by Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews.

http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/14234_iranelection0609.pdf

OR - NOT FRAUDULENT

"Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin... Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund...

"Iranians view their support for a more democratic system, with normal relations with the United States, as consonant with their support for Ahmadinejad. They do not want him to continue his hard-line policies. Rather, Iranians apparently see Ahmadinejad as their toughest negotiator, the person best positioned to bring home a favorable deal...

"Allegations of fraud and electoral manipulation will serve to further isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence against the outside world... Consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401757_pf.html

FRAUDULENT ELECTION THEORY

"... on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory. The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose. They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts. This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran... The regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two..."
http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/stealing-iranian-election.html

IRAN OPINION POLL

"More than three out of every four Iranian citizens favour improved relations with the United States... Just over half (52 percent) of the pool of 1,001 respondents also said they believed Tehran should develop nuclear weapons, although more than 70 percent said they would support a deal by which the government would agree to forgo that option in exchange for outside aid and investment... Only one in four respondents said they favoured a peace treaty recognising the Jewish state, even with the creation of an independent Palestine alongside it. Sixty-two percent said they opposed any such treaty, while nearly two out of three respondents said they supported Tehran's provision of military and financial aid to Palestinian resistance groups... however, 52 percent said they would support a peace treaty recognising Israel if it were part of a larger deal leading to better relations with Washington..."
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47141

IAEA: IRANIAN ENRICHMENT OUT OF CONTROL

"According to the... International Atomic Energy Agency in its new report, Iran will be able to produce one nuclear bomb by the end of this year, doubling that figure in 2010... The IAEA admits its investigations are stalled in Iran... Iranian officials insist their nuclear program is peaceful and refuse to answer questions or cooperate in any way with UN inspectors. At one point in its new report, the IAEA asked for cameras with different wide-range angles for Natanz, indicating that even there, the Iranians are playing cat and mouse to conceal the real scale of their activities from view..."
http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=6111

IRAN NOT COOPERATING WITH IAEA

"The IAEA... says Iran is continuing to enrich uranium in defiance of the UN Security Council... the IAEA says Iran now has about 7,000 centrifuges - the machines used for enriching uranium. The agency says that Tehran is running almost 5,000 of them. It also says that Iran has boosted its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) by 500kg to more than 1,300kg in the last six months... the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security think-tank has said that Iran now had enough LEU to convert into high-enriched uranium (HEU) to make one atomic bomb... (however) Iran would need to overcome some technical hurdles to achieve this - a process that could take several years or more. A senior official close to the IAEA says the agency has made little progress in its investigations in Iran and in Syria. The agency has urged both countries to co-operate with its inspectors."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8086565.stm