From The BBC News

Iranian riot police are reported to have arrested a number of pro-reform protesters in Tehran after demonstrations turned violent.

Police clashed with hundreds of people marching despite a ban on public gatherings since the disputed election in June, Reuters news agency said.

The re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sparked widespread protests and allegations of vote-rigging.

Defeated candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi has continued to contest the result.

Mr Mousavi has issued statements opposing the election result, saying detention of protesters would not end opposition.

Power protest

The latest reports of clashes in the streets came as pro-reform supporters planned to stage a new form of protest.

Activists are being urged to turn off lights and domestic appliances at 2055 local time (1625 GMT).

Five minutes later, at 2100, they then plan to switch on appliances that consume large amounts of electricity, such as irons, toasters and microwave ovens.

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From TruthOut
By Norman Solomon

When approaching Iran, the Republican Party line and the Hugo Chavez line are running in opposite directions – but parallel. The leadership of GOP reaction and the leadership of Bolivarian revolution have bought into the convenient delusion that long-suffering Iranian people require assistance from the US government to resist the regime in Tehran.

Inside Iran, advocates for reform and human rights have long pleaded for the US government to keep out of Iranian affairs. After the CIA organized the coup that overthrew Iran’s democracy in 1953, Washington kept the Shah in power for a quarter-century. When I was in Tehran four years ago, during the election that made Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president, what human rights activists most wanted President Bush to do was shut up.

But Bush played to the same kind of peanut gallery that is now applauding the likes of Sen. John McCain. The Bush White House denigrated the 2005 election just before the balloting began – to the delight of the hardest-line Iranian fundamentalists. The ultra-righteous Bush rhetoric gave a significant boost to Ahmadinejad’s campaign.

Denunciations and threats from Washington are the last thing that Iran’s reform advocates want. And Iranians certainly don’t need encouragement from Uncle Sam to do what they can to bring about democratic change.

John McCain doesn’t get it. And neither does Hugo Chavez.

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From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

Iran’s current political divisions can be traced back to a controversy nearly three decades ago when Iran faced war with Iraq and became entwined with U.S. and Israeli political maneuvers that set all three countries on a dangerous course that continues to this day.

In the election dispute now gripping the streets of Tehran, Iran is experiencing a revival of the internal rivalries born in the judgments made in 1980 and later that decade about how and whether to deal with the Little Satan (Israel) and the Great Satan (the United States).

Former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, who claims he is the rightful winner of the June 12 presidential election, was part of the group (along with his current allies former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former House Speaker Mehdi Karoubi) that favored secret contacts with the United States and Israel to get the military supplies needed to fight the war with Iraq.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s current spiritual leader and the key supporter of reelected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was more the ideological purist in the early 1980s, apparently opposing the unorthodox strategy that involved going behind President Carter’s back to gain promises of weapons from Israel and the future Reagan administration.

Khamenei appears to have favored a more straightforward arrangement with the Carter administration for settling the dispute over 52 American hostages seized by Iranian radicals in 1979.

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From The Asia Times
By Ali Gharib

After 30 years of enmity closed off most lines of communication, the recent crisis in Iran has suddenly engendered a boom of American interest in the Islamic Republic.

But much of the attention in Washington and elsewhere in the US is often misplaced, misguided, or completely detached from the realities currently embroiling Iran in its most significant crisis since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

United States diplomatic relations with the nascent Islamic Republic were severed after a hostage crisis, when a group of Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and held many of its occupants hostage for 444 days.

Since then, few significant steps have been taken towards repairing relations, and the remaining contacts between the US and Iran atrophied as US experts with firsthand knowledge of Iran grew older and their knowledge grew more obsolete.

“[The revolution] was 30 years ago,” said ambassador Nick Burns, a former State Department under secretary for political affairs in the George W Bush administration. “We have a whole generation of foreign service officers who didn’t learn Farsi.”

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From The NY Times
By Alan Cowell

As Iran’s embattled opposition leader said he would “not back down for a second” in challenging the disputed elections, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told President Obama on Thursday to avoid interfering in Iran’s affairs and demanded an apology from the American leader for striking the same critical tones as his predecessor, George W. Bush.

The sharp words offered no prospect of eased tensions between Washington and Tehran at a time of profound differences over issues such as Iran’s nuclear program and its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, which the United States calls terrorist organizations.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments, quoted on the semi-official Fars news agency, came as at least three Iranian newspapers reported that only 105 of 290 members of the Iranian Parliament invited to a victory party for him Wednesday night actually attended the event, suggesting a deep divide within the political elite over the election and its aftermath. Neither the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, nor the deputy speaker, Mohammed Reza Bahonar, an erstwhile ally of Mr. Ahmadinejad, made an appearance.

Opposition figures said Thursday that 70 academics had been arrested after meeting with the main opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, on Wednesday, adding to a wave of detentions that has been depicted as the most sweeping since the Iranian revolution in 1979. But Mr. Moussavi said Thursday in a Web posting: “’I will not back down even for a second, even for personal threats or interests.”

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From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Maybe you were there when Neda died.

If you were, you saw a tragedy, of course, a 26-year-old Iranian protester gunned down in the streets. But I am convinced you also saw the future — a profound change in the way you and I will henceforth comprehend the world.

Many of us — your humble correspondent prominent among them — have been less than impressed with the ubiquity of social-networking Web sites. Spurred by reports of congresspersons who tweet banalities during a presidential speech, of cyberbullying and flash mobs, we have regarded them as an engine of vanity and inanity, a mirror reflecting the utter vapidity of much of American life and culture.

In this judgment, we have been exactly right. And also exactly wrong.

This is not to say that social-networking media have not been guilty of dumbing down the discourse. But it is to admit the obvious lesson of recent days: They can facilitate higher purposes as well. For this reality, the cause of human freedom can be grateful.

After all, when angry Iranian voters took to the streets to protest a stolen presidential election last week and were clubbed and shot in retaliation, the events could easily have been a non-story in the rest of the world, given that Iran had placed heavy restrictions on foreign reporters. But what the theocratic regime had not counted on was that ordinary Iranians armed with camcorders, laptops and cellphones would document the unrest or that it would make its way to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other Web places where people connect.

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From The Raw Story

Iran’s under-fire President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tuesday sat side-by-side with world leaders at a summit in Russia, defiantly proclaiming the age of empires had ended and attacking the United States.

In a show of confidence after the worst riots in his country in a decade, Ahmadinejad made no mention of the violence or his hotly disputed reelection victory in his address to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

“The international capitalist order is retreating,” the controversial president told world leaders, including Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and China’s Hu Jintao, in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg.

“It is absolutely obvious that the age of empires has ended and its revival will not take place.”

A broadly-smiling Ahmadinejad, wearing a dark suit and as usual no tie, earlier shook hands with a beaming Medvedev before the leaders went into the second day of the summit.

Whether Ahmadinejad — who has a habit of stealing the limelight at such events — would turn up had become a source of intrigue after he postponed his planned arrival on Monday following unrest over his disputed election victory.

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From Tom Dispatch
By Roane Carey

Israel has been steadily ratcheting up pressure on the United States concerning the grave threat allegedly posed by Iran, which seems poised to master the nuclear fuel cycle, and thus the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. The new Israeli prime minister, Likud Party hawk Benjamin Netanyahu, has warned President Barack Obama that if Washington does not quickly find a way to shut down Iran’s nuclear program, Israel will.

Some analysts argue that this is manufactured hysteria, not so much a reflection of genuine Israeli fears as a purposeful diversion from other looming difficulties. The Netanyahu government is filled with hardliners adamantly opposed to withdrawal from, or even a temporary freeze on, settlements in the occupied territories, not to mention to any acceptance of Palestinian statehood. On his first day as foreign minister, extremist demagogue Avigdor Lieberman, with characteristic bluster, announced that Israel was no longer bound by the 2007 Annapolis agreements brokered by Washington, which called for accelerated negotiations toward a two-state settlement.

Such talk threatens to lead the Israelis directly into a clash with the Obama administration. In what can only be taken as a rebuttal of the Netanyahu government’s recent pronouncements, in his speech to the Turkish Parliament Obama pointedly reasserted Washington’s commitment to a two-state settlement and to the Annapolis understandings. So what better way for Netanyahu to avoid an ugly clash with a popular American president than to conveniently shift the discussion to an existential threat from Iran — especially if he can successfully present it as a threat not just to Israel but to the West in general?

All of this adds up to a plausible argument against undue alarm over the latest Israeli warnings about an attack on Iran, but it’s flawed on several grounds. There is a broad, generally accepted paranoia in Israel about Iran, a belief that its leaders must be stopped before they proceed much further in their uranium enrichment program. (This view is not shared on the Israeli left, but it’s now a ghost of its former self.)

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From The LA Times
By Ali Akbar Javanfekr

Writing From Tehran — On March 20, at the start of the Persian New Year, President Obama delivered a speech offering “the promise of a new beginning” in relations between the U.S. and Iran. But Obama also told Iranian leaders that the right to be part of the world’s “community of nations” came with responsibilities and could not be achieved “through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions.” An aide to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad submitted this Op-Ed article in response to Obama’s speech.

President George W. Bush’s actions during his time in office generated hatred and mistrust of the U.S. throughout the world. But in fairness, he was also one of the most honest American presidents, because his deeds and words matched.

America’s Democratic Party has historically been less honest than its rival Republican Party. I hope President Obama can change this approach and that he will turn out to be the most honest U.S. president of all.

Mr. Obama’s recent message to Iran on the occasion of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, contained some encouraging signs — and some negative ones.

The president expressed a willingness to talk openly with Iran’s leaders. This willingness is promising. The Islamic Republic of Iran appreciates friendly behavior that stems from respect and courtesy toward other cultures and nations.

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From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

President Barack Obama and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke past each other in a recent exchange partly because both countries nurse historical grievances against the other and neither has fully acknowledged that mutual history dating back three decades.

For instance, in responding to Obama’s Persian New Year message, Khamenei appeared to reference a top-secret U.S. document in which President Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, described being told by Middle East allies in 1981 that President Jimmy Carter had given a “green light” to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in September 1980.

That “Talking Points” document, which Haig used to brief Reagan, was first revealed at Consortiumnews.com in 1996 after I discovered it among documents left behind by a House task force that had investigated allegations that Reagan’s 1980 campaign contacted Iranian officials behind Carter’s back, the so-called “October Surprise” scandal.

From those early contacts, Reagan’s administration then secretly sanctioned arms shipments to Iran via Israel, a pattern that later merged into the Iran-Contra Affair, according to evidence that has emerged from several investigations of these linked scandals.

After returning from his first Middle East trip in April 1981, Haig wrote in his “Talking Points” that he was impressed with “bits of useful intelligence” that he had learned.

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