Does Letter Prove Iran Election Fraud?
(CBS/YouTube)
Two prominent Iranian film makers have asked European countries not to acknowledge the legitimacy of Iran's June 12 elections, claiming a letter proves the results were fabricated.
Marjane Satrapi (at left), who was behind the acclaimed animated feature film "Persepolis," and filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf addressed a gathering of Green Party members of the European Parliament on Tuesday and presented a letter which they claim shows the real vote count from the disputed election.
A video posted on YouTube shows the two addressing the meeting in Farsi and English (the Farsi remarks are translated, so don't stop watching when you fail to hear a recognizable word right away). Makhmalbaf is reportedly a known acquaintance of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.
The letter they present to the MEPs has been circulated for several days, but its contents cannot be verified. It is claimed the letter was a confidential note sent by Iran's Interior Minister (the Interior Ministry is in charge of running elections in the country) to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.IranWatch: Track the latest on the Iran election upheaval
Below is the complete text of the letter, dated June 13, translated by CBS News:
Salaam Aleikum.
Following your concerns regarding the results of the presidential election and per your given discretion to have Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remain as president during this sensitive juncture. Therefore, everything has been planned in a way that the public announcement will be made in accordance with the interests of the regime and the revolution. All necessary precautions have been taken to deal with any unexpected events of election aftermath and the intense monitoring of all the parties' leaders as well as the election candidates.
However, for your information, the real votes counted are as follows:
Total number of votes: 43,026,078
Mir Hossein Mousavi: 19,075,623
Mehdi Karoubi 13,387,104
Mhmoud Ahmadinejad: 5,698,417
Muhsen Rezai: 3,754,218
Void: 38,716
Minister of Interior
Sadegh Mahsouli
Again, CBS News has no way of verifying the authenticity of the document, which has been widely circulated by Mousavi's supporters. The official results, as announced by the government just hours after polls closed, showed a landslide victory for Ahmadinejad – with more than 60 percent of the vote tally.
Veteran journalist Robert Fisk also reported on the letter Thursday in The Independent.
He asks some very good questions of the purported evidence, photocopies of which have been widely disseminated among opposition supporters.
"Could this letter be a fake? Even if Mr. Mousavi won so many votes, could the colorless Mr. Karroubi have followed only six million votes behind him? And however incredible Mr. Ahmadinejad's officially declared 63 per cent of the vote may have been, could he really — as a man who has immense support among the poor of Iran — have picked up only five-and-a-half million votes?"
There has been little certainty with regard to any of the "facts" to emerge from Iran during the past week. Mr. Fisk probably hit the nail on the head with his following paragraph, which highlights the level to which propaganda is driving this news story:
"The letter may well join the thousands of documents, real and forged, that have shaped Iran's recent history, the most memorable of which were the Irish passports upon which Messers Robert McFarlane and Oliver North travelled to Iran on behalf of the US government in 1986 to offer missiles for hostages. The passports were real – and stolen – but the identities written onto the document were fake. Mr. Ahmadinejad's loyalists will undoubtedly blame "foreigners" for the "letter" to Ayatollah Khamenei. But its electrifying effect on the Mousavi camp will only help to transform suspicion into the absolute conviction that their leader was quite deliberately deprived of the presidency."
Most of the news stories I've read coming from Iran over the last two years posted in American and foreign newspapers indicate that Mr. Ahmadinejad is greatly disliked by his fellow Iranians! This 'official' letter tally lends support to that belief!
And, is it so hard to figure out why?! He's an extremist, heavy-handed politician!
It makes sense that there's a couple other popular leaders who have broad appeal and that would out poll him! By these figures? Possibly!
An important question is: who did they get the letter from?
Personally, I think the letter is probably valid. I believe Mr. Ahmadinejad was easily defeated, but he's being "kept" in office!
SO, here we are in the 21st century, and leaders continue to "rig" elections in order to attain power! Does anybody REALLY believe
Bush, Putin, OR now, Mr. Ahmadinejad, were elected and didn't STEAL
their offices---I DON'T!
The separation of Church and State is a bad idea for the survival of the planet. The only risk the nuclear technology that has come about from the advancements of Progressive / aka "liberals", getting into the hands of the faithful knuckle draggers.
Show me one religious state that has advanced beyond the Dark Ages.
interesting
by curse914 June 18, 2009 5:58 AM PDT
You know it is really hard to come up with one.
It's like the perpetuators of it are assuming the rest of us are blind and ignorant. Telling western readers what they want to hear is no great effort. What's sickening is the amount of U.S. dollars devoted to this effort, and a slap-in-the-face reminder of why tax-paer supported lobbyist efforts like AIPAC are the nails in the coffin of American democracy.
Where in the article are you the individual not left to determine for yourself that this letter that was widely distributed in Iran, valid or not, is worthy of our attention? The propogandist would claim it to be trus sans caveats.
Letters are so hard to fake,videos too-has Bin Laden spoken out on this yet?
Riots are easy to instigate when you have agent provocateurs.
Iran had an election-ITS OVER-give it a rest.
Another factor that the press does not seem to want to address is that pre election polls only had Mousavi at 14%. nobody seems to care about that. The majority in Iran don't like the west, don't want reform, have a very good standard of living compaired to others in the region and therefore don't want change. The only Iranians who want change are the students and some of the urban population, which is only a small part of the total population. Granted the students will gain influence as they get older but they don't have the numbers yet.
I would like to see change in Iran, but as an American it is not my place to decide their leaders, it is up to the Iranian majority. Before you buy into the stolen election junk read up on the country and the region. you'll learn that the majority don't like change and are not comfortable with freedom.
That said I don't believe he got any 62% of the vote either.
Not that it matters to Iran, Iran's nuclear program or Iran's relationship with the US who won. The real seat of power is in the hands of an extremely fundementalist group of elite Shaira enthusiasts that have absolute control of Iran's social, economic and foreign policies. Khamenei has repeatedly stressed strict adherence to fundementalist Islamic ideology takes precedence over pragmatism so no matter who ends up victor, there will be little substantive change in Iran's presentation to the world.
Nuclear enrichment will continue unabated. For what purposes we can only guess.
The economy will still limp on only one good leg; Iran will still deal with a 15 to 30% unemployment rate.
The educated middle class, such of it that still exists there, will still chafe under increasingly restrictive measures that constrain private morality and personal freedoms.
Freedom of religious expression will still be a fantasy.
There will still be an almost uncrossable divide between the extremely wealthy and dirt poor. It's as bad over there as it is here.
If Iran is to realize the "change we can believe in" that we sought in 2008 the entire concept of "Islamic Revolution" will have to be drastically altered. This does not necessarily mean cozying up to the West; nor does it mean Iran must completely separate Church from State (Great Britain hasn't). But it does mean the state machinery must operate at a level of independence from the church that is far greater than that which exists now. It does mean the ceramic like inflexibility of the Mullahs' interpretation of Islam will have to modify and it also means they will have to surrender much of the power they now have.
Only then will it matter who won.
The ultimate irony is that the media spends all this time worrying about Iran's election fraud, but not our own homegrown epic fraud. Here we have a President who refuses to produce even the most basic documents to prove who he is or where he was born, as all the best evidence shows he was born in Kenya, thus making him ineligible for the job. Yet the media and our leaders have buried the story. Why?
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=98546
Read and educate yourself.
______
Must you people spew your lies on every thread?
I hope this letter is legit, and the wave keeps going in favor of Mousavi. The councel that dedides who is the Supreme Leader can't be happy with the way HE, and his henchman have mucked this election up.
Time for a new Supreme leader kids.
Not that it would change Iran ALL that much, but it's a start.
Ahmadinejad is just a slimy character! I say ALL military support should pull out of Iran, we already have sanctions against them by the the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC)do not allow them to come to the USA, do not even allow them to take connecting flights through other country and let them kill each other, which is exactly what they are doing.
Let ALL military forces get out and let the Iranians destroy each other that way they can blame no one but themselves.
Back then in the USA, the other guy won the election, but the right-wing Supreme Court pulled some funny-logic out of its rear and gave the election to the right-wing idiot cowboy from Texas.
We and the world had to suffer with him and his crack-pot war-mongering Nazis for the next 8 years!
Today in Iran, its the same thing, only its the Islamic clerics, THEIR RELIGIOUS-RIGHT, trying to shove their version of George W. Bush on them for another term.
BUT, unlike us here back in 2000, the Iranians AREN'T having any of it!!!
When will politicians learn that they are answerable to the PEOPLE, not to business, not their religious beliefs, or not their own wrapped agenda!!!
HAIL OBAMA????
Didn't Dan Rather and CBS learn anything?
Crappy editing and unrestrained reporting have become the norm.
Lastly, why is it of such importance to the western media to even be concerned about it, the only people who have any right whatsoever to even consider the matter are the Iranians, it is an internal matter, and no business of any other country.
The aroma of western "covert" interference wafts on the winds...
An international commission could come into Iran and quickly determine who actually won but since that will not be allowed, the world can only believe that the election results are fake.
The US allowed foreigners to monitor elections in 2004 after the questions on GW Bush's first term election so if the US has no problem with it, no other so called "democratic" country should either.
One of the key principles of democracy is openess and checks and balances.
One of the reasons America accepted a second Bush term was the monitoring and audits by outside parties verfied the results as legitimate.
could in anyway verify the results were legitimate. Most states were and
are using voting machines that have no paper trail, and offer no independent
assessment or way of assessing the legitimacy of the one vote per registered
voter count taken by computer software driven polling machines. There are
even places that can't even tell you if every vote was made by an American
citizen.
Couple that with the fact that the entire world and Democrats were highly
motivated to take Bush out of office, and in turn voted in RECORD BREAKING
numbers. The unfortunate curiosity is that Republicans apparently managed
to vote Bush for a second term in a HISTORICAL RECORD BREAKING NUMBER OF
VOTES FOR ANY PRESIDENT IN ALL OF HISTORY despite the intense unpopularity
of this President in 2004.
You'll have to identify those "outside parties" of which I'm unware and
you are referring to, or I'll have to assume you are fabricating this.
Lying with the caps lock button on only makes the lie more visible.
"The Media Consortium hired the National Opinion Research Center to examine 175,010 ballots that were never counted in Florida. The investigation took 8 months and cost $900,000. No matter what standard for judging ballots is applied, Gore wins.
Miami Herald Statewide Count of "Undervotes" and "Overvotes" Proves Gore Won by 662
Without counting a single hanging or dimpled chad, Gore won by 662, according to the Miami Herald. The votes below were crystal clear votes as determined by the Herald's accounting firm, BDO Seidman. Under Florida law, all of these ballots should have been counted by election officials on Election Day. Their failure to do so is Official Misconduct, not "Voter Error" (Btw, the Herald was a neo, pro-Bush paper)
If every county in Florida - not just the Republican ones - had state-of-the-art voting machines that allowed voters to correct their mistakes, Al Gore would have won by 46,466."
This is verified by independent analysts, btw, and for your info, the recount was halted by the Supreme court, because it held that a recount should be held in similar fashion for all disputed counties, and that there was not enough time to recount manually, before the deadline when results had to be certified.
fixed it with countless lawyer challenges.
Im Glad Iran is giving their Version of SHRUB a black eye with their protests.
Something we should have done in 2000
What, that religion offers only stagnation? I offer up Iran as exhibit A.
Show me one religious state that has advanced beyond the Dark Ages.
Staying in the Dark Ages suites them just fine, as long as they can use their religion to impose their will on everyone else.
American chrisitians act just like the Islamic radicals do.
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by jwesel1
June 19, 2009 5:03 PM EDT
- Before the 2004 elections, the CEO of Diebold that manufactures voting machines told the conference of Republican voters that there's no way Republicans will lose the election. This is why there is never a paper printout of a vote after it is cast. They described it as technically not possible. The caveat is that Diebold is the same company that manufactures ATMs that alway print out the transaction record. US should first clean up its act before pointing fingers at others.
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