Neda Agha-Soltan, The Angel of Iran (1982-2009)

FOR THE FIRST TIME HER PARENTS SPEAK OUT

Music posters still hang on the walls; stuffed animals decorate a twin bed in the corner of the room. Clothes lie neatly folded in the closet.

Neda Agha-Soltan's bedroom in Iran remains practically untouched since the day she died.

A little more than a week away from the one-year anniversary of her death on June 20, 2009, Neda's family refuses to forget their daughter's spirit.

Journalist Saeed Kamali Dehghan traveled to Tehran to interview Neda's relatives in their home for a new documentary on her life and her tragic death.

HBO's new documentary, "For Neda," tells the personal story of the woman who unwittingly became the symbol of the post-election reform movement in Iran when her death was captured on a cell phone video and shown around the world.

"She is any girl, anywhere, but this just wasn't anywhere," the film's producer and director, Antony Thomas, told CNN. "I wanted to show the people who demonstrated, whatever happened, that their courage has not been forgotten."

Not able to find a professional camera crew that would accept the assignment, Kamali Dehghan, a print journalist who had never handled a movie camera before, took a two-day crash course and smuggled a camera into the country.

link | HBO documentary will debut in U.S. at 9 p.m. ET Monday.

Neda Agha-Soltan The Angel of Iran(1982-2009)
Originally uploaded by AtomicJukebox.com

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She was 'like an angel'

Neda's mother: She was 'like an angel' - CNN.com

The night before she was killed on the streets of Tehran, the woman the world would come to know simply as Neda had a dream. "There was a war going on," she told her mom the next morning, "and I was in the front."

"People go and write on her grave in red ink the word 'martyr,'" she said, "and then the authorities go and wipe it off." MORE »

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Why We Protest - IRAN

Even if a ballot is silenced, the voice behind it cannot be.

The people behind the brunt of Iran Twitter information. link

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Tehran morgue demands 'bullet fee' for release of body

What kind of no-good sorry bastard thinks that killing someone is not enough pain to inflict on one family?

"Damn, I've only just killed her. What else can I do to wig her family the fuck out?"

The family of a 19-year-old Iranian killed during clashes between security forces and protesters says officials demanded a $3,000 "bullet fee" before they could claim his body at the morgue, The Wall Street Journal reports.

link

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Poem From the Rooftops of Iran

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Enough Fear

IRANIANS AND AMERICANS SAY NO TO WAR




Enough Fear



How to dismantle an atomic crisis



Seymour Hersh writes an article in the New Yorker. President George W. Bush makes a statement to the press in Washington. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issues a letter from Tehran. But there is something missing from this debate: the voices of the people with the most to lose.



This is a campaign to bring the voices of Iranians and Americans into a discussion that is being dominated by extremists on both sides and bringing us closer to the unthinkable: nuclear war. Our leaders continue to rattle their sabers and spread fear, but we're ready to talk, and if they won't take that first step, we will take it for them. We've had enough. Enough posturing. Enough threats. Enough fear.

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The botched US raid that led to the hostage crisis

Are we supposed to believe what we see on television about the Iran/British captured soldiers situation? I don't ask that you believe as I do. I want you to get more than one view.

Most of tv, if not all, is agenda-based. Some television may have detergent or votes to hawk which is expected. It's the demagogue driven television I worry about and is why we're asked to turn off our tv sets from time to time. If US television is where you get most of your news, you're right to be asked to turn it off. If you're wise enough to go outside the US for your news, I admire you for that. It wasn't easy before the internet with all it's global perspectives. So all this blabbering preface brings me to an article I saw on Independent, a British newspaper.

The botched US raid that led to the hostage crisis

Exclusive Report: How a bid to kidnap Iranian security officials sparked a diplomatic crisis

By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 03 April 2007

A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Better understanding of the seriousness of the US action in Arbil - and the angry Iranian response to it - should have led Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence to realise that Iran was likely to retaliate against American or British forces such as highly vulnerable Navy search parties in the Gulf. The two senior Iranian officers the US sought to capture were Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, according to Kurdish officials.

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Hersh: New Pentagon Unit Developing Contingency Plan To Bomb Iran

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh reports that a special Pentagon unit has been charged in recent months with developing plans for U.S. air attacks on Iran. From Reuters:

Despite the Bush administration’s insistence it has no plans to go to war with Iran, a Pentagon panel has been created to plan a bombing attack that could be implemented within 24 hours of getting the go-ahead from President George W. Bush, The New Yorker magazine reported in its latest issue.

The special planning group was established within the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in recent months, according to an unidentified former U.S. intelligence official cited in the article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in the March 4 issue. via

THE REDIRECTION
Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

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Filibuster to End the War Now!

It Only Takes 41 Senate Votes to End the War. Republicans Show the Way.

Filibuster to End the War Now!

By JOHN V. WALSH

We hear over and over again that it "takes 60 votes to get something serious done in the Senate." That is a lot of malarkey. It takes only one senator to begin a filibuster against any bill. And then it takes only 41 votes to uphold that filibuster and prevent any proposed law from coming to the floor.

Thus, the present authorization for defense funding in the coming fiscal year can be stopped cold if it contains funds for the war on Iraq. And this can be done by just one courageous Senator, backed by 40 colleagues.

Let me propose the following scenario. Just one Senator, Ted Kennedy or Russ Feingold or Robert Byrd, arises in the Senate and declares that he will filibuster the present defense authorization bill if it contains funds for the war on Iraq or Iran. That bill is then dead unless there are 60 votes (3/5 of the 100 Senators) to end the debate, i.e., to invoke cloture. That is it. Bush no longer has the funds to prosecute the war. He has to come back with a funding bill acceptable to the 41.

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SOTU Drinking Game

I always think these games are right-on about the predictable buzzwords or talking points that are mentioned. Especially when the "sectarian violence", the pseudonym for civil war, is used.

SOTU Drinking Game 2007

Every time he says.... - # of Drinks

“The state of our union is strong…” (or some version of this) - 1,+1 if he breaks down in tears

"the American people" - 1

troops - small 1

surge - quick 1

Iraq - 1

Baghdad - 1

"sectarian violence" - 1 Car Bomb recipe

Iran - 1

terror (however itÂ’s pronounced) - small 1

detainees - 1, with your hands behind your back

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - 2 (+1 if he pronounces it correctly)

Saddam Hussein or Saddam - 1

elections - 1 if referring to another country's, 2 if referring to the 2006 midterms

freedom - 1

Homeland - 1 if followed by "Security"; 2 if another context

"Bring it on" - Arm-wrestle the person next to you; loser drinks

MORE//

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Chicago 10 - Bringing a Political Trial to Animated Life

The trial of the Chicago Eight was the quintessential political trial and an animated account just doesn't do it for me. What's to stop an upcoming Scopes trial in 3D or an Iran-Contra/Watergate mashup?

(The Chicago 7 + Bobby Seale + 2 attys = Chicago 10)

link

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WATCHING LEBANON - Washington's interests in Israel's war. --by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

The White House was more focused on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran's nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.

..."If the most dominant military force in the region the 'Israel Defense Forces' can't pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million," Armitage said. "The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis."

...A former intelligence officer said, "We told Israel, 'Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.' "

link

More truth on laying the foundation for a war with Iran. Hersh always cuts through the mountains of bullshit and also has an incredible way of getting people of the highest ranks to confide in him.

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Some of the US's most reliable voices are weighing in on the impending Iran invasion.

Bombs That Would Backfire
by Richard Clarke and Steven Simon

The parallels (to Iran) to the run-up to to war with Iraq are all too striking: remember that in May 2002 President Bush declared that there was "no war plan on my desk" despite having actually spent months working on detailed plans for the Iraq invasion. Congress did not ask the hard questions then. It must not permit the administration to launch another war whose outcome cannot be known, or worse, known all too well.

Link

Kucinich to Bush: evidence that US military is ALREADY in IRAN
by robelicit

WASHINGTON - Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH), Ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, sent the following letter to President George W. Bush today about the presence of US troops in Iran:

Dear President Bush:
Recently, it has been reported that U.S. troops are conducting military operations in Iran. If true, it appears that you have already made the decision to commit U.S. military forces to a unilateral conflict with Iran, even before direct or indirect negotiations with the government of Iran had been attempted, without UN support and without authorization from the U.S. Congress. [More...]


Will Bush come clean about Iran? The most secretive administration in all of history come clean about something? Not until we see our soldiers in Iran on the 6 O'Clock News. They're probably moving ships into position, setting up ports and air space details, bringing in supplies, etc. This is the fugliest deja-vu I've ever experienced.

Link

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I couldn't be in politics. I don't have the thick skin for it. It's a little wimpy but I can't even read that Seymour Hersch New Yorker piece without crying. It's a long article, but here's what got me in the solar plexus:

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was "absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb" if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do," and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy."

And that's just for starters. We know Bush is a stooge, but he has a messianic vision and that vision makes him extremely dangerous.

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Web Trail | Impending Iran attack?, Low-Fat bOING bOING, Bare Care, Pass the PDR, Busted, Iknow Eno

Inevitable Iran Attack? The official excuse for the attack is the possible nuclear weapons program in Iran: ex-CIA agents Paul Pillar and Ellen Laipson as well as retired United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix state that if Iran were really trying to build atom bombs, then the most effective way to stop this would be a guarantee from the US and Israel not to attack Iran. [MORE...]

The popular bOING bOING is a good website in part because they have something for everyone. But there are some topics that just don't interest me - particularly the tech stuff that's way over my head. And that's where bOING bOING LITE comes in.

McSweeney's Career Days is very funny with a Memo
To: All Employees
From: Paul Pell, President and CEO, Die Mold Industries Inc.

Bush BUSTED!

Please Call Home is the working title of a feature-length documentary about the Big House -- the Macon, Ga., residence in which the Allman Brothers Band lived during the early '70s.

About 35 UC San Diego students stripped to their underwear – and in some cases, wore nothing but poster boards – yesterday to persuade university administrators to adopt more stringent labor codes for the manufacturing of all university licensed apparel. [More...]

And goes running for the shelter... - Alcibiades Dream a clinical, but honest account of a drug user in college.

Did You Know?
Brian Eno did the Windows 95 startup sound.

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"US prepares military blitz against Iran's nuclear sites."

Putting this info out there is the equivalent to the Bush taking off his shirt, handing someone his jacket and saying, "Let's dance, Iran!"

Does it feel like Preznit Redneck wants to kick everyone's ass? Not your best quality in a world leader. [/shudders]

The moves of a desperate man? His ratings have fallen to an all-time low of 34%.

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War pimp alert:

Frist says military action a posssibility against Iran:

Asked whether Congress had the political will to use military force against Iran if necessary, First said: "The answer is yes, absolutely." [more...]
(via infocleho)

His every move is blatantly posturing for head idiot of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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WEBTRAIL - Gimp Nipples, Truthiness, War Pimp, David Blaine, CribCandy, and Buns

War pimp alert: U.S. President George Bush, speaking at a Washington press conference, said: "Iran armed with a nuclear weapon poses a great threat to the security of the world. Second verse (Iran)-- Same as the first (Iraq).
[MORE...]

David Blaine. Master magician or master of deceit? Like him or not, did you know he had a treasure hunt and gave away a 100k prize a few years ago? Link. And I see that he's also a blogger. Interesting.

"Somebody get a bucket, I think I'm gonna Truth!" Stephen Colbert's episodes featuring all his Wørds of the day on "The Wørd" and his (Usually) Truthy Intros. [MORE...]

Here at Comfortstand, we decided to celebrate the changing of the year by asking artists from all over the world to take the song most associated in people's minds with New Years Eve (the old Scottish song 'Auld Lang Syne'), and to provide their interpretations of the tune.
Link

From Comforstand I followed a link to a MySpace site of a band by the name of Gimp Nipples. Quite an innovative name, wouldn't you say? Just what visual would you have to experience to come up with a name like that? Shudders.

Crib Candy has cool stuff for your home from the kitschy to the practical to the eco-friendly. via: thumbmonkey

I don't want buns of steel. I want buns of cinnamon.

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"Nuclear War Against Iran"

By Michel Chossudovsky
globalresearch.ca
1-5-06

The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran is now in the final planning stages.

Coalition partners, which include the US, Israel and Turkey are in "an advanced stage of readiness".

Various military exercises have been conducted, starting in early 2005. In turn, the Iranian Armed Forces have also conducted large scale military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf in December in anticipation of a US sponsored attack.

Since early 2005, there has been intense shuttle diplomacy between Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara and NATO headquarters in Brussels.

In recent developments, CIA Director Porter Goss on a mission to Ankara, requested Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan "to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets." Goss reportedly asked " for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation." (DDP, 30 December 2005).

In turn, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given the green light to the Israeli Armed Forces to launch the attacks by the end of March:

All top Israeli officials have pronounced the end of March, 2006, as the deadline for launching a military assault on Iran.... The end of March date also coincides with the IAEA report to the UN on Iran's nuclear energy program. Israeli policymakers believe that their threats may influence the report, or at least force the kind of ambiguities, which can be exploited by its overseas supporters to promote Security Council sanctions or justify Israeli military action. [More]

I used to think that Nixon was the worst president I'd ever voted against. This seed was planted ages ago and after the prerequiste amount of fear-mongering, the public will be aggitated enough to support this assault, too. If the latest news on an impending strike on Iran doesn't worry you, you may not have a pulse.

[Link - via Zim Zalabim]

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George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke.

Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.

It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability. [MORE...]

Go Cheney yourself, Dick. Just how does a soul-less stooge who's driven by greed and power get away with so much for so long? How he still has supporters astounds me.

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