5. Then came all the usual disinformation media hypes, and outright lies or false reports without retractions afterward:
5a. First was the "too fast vote count" charge, "impossible to have counted the votes in so short a time!" cried anchors. This was an easy sell to a US public used to complicated elections with many positions to be filled. But in Iran the Presidential election is solely for the presidency, and each ballot cast has only one check mark to count, done electronically since the last two elections.
5b. CNN anchors repeat over and over again that Ahmadinejad receiving 62% is "unbelievable," but as Paul Craig Roberts wrote, "As Mousavi was seen as Rafsanjani's man, why is it "unbelievable" that Ahmadinejad defeated Mousavi by the same margin that he defeated Rafsanjani in the previous election?"
5c. CNN reports that some "Iran experts" argue that Mousavi's Azeri background and "Azeri accent" mean that he was guaranteed to win Iran's Azeri-majority provinces; since Ahmadinejad did better than Mousavi in these areas, fraud is the only possible explanation.
"The breadth of Ahmadinejad' s support was apparent in our pre-election survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi."
Paul Craig Roberts reported this in Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran?, Counterpunch, 6/25/09
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts06162009.html
"Ahmadinejad himself speaks Azeri quite fluently as a consequence of his eight years serving as a popular and successful official in two Azeri-majority provinces; during the campaign, he artfully quoted Azeri and Turkish poetry -- in the original -- in messages designed to appeal to Iran's Azeri community. (And we should not forget that the supreme leader is Azeri.) The notion that Mousavi was somehow assured of victory in Azeri-majority provinces is simply not grounded in reality." wrote Flynt Leverett with Hillary Mann Leverett in Ahmadinejad Won, Get Over It, June 15, '09, New America Foundation.
5d. "The Election Commission announced that there were 3 million false votes!" cried CNN and the Times." Not true! The announcement Election Commission had reported that there were a total of 3 million votes in the districts to be recounted to satisfy charges filed, and that even if all 3 million were awarded to Mousavi, it would make no difference since that would only reduce Ahmadinejad's lead to 8 million.
5e. CNN, Wolf Blitzer laughing with a sneer, "Apparently in many polling places the total votes cast exceeded the number of register voters! (chuckle)." But not as in the States, Iranians can vote in any of the thousands of polling places in the nation with just their identity cards. Any citizen on vacation or visiting parents in another town need not return to where they reside normally, and can cast their ballot wherever they might be.
5f. "They (the taken for granted, the bad government thugs, for sure) shot this beautiful young lady." Replayed and replayed without doubt that it was done by someone in employ of the government and not a paid provocateur. "When that beautiful girl was shot after getting out of her car she was not near any demonstration", noted the Iranian Ambassador to Mexico speaking on CNN Mexico (not picked up by U.S. CNN), "yet there was, conveniently for the pro-Mousavi forces, someone taking pictures". He spoke of the trajectory of the bullet and its manufacture and an ongoing investigation.
Anyone who has read up on details of CIA methods chronicled by CIA defectors describing programed riots with planted false rumors in CIA established publications, frightening from both sides, hired demonstrators for two confronting sides, noticed immediately whose side her death benefited, and the lump in everyone's throat over the sickening death of a young woman bystander, no matter who shot her, is accompanied by a suspicion of possible provocateur involvement. One felt anger, that regardless of who fired the shot, the events leading to her death all began with Mousavi crying, "I won!" before any results were announced.
CNN was obviously favoring coverage to show a strictly one-sided story, but not all attempts of Iranian police to persuade peacefully escaped cell phone camera peripheral coverage.
5g. Within weeks, media switched away from a focus on a "fraudulent vote count', morphing it into a theme of "the people of Iran want a revolution' and then on to "women rights on dress code', as if previous presidents Rafsanjni and Khatami, and former Prime Minister Mousavi had not been enforcing the dress code and running a brutal prison system during their 16 years in office preceding Ahmadinejad.
5h. the reporting of cries of., "We want be more friendly to the world" from demonstrators, rather striking sentiments since the vast majority of Iranians are very much aware that the West (England and US and now its European satellite NATO) have never been friendly to Iran, quite the contrary, for interest in controlling Iran's oil). Was this "more friendly to the world a coded slogan for "more friendly to the world's superpower and meaning that the protesters were longing for a U.S. life style, unregulated private banking and the kind of unrestricted commercial investment freedom the Iranian capitalists are being denied? It does not seem a credible desire for Iranians "of all walks of life," who know of U.S. backing Saddam's war against Iran and what happened to a beloved historical nationalist figure, Mohammed Mosaddeq.
5j. The news anchors keep crediting the new technology of cell phone cameras and Twitter as enhancing communication and exposure for the demonstrators. According to Thierry Meyssan in the Swiss newspaper Zeit-Fragen, the CIA used SMS or text messaging and Twitter to spread disinformation about the Iranian election, including the false report that the Guardian Council had
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