http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html

...the police in Tehran beat and fired tear gas at several thousand protesters who joined a demonstration at a mosque in support of defeated presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi....

(on occasion the NYT gets it right, so it is worth noting!)

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I'd like your opinion on this argument that the Iranian election could not have been stolen with so little evidence remaining:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/28-3

Mark Weisbrot:

" After searching through thousands of news articles without finding any substantive information on the electoral process, I contacted Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who heads the North American Studies department at the University of Teheran. He described the electoral procedures to me, and together we interviewed, by phone, Sayed Moujtaba Davoodi, a poll worker who participated in the June 12 election in region 13 (of 22 regions) in Tehran. Mr. Daboodi has worked in elections for the past 16 years. The following is from their description of the procedures.

According to their account, there are 14 people working at each polling place, in addition to an observer representing each candidate. Most polling places are schools or mosques; if the polling place is a school then the team of 14 people would include teachers. There are 2-4 representatives of the Guardian Council, and 2 from the local police. After the last votes are cast, the ballots are counted in the presence of the 14 people plus the candidates' representatives. All of them sign five documents that contain the vote totals. One of the documents goes into the ballot box; one stays with the leader of the local election team; and the others go to other levels of the electoral administration, including the Guardian Council and the Interior.

The vote totals are then sent to a local center that also has representatives of the Guardian Council, Interior, and the candidates. They add up the figures from a number of ballot boxes, and then send them to Interior. In this election, the numbers were also sent directly to Interior from the individual polling places, in the presence of the 14-18 witnesses at the ballot box.

Each voter presents identification, and his or her name and information is entered into a computer, and also recorded in writing. The voter's thumbprint is also put on the stub of the ballot. The voter's identification is stamped to prevent multiple voting at different voting places, and there is also a computer and written record of everyone who voted at each polling place.

If this information is near accurate, it would appear that large scale fraud is extremely difficult, if not impossible, without creating an extensive trail of evidence. Indeed, if this election was stolen, there must be tens of thousands of witnesses -- or perhaps hundreds of thousands - to the theft. Yet there are no media accounts of interviews with such witnesses.

Is it possible that, in most of the country, the procedures outlined above - followed in previous elections - were abruptly abandoned, with ballot boxes whisked away before anyone could count them at the precinct level? Again, many of the more than 700,000 people involved in the electoral process would have been witnesses to such a large-scale event. Given the courage that hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated in taking to the streets, we would expect at least some to come forward with information on what happened.

Rostam Pourzal, an Iranian-American human rights campaigner, told me that it is common knowledge in Iran that these are the election procedures and that they were generally followed in this election. Professor Marandi concurred, and added: "There's just no way that any large-scale or systematic fraud could have taken place."

The government has agreed to post the individual ballot box totals on the web. This would provide another opportunity for any of the hundreds of thousands of witnesses to the precinct-level vote count to say that they witnessed a different count, if any did so."

Designing Detention: A Model Law for Terrorist Incapacitation by Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, and Colleen A. Peppard, attempts to legitimize and "preserve a zone of executive discretion for such detentions."

It is interesting to list the implicit assumptions behind this paper.

1. "....to detain terrorists arrested in the far corners of the earth..."

A. Most corners of the earth belong to one sovereign country or another. Presumably arrest of terrorists or potential terrorists in that country and prosecution is the job of the government of that country, not the President of the United States.

B. The case in which the President has some such power of detention is when we are at war with that corner of the earth. In which case the Geneva Convention rules of war should apply.

It is a long argument, but if you think it through, I think these are the premises:

I. America will be at war indefinitely.

II.There will be no victory.

III.There will be no attempt to rectify the conditions that led to hostilities in the first place, at the end of which prisoners can be released (like in normal wars).***

IV.The President has authority over the far corners of the earth.

(III. results from the assumption - "they hate us for our freedoms". But nothing Americans do as individuals causes anyone to bomb us; it is what our Government and corporations do that is at the root of the hostility; and that our government is taking great pains to disguise from us.)

V.The establishment wants the President permanently invested with the powers he temporarily holds in a war or domestic insurrection, including the power to abrogate habeas corpus, and beyond that, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, the international conventions against torture, and the like. The Presidents - Republican and Democratic alike - want that too.

We are on the verge of the President as Emperor.