Hundreds more people may have died in Iran's post-election unrest than the authorities have admitted, amid allegations that the death toll has been obscured by hiding victims' bodies in secret morgues.
Human rights campaigners say anecdotal evidence suggests the number of demonstrators killed in clashes with government forces after last month's poll was far higher than the official death toll of 20 and may amount to a "massacre".
Israeli officials have welcomed
comments by US Vice-President Joe Biden that America would not stand in
the way of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear plants.
Mr
Biden contradicted his country's most senior military commander,
Admiral Mike Mullen, when he responded, three times, to questions on
the American ABC's This Week program that Israel was free to do what it needed to do.
WASHINGTON - The Barack Obama
administration has given new prominence to a Bush administration charge
that Iran is providing military training and assistance to the Taliban
in Afghanistan, for which no evidence has ever been produced, and which
has been discredited by data obtained by IPS from the Pentagon itself.
The new twist in the
charge is that it is being made in the context of serious talks between
NATO officials and Iran involving possible Iranian cooperation in
NATO's logistical support for the war against the insurgents in
Afghanistan.
Facing
an unprecedented popular uprising against his autocratic rule and his
apparently fraudulent re-election, Iran's right-wing president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad has attempted to blame the United States. A surprising
number of bloggers on the left have rushed to the defense of the
right-wing fundamentalist leader.
By marshalling the regime's coercive instruments, Iran's 70-year-old
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, has, for now, succeeded in
curbing the popular, peaceful challenge to the authenticity of Iran's
fateful June 12th presidential election. But he has paid a heavy
political price.
When
I returned from covering the Iranian elections recently, I was surprised
to find my email box filled with progressive authors, academics and
bloggers bending themselves into knots about the current crisis in Iran.
They cite the long history of U.S. interference in Iran and conclude
that the current unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the
Empire.
That
comes as quite a shock to those risking their lives daily on the streets
of major Iranian cities fighting for political, social and economic
justice.
In Isfahan, Iran, an 80 year
old woman stood defiantly in her doorway. Twenty baton-wielding Basij
men arrived on motorcycles and threatened to enter her house in pursuit
of a group of young demonstrators. Instead of running with fear or turning
her back on the demonstrators, this woman looked the pursuers straight
in the eye and said “You will not get past me.”
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 U.S.
government to resist the regime in Tehran.
Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard military unit has threatened to crush further protests over the country's disputed June 12 presidential election.
A statement published on the Guard's website on Monday said the paramilitary force would not hesitate to confront "illegal" rallies organised by supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated reformist presidential candidate.
"At the current sensitive situation ... the Guards will firmly confront, in a revolutionary way, rioters and those who violate the law," the statement said.
