MSNBC----
"There are people who want to see greater openness."
"I am deeply troubled by the violence that I've been seeing on television."
"I think that the democratic process, free speech, the ability for folks to peacefully dissent, all those are universal values and need to be respected."
President Barack Obama....June 16, 2009
Iran’s Islamic leadership agreed to conduct a limited recount of votes following last week’s disputed presidential election, a spokesman said Tuesday, as thousands of people took to Tehran’s streets.
Iranian state media said the government organized a massive rally to demand punishment for those who violently protested the announced results of Friday’s balloting, which the government said had been won by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi claimed he won the election and has demanded a new election.
Authorities banned all foreign news reporting from the streets, making it difficult for Western media to confirm the reports that thousands of Iranians had gathered for demonstrations and counterdemonstrations Tuesday.
Reports from eyewitnesses said gunfire came from the roof of a building in Tehran used by a state-backed militia after some supporters of Mousavi set fire to the building and tried to storm it.
Eyewitnesses said violence broke out at a rally in central Tehran, where plainclothes militia beat pro-reform protesters with sticks. Some of the plainclothes officials were reported to be chanting “Death to America.”
In Washington, President Barack Obama acknowledged that he was in a difficult position in trying to craft the U.S. response to the unrest in Iran, which has seen Washington as a bitter enemy for 30 years.
“I think that the world has deep concerns about the election,” Obama said at a news conference Tuesday with the visiting president of South Korea. But he said it would not be “productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling ... in Iranian elections.”
The president said he stood with “the universal principle that people’s voices should be heard and not suppressed,” but he stressed that “how that plays out over the next several days and several weeks is something ultimately for the Iranian people to decide.”
Republicans criticized Obama for not being tougher on Tehran. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said in an interview on NBC’s TODAY show that Obama should speak out about Iran’s “corrupt, flawed sham of an election.”
Mousavi backers blanket streets:
NBC News staff in Tehran were not allowed to report from the streets or to send video supporting any reports. But an NBC News producer sent messages describing some of the scene at the Mousavi rally.
The crowd reached about 100,000 people in less than three hours. Images of Mousavi were spray-painted in green on every street corner, and supporters carried banners reading “Mir Hossein Mousavi our true president.”
The crowd remained peaceful, sending messages to one another to stay calm and not to chant anything hostile.
With traditional reporting silenced and e-mail and many Web sites shut down by the government, much of the information from Tehran was coming through social media Internet services like Twitter.com and Facebook.com, which can be accessed through mobile devices and cell phone networks.
Twitter postponed a scheduled blackout for maintenance Tuesday so as not to silence the protesters after the U.S. State Department lobbied it to keep its service running during the unrest, a State Department official said. The official said the United States wanted to highlight “Twitter’s role as an important means of communication — not with us — but horizontally in Iran.”
Messages from people claiming to be eyewitnesses to the violence were flowing into Twitter at the rate of hundreds a minute. Numerous reports of gunfire were being posted, and videos purporting to capture demonstrators’ being beaten — and, in at least one case, killed — were also being published on YouTube.com.
“After this is all over, the people of Iran will always remember how people from all over the world supported them,” said a message that appeared to come from Tehran.
One Twitter user called the banned communications “cyberwarfare at its best,” and there were unconfirmed reports that Iranian security forces were fighting back by creating their own Twitter accounts to spread their version of events.
The independent, nontraditional reporting from participants illustrated the difficulty Iranian authorities were having in clamping down on the protesters and the worldwide attention that is bolstering their actions.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the Guardian Council, an unelected body of 12 clerics and experts in Islamic, to investigate the election results after he met with Mousavi on Sunday.
A spokesman for the Guardian Council, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, was quoted on state TV as saying the recount would be limited to voting sites where candidates claim irregularities took place. But he did not rule out the possibility of canceling the results entirely, which would be an unprecedented step.
There was no immediate word from Mousavi on the announcement, who had said Monday that he was not hopeful that the council would address his charges.
As waves of messages went out alleging that seven people had been killed after crowds tried to storm a compound linked to the powerful Revolutionary Guard, Iranian state radio decided Tuesday to confirm the reports, calling the demonstration an “unauthorized gathering.”
Government seeks to cool passions:
The huge rallies also showed the resolve of Mousavi’s backers and have pushed Iran’s Islamic establishment into attempts to cool the tensions after days of unrest.
The death toll reported Tuesday was the first in Tehran since the post-election turmoil gripped Iran and could be a further rallying point in a culture that venerates martyrs and often marks their death with memorials.
Mousavi said in a message in his Web site that he would not be attending any rally, and he asked his supporters to “not fall in the trap of street riots” and to “exercise self-restraint.”
Ahmadinejad traveled to Russia on Tuesday after delaying the trip for a day. He did not mention the election or the unrest, instead focusing his rhetoric on the United States.
“America is enveloped in economic and political crises, and there is no hope for their resolution,” he said through an interpreter. “Allies of the United States are not capable of easing these crises.”
A Web site run by Iran’s former reformist vice president, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, said he had been arrested by security officers, but it provided no further details. Abtahi’s Web site, which is popular among young Iranians, has reported extensively on the alleged vote fraud after Friday’s election.
Britain and Germany, meanwhile, joined the calls of alarm over the rising confrontations in Iran. In Paris, the Foreign Ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador to discuss the allegations of vote-tampering and the violence.
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Sources: MSNBC, Day Life, Google Maps
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