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POPSIran Opposition Finds New Ways to Protest 
Khamenei ordered Iran election fraud, says ex-president VIENNA,AUSTRIA Jul 07 2009 Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is personally behind the alleged fraud in the June 12 presidential election, former Iranian president Abolhassan Banisadr claimed in Vienna late on Monday. "The regime is edging closer to the abyss and is holding on to power solely by means of violence and terror," said Banisadr, who was Iran's first elected president following the 1979 Islamic revolution. The regime wanted to keep the population in a permanent state of uncertainty and fear and so systematic terror was institutionally organised and controlled by the regime and Khamenei, he added. "They don't want Iranians to be able to even think about protests in their own homes." Intellectuals and students were the main targets since they were regarded as the driving force behind the resistance, Banisadr continued. "Reformers and liberal pragmatists are to be wiped out."
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POPS No Eyewitnesses to the Crime Still, the world is watching. As we Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence, let’s stand with Iran by recalling the first democratic revolution in Asia. It began in 1905 in Iran, driven by the quest to secure parliamentary government and a Constitution from the Qajar dynasty. Now, 104 years on, Iranians demand that the Constitution they have be respected through Islamic democracy and a government accountable to the people. They will not be silenced. The regime’s base has narrowed dramatically. Its internal splits are growing with the defection of much of the clerical establishment. One distinguished Iran scholar, Farideh Farhi, wrote this to me: “So I cry and ask why we have to do this to ourselves over and over again. Yet I do have hope, perhaps for purely selfish reasons " because I don’t want to cry all the time, but also because of the energy you keep describing.
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POPS Iran's Hidden Revolution Far from fretting about an impending attack from Israel or America, guard leaders have been warning the ayatollah that the most formidable threat to the Islamic Republic is a “soft regime change policy” involving the use of “orange revolutions” (as the hard-line Iranian newspaper Kayhan recently editorialized) Encircled by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, besieged from within by disgruntled citizens, the supreme leader has turned to a bellicose strongman to preserve the system that elevated him. Indeed, Ayatollah Khamenei " who was scorned as a religious lightweight by many more established mullahs when he was chosen for the top post in 1989 " has repeatedly shown himself willing to undercut the “Islamic” in Islamic revolution. In doing so, he has painted himself into a corner " a permanent alliance with Mr. Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards. And this fraudulent election will only push them closer together.
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