Opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi appears to be running out of options. According to the New York Times, he's promising to conduct only officially permitted protests (not likely) and the Guardian Council, which already validated Ahmadinejad's election, has validated it again. "There has been no fraud in the election," a spokesman announced.

And after blaming foreign reports for all their troubles, Iranian officials are also making extra efforts to silence the media (satellite signals have been jammed), which shouldn't be too difficult for a regime willing to arrest an entire newspaper (an estimated 40 journalists have been taken into custody). And don't wait for Twitter to ride in on a horse and save everybody. "It is still possible that the information age will crack authoritarian structures in Iran," writes Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "But it is far more likely that the government will be able to use that technology to secure its own rule."

To top it all off, ‘influential' cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, speaking at Friday Prayer in Tehran, called for protesters to be dealt with extra persuasively (with death).

Meanwhile, President Obama is not impressed. "There is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks. We don't yet know how any potential dialogue will have been affected until we see what has happened inside of Iran," he says, adding that the "clock is ticking" on Iran's development of a nuclear program.

Today Iranian forces evicted the family of Neda Agha-Soltan from their home. They also canceled Neda's scheduled funeral and refused to turn her body over to her family. Further, she was buried in an undisclosed location without the family's knowledge and the government instituted a ban on all mourning on her behalf. It's been also rumored that the Iranian government told Neda's family that she was murdered by a hitman hired by a journalist from the BBC so that he could make a documentary about her. Some of her family's neighbors spoke to the press.

"We are trembling," one neighbour said. "We are still afraid. We haven't had a peaceful time in the last days, let alone her family. Nobody was allowed to console her family, they were alone, they were under arrest and their daughter was just killed. I can't imagine how painful it was for them. Her friends came to console her family but the police didn't let them in and forced them to disperse and arrested some of them. Neda's family were not even given a quite moment to grieve."

The Iranian government stepped up their efforts to crack down on protesters, using guns, tear gas, clubs and, according to some reports on Twitter, axes, to snuff the opposition. The nation's leadership went so far as to cast anyone in disagreement with the results of the recent election as an enemy of the state.

Reports the New York Times:

Witnesses reported scenes of chaos and fear where riot police officers outnumbered demonstrators by about four to one. Many wore masks to conceal their identities. The Basijis stopped people to check their cellphones for video or pictures of the unrest.

"I saw one group of about 100 people who began chanting ‘Death to the dictator' on one of the side streets," said another witness who insisted on not being identified for fear of arrest. "The Basijis attacked them and beat them really bad." Unconfirmed reports of bloodshed and at least one death flooded the Internet.

Instead of heeding calls for moderation, the government has conducted one of the harshest crackdowns in its history. Dozens of former high-ranking officials have been jailed. The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reported Wednesday that about 240 people, including 102 political figures, were in jail. The government has said that it arrested 627 more people since the protests broke out.

Also under close guard are the foreign media in Iran. Arrested today was a freelance reporter for the Washington Times, and all remaining foreign press credentials were revoked by the government. Meanwhile, many other journalists were still being held captive, while others have been forced to leave the country.

It appears as though the momentum for the protests has been curbed greatly by the iron fist of the Iranian government, while any pretense that Iran is a democracy has all but evaporated.

Here's a report from Rachel Maddow's show tonight filled with even more heartbreaking news, but also a slight glimmer of pride in knowing that American hacker geeks have been fighting a successful cyberwar with the Iranian government, shutting down many government websites.

• In one of the more heartbreaking stories to come out of this whole mess, reports emerged yesterday that the Iranian government was charging "bullet fees" to family members of anyone shot during the protests and demonstrations by Iranian forces. One man said that he had to pay the equivalent of $3000 in order to retrieve the dead body of his son from a local morgue. [Wall Street Journal]
  
  
• In an effort to prevent him from speaking to his millions of supporters, Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi has been placed under 24-hour guard by the Iranian secret police. [Independent]
  
  
• Iran announced that it has no intention of overturning the results of the recent presidential election there. [VOA News]
  
  
• Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei granted Iran's Guardian Council five additional days to review complaints of fraud in the country's recent presidential election, though it's doubtful that this is anything more than a symbolic gesture. [Reuters]
  
  
• Iranian newspapers sympathetic to that country's hardline leadership are calling for the government to prosecute Mir Hossein Mousavi for causing the deaths of many of the young people killed in the uprising there. [Telegraph]
  
  
• Iranian forces raided a downtown Tehran building on and arrested a number of people accused of organizing protests against the government and its leadership. [Yahoo]
  
  
• Iran's parliament announced it would inaugurate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president by mid-August. [LA Times]
  
  
• The Iranian government has instituted lifetime bans on members of the Iranian soccer team who wore green wristbands in support of the protesters. [Guardian]
  
  
• Prior to the Iranian election, the Obama administration reached out to the Iranian Supreme Leader, only to have him ridicule their efforts publicly. [Washington Times]
  
  
• The Iranian government is airing interviews on state television of protesters saying they were coerced by Western governments and the Western media into going out and causing trouble in the streets. [MSNBC]

Now, it's doubtful that anything he says here in his second grade-level tutorial is anything Gawker readers don't already know, but perhaps if we're lucky, Glenn's crude representation of Allah and the Iranian leaders will lead to some fundamentalist group to issue a fatwa against him, and then the comedy can really begin!

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Her full name was Neda Agha-Soltan. Iranian security forces have forbidden her friends and family from speaking to the press about her life and death, even going so far as forcing them to remove the black mourning banners hanging in front of their house, but the LA Times was able to get comments from a few people who knew her and piece together some background on her, as well as what happened on Saturday when she was killed.

Neda Agha-Soltan was born in Tehran, they said, to a father who worked for the government and a mother who was a housewife. They were a family of modest means, part of the country's emerging middle class who built their lives in rapidly developing neighborhoods on the eastern and western outskirts of the city.

Like many in her neighborhood, Neda was loyal to the country's Islamic roots and traditional values, friends say, but also curious about the outside world, which is easily accessed through satellite television, the Internet and occasional trips abroad.

The second of three children, she studied Islamic philosophy at a branch of Tehran's Azad University, until deciding to pursue a career in the tourism industry. She took private classes to become a tour guide, including Turkish language courses, friends said, hoping to some day lead groups of Iranians on trips abroad.

Travel was her passion, and with her friends she saved up enough money for package tours to Dubai, Turkey and Thailand. Two months ago, on a trip to Turkey, she relaxed along the beaches of Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast.

"She was a person full of joy," said her music teacher and close friend Hamid Panahi, who was among the mourners at her family home on Sunday, awaiting word of her burial. "She was a beam of light. I'm so sorry. I was so hopeful for this woman."

According to her friends, Neda was an accomplished singer who was taking piano lessons regularly. What she wasn't was a political activist, but she felt inspired by the injustice of the recent election to join friends in a demonstration taking place on Saturday, despite warnings from her friends and family that something bad might happen.

"Don't worry...It's just one bullet and its over" is what she supposedly told a friend who'd expressed concern for her safety.

Her friends say that Neda was stuck in traffic with three others on the way to a demonstration on Saturday. Frustrated, they got out of the car for air. Shortly thereafter, they heard a cracking noise in the distance and Neda collapsed to the ground with a bullet in her chest. "I'm burning" is what friends say her last words were.

Family, Friends Mourn Neda Agha-Soltan, Iranian Woman Whose Death was Caught on Video [LA Times]

Just like the image of a man standing in front of a tank brigade became the lasting image of the Tiananmen Square protests in China, the video of Neda, her eyes growing ever more vacant by the second as her spirit leaves her body and climaxing with blood pouring from her orifices, is destined to become the image that few of us who saw/see it will ever forget. What happens next in the movement is the question. Will Neda's death galvanize the Iranian revolutionaries who've spent the past week protesting against the religious conservatives who control their government and rigged the recent presidential election in their favor, or will Neda's death scare enough of them into submission to allow the government to effectively squash the movement?

Time speculates on this very subject:

Although it is not yet clear who shot "Neda" (a soldier? pro-government militant? an accidental misfiring?), her death may have changed everything. For the cycles of mourning in Shiite Islam actually provide a schedule for political combat - a way to generate or revive momentum. Shiite Muslims mourn their dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, and these commemorations are a pivotal part of Iran's rich history. During the revolution, the pattern of confrontations between the shah's security forces and the revolutionaries often played out in 40-day cycles.

The first clashes in January 1978 produced two deaths that were then commemorated on the 40th day in mass gatherings, which in turn produced new confrontations with security forces - and new deaths. Those deaths then generated another 40-day period of mourning, new clashes, and further deaths. The cycle continued throughout most of the year until the shah's ouster in January 1979.

The revolutionaries exploited the deep passion about martyrdom as well as the timetable of Shiite mourning in whipping up greater opposition to Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. With the deaths of "Neda" and others, they may now find the same phenomena used against them.

On a personal note, I first saw the video of Neda's death on Sunday afternoon at around 2PM. For the remainder of the day and up to this point, I've failed every effort, and there have been many, to get it out of my head. Even when I went to the gym late in the day, a place of solace where I'm usually able to blast music in my ears while exercising and just forget about everything going on in the outside world, I found myself unable to remove Neda from my mind. Now, I realize that this doesn't make me unique as I'm sure that many have felt overcome with the same feelings after seeing the video, but it's significant beyond Iran for many reasons, not the least of which being because I think it causes everyone who's seen the video to contemplate their own lives in their own country, just like it did and continues to do with me. Would we Americans be willing to stand up to our government under the same circumstances? I sort of doubt it.

Regardless, here's the video of Neda's death for benefit of those who haven't seen it. I suppose at this point it goes without saying, but this is extremely graphic, disturbing footage.

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Our sisters at Jezebel also have a post on this that includes links to many thoughts/opinions on the matter. [Jezebel]

In Iran, One Woman's Death May Have Many Consequences [Time]

Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham released this statement tonight regarding Bahari's arrest:

We are deeply concerned about Mr. Bahari's detention. As a longtime NEWSWEEK reporter he has worked hard to be balanced in his coverage of Iran. We see no reason why he should be held by the authorities. We respectfully ask that they release him as soon as possible.

Newsweek notes that there have been at least 20 journalists and bloggers arrested by the Iranian government in their recent crackdown on the reporting of strife within that country. Tehran Bureau lists many of them, as well as a number of politicians and academics who've been captured, in this post on their website.

Interestingly, Maziar Bahari was interviewed by Jason Jones in a Daily Show segment that aired on Thursday night. He is also the author of a book on Iran's social transformation being brought about by its burgeoning population of young intellectuals, something that probably didn't sit well with the country's hardline religious leadership.

Newsweek Reporter Arrested [Newsweek]

On Saturday, as things turned from bad to worse in Iran as thousands of protesters took to the streets in anger to revolt against the sham election in that country, CNN, a cable news network that rose to prominence largely because of its reporting of strife in foreign lands, was virtually silent about the uprising on television and on the web. As pointed out by ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick, "hours after Iranian police began clashing with tens of thousands of people in the street, the top story on CNN.com remains peoples' confusion about the switch from analog TV signals."

CNN's lack of coverage of the burgeoning revolution in Iran and the highly questionable re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, arguably America's leading bogeyman at this moment in time, didn't go unnoticed on Twitter, where the hashtag "#CNNFAIL" spread like wildfire and was one of the site's trending topics for a large portion of the day.

In a story posted to their website tonight titled "Internet Brings Events In Iran to Life," the BBC said this:

All over the world people are monitoring unfolding events in Iran via the internet, where an apparently decisive election victory by the ruling party is being challenged on the streets.

Although there are signs the Iranian government is trying to cut some communications with the outside world, citizen journalism appears to be thriving on the web.

To that end, Twitter served as a vital mode of Iranian citizen communication and as a channel to the outside world after the government shut down much of the web and blocked virtually all cell phone communications. An example:


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In what could be viewed as a watershed moment for social networking and the internet in general, here you have an oppressive regime with little tolerance for dissent doing everything in its power to stymie an uprising and failing miserably because of the ability of individuals to bypass the state-controlled media outlets and communicate with each another directly. To think that the very social networking tools conceived as intangible ideas by young Americans just a few short years ago in dorm rooms and basements and garages have now come to fruition as something tangible with the power to influence the course of events halfway across the world—Well, it's kind of breathtaking.

Meanwhile, Howard Kurtz had Rick Sanchez and sportswriter Gregg Doyel on Reliable Sources for an utterly useless but incredibly ironic debate over Twitter's relevance. To his credit Sanchez, a mildly obsessive Twitterer, sort of gets it, mentioning that he interviewed someone in Tehran on his show that he'd met on Twitter, but no one on the show seemed to grasp the fact that the Twitter was in midst of handing CNN its proverbial ass as a news source before, during and after the airing of Reliable Sources.

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Finally, though there are some valid criticisms of Twitter, everyone working at CNN should be thoroughly embarrassed of their efforts over the weekend.

Scarborough, appearing with GOP strategist Mike Murphy in a roundtable discussion with host David Gregory, said, "I suspect that Cairo speech really scared the Grand Ayatollahs...If they were going to fix an election, this was the time to fix it."

Now, even the most hardcore Obama supporter would be hard-pressed to credit a single speech by the President with triggering a revolution in a Middle Eastern country, but Scarborough's theory that his words at Cairo University may have freaked out Iran's string-pullers to the point where they became too aggressive in their election-fixing, thus sparking a revolution by outraged citizens, does have a ring of plausibility to it.

And this sort of intellectual honesty is one of the reasons to like Joe Scarborough.

Video via Media Matters