Overhearing Arabic-speaking riot police might not be completely false. It could well be that the individuals mentioned come from Iran’s western province of Khuzestan, near the Iraq border, where many people have Arabic as a first language – although they can no doubt speak Persian, they may prefer to revert to Arabic under a stressful situation or even to prevent the protesters from understanding what they’re saying.

Posted by: Ash | Jun 17 2009 8:08 utc | 3

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10385

Posted by: o | Jun 17 2009 8:42 utc | 5

The American Empire Is Bankrupt Yawazaha, yawazaha, yawazaha, they shoot horses don’t they?

Posted by: anna missed | Jun 17 2009 9:46 utc | 7

@7 I wish Hudson was right but he’s always been prodigiously befuddled. If the Chinese could substitute Eurasian markets for US markets, then Hudson’s end is near, but China’s development model is too dependent on the US market, which is still big as hell even as it slumps. Making a bloc of these economies is good for them but not necessarily bad for the US. Europe made a currency bloc out of a much bigger market and see how it crushed the dollar… oh, uh, wait.

Posted by: …—… | Jun 17 2009 12:29 utc | 9

@Lysander – I hardly even noticed that there were prodemocracy protests in Georgia ..
Those are running for two month now and Saakashvili is trying to suppress them just as long. Usually some shock troops single out demonstrators and beat them up. The official news hardly ever reports on the demonstrations and police attacks. The opposition TV was pressed and at a time its studios ransacked. The opposition does its best to not use violence at all.
In the recent days Saakashvili’s methods are getting worse: Opposition Alliance Reports on Arrest of its Activists

An opposition Alliance for Georgia said on June 17, that ten of its activists had been arrested in last few days in various parts of Georgia mainly with charges related to illegal possession of firearms and one with drug-related crime.
The Alliance, which unites New Rights Party, Republican Party and a political team of Irakli Alasania, said that apart of Tbilisi, arrests were conducted in Gori, Lanchkuti, Chokhatauri, Chiatura, Tkibuli and Adigeni. According to the Republican Party most of the arrested persons are its activists.
In a written statement on June 17, Irakli Alasania, leader of Alliance for Georgia, who currently visits the U.S., said that the June 15 “violent crackdown” on the peaceful protesters and beating of Zurab Abashidze, his close ally, outside the Tbilisi police headquarters “has to be assessed as the terror attack on politicians having different points of view.”
He said that the trend “indicates that the authorities have chosen violent 7 November 2007 path for resolving of the acute political crisis.”
“This is the road to inevitable civil confrontation, the responsibility for which has to be fully borne personally by Mikheil Saakashvili,” Alasania said. “We consider the numerous violent acts by the authorities as their response to our multiple calls to urgently start the dialogue to resolve the current political crisis.”
Meanwhile, the opposition Conservative Party said in a statement on June 17, that total of 20 opposition activists have been arrested over various criminal charges and 10 – in connection with various administrative offenses since the launch of street protest rallies on April 9. It also said that over 100 cases of assaults on opposition activists and supporters were registered by various human rights groups and opposition parties since the launch of the protests with none of them being investigated by the police.

Posted by: b | Jun 17 2009 13:39 utc | 11

no 9 – the dollar going down basically means the US should be able at one stage to be competitive enough to export, however will find it very expensive to import.
so China has an interest for a strong dollar, to achieve that they are forced to save the dollar, as spending it will devalue it.
there is a tipping point in this however, where China exports for less it gains, and I guess by printing dollars the US has finally reached it.
the US is not the only market out there, and other traders are prepared to pay more than green paper.

Posted by: outsider | Jun 17 2009 14:09 utc | 13

Torture, Psychology, and Daniel Inouye
The True Story Behind Psychology’s Role in Torture?

A seventeen-year-old boy is locked in an interrogation cell in Guantanamo. He breaks down crying and says he wants his family. The interrogator senses the boy is psychologically vulnerable and consults with a psychologist. The psychologist has evaluated the boy prior to the questioning and says, “Tell him his family has forgotten him.” The psychologist also prescribes “linguistic isolation” (not letting him have contact with anyone who speaks his language.) The boy attempts suicide a few weeks later. On the eve of the boy’s trial, the psychologist apparently fearing her testimony will only further implicate her, indicates she will plead the Fifth Amendment if she is called to the stand. The trial is postponed, leaving the boy in further limbo.
The military psychologist is merely a foot soldier in psychology’s participation in torture. It goes much deeper. We now know that psychologists helped design and implement significant segments of George Bush’s torture program. Despite their credo, “Above all, do no harm,” two psychologists developed instruments of psychological torture. They “reversed engineered” psychological principles. They used the very therapeutic interventions psychologists use to ameliorate psychological suffering, but “reversed” their direction to create psychological distress and instability. If one’s reality sense is threatened, a good therapist validates and supports it as appropriate. In reverse engineering, the environment is deliberately made more confusing and the victim’s trust in his own perceptions is intentionally undermined. In extreme form, this can ultimately drive a person to insanity from which some never come back. These were the types of techniques that were used on the seventeen-year-old detainee and others.
Military psychologists also colluded with the Justice Department to help CIA operatives circumvent the legal prohibitions against torture. Under the Justice Department definition of torture, if a detainee was sent to a psychologist for a mental health evaluation prior to interrogation it was per se evidence that the interrogator had no legal intent to torture the detainee because the referral “demonstrated concern” for the welfare of the detainee.
Most remarkably of all, this whole process occurred under a protective “ethical” seal from the American Psychological Association (APA), psychologists’ largest national organization. The APA governance repeatedly rejected calls from its membership for APA to join other health organizations in declaring participation in Bush detention center interrogations unethical.
Most psychologists are appalled at what the APA has done, and many, like me, have resigned from the APA. But the true story behind APA’s involvement with torture has not been fully told.

One can only hope that the increasingly empty stores can become meeting centers for the upcoming populist revolt.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 17 2009 14:25 utc | 15

no 9 – the dollar going down basically means the US should be able at one stage to be competitive enough to export, however will find it very expensive to import.
Besides guns and debt, what does the U.S. have left to export?
It’s a myth that the Chinese need the U.S; the Chinese need access to markets where they can sell their wares. The U.S. has, for the last two decades, been the most convenient one, but with the current economic conditions that’s no longer true.
The Chinese can take a hit in their economic growth — a fall from 8-10% annually to 3-6%? Big deal. A falloff in production will, for them, translate into an opportunity to develop domestic markets badly in need of attention, during which time they’ll be able to build up R&D on basic goods and technology that will be extremely attractive to other developing markets (Africa, S/Central America, Central Asia, etc), as well as to economic superpowers like India and Russia.
Don’t believe the hype: the U.S. need the Chinese far more than the Chinese need the U.S. Think about it: if it weren’t true, then why is the U.S. fighting so hard to drive a wedge between Pakistan, Iran, and China?

Posted by: china_hand2 | Jun 17 2009 16:45 utc | 17

anyone else catch that comment in the charting stock’s link, dated “June 16th, 2009 at 5:02 am” from someone named “Ali” who writes, in part, “to the author of this bs article : i am from iran and i want to tell you, you have no idea what is happening here so you better shut-up … the election result was totally fabricated by the Ahmadinejad and his government… … we can not tolerate 4 more years of ahmadinejad’s retardedness and tyranny. we voted to take his power but they changed and faked the result. i hope you apologize to these people for accuseing them…Also check my ip if you doubt im from Iran, douchebag.”
sound like the same ‘ali’ who posted here recently before making up an excuse to sign off?

Posted by: b real | Jun 17 2009 17:54 utc | 19

i don’t think i saw these posted here yet, but they could fit in w/ the story about foggy bottom intervening in twitter’s maintenance window to keep the site active
Iranian opposition launches organized cyber attack against pro-Ahmadinejad sites

Through a combination of DIY (do it yourself) denial of service attack tools (DDoS), multiple iFrame loading scripts, public web page “refresher” tool, and a much more effective PHP script, the participants have already prompted some of the major Iranian outlets to switch to “lite” versions of their sites in an attempt to mitigate the attack.
Let’s assess this very latest example of people’s information warfare concept, find out which sites remain affected, and discuss the attack tools used:
The campaign appears to have been organized through Twitter, which despite public reports that the site has been banned in Iran, appears to be still accessible through a a persistent supply of proxy servers on behalf of the opposition.
Moreover, the ongoing distributed denial of service attacks, are using techniques which greatly resemble those used in last year’s Russia vs Georgia cyber attack, and the ones Chinese hacktivists used back in 2008 in order to temporarily shut down CNN, with a single exception – there’s no indication of a botnet involvement in the present attack.
Instead, the attack relies on the so called people’s information warfare concept, which is the self-mobilization of individuals, or their recruitment based on political/nationalistic sentiments by a third-party, for conducting various hacktivism activities such as web site defacements, or launching distributed denial of service attacks.
…

Iranian Opposition DDoS-es pro-Ahmadinejad Sites

So far, their rather simplistic denial of service tools has managed to disrupt access to key government web sites, and the intensity of the attacks is prone to increase since the opposition appears to be in a “learning mode”.
What does “learning mode” stand for here? It’s their current stage of experimentation clearly indicating their inexperience with such campaigns and DDoS attacks in general. The opposition’s de-centralized chain of command isn’t even speculating on the use of botnets, since the primitive multi-threaded Iranian connections hitting Iranian sites seems to achieve their effect.
…
What has changed since yesterday’s real-time OSINT analysis? The web based “Page Rebooter” tool heavily advertised by the opposition has decided to stop offering the service due to the massive abuse:
…
Meanwhile, the opposition has come up with a segmented targets list including hardline news portals, official Ahmadinejad sites, Iranian law enforcement sites, banks, judiciary and transportation sites, aiming to recruit international supporters:

“ALL PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD:
Please help us in a full-scale cyberwar againts the dictatorial brutal government of Ahmadinjead! Help Iranians to earn back their votes per instructions below:
Simply click on few of the following links (better too choose your selections from different categories); it opens the site in a new tab. It will not stop you from browsing but by sending a refresh signal to the target site will saturate it. By doing so, we can block Ahmadinjead’s governments flow of information in many of its key components as shown below. Please help us and yourself from this lunatic who will push the world to world war III.”

Following the updated list of targets, a new LOIC.exe DoS tool is being advertised. The tool is however, anything but sophisticated (it’s been around since 6 Jul 2008) compared to even the average Russian DDoS bot. Combined, the simplistic nature of the opposition’s attack tools indicates the lack of any in-depth understanding of information warfare principles, in times when other countries are already going beyond cyber warfare and aiming for the unrestricted warfare stage.

Posted by: b real | Jun 17 2009 18:35 utc | 21

@20:
Yeah, sure — it’ll hurt.
But by building domestic demand, the pressure presented by all those peasants moving to teh city to look for work will be eased.
China’s already latched on to several vines:
Iran. Pakistan. Somalia. Sudan. Central Asia.
See a pattern, here?

Posted by: china_hand2 | Jun 18 2009 2:22 utc | 23

No. I’m not saying China’s involved with the Islamist movements, and i don’t have much evidence to back up any assertion that China’s got much of any influence, there.
What i do think, though, is that what’s happening in Somalia is evolving into an extension of what’s happening in Sudan.
I see the Horn as an area where US/UK influence is under direct challenge — particularly since the GWOT began — and it’s the only area in Northern black-Africa where the US has strong foreign influence. Uganda and Kenya are still solidly within the US sphere, but the oil revenues of Sudan, Chad, and other areas threaten to break that region open in the same way it did for Venezuela, Iran and Brazil.
So China already has a relatively strong foothold in Sudan, and Sudan is the closest thing to an independent, local, nativist “ally” Somalia has. Every other nation around either takes its orders from the US/UK, is Arab, or is an enemy. So while the relationship with China is indirect, i think it’s growing apace and is an increasing worry for the U.S.
But beyond that: no. That was a half-assed slip. There’s any one of a number of other African nations i should’ve put in its place.

Posted by: china_hand2 | Jun 18 2009 5:49 utc | 25