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Iran Presidential Race Heads to Unprecedented Runoff in Election
Marred by Fraud Allegations
Bush's Environment Chief: From the Oil Lobby to the White
House to ExxonMobil
Iran Presidential Race Heads to Unprecedented Runoff
in Election Marred by Fraud Allegations
Allegations of vote rigging and fraud mar presidential elections
in Iran that pit a hardline mayor against a former president
in an unprecedented run-off election. We speak with veteran
Middle East journalist Dilip Hiro and Iranian-American writer
Roya Hakakian. Her family supported the 1979 revolution, then
fled. [includes rush
transcript]
Voters in Iran headed to the polls Friday in the closest
presidential election since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But
electoral officials today ordered a random recount of 100
ballot boxes following accusations of vote rigging and fraud
by several of the candidates.
In a surprise result, the hardline mayor of Tehran Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad came in second behind former president Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani. The two candidates will face each other in an
unprecedented run-off election later this week.
Ahmadinejad is a former revolutionary guard who is looking
to reinforce Iran’s strict Islamic code and has spoken
out against restoring ties with the United States. Rafsanjani,
who was president of Iran from 1989-1997, is described as
a conservative pragmatist and has called for a "new chapter"
in US-Iranian relations.
Ahmadinejad came in only one and a half percentage points
behind Rafsanjani in Friday’s poll, despite being a
virtual unknown ahead of the race. Allegations of vote fraud
soon followed with the circumstances around the election raising
suspicion.
When the Interior Ministry issued its first results, it had
Rafsanjani in first place, followed by reform candidate Mehdi
Karroubi. Half an hour later, the Guardian Council announced
that Ahmadinejad was actually in first place. The Guardian
Council is made up of hard-line clerics that has ultimate
control over government actions but is not supposed to interfere
in ballot counting. When the final tally was announced, Rafsanjani
finished with 21 percent of the votes and Ahmadinejad with
19.5 percent.
Critics pointed to other irregularities, including Ahmadinejad’s
announcement on Saturday that he would be in the run-off,
hours before official results were issued.
Meanwhile, Iran has called on President Bush to apologize
for criticizing the election as undemocratic ahead of Friday’s
vote. Some say the high turnout of 62 percent discredited
Bush’s comments. The Intelligence Minister said Bush
"motivated people to vote in retaliation."
On Sunday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also criticized
the legitimacy of the electoral process, in which unelected
clerics barred most of the 1,000 presidential hopefuls, including
all the women, from running.
- Roya Hakakian, Iranian-American author and journalist.
She grew up in Iran before leaving for the United States
when she was 18. She is a founding member of the Iran
Human Rights Documentation Center. Her memoir of growing
up in post-revolutionary Iran is titled "Journey from
the Land of No."
See website: www.RoyaHakakian.com.
- Dilip Hiro, veteran journalist on the Middle East. His
trilogy of books on Iraq and Iran are considered some of
the most definitive histories of the wars in the Persian
Gulf. His latest book is called "The Iranian Labyrinth:
Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies."
Bush's Environment Chief: From the Oil Lobby to the
White House to ExxonMobil
The Bush administration worked behind the scenes altering
White House and G8 documents to downplay the impact of climate
change. White House Council on Environmental Quality chief
of staff Phillip Cooney repeatedly edited government climate
reports. He used to work for the American Petroleum Institute
and now he's left the White House to work for ExxonMobil.
We speak to the New York Times reporter who broke the story.
[includes rush
transcript]
The Bush administration worked behind the scenes to weaken
key language in the Group of 8 proposal for joint action on
climate change. The Washington Post reported on Friday that
administration officials successfully pressed negotiators
to drop sections of the report that warned of more frequent
droughts and floods and commited a specific dollar amount
to promoting carbon sequestration in developing countries.
This follows major revelations published in the New York
Times earlier this month that a White House official repeatedly
edited government climate reports in ways that played down
links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.
The official -Philip Cooney- was chief of staff for the White
House Council on Environmental Quality which shapes much of
America”s environmental policy. Before coming to the
White House in 2001, Cooney was a lobbyist at the American
Petroleum Institute.
Just two days after that article was published, Cooney resigned
from the council and ExxonMobil announced they were hiring
him. A recent investigation by Mother Jones magazine found
that ExxonMobil has spent at least eight million dollars funding
a network of groups to challenge the existence of global warming.
ExxonMobile defended its hiring of Cooney by stating that
they hire from both sides of the aisle. In a written statement
to Democracy Now! The company wrote that “ExxonMobil
hired Mr. Cooney at about the same time we hired Matt Gobush,
who was the Communications Director for Democratic Senator
Joe Lieberman. We have always hired highly qualified people
for their talent--not their politics.”
- Andrew Revkin, prize-winning science reporter with The
New York Times. He wrote the books "Global Warming:
Understanding the Forecast" and "Burning Season:
The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon
Rain Forest." He is the recipient of the National Academies
Communication Award for print journalism, two Science Journalism
Awards of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science and an Investigative Reporters & Editors Awards.
-Read Revkin's recent Arctic
coverage
-Andrew Revkin also plays with Acoustic-Roots Band, Uncle
Wade
For a copy of today’s program, call 1 (800) 881 2359.
Our website is www.democracynow.org.
Our email address is mail@democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is produced by Mike Burke, Sharif Abdel Kouddous,
Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press, Jeremy Scahill and Parvez Sharma.
Mike Di Filippo is our engineer.
Thanks also to Uri Galed, Angela Alston, Orlando Richards,
Simba Russeau, Johnny Sender, Rich Kim, Joe Murgio, John Randolph,
Chris Zucker, Karen Ranucci, Denis Moynihan, Eric Rweyemamu,
Jenny Filipazzo and Isis Phillips.
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