AI’s First Report on the Hoax
On December 2009, I read on an Amnesty International website that this organization was taking up the Taraneh Mousavi hoax. This alarmed me, since it was playing with AI’s reputation and that of the broader struggle for human rights in Iran. I wrote a message to AI expressing my concerns in the text box provided on its site. I received a timely and courteous response from Drewery Dyke , who has been Amnesty International’s researcher on Iran since 1999, about a week later.
I responded the next day.
There followed a day or so of trying to arrive at a time we could converse. This proved to be difficult. After not hearing from AI for six weeks, I tried to reestablish contact.
All I received in response was an out of office message. I sent one last message and heard from AI no more.
The Hoax Integrated into AI’s Report
While pondering what to do next, I noticed that Amnesty International has come out with a report on the events in Iran after the June 2009 elections titled Iran: Election Contested, Repression Compounded. The report has its own weaknesses. Although for the most part it is a damning indictment of the crackdown on civil liberties launched after the elections by Iran’s ruling military-clerical clique, it seemed to me to lack the professional quality one comes to expect from Amnesty International, the gold standard of human rights groups. There was the odd mistranslation (narm afzari means software, not intellectual). More seriously, there are too many “was said to have’s” and undocumented statements. (“In the hours following the closure of the polls, the Ministry of the Interior was said to have confidentially informed Mir Hossein Mousavi that he had won.” (p. 17))
Most disturbing to me was its continuing the above-mentioned indefensible championing of the Taraneh Mousavi hoax, to which it devotes an entire section. (pp. 42-43) This section begins:
On 28 June, 28-year-old Taraneh Mousavi, along with upwards of 2,000 other demonstrators, went to the Ghoba Mosque, north-central Tehran, where they intended to take part in a commemoration for those killed in the then ongoing unrest, in the context of a pre-arranged commemoration for a prominent figure killed in 1981.
This is not what the report’s sources say. In these sources, she was depicted as a bystander who was caught up in the repression because she went into the Qoba Mosque to say hello to a friend (or, in an allied blog, she was arrested for her looks.) (By the way, how does the blogger know that she went to the mosque to talk to a friend? Was s/he observing her movements? How do we know that the basijis arrested her because of her looks? This magic insight into a character’s thought-processes are tell-tale signs that we are dealing with a piece of fiction.) The English-language translation of a source that AI did not quote (Iranian-e Chap–this blog has been eliminated and the account survives on the websites affiliated with the Worker-Communist Party of Iran) does have her being a participant in the demonstration. The sources AI cites do not, and this is not how the story has come to be accepted by its upholders.
The report continues:
From information collected by Amnesty International, it appears that around five hours after her arrest she disappeared. An anonymous telephone call several days later informed her parents that she had been raped, had tried to commit suicide and had been taken to Emam Khomeini Hospital in Karaj. On arrival at the hospital her parents found that she had not been registered at the hospital. They were told that someone fitting Taraneh Mousavi’s description had been seen by a nurse, but that she had been taken away while unconscious. In the following days, unconfirmed reports suggested that Taraneh Mousavi had been tortured at Evin Prison, but it was unclear when this may have been.
The report does not mention the nature of this “information collected by Amnesty International”. Were these the same “unconfirmed reports” on which the story of her torture is based? And where did these “unconfirmed reports” themselves come from? The report continues:
Eighteen days after her arrest, on around 16 July, unnamed officials reportedly informed her parents that a burned corpse resembling Taraneh Mousavi’s description had been found in the scrubland between Karaj and Qazvin.
Who “reportedly” had this information? The report is silent on this point.
The original source of this story comes from a group of bloggers who “took up” (or invented) her case, on July 17, according to AI. In fact, zeerzamin took up the case July 13, after which it was parroted by cherikonline, the only primary sources AI gives for the case. (We will discuss these sources further below.) Amnesty International’s report on the affair concludes with the unsubstantiated allegation “Taraneh Mousavi’s mother was later removed from her house and reportedly taken by the authorities into ‘protective custody’”. This is mentioned by no blogger I am aware of, and in any case in unattributed. It was not mentioned in AI’s December report on the subject mentioned above either.
We now pass to the bloggers whom AI sourced in its report, as well as the blogger who possibly initiated this hoax and which AI does not cite.
Source 1: The Online Guerilla
Cherik Online (the Online Guerrilla) is a blogger located in the West. (His date entries are entirely in the Western calendar, something unthinkable inside Iran). We know nothing more of him than that he admires Dostoyevsky’s maxim that when he was in prison, he realized that solitude was more valuable than freedom. He has a record of “breaking” stories based on his own uncorroborated self as a source, some of which are quite ridiculous. Thus, in one issue, he reported that Ahmadinejad consulted Indian fortune tellers while visiting that country. No other press source had uncovered these secret séances, but the Online Guerrilla, from his perch in Europe, sniffed it out!
CherikOnline’s particular stock in trade are his private insight into the secrets of the Iranian military, mostly concerning the imminent disintegration of the repressive forces. He said that the Iranian government was organizing a provocation against the Basij in which an explosion would cause massive casualties. He claimed that many soldiers and members of the security service were fleeing their posts, not wanting to attack the demonstrators. In a similar vein, he claimed that a major leader of the Revolutionary Guards was being disciplined for refusing to lead his forces against the people. This was a story which was widely echoed, including, initially, by myself. It was shown to be completely false when this officer leveled a violent threat against the demonstrators and showed that he was full of enthusiasm for head-breaking. When the truth came out, our guerrilla complained that the circulation of the story as a rumor and its ultimate discrediting was part of a psychological war against the opposition. There was, of course, no thought of taking responsibility for having launched this baseless rumor himself. After all, it was circulated in his own name. Along the same lines, he published a “letter” from members of the repressive forces urging former Revolutionary Guard commander and conservative presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai to continue to protest against the government. Of course, no such letter ever surfaced. These stories, and dozens more like them, are presented on the sole authority of the blogger, who, again, claims to have access from his station in the West to privileged information from Iran, information of which no sources inside of Iran seem to have any knowledge.
I have spent more time on my blog reporting about cherikonline’s role in perpetrating the Taraneh Mousavi hoax than I care to think, and the reader is referred to these articles. In a lengthy attack on Iranians who doubted the Taraneh Mousavi story, this blogger argued that it was impossible to reveal the whereabouts of Taraneh Mousavi’s family, since this would jeopardize them (and this, despite saying in which district of Tehran they lived and what her father’s profession is!) Yet in a recent post, he writes,
The Green Movement has held gatherings for many of the its martyrs on their fortieth. If there is any inclination to gather for the fortieth of Taraneh Mousavi’s passing and this is officially announced over the media at the Green Movement’s disposal, CherikOnline will publish the address of Taraneh Mousavi’s house.
So after all the protestations that CherikOnline cannot reveal its sources because of security considerations, it offers to blow everyone’s cover if the Green Movement would officially recognize its story!
Source 2: The Underground Sock Puppet
Zeerzamin is another blog apparently published in the West. (Like CherikOnline, it uses the Western calendar.) Its blogger openly admits that his blog had been set up to spread the Taraneh Mousavi story, and so one cannot consider it to be an independent source. It would be as if a blog set up specifically to spread the story that Vincent Foster had been murdered by Hillary Clinton was cited as a source of information about this rumor. In most cases, a blog is the source for a story. In this case, the story is the source for a blog. One of its articles actually criticizes those who won’t take the story seriously because it has no sources. Um, yeah.
Source 3: Omid Habibinia’s Rape Fantasies
The third source, which AI does not cite, presumably because he had taken down the website on which he had posted his Taraneh Mousavi stories several months ago, was Iranian-e Chap (Leftist Iranians). This was a group founded by Omid Habibinia. He played a central role in setting this hoax in motion, and so his credibility should also be examined.
Habibinia seems partial to rape stories. He published another such story featuring a beautiful young Iranian woman with her face barely fuzzed out. She is not talking—it is a photograph, but a recording of her voice tells of a harrowing experience of sexual terror in Iran’s prisons. An audio engineer who posted on this story considers it a fake. The story itself is fantastic, and is similar to the Taraneh Mousavi story in that it features Iranian émigrés in Europe getting access to the intimate details of the suffering of Iranian female prisoners in Iranian prisons. Habibinia claims that he was in communication with this woman for a month, during which he urged her to open up and tell the world about her sexual torment. It is entirely unclear why she would have contacted Habibinia and not a professional human rights organization to tell her story. This story, unlike the Taraneh Mousavi story, has a minor following, although it has found some popularity on websites catering to rape fantasists. (These sites contain shocking, upsetting, and offensive material.)
Along these lines, it is interesting that on his Persian and English blogs, Habibinia published only four articles dealing with Iraq and two of them deal with the use of Iraqi girls (more likely girls posing as Iraqi girls) as models in American rape videos. (This site contains shocking, upsetting, and offensive material.) The viewer of this page will note that he does not shrink from displaying these pictures on his blog, all the while tut-tutting about them.
A Final Comment
One more comment on the use of these sources by AI. It seems clear to me from Drewery Dyke’s questions in his December message to me as well as AI’s report saying that Cherik Online and Zeerzamin had merely taken up the story and brought it to the attention of the opposition’s leadership that AI had no idea of what the story’s actual sources are. In addition, the citing of the sources is entirely vague–no link to a specific issue, simply references to the blogs as a whole. And, finally, it seems abundantly clear that due diligence was not done in vetting the sources. No sensible person who reads them with any attention could find them credible. But without these sources, the story crumbles to the ground.
من آنجه شرط بلاغ است با تو می گویم
تو خواه از سخنم پند گیر و خواه ملال
