A reader pointed me to an editorial in this morning’s Washington Post, wherein Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty say that they did polling prior to the election in Iran that was predictive of the announced result. The first thing I did was to examine the authors of the this editorial.
Ken Ballen is president of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, a nonprofit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism. Patrick Doherty is deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation.
I know the New America Foundation. My brother works there and I was a finalist for a position there last year. I don’t have any inherent distrust of NAF, but I also know that their director Steve Coll, is about as connected with the foreign policy establishment in this country as it is possible to be. He’s the author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 and
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
, the two most comprehensive books available in their fields.
Terror Free Tomorrow, however, is another story. I took a look, first, at their Board of Advisers. And here is what I found:
John McCain– of ‘Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Iran’ fame
Lee H. Hamilton– Bush/Cheney’s hand-picked 9/11 Commission co-chair, after Henry Kissinger turned down the job
Thomas H. Kean– Bush/Cheney’s hand-picked 9/11 Commission co-chair, after Henry Kissinger turned down the job
Slade Gorton– Bush/Cheney pick for 9/11 Commission
Thomas S. Foley– former Democratic Speaker of the House
Stephen W. Bosworth– Dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. Formerly U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea (1997-2001). Earlier, he served as the Ambassador to Tunisia and to the Philippines. He was President of the United States Japan Foundation, and was also the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs. He is also a member of the International Board of Advisers for the President of the Philippines.
Louis Caldera– member of the advisory board of the New Democrat Network, former president of the University of New Mexico, Secretary of the Army (1998-2001).
Husain Haqqani– Pakistani ambassador to the United States. He was formerly the director of the Center for International Relations and an associate professor at Boston University, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and co-chair of Hudson Institute’s Project on Islam and Democracy” and a scholar with Hudson’s Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World.
Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief– the Iraqi lawyer who claims to have told U.S. Marines the location of the captured Private Jessica Lynch in early April 2003. Weeks later, Al-Refaief and his family were granted U.S. asylum[1]. Along with the chance for U.S. citizenship, al-Rehaief received $300,000 from Rupert Murdoch’s Harper Collins for a book about the Lynch rescue.[2] He also was given a job at the Livingston Group[3], a high-powered D.C. lobby firm.[4] His book Because Each Life Is Precious: Why an Iraqi Man Came to Risk Everything for Pvt. Jessica Lynch is being promoted by his Livingston Group colleague Lauri Fitz-Pegado and Republican PR man Craig Shirley. Fitz-Pegado is infamous for her work at Hill & Knowlton PR in 1990 coaching the Kuwaiti girl called “Nayirah” in her shocking but phony testimony on Congressional hill that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies.
Muhammad Qodari– worked for the preeminent Indonesian think-tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Jakarta, Indonesia. Mr. Qodari has also served as Director of Research in charge of all surveys and polling for LSI, a leading polling firm in Indonesia.
Robin Wiener– a Board Member and Treasurer of Families of September 11, the leading organization representing family members of the victims of 9/11.
James Kreindler– the attorney [that] represent families of Lockerbie victims in a civil suit against Libya. He is a partner of the law firm of Kreindler & Kreindler. His specialty is aviation accident litigation and has been involved in well-known cases such as TWA Flight 800. Kriendler chairs the Plaintiffs’ Committee of the Aviation and Space Law Committee of the American Bar Association.
Mansoor Moaddel– a professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology at Eastern Michigan University.
This is one of those modestly right-wing organizations that propagate in Washington DC by coupling with the DLC, the New Democrat Network, and various foreign chambers of commerce. Of the four directors, one used to work for Richard Lugar, one for Sam Nunn, and another is Vice President at Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (of Mark Penn and Doug Schoen fame). In other words, this is the true face of empire, mainly concerned with foreign investment opportunities, but in the guise of stamping out Islamic extremism and terrorism.
Maybe these folks did honest polling in Iran prior to the election, maybe they didn’t. The fact that one of their advisers is the Iraqi who started the Jessica Lynch hoax and who has connections to the Kuwaiti incubator hoax, is not giving me a whole lot of confidence. That this group is now committing itself to lending credibility to the Iranian elections is actually quite frightening.
Juan Cole discusses this poll today at Informed Comment. He’s not so impressed for other reasons. The Kuwaiti baby incubator hoax was pure filth.
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investigation … thanks!
My new diary – Gunfire Erupted at Major Opposition Rally in Tehran
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Nice work, Booman. And hey – in your browsing, have you found out how votes are cast and counted in Iran? Do they vote on paper? If so, who counts the votes? Do they vote by machines? If so, who are the vendors?
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I keep reading reports the tally of votes were skewed in a similar pattern across the nation in cities and rural villages alike: Ahmadinejad 2 : Mousavi 1. I understand the absentee ballots from outside of Iran were 300% higher than in 2005. Funny, the same ratio was found: Ahmadinejad 2 : Mousavi 1. However it’s difficult to find any source for these data. There seems to have been leaks from inside the Ministery of Interior to the opposition parties in the early stages of vote counting. This added to the upheaval when the “official” result was announced. Perhaps the Guardian Council was aware of the poll mentioned above and thought: “Why not?”
The speed with which the results were announced and finalized also has raised suspicions. Voting was conducted across the country on paper ballots — with each ballot being folded and slipped into a sealed plastic voting box.
That means each of tens of millions of ballots had to be laboriously unfolded and counted by an election official rather than being tallied electronically.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."They use paper ballots throughout the country.
Paper ballots.
So the results had to be read by hand right? It’s unrealistic to me that they were able to count enough ballots to call the election for Ahmadinejad within 2 hours of polls closing
Yep. Especially since unlike the US Iran does not span multiple time zones, and determines the winner by a simple majority, not an electoral system.
they didn’t even read the ballots. At most they could have sampled them.
Oh, come on, BooMan! How can you be such a patronizing colonialist Great White Father? Do you think the Iranians are primitive beings who are incapable of superhuman feats just because they are Muslims? Or is it their brown skin? Or the fact that they talk funny and write funny? What makes you think they couldn’t read millions of ballots in just a couple of minutes?
Seriously, BooMan, get over your imperialist American superiority complex and show a little respect for people from other countries!
heh.
I really must learn to attribute super-human qualities to all non-Americans.
Thanks for the investigation of that link. An interesting assortment of characters but since that bunch has no incentive to make AN seem popular, it really only lends it more credibility for me.
As for counting the votes so fast, chances are it wasn’t just one guy counting all of them. Likely each precinct had a number of election officials. After the vote, they divide up the ballots among themselves and start counting. IF there are say, 5000 votes in a precinct and 10 officials counting, that’s 500 votes a piece. That sounds like 2 hours work even for mere mortals.
Then why is it so unusual for results to be announced as soon as the polls close? Why does it typically take weeks, or at least days, even in fairly small countries?
What’s quite frightening is the meltdown of Booman’s brain. The piece on Iran is sober analysis and, unlike you, doesn’t jump to any definitive conclusions.
yeah, because the Hudson Institute and Doug Schoen and the people behind the Jessica Lynch and Kuwaiti incubator hoaxes are so objective and reliable.
Nico Pitney must be a proponent of American Exceptionalism, too.
link.
Nice to know who is behind the poll and the WaPo article, BooMan.
It makes perfect sense to me. If your goal is to dehumanize the Iranian people and you want to advance the Charles Krauthammer/Max Boot position that Friday’s election was a rejection of Obama’s Cairo speech and a wholehearted embrace by the iranian people of “The Mad Mullahs”, then you would certainly want to paint Ahmedinejad’s win as legitimately as possible.
After all, if you see the Iranian people as actual human beings suffering under a stolen election, you’re much less likely to tolerate Israeli bombs dropped on Iran.
But if you advance the notion that by supporting Ahmedinejad that the Iranian people have “rejected peace”, well, then they have brought this upon themselves by voting for this “madman”…
Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com tears the supposed results from the poll apart.
Polling Predicted Intimidation — and Not Necessarily Ahmadinejad’s Victory
money quote:
Unfortunately, while the poll itself may be valid, Ballen and Doherty’s characterization of it is misleading. Rather than giving one more confidence in the official results, the poll raises more questions than it resolves.
Thanks for this!
“That this group is now committing itself to lending credibility to the Iranian elections is actually quite frightening.”
Yes, but WHY are they doing this? And why this particular group? What other groups (I mean in the USA) are doing the same? These are not rhetorical questions.
I see that Zandar (just above) has addressed these questions. Makes sense, Zandar — but I’d also like to know what others on this thread think.