With the increasingly bloody battle for Iran’s future raging on in Tehran, social networking Sites, like Facebook and Twitter, remain the primary source of news out of the country, whose government has effectively banned all established press from reporting.

Wisely, Twitter has done whatever it can to help maintain its service for the Iranian people, ensuring Twitter’s relevance in this new era of information sharing, if not in the history books. Facebook, on the other hand, has taken a different approach.

Meet Saeed Valadbaygi, author of the Website, Revolutionary Road and one of the primary ‘citizen journalists’ for the revolution currently going on in Iran. His extensive reports have been referenced and quoted repeatedly in the mainstream media, from Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish to MSNBC.

In addition to posting on his Site, Saeed uses both Twitter and Facebook to report everything from first hand experiences to videos from the frontlines in Iran, online, for the world to see.

But within the last few days, Facebook has twice threatened to cancel Saeed’s account, citing as the reason vague violations of their Terms of Service. After receiving the warnings, Saeed posted them to his Facebook page, without comment. Facebook then deleted the posts from his Site.

In response, a Facebook group, “in defence of Saeed’s activities on Facbook” [sic] is attempting to keep Facebook from canceling Saeed’s account. The group currently has more than 1,350 followers and is growing by the day. (more…)

To begin, it doesn’t matter how we got where we are. I really don’t care how often Obama wants to talk about who is to blame, but we are here now, we are screwed and we have to get out. YES, we know, McCain was not voted Miss Congeniality…we heard. And yes, no one really knows how to pronounce Ahmadinejad – we got it.

The sad part is, we sat around COED office drinking and watching the debate – and when it was done, we started talking and it was quite obvious that we were all watching different debates.

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This should make you angry: With Iraq still raging, and bullets still raining in Afghanistan, the Bush Administration, along with some compliant Democratic Senators, have been funding covert operations against Iran, conducted by the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), according to American Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, Seymour M. Hersh, in his latest New Yorker article, “Preparing The Battlefield.” And the rabbit hole just gets deeper from there…

From the New Yorker:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

 Check out the rest of Seymour Hersh’s “Preparing The Battlefield” here!

(Image source: NationalGeographic.com)

After receiving what he felt to be “unfriendly treatmentâ€? at Columbia University, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmandinejad has decided to return the favor by extending an invitation to President Bush to speak at an Iranian university. Ahmandinejad, who has finished up his visit to New York, offered the invitation to show the world how much more respectful Iranian students are toward visiting dignitaries, as opposed to the United States where he was met with protests. President Bush, most likely and rightfully, declined the invitation. (more…)

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to task. When the terrorist turned President at long last made his appearance at the university, he was introduced to the crowd with a harsh scolding from Bollinger on his country’s human-rights record and his denial of the Holocaust.

Calling him a “petty and cruel dictatorâ€? whose Holocaust denial would only fool the “ignorant and illiterateâ€?, Bollinger said Ahmadinejad was either “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.â€? Before he gave his prepared speech to the audience, Ahmadinejad responded by saying those statements were “an insult to information and to the knowledge of the audienceâ€? However, if anyone insulted the knowledge of the audience, it was Ahmadinejad himself.

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