US agency mistranslated Iran election report

CJ Harwood a.k.a. Warlaw compares the BBC Monitoring's translation of the of the Guardian Council report on election irregularities in Iran with the U.S. Open Source Center's translation, and finds a major discrepancy:

The U.S. OSC file silently omits text, the smoking gun, the number of accredited election observers, ID cards, issued to 40,676 observers requested by Mir Hossein Mousavi (Mirhoseyn Musavi) and issued to 13,506 observers requested by Mehdi Karroubi (Mehdi Karrubi), Mousavi’s ally. ...

Warlaw concludes from this:

The signatures of these, their own observers, on the ballot count forms on the day, and their subsequent silence, and the silence of Musavi and Karrubi on their behalf, their failure to challenge any of the published ballot box counts, constitutes their certification, that every single ballot box count they observed, the published ballot count is accurate, that’s at least 89% of the 45,692 total ballot boxes. And maybe all of them, some polling stations had more than one ballot box and so some observers presumably certified more than one box.

More here

And the original, Farsi-language version of the Guardian Council report is here and see this Gozaresh too

Comments

[Lysander]

Cyrus,

I'm curious what you think is fueling the continued protests and whether you believe the government is at risk.

I should mention that I have always admired Iran's courage in standing up to the west and acknowledge it has been an essential bulwark against American-Israeli expansionism. But the price paid through economic isolation has been high and maybe Iran's people are no longer willing to pay it. If so, it has to be their choice.

[Cy responds: much of it is genuine pent-up frustration but it is socially limited and so I don't think the government is at risk. Don't forget, Mousavi is very much part of the same regime. This is an intra-regime conflict, exploited by some exile groups for their own ends. Some people say that means the regime has "fractured" and rejoice at that -- but it was never really so monolithic as portrayed.]