The day after 'The day after..'

Since my blog on the appearance of an hypothetical article about the impact of an Iranian nuclear test on the Gerdab website run by the Revolutionary Guards', an Iranian journalist has been in touch claiming authorship.

He is Seyed Ali Pourtabatabaei, a 30-year-old from Qom, and he runs a blog called Kheyrazanonline, which my colleague Saeed Kamali Dehghan could translate as "Bamboo". As far as we can tell, the original account of the "day after" was indeed posted on the blog before it was on Gerdab.

I am trying to arrange an interview with Pourtabatabaei and hopefully that will happen soon. Meanwhile, Saeed has translated some of his blog entries, and short bio. In them, Pourtabatabaei says he's interested in literature, human rights, media, economics and politics. He says his day job involves moderating "a small news agency" and "an electronic publication". He does not name either, but he says he founded both of them and describes them as being concerned with "Mahdaviat" (a religious term referring to the second coming of Imam Mahdi, also a preoccupation of President Ahmadinejad). Pourtabatabaei says he has a BA in law and is on the point of graduating in an MA in human rights.

He defines himself as a defender of the Islamic Republic in the face of attack from the Green movement, but not an unquestioning supporter of the current government.

On the eve of the second anniversary of the election that gave this government the opportunity to take office, I want to say that we exist too. We, the supporters of the Islamic Republic of Iran, we exist on-line too. Some of us no longer support this government. Many of us, including me, do not agree with what some people in the establishment did during or after the election. and we distance ourselves from them. But all of us have rallied around the Islamic Republic of Iran to defend it.

He has an entry about my blog headlined 'Guardian's gaffe and the delusion of the western intelligence services' which implies I was taken in by aforesaid intelligence services into assuming his piece was an IRGC product. Jeffrey Lewis, at Arms Control Wonk, also warns against over-interpretation in a very measured blog.

Hopefully I will know more after talking to Pourtabatabaei, but meanwhile the one thing that seems clear is that the apparent taboo on talking about a putative Iranian nuclear weapon appears to have been broken. Pourtabatabaei's original post has not just been allowed to stand in a highly monitored and restricted web environment, but also propagated by an IRGC-sponsored aggregator. That is fairly interesting.

Source: guardian.co.uk