What's happening in Iran?

I'm checking regularly in with Nico Pitney who is live-blogging (acting as a clearing-house for information) at Huffington Post. He is posting photos, videos, and news gathered from mainstream media but much of it from Twitter, which has turned out to be one of the few ways people can get news about of Iran in the face of the state's crackdown on protest against the results of the election. This gives us a sense of what is happening now.

But how do we interpret this information? "Follow the Developments in Iran like a CIA analyst" at The Atlantic (via Howard Rheingold), or, "don't assume anything." The Big Picture (the Boston Globe's amazing photoblog has some compelling images.

The BBC has posted a very thorough description of Iran's political institutions, and an analysis of why these protests might be different from those of earlier years. It also discusses the many Internet sources of information, including various blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Picassa and Twitter, that are being monitored, aggregated and amplified.

Global Voices Online, an international blog aggregator and news service, is collecting the voices of bloggers around the world who are writing about the events in Iran: "Storm of protest."

While we might emotionally want the Obama administration to leap to the microphone to take sides, the perception that the U.S.(under Bush) was siding with one group over another was one of the factors in the past that led to a increase in power by the fundamentalists. In addition, it may appear to outsiders that there is a clear division between the regime and the people, but the current political struggle is as much between two factions of the regime struggling for power as it is representative of the hopes of people for a less repressive state. The arguments in the comments of this post and also this one should remind us that the situation is extremely complex. I frankly don't know whom to believe about the voting, but I do know that the forces of state repression are hard at work.