Some western analysts believe that Ahmadinejad's margin of victory, as was announced by Iranian officials, cancels out the effect any possible voting irregularity could have had on the outcome of the election.

What they don't know is that the Islamic Republic government has mastered the "Big Lie" technique - as defined in "Mein Kampf" - and has been using it on a regular basis. The Iranian government is quite capable of releasing carefully crafted arbitrary numbers as the result of the ballot count. After all, who is going to do a recount when the "Supreme Leader" is backing Ahmadinejad?

I came across this interview with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a renowned Iranian filmmaker, who describes his first hand account of how the coup happened:

http://www.roozonline.com/persian/news/newsitem/article/2009/june/13//-fc8bc022f7.html

I uploaded the interview as an image just in case the website or the article is taken down. The interview is in Persian. Here are the key points in English:

- Mr Mousavi was informed by the Interior Ministry of his outright victory. He was told that Ayatollah Khamenei had been informed and he said "it's OK", but he asked them to "manage" the announcement of the news.

- At the same time, the information center of Mr Mousavi was attacked. For one to two hours the international communications of the center was cut off. So I [Mr Makhmalbaf] was given the responsibility to announce to the world that Mr Mousavi was the outright winner.

- But, when Mr Mousavi was preparing his victory speech, commanders of the Revolutionary Guard came to his election base with a letter from Khamenei containing this message: "I do not allow your green revolution to succeed. Defeat of Ahmadinejad is defeat of me."