Iranians will head to the polls tomorrow to elect a new President. Iran has been a major player in the Middle East for decades and, considering the country’s loose remarks about nuclear energy and existential warfare throughout the past few years, all eyes will be directed on Iran come Election Day. This will also be the first vote for Iranians since the 2009 re-election of current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A dismal occasion for Iranian voters, the 2009 election was almost certainly rigged in Ahmadinejad’s favor. However depressing, that election in 2009 did manage to inspire what became known as the Green Movement, comprised of Iranian moderates and liberals, which still seeks to reform Iranian public policy. Unfortunately for those Iranian moderates, liberals, and independents, the slate of candidates that will appear for selection on Election Day are far from reform candidates. If a candidate fails to win more than 50% of the vote on Friday, then a runoff election will occur on June 21.

On a cold night in January 1990 in Berlin, a mob of angry citizens and western intelligence agents struck a blow for freedom. They stormed the headquarters of Stasi, the secret police service of the GDR. Guards were beaten, furniture was thrown, files were stolen, files were destroyed. The most effective and pervasive apparatus of surveillance the world has known until today was exposed and dismantled.

After the dust settled and the CIA agents had spirited away the files that concerned them most, the public of a reuniting Germany was confronted by a harsh reality: their world was riddled with secret policemen and snitches. According to some estimates, as many as one in 166 East Germans spied on their fellow citizens as a full time employee of the Stasi and as many as one in seven were parttime snitches. Spouses spied on each other. The system was effective and rewarded the citizen who participated materially and psychologically.

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the great good wizard Saruman becomes slowly corrupted by a malign influence named Sauron. Hoping to look into the future, the distance and the past he gazes into a magical crystal ball called a palantir. He finds Sauron's great unblinking eye looking back at him, bending his will, subverting him, causing him to both compete with Sauron and become just like him. He slowly breeds foul creatures and converts his citadel of Isengard into a replica of the great furnace factory of death that is Sauron's own seat of power at Mount Doom.

The Obama administration's modern day flaming eye stares at us in part through its own crystal ball called PRISM, which appears to be a data integration product made by Palantir Technologies, a secret cybersecurity firm that got its start up funding from the CIA.

As the brutality in Syria begins to spread throughout the region, the United States can no longer afford to choose the time at which it confronts this crisis. The time is now. Bashar-al-Assad’s regime is committing intolerable war crimes against the Syrian people, who are demanding a long overdue change in power. Spilling into its bordering countries of Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan, the violence in Syria exhausted at the expense of many innocent people deserves an informed discussion at the very least.

The Syrian struggle, by and large, boils down to a religious dispute. The divide exists within the ranks of Islam, and culminates in a separation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Mohammed founded Islam in the 7th Century and installed the first Islamic state, known as a Caliphate, in 622. A theocracy by definition, that first Islamic state came to be in Medina, which is located in present-day western Saudi Arabia. According to Sunnis, the first four Caliphs (Mohammed’s successors) were legitimate religious leaders. Further, Sunnis considered these Caliphs’ heirs to be lawful.

Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious -- and revealing -- is "aiding the enemy."

A blogger at _The New Yorker_, Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and over the entire country:

* "Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?"

* "In that case, who is aiding the enemy -- the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?"

When the deceptive operation of the warfare state can't stand the light of day, truth-tellers are a constant hazard. And culpability must stay turned on its head.

That's why accountability was upside-down when the U.S. Army prosecutor laid out the government’s case against Bradley Manning in an opening statement: "This is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy -- material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk."