Fast-breaking news from Iran

CNN's Iranian expert Reza Aslan reported this:

There are very interesting things that are taking place right now. Some of my sources in Iran have told me that Ayatollah Rafsanjani, who is the head of the Assembly of Experts -- the eighty-six member clerical body that decides who will be the next Supreme Leader, and is, by the way, the only group that is empowered to remove the Supreme Leader from power -- that they have issued an emergency meeting in Qom.

Now, Anderson, I have to tell you, there's only one reason for the Assembly of Experts to meet at this point, and that is to actually talk about what to do about Khamenei. So, this is what I'm saying, is that we're talking about the very legitimacy, the very foundation of the Islamic Republic is up in the air right now. It's hard to say where this is going to go.

Another source suggested that they may not replace Khamenei but could force him to drop his support for Ahmadinejad.

And then Nico Pitney, who has been keeping a running blog on this crisis through his twitter contacts with people in Iran, says only a few people know whether the election was actually a fraud; but he offers these two important points:

But what we have is evidence of two key problems: 1) highly improbable outcomes in the alleged vote count, and 2) allegations of fraud from people in the position to know the truth. Let me briefly address both.

1) As a smart Iranian-American reader pointed out, the best evidence of potential fraud is that the alleged results indicate that Mousavi did not even win his hometown. Now, Mousavi comes from a minority background in Iran, and in his hometown, virtually everyone is from the same minority. As the reader noted, "it's almost like having Obama getting only 20-30% of the African American vote." It's not direct evidence of fraud -- just highly improbable.

2) As to serious allegations of fraud, I present you with this excerpt from NYT executive editor Bill Keller's first piece from Iran:

One employee of the Interior Ministry, which carried out the vote count, said the government had been preparing its fraud for weeks, purging anyone of doubtful loyalty and importing pliable staff members from around the country.

"They didn't rig the vote," claimed the man, who showed his ministry identification card but pleaded not to be named. "They didn't even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it."

So, there you have it, as of 2:00am.

Ralph