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To the untrained eye or the rushed glance of a tourist, there is an eerie calm in Iran right now. And Iran's brutal rulers have done everything imaginable to turn us all into tourists -- at best -- when it comes to reading the events of the country's tumultuous last year.

In this and so many other ways, Iran's mullahcracy inevitably recalls the latter days of the Soviet Union. But -- at least until the very end -- the Soviet censors could clamp down with brute force on the spread of information so that foreign journalists simply didn't know what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. They had it easy: no Internet. The journalism-hunters in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran must cope with a world in which information spreads freely, where satellite dishes are everywhere and more than 22 million Iranians use the Internet. To keep up, the embattled government has done everything in its power over the last year first to stanch the flow of stories and then to make the stories that inevitably leak out impossible for outsiders to verify. It has managed to erect, if not a sturdy, leak-proof wall like its Soviet forebears, at least a confusing and ever-adapting smokescreen.

Iran employs a vast and sometimes invisible army of paid minions and ideological myrmidons to help frame every question in the public domain -- and even manufacture convenient "facts" to fit its claims. A major element of this is a massive and largely unreported initiative, which the governmen... >>>