OK, I'm using the "F" word.

That's right, I'm going to echo the opponents of the Iranian dictators, who called their recent election a "fraud" and compare it to the "fair and equal justice" of National Marine Fisheries Service enforcement actions.

They are both frauds. In fact, the pronouncements and edicts of the NMFS leaders and the Ayatollah Khamenei sound remarkably similar.

Both are oligarchies, enforcing pre-determined outcomes, allowing no dissent on their authority, their world view or their actions taken against their citizenry to suppress any questioning of that authority. Both NMFS and the Iran dictators employ a scary, tactical, ideologically hardened enforcement police force, one on wheels with shields, the other on boats with cannons.

Both forces are driven by ideological leadership which depend on a labyrinth of regulation and are guided by a Koranic or a Pew-ratanical fervor, shall we say. Above all, both regimes have set up a self-perpetuating process from which few can escape.

Any victory for truth or fairness is quickly appealed to higher layers of seemingly fixed justice. Defendants can only fight until their money runs out and they succumb or they turn states' evidence, recant and rat out others to "settle" their cases. In Iran, they "confess." Goliath holds all the cards.

How can we get our president to look deeper into this mismatch? The New York Times broke my heart last Monday with an editorial called "Ocean Rescue" that showed how well and how much Kool-Aid the Pew Environmental Trust has served up to the media. The willing national media, it seems, drank, swallowed and digested the cooked science that declares our waters almost completely fished out.

The portrait of our fishing fleet is akin to that of giant mining or logging companies strip-mining the seas. The Pew Trusts are winning and accelerating the PR battle. The save-the-planet forces have lumped us in with the bad guys. The Gloucester Daily Times' Richard Gaines is one of the only media voices pitched in the other direction, but can his voice ever be loud enough to cut through the crackdowns?

Last week, the General Accounting Office's Coast Guard Law Report stated that the closed administrative justice system was fair and valid on the same day the Iranian Supreme Council ruled the elections completely fair and without fraud — despite the fact that there were 3 million more votes cast then there were population in those cities. They declined to discuss or let anyone examine the evidence.

The NY Times reported: "Iran's government continued to move aggressively to crush popular protests over a disputed presidential election, setting up a special court for demonstrators, detaining hundreds of independent and opposition journalists and activists, and sending a force of police officers and militiamen onto the streets."

Does that have a familiar ring to it? Our own paper's recent editorial comments on the Coast Guard administrative law system could play similarly in Gloucester and Tehran. "It's findings have been shown to be preposterously one-sided." NY Times: "But the government crackdown on protests continues." You said it, brothers.

The following is my letter, sent to the New York Times last Monday:

"Your editorial 'Ocean Rescue' (Monday, June 22) could not be more off base. The fish stocks you name have been coming back — cod, pollock are recovering.

"Sens. Kerry and Kennedy, indeed the entire New England congressional delegation has requested fairer studies. The science is 'cooked.' Driven by the ideology of The Pew Foundation, funded by big oil money, national media have failed to cover the repressive efforts of the National Marine Fisheries Service enforcing shaky science to drive the family fishing fleets of new England nearly to extinction.

"Jane Lubechenko is but the latest face to oversee the travesty of justice in kangaroo military-style courts — with limited appeals — occurring daily in our Gloucester fleet. The catch share program will change the New England fishing fleets in the same way government-policy favored factory farming over family farms. Corporations will dominate the fleets as a result. A crash government growth policy to build the fleets in the '70s has now run into a crash government repression scheme to extinguish the fleets.

"There must be a medium way. Unaffiliated science must be employed to take a true picture, not one driven by ideology. These aren't giant logging or mining companies over-exploiting the resource. They are family fishing boats. There aren't enough of them left to overfish the steadily recovering stocks. I have always backed your environmental warnings, but on this, you are misinformed by your foundation sources. Please look deeper into this story."

Gloucester resident Gordon Baird is founder of Billboard's Musician Magazine and the West End Theater, and is producer of the "Gloucester Chicken Shack" TV show.