Laura Cereta
06-28-2009, 09:02 AM
Iran's torture practices are even worse than the beatings on YouTube. Daily Beast contributor and human rights lawyer Scott Horton on the nation's most notorious torturer.
Since June 14, Iran has witnessed a mass popular uprising against a fraudulent election, which bears some close comparisons with the one that toppled the shah in 1979. But the enthusiasm and resolve of the Green Revolution has been held in check by the brutal tools of a sophisticated police state that learned from the shah’s equivocation. The tools used so far and those now in planning allow us to sketch the outlines of the Khamenei police state. They also allow us better to understand what the opposition means when it calls for the restoration of the rule of law in Iran.
The Basij are controlled by the Iranian Republican Guard and are under the authority and control of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei—with personal loyalty to Khamenei a principal criterion for recruitment of members. Before the uprising, the Basij’s major function consisted of enforcing rules of public morality—requiring women, for instance, to wear the hijab in public, collecting and destroying pornography, and monitoring for and destroying satellite dishes. The use of truncheons and physical brutality are Basij signatures.
“The man, who has come from a small town in the eastern province of Khorasan and has never been in Tehran before, says he is being paid 2m rial ($200) to assault protesters with a heavy wooden stave. He says the money is the main incentive as it will enable him to get married and may even enable him to afford more than one wife. Leadership of the volunteers has been provided by a man known only as ‘Hajji,’ who has instructed his men to ‘beat the counter-revolutionaries so hard that they won’t be able to stand up.’
Police suppression techniques include use of tear gas and helicopters dumping burning liquid on protesters (likely tear gas compounds suspended in water). Police also use cameras and other imaging devices to make images of the protesters for use in their later identification and arrest. The regime also uses torture.
What happens to the thousands of protesters who are being carted away by the police and militia? The Iranian state has long had a predilection for torture; the overthrow of the shah and arrival of the Islamic republic produced only a slight modulation of the techniques.
Salon.com has recently published a detailed account of a 17-year-old who was seized last week by Basij militiamen and tortured:
“One of them asked me if [the former reformist president] Khatami would come save us, while they were breaking my fingers and cutting the finger webs. Although I swore a thousand times that I had not voted and had never participated in any demonstration, they didn’t care and just kept beating me hard. I fainted once or twice but there were 20 some of us who fainted every time their bones were broken, and as soon as they gained their consciousness, the riot police started beating them again. I was trying to contract my muscles to avoid further bone fracture. This continued till around 1 p.m., when they took us to another place, where security guards were in charge. We were then interrogated by the militia. Again, they kept beating me although I told them that I have never participated in any demonstration. In general, they were less harsh than the previous ones. In the evening, we were transferred to a police station where normal police with green uniforms hung us by our hands (you can see the signs of the string around my wrists on the pictures), they hung some of us upside down and started beating us again.”
http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu212/2059911/story1.jpg http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu212/2059911/story2.jpg http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu212/2059911/story3.jpg http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu212/2059911/story4.jpg
Torture is generally being applied with two primary objectives—to force prisoners to identify others involved in the demonstrations and coerce false confessions. The protesters are compelled to state that they went to demonstrations against the government because they fell under the influence of foreign media...
As usual, torture is used to develop false information that works as domestic propaganda. The claim that foreign news services are the principal instigators serves several goals. First, it will provide a basis for criminal charges against protest leaders like Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Under Iran’s Law of Discretionary Punishment (Qanon-e Ta’zir), “consorting with foreign powers” is a crime subject to severe punishment. It can and frequently is elevated to a more formal criminal charge of “espionage,” in which case the death penalty can be sought. But in the Iranian system, insulting government leaders, convening unlawful meetings, and making false statements to the government are also punishable crimes. Second, it can provide a basis to prosecute not only the protester who made the confession, but also those who were identified by him or her as participants. But most important, it is used to fuel the Khamenei regime’s propaganda that the opposition is controlled by evil foreign powers, especially the United States and Great Britain.
http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu212/2059911/dblogo.png (http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-06-26/inside-khameneis-police-state/)
Since June 14, Iran has witnessed a mass popular uprising against a fraudulent election, which bears some close comparisons with the one that toppled the shah in 1979. But the enthusiasm and resolve of the Green Revolution has been held in check by the brutal tools of a sophisticated police state that learned from the shah’s equivocation. The tools used so far and those now in planning allow us to sketch the outlines of the Khamenei police state. They also allow us better to understand what the opposition means when it calls for the restoration of the rule of law in Iran.
The Basij are controlled by the Iranian Republican Guard and are under the authority and control of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei—with personal loyalty to Khamenei a principal criterion for recruitment of members. Before the uprising, the Basij’s major function consisted of enforcing rules of public morality—requiring women, for instance, to wear the hijab in public, collecting and destroying pornography, and monitoring for and destroying satellite dishes. The use of truncheons and physical brutality are Basij signatures.
“The man, who has come from a small town in the eastern province of Khorasan and has never been in Tehran before, says he is being paid 2m rial ($200) to assault protesters with a heavy wooden stave. He says the money is the main incentive as it will enable him to get married and may even enable him to afford more than one wife. Leadership of the volunteers has been provided by a man known only as ‘Hajji,’ who has instructed his men to ‘beat the counter-revolutionaries so hard that they won’t be able to stand up.’
Police suppression techniques include use of tear gas and helicopters dumping burning liquid on protesters (likely tear gas compounds suspended in water). Police also use cameras and other imaging devices to make images of the protesters for use in their later identification and arrest. The regime also uses torture.
What happens to the thousands of protesters who are being carted away by the police and militia? The Iranian state has long had a predilection for torture; the overthrow of the shah and arrival of the Islamic republic produced only a slight modulation of the techniques.
Salon.com has recently published a detailed account of a 17-year-old who was seized last week by Basij militiamen and tortured:
“One of them asked me if [the former reformist president] Khatami would come save us, while they were breaking my fingers and cutting the finger webs. Although I swore a thousand times that I had not voted and had never participated in any demonstration, they didn’t care and just kept beating me hard. I fainted once or twice but there were 20 some of us who fainted every time their bones were broken, and as soon as they gained their consciousness, the riot police started beating them again. I was trying to contract my muscles to avoid further bone fracture. This continued till around 1 p.m., when they took us to another place, where security guards were in charge. We were then interrogated by the militia. Again, they kept beating me although I told them that I have never participated in any demonstration. In general, they were less harsh than the previous ones. In the evening, we were transferred to a police station where normal police with green uniforms hung us by our hands (you can see the signs of the string around my wrists on the pictures), they hung some of us upside down and started beating us again.”
http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu212/2059911/story1.jpg http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu212/2059911/story2.jpg http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu212/2059911/story3.jpg http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu212/2059911/story4.jpg
Torture is generally being applied with two primary objectives—to force prisoners to identify others involved in the demonstrations and coerce false confessions. The protesters are compelled to state that they went to demonstrations against the government because they fell under the influence of foreign media...
As usual, torture is used to develop false information that works as domestic propaganda. The claim that foreign news services are the principal instigators serves several goals. First, it will provide a basis for criminal charges against protest leaders like Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Under Iran’s Law of Discretionary Punishment (Qanon-e Ta’zir), “consorting with foreign powers” is a crime subject to severe punishment. It can and frequently is elevated to a more formal criminal charge of “espionage,” in which case the death penalty can be sought. But in the Iranian system, insulting government leaders, convening unlawful meetings, and making false statements to the government are also punishable crimes. Second, it can provide a basis to prosecute not only the protester who made the confession, but also those who were identified by him or her as participants. But most important, it is used to fuel the Khamenei regime’s propaganda that the opposition is controlled by evil foreign powers, especially the United States and Great Britain.
http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu212/2059911/dblogo.png (http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-06-26/inside-khameneis-police-state/)