Iranian Horn Uses Torture as Punishment

Amnesty International: Iran Uses Torture as Punishment

Editor01September 2, 2020

In its latest report about human rights violations in Iran, Amnesty International revealed the new scope of exercising torture and ill-treatment against detainees of the November 2019 protests

By Pooya Stone

On September 2, Amnesty International (AI) revealed the new scope of harrowing torture and other ill-treatment against detainees of the November 2019 protests in Iran. In mid-November 2019, the Iranian government hiked the gasoline prices by 200 percent. In response, many citizens flooded the streets of over 190 cities across all of Iran’s 31 provinces, demanding the authorities suspend the plan.

However, the rulers violently cracked down on peaceful protesters with live ammunition, heavy machineguns, snipers, armored vehicles, and helicopters. The state security forces, Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and plainclothes agents murdered at least 1,500 demonstrators in public. They also left over 8,000 injured and captured around 12,000 others for participating in protests.

Top officials, including the supreme leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani, praised security forces’ performance against barehanded citizens. They called protesters “rioters and hooligans” who should have been suppressed. High-ranking officials gave a badge of “honor” to ruthless police officers, IRGC members, and judicial officials for saving the state from collapse.

Notably, at dawn on November 17, in his first public position about the protests, Khamenei rejected any kind of concession before public demands. “No wise person who loves his country, who loves his suitable life, would help these [protesters]. These are ‘hooligans’!” He also admitted, “Some people are worried or angry over this decision [gasoline prices hike], or it’s to a detriment, or they think it is, and they are unhappy,” the state-run TV Channel wired Khamenei’s remarks on the day.

Later, on December 23, Reuters revealed that Khamenei had ordered IRGC commanders to suppress the protests at all costs. “Special Report: Iran’s leader ordered a crackdown on unrest – ‘Do whatever it takes to end it,’” Reuters titled.

Of course, what happened on the streets and in public is not the entire story. Despite quelling the protests, the interrogators and judicial officials continued the crime against thousands of detainees. Officials have yet to announce the real number of victims and inmates, which allows them to exercise any torture and ill-treatment against prisoners and add to the number of fatalities.

In its report, Amnesty International noted that Iranian authorities use torture as a punishment, intimidation, and humiliation. They are practically torture captives to hear what they want. Afterward, they file enforced confessions as evidence and issue severe sentences like death sentence against offenders in a collaboration with judicial officials.

The organization listed several crimes committed by Iranian security forces, prosecutors, and interrogators follow as:

•Widespread torture including beatings, floggings, electric shocks, stress positions, mock executions, waterboarding, sexual violence, forced administration of chemical substances, and deprivation of medical care

• Hundreds subjected to grossly unfair trials on baseless national security charges

• Death sentences issued based on torture-tainted “confessions”

“Instead of investigating allegations of enforced disappearance, torture, and other ill-treatment and other crimes against detainees, Iranian prosecutors became complicit in the campaign of repression by bringing national security charges against hundreds of people solely for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, while judges doled out guilty verdicts on the basis of torture-tainted ‘confessions,’” said Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa.

The report also added that the detainees include children as young as ten and injured protesters and bystanders arrested from hospitals while seeking medical care for gunshot wounds. “Hundreds have since been sentenced to prison terms and flogging and several to the death penalty following grossly unfair trials which were presided over by biased judges behind closed doors, frequently lasted less than an hour, and systematically relied on torture-tainted ‘confessions,’” the report indicated.

However, this is not the first time that Iranian authorities show such cruelty against inmates. In July and August 1988, the same authorities and judicial officials like the judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi, the current Justice Minister Alireza Avaei, former Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi, and many others were involved in the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners, mostly member and supporters of the Iranian opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

“The execution of imprisoned opponents, including those who had already been tried and were serving their prison terms, was the biggest massacre of political prisoners since World War II,” Baroness Boothroyd, Former Speaker of the House of Commons pointed out at the call for justice summit on July 19.

In fact, the international community’s indifference versus the Iranian government’s horrible crime in 1988 has emboldened the ayatollahs to continue their crimes and intensify their oppressive measures against the society, in particular dissidents and protesters.

“The 1988 massacre not only lays bare the international community’s inexplicable failure to uphold and defend international law enacted to prevent genocides and massacres but also highlights a worrying culture of impunity for serious human rights‘ abusers in Iran,” said David Jones, British MP, former Secretary of State for Wales, at the videoconference in commemoration of the 1988 massacre’s victims on August 22.

In this context, it is imperative that human rights organizations, including the United Nations and its affiliated bodies, exert pressure on the Iranian government to release all protesters immediately. They must also dispatch a fact-finding delegation in Iran to inspect human rights violations facts.

On August 31, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), urged the international community to intervene immediately to stop execution in Iran. “I urge the international community, especially the United Nations Secretary-General and other human rights organizations to intervene immediately to stop the executions, secure the release of the prisoners, and prevent a major humanitarian catastrophe in prisons Iran,” Rajavi tweeted.

Dick CHITLER Says Iraq War Was Right! (Rev 13:10)

Dick Cheney: ‘We were right’ to invade Iraq

09/01/15 02:43 PM
By Zachary Roth

Dick Cheney just won’t let it go.

In a new book, the former vice president mounts a furious assault against President Obama’s foreign policy, which Cheney argues has damaged American security by retreating from a position of global leadership. And Cheney takes the obligatory shot at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya. But Cheney often seems more concerned with defending the disastrous foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration—from invading Iraq to the use of torture—made more than a decade ago.

In “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America,” Cheney, writing with his daughter Liz Cheney, a former State Department official during the Bush administration, takes aim at the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, writing it will “guarantee an Iranian nuclear arsenal.” The Cheneys insist that invading Iraq was the right call, writing “things were in good shape” in the country when Obama took office. Oh, and they suggest that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden was probably a Russian spy.

Almost the first half of the book is devoted to defending Dick Cheney’s tarnished legacy as perhaps the most important figure in the Bush administration’s push for war in Iraq and its handling of the war on terror.

At one stage, the Cheneys write that “history will be the ultimate judge of our decision to liberate Iraq.” But just two pages later, as if unable to resist re-engaging the issue, they describe the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as a “grave threat to the United States” before concluding: “We were right to invade and remove him from power.”

They even insist that U.S. troops “were in fact greeted as liberators,” just as Dick Cheney predicted before the invasion—a quote that Bush administration critics have frequently hung around his neck.
The Cheneys also offer a strained rationale for why, even though Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, the terror attacks still were a reason to invade Iraq. “[A]fter 9/11 … we had an obligation to do everything possible to prevent terrorists from gaining access to much worse weapons. Saddam’s Iraq was the most likely place for terrorists to gain access to and knowledge of such weapons.”

As for the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program, “it worked,” the Cheneys write. “As we pieced together intelligence about al Qaeda in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the enhanced interrogation program was one of the most effective tools we had. It saved lives and prevented attacks.”

And, they claim, it’s a “falsehood” to say that the torture that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison “represented official policy,” or “had something to do with or was related to America’s enhanced interrogation program.”

The prison at Guantanamo Bay “was and remains safe, secure, humane and necessary,” according to the Cheneys. And people who oppose the Bush administration’s controversial warrantless wiretapping program “will be accountable for explaining to the American people why they fought to make it more difficult for the United States government to effectively track the communications—and therefore the plans—of terrorists inside the United States,” they write.
Still, the thrust of the book is an attack on Obama’s foreign policy, which, the Cheneys argue, has made the U.S. less safe by failing to wield American power around the globe.

“President Obama has departed from the bipartisan tradition going back 75 years of maintaining America’s global supremacy and leadership,” the Cheneys write, calling the idea that that “America is to blame and her power must be restrained” the “touchstone of [Obama’s] ideology.”
With the Iran nuclear deal, Obama “is gambling America’s security on the veracity of the Mullahs in Tehran,” they write, calling it a “falsehood” that the pact will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. “The truth is the opposite,” they write. “This agreement will guarantee an Iranian nuclear arsenal.”

Indeed, the Cheneys compare the deal to the Munich agreement of 1938, a frequently used example among conservatives of the dangers of appeasement.

“Hitler got Czechoslovakia,” the Cheneys write (in fact, at Munich, Hitler got the Sudetenland, an area of western Czechoslovakia mostly inhabited by German speakers). “The Mullahs in Tehran get billions of dollars and a pathway to a nuclear arsenal.”

The Cheneys also take the chance to go after Clinton on Benghazi, in an effort to reinforce questions about her character as she runs for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. They accuse her of “adopting a false narrative because it serves political purposes,” adding, “It is the difference between lying to the American people and dealing with them truthfully.”

Dick Cheney also recounts that a Pentagon official told him in a phone call that the administration’s “pivot to Asia” was “all about budgets.” From this Cheney writes: “President Obama was pretending the war on terror was over so that he wouldn’t have to continue to allocate significant military resources to the Middle East.”

“We’ll decline comment on second-hand anonymous quotes, but the President has been clear about the re-balance and its place in our national security. The re-balance to the Asia-Pacific region is based on a comprehensive assessment of long-term U.S. interests,” Defense Department spokesman William Urban told msnbc. “The security and prosperity of the United States depends on continued stability in the Asia-Pacific region, and therefore, the United States will stay fully engaged in the region to ensure that we continue to promote those interests.”

Perhaps the strangest charge in the book is the one about Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked a trove of classified documents before fleeing to Hong Kong, and, ultimately, Russia.
“Whether Snowden was a Russian operative at the time he stole the U.S. secrets is a subject of debate, although it is hard to conceive of his landing in Moscow as a coincidence,” the Cheneys write. Snowden has denied being a Russian spy.