Iranian hard-liners upset over political prisoners' letters -- torture, forced confessions & abuse

[Elmore Furth]

Sometimes you just can't win the PR battle.

In a series of taboo-breaking letters written from prison, activists, politicians and journalists - most of them arrested in the aftermath of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed June 2009 election victory - have been telling tales of torture, criticizing Iranian leaders and encouraging others to continue their protests.

Government officials and their supporters in the media say the criticisms threaten national security and are demanding that judiciary officials put a stop to them.

Abdollah Momeni, a former student leader, described in vivid detail in a recent letter how he was brutally beaten dozens of times by his interrogators, kept for weeks in a tomb-like cell and forced to confess to crimes he says he did not commit.

"All this treatment is carried out in the framework of a religious regime, justified by claims of protecting the state," Momeni, 34, wrote in a letter published three weeks ago on the Web site of a human rights group that is critical of the Iranian government. "Haven't the law enforcement officials and the rulers of the current government of the Islamic Republic failed the test of justice, morality, and humanity?" Momeni also used the letter to call for the establishment of a truth commission to investigate the conduct of prison interrogations


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100103519.html?wprss=rss_world&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wp-dyn%2Frss%2Fworld%2Findex_xml+%28washingtonpost.com+-+World%29">Iranian hard-liners upset over political prisoners' letters

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. no system like that can last.

but change also must come from within, and as fragile as that nation is, it will happen in our lifetime.

I recall feeling the same way before the USSR began to fall apart.