Scott Horton: Where Iran's Regime Learned Its Tricks

[marmar]

via MichaelMoore.com:




Saturday, June 27th, 2009
Where Iran's Regime Learned Its Tricks ...by Scott Horton

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.

Daily Beast


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.

Organized Police Violence

Iran’s theocratic state has a number of police organizations that serve overlapping but different functions. It has conventional police officers, who are frequently characterized by protesters as more moderate and restrained. An informal, youthful paramilitary police called the Basij have carried much of the brunt of the effort to suppress demonstrators. 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.

These informal militias have been boosted dramatically in recent weeks with fresh recruits who have been told that the demonstrators are bent on toppling the state. They have been given full license to use harsh force to put the demonstrations down. Roozonline, a Farsi Internet newspaper, recently featured an interview with one of the new recruits. Here’s a summary by The Guardian’s Robert Tait of the interview:

“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.’ The volunteers, most of them from far-flung provinces such as Khuzestan, Arak, and Mazandaran, are being kept in hostel accommodation, reportedly in east Tehran. Other volunteers, he says, have been brought from Lebanon, where the Iranian regime has strong allies in the Hezbollah movement. They are said to be more highly paid than their Iranian counterparts and are put up in hotels. The last piece of information seems to confirm the suspicion of many Iranians that foreign security personnel are being used to suppress the demonstrators. For all his talk of the legal process, this interview provides a key insight into where Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believes the true source of his legitimacy rests.” ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=1245

[timeforpeace]

1. Alex, I'll take "It was the US!" for $1000.