You doubtless remember the revelations about how terrorists were treated at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. As bad as the detainees were, the treatment some of the received at the hands of a few American Guardsmen was unconscionable and illegal, and at least most of the persons responsible have been held to account.
You've also heard that the prison at Guantanamo Bay is scheduled to be closed in January because it fails to meet the exacting standards of American penology even though it's apparently a model penal institution whose detainees live better than do many inmates in our civilian penitentiaries.
In any event, amidst all the talk of prisoner mistreatment in American detention camps what's often omitted is any insight into how political prisoners are treated in most countries around the world.
Alexander Sohlzenitsyn was imprisoned in the former Soviet Union during the late forties and early fifties and survived to write an extraordinary book, titled The Gulag Archipelago, about the ghastly horrors of communist "justice."
Richard Wurmbrand was imprisoned behind the iron curtain because he was a Christian minister. His book titled Tortured for Christ describes the incredible cruelty of which men hostile to God are capable.
Armando Valladares was a Cuban who was deemed a political enemy of the Castro regime and was imprisoned in a system Dantesque in its hellishness. He wrote about his experience in Against All Hope.
In the aftermath of the war in Iraq we read of the unspeakable tortures perpetrated by Saddam Hussein, his sons, and his henchmen. We read about the horrible manner in which people who opposed them or stood in their way were tortured, mutilated, run through wood chippers, and suffered other grisly torments to the amusement of the Baathist psychopaths.
Some of the victims of these governments lived to tell their stories. Millions of others around the globe, especially in communist and Islamic countries, have not been so fortunate. The tortures they've suffered, and are suffering today, for no reason other than that they are political or religious liabilities are unimaginable.
Now word is beginning to leak out about the prisons in Iran and the brutalities to which hundreds of dissidents rounded up in the wake of the recent political protests there have been subjected. If the reports are accurate, they should be mailed to every person who applauded Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his visit to New York City and Columbia University last year. If the reports are accurate this man and his political patrons among the mullahs are as demonic as Saddam Hussein, and they deserve the same fate.
Here's part of the report:
Until the defeated Iranian presidential contender Mehdi Karroubi broke the wall of silence surrounding the Islamic Republic's prisons to demand an investigation into allegations of rape, little attention was paid to the abuses meted out to protestors who dared to claim that the June 12 election was rigged.
These abuses are inflicted routinely and systematically in seven secret prisons where political detainees are held at the behest of the revolutionary Islamic regime. Those prisons are described by DEBKAfile's Iranian sources as inhuman hellholes:
Kahrizak
This is the jail which supreme leader Ayatallah Ali Khamenei wanted razed to the ground to conceal the outrages committed there against scores of reform-seeking protesters who had the cruel fortune to be dumped there. Kahrizak on the southern outskirts of Tehran was notorious as the penal facility for Iran's most violent thugs and gangsters. Those inmates were let loose on the political prisoners who were incarcerated in cells ten meters square. An unknown number suffered rape and bloody beatings, which not all survived.
The commander of Iran's internal security forces Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam said Sunday, Aug. 9, that he would not deny his share in the blame for the "terrible things that took place in Kahrizak" where two protesters were admittedly found dead. He claimed that two of the security officials responsible for "widespread prisoner abuse" had been fired and awaited trial.
The prison remains open and our sources doubt those responsible for the outrages will be brought to trial.
Six more jails and detentions centers operate in the Tehran area.
Ghamar prison
A low, inconspicuous door behind the Ghamar Bani Hashem Hospital on Resaalat Street near the security ministry leads into a top-secret holding facility for interrogating political prisoners. It is closely guarded by Iran's intelligence ministry.
It has two floors and a yard, containing four interrogation rooms, eight isolation cells and eight holding cells in which dozens of detainees are crammed, allowed access to showers once a week and toilets three times a day. Here, the detainees undergo their first inquisition and beatings before they are transferred to other prisons. Their eyes and mouths are bound with leather straps to prevent them from identifying their tormentors. Their agony ends when they sign written confessions.
Most of the victims' families do not know their whereabouts.
Esharat-Abad prison
Several hundred political prisoners are crowded into this facility for drug offenders which is designed for 250 to 350 inmates. It is situated in the Narcotic Unit's headquarters in central Tehran.
The building consists of three large units broken up into cells of 1.5 x 2 meters, into each of which up to five detainees are squeezed for an agonizing three to seven days. Under interrogation, their arms and legs are broken to make them confess and give up information. Accustomed to beating and humiliating dope traffickers, the wardens carry on abusing the political detainees.
Sanitary conditions are appalling and the inmates are fed scraps from the prison staff canteens. The stench of vomit and sweat in the unventilated cells is unbearable. Whenever a detainee dies of torture or disease, prison authorities file a fictitious report. After the questioning finishes, those who survive are transferred to the central prison at Evin. No one has been brought to book for their deaths.
There's more at the link. Abu Ghraib was abominable, but I suspect that if prisoners in almost any jail in the communist or Islamic worlds were offered the opportunity to be transferred there, they'd accept without a moment's hesitation.
RLC
