Freedom fighter - Terrorist, Torture - Religious training

One mans freedom fighter is anothers terrorist and to Iran torture is religious training.

From FrontPage

Earlier this month, Iran’s Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi wasted no time denouncing the abuse of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison, accusing the United States of "systematically killing, torturing and raping Iraqis." Echoing this statement, President Mohammad Khatami said, "The painful torture inflicted by the occupying forces on Iraqis is a great tragedy." Top Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Janati went even further with his own invective saying "the pictures shown on the television showed the US criminal essence, which emanates from American savagery."

While the leaders of Iran’s tyrannical regime have shamelessly jumped on the band wagon to take the moral high ground in the midst of the Abu Ghraib prison fiasco, they conveniently forget to mention the real "systematic" killing, torture, and rape practiced in their own prisons against Iranian dissidents during the twenty five years of their rule.

They neglected to mention the bloodbath they created during the infamous 1988 massacre of political prisoners at Evin prison—in which somewhere between 4,000 and 30,000 prisoners were methodically executed in several months. Sixteen years after this tragic slaughter, the families of those prisoners still have not located the graves of their love ones.

"The massacre continued until October 1988," testified Hossein Mokhtar’s, a political prisoner who survived the Evin prison. "But they killed more than 90% of prisoners during the first 10 days. So many times we heard the heavy machine guns which were shooting to the victims in the ‘Shooting Execution hall’ of the prison. These were in addition to hanging on cranes and other hanging stands," he said. French daily Le Monde wrote that many of the executed were only between 12- and 14-years-old when they were jailed for taking part in public demonstrations years before.

Last month, perhaps in light of the increasing concerns about Iran’s rampant human rights violations, particularly the torture death of Canadian photojournalists Zahra Kazemi last summer, the Judiciary Chief Mahmoud Shahroudi ordered a ban on the use of torture. The Iranian-borne Kazemi, 54, died from a brain hemorrhage caused by a blow to the head while in custody. She was arrested for taking photographs outside Tehran's notorious Evin prison.

Presumedly you do not ban something that does not exist, eh?

[...]

Iran has not yet joined the Convention Against Torture, a convention that was introduced in 1975 and has been ratified by several countries, including Libya, China and Sudan. Article 1 of the convention bans most of the existing practices that fall under the "religious punishment" of Iran’s Sharia-based penal code. It is a system of laws that codifies lashes, amputations, eye-gouging, and stoning for charges ranging from robbery, drinking alcohol, and adultery to anti-government political activities. In the perverted lexicon of the mullahs, these "punishments" are not considered torture.

Inside prisons, on any given day, a religious judge could issue an order for "Tazir," a religious term for physical punishment of the detainee that ranges from lashing the victim for hours to solitary confinement and electric shock. The ban does not apply to "Tazir".

Amputations and eye-gouging? Seems Kilroy was right after all.