Iranian Regime Murders Blogger In Captivity

The Iranian theocratic regime has just beaten to death a 35 year old blogger, Sattar Beheshti, in prison, according to Reporters Without Borders. He was being persecuted for blogging things the regime didn’t like, which it considered a Threat To National Security. (The standard excuse of all governments when they persecute people, along with Threating Public Order.) The BBC reports that this is the 17^th prisoner beaten to death in the regime’s prisons in 9 years.

Whatever one thinks of the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program, the regime itself is repressive, and totalitarian in its ideology. Recall the violent repression of the protests against the last, fixed election, which reelected President Ahmadinejad. (Ahmadinejad is more and more impotent these days. He can’t even make personnel appointments or keep his own people out of prison! His final term ends in Spring 2013. Yet we keep hearing references to “Iranian threats to wipe Israel off the map” which apparently refer to his past inane spoutings, despite the fact that he doesn’t call the shots.) It would be a blessing for the Iranian people to be free of it. (What’s the U.S. plan, to impose the now erstwhile terrorist MEK on Iran?) Nevertheless, the Iranian regime and Israel are obviously enemies- especially since Iran supports Hezbollah and Hamas, anti-Israeli organizations.

Coincidentally, the U.S. announced sanctions against more Iranian Government targets, including the communications minister and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance [i.e. Propaganda and Indoctrination]. Ironically, unnamed U.S. Treasury and State Department officials told the New York Times that these officials are culpable for censoring news media, jamming satellite broadcast, disrupting Internet activities, and “intimidating and detaining journalists” in the NY Times’ words. [“Iran Fired onMilitary Drone In First Such Attack, U.S. Says,” 11/8/12.] Except for the first of those, the U.S. does all of that too. In fact, it goes farther than these particulars against Iran, killing journalists, especially ones from Aljazeera (in Kabul and Baghdad), but also from Reuters, a Spanish journalist killed in the U.S. Army attack on a Baghdad hotel, and others.* (The Baghdad hotel was well known as a location for journalists, as we know from a former NSA worker interviewed on Democracy Now.) [However, the theocratic regime of Iran has killed at least one journalist in custody; odd that it wasn’t mentioned by the U.S. officials and NYT.]

One Aljazeera employee was imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for several years while he was interrogated on Aljazeera’s inner workings, and promised to be released only if he’d be a U.S. spy inside Aljazeera.  

*On the matter of intimidation of journalists, leaving aside whether Julian Assange qualifies as a journalist, increasingly the U.S. is trying to obtain journalists’ confidential sources via Grand Jury inquisitions, and seems to be inching closer to using the so-called  Espionage Act against reporters who report whistleblower-obtained secrets. The secrets the high officials choose to plant anonymously in organs such as the NY Times are treated differently, of course, those officials are free to keep committing the same “crime” of divulging “classified information” with impunity. And in a lawsuit brought against the Carl Levin-authored and Obama-signed provision of the most recent Military Money Act allowing imprisonment without charges of U.S. citizens labeled “terrorists” in military gulags for indefinite periods, journalists and others made the point that they were intimidated in their work by this. The Federal District Judge agreed, but of course the Obama regime is appealing. So different from Bush! Lucky thing Romney lost, too!