Open letter to Ayatollah Khamenei
On the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution, Index on Censorship and international free speech campaigners call on Iran to release the more than 60 writers, journalists, and bloggers currently in prison
Let My Colleagues Go
This article was originally published in the International Herald Tribune
Dear Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
Your government and supporters think of you as God’s representative on earth. Your official title is “Supreme Leader,” so you are responsible for all the wrongs and rights that happen in our country.
You have also been called the “No. 1 enemy of journalists in the world” because your government has arrested dozens of them since the presidential elections in June 2009. More than 60 are still in your prisons.
I was unfortunate enough to know firsthand how your agents treat journalists. I was kept in your jail for 118 days simply for being a reporter. For much of that time I was tortured.
But I do not hold any grudges. I am writing out of concern for my colleagues and the future of our country.
“Our future society will be a free society and all the elements of oppression, cruelty, and force will be destroyed.” It is not I who am saying this. It was your predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said those words to a reporter from Der Spiegel on November 7, 1978. The only accusation against many reporters who are languishing in Iranian jails is that they held a mirror to the actions of the Iranian government. They did not want to overthrow it. They never took up arms. All of them did their job as peacefully as journalists elsewhere around the world.
Your government issued me a press card. But I was coerced to make a false televised confession admitting that I was acting as an agent of evil Western media. I was forced to say the media are trying to overthrow the Islamic government. I was beaten and threatened with execution to make that confession. I was beaten again after the show because I did not perform as well as my interrogator would have liked. Yes, Ayatollah Khamenei, I had to apologise to you on television to stop my torturer from punching me in the head.
I had no personal animosity against you or any other Iranian official. I reported peaceful demonstrations in the streets of Iran because it was the news of the day. Neither I, nor any of my colleagues, instigated the demonstrations against your president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Our job as journalists is to report the truth as accurately as we can. Even if some of us made mistakes, our punishment should never have been jail and torture.
Ayatollah Khamenei, next time you see a reporter confessing to his or her “crimes” and asking you for mercy on your television, remember: He or she has been tortured in your jails.
Many a time my torturer told me that he kicked me to make you happy. He told me, “Each time I slap you I can feel that the Master is smiling at me.” Ayatollah Khamenei, I think you are responsible for what happened to me.
It is getting late for you to repair the damage done to our country. But it is still not too late. You can start by releasing imprisoned journalists.
I know that I will make many people who are fed up with your regime — especially my fellow Iranians in the diaspora — angry by saying this, but most Iranian journalists are not interested in a regime change. Most journalists, even those who are very critical of the current government, believe they can live and work in Iran even under censorship.
Many of us were frustrated with your Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. We did not like to see our press cards revoked and to be barred from reporting one event or another. We accepted these restrictions as occupational hazards. We knew that we were not in a Western democracy. Our only request to our government was not to imprison, torture or kill us.
You must be aware of the lengthy sentences for imprisoned journalists. You must know that your judges are charging journalists with “fighting against Allah.”
I have heard that you read a novel a week. You must have read George Orwell’s “1984.” It is quite a popular book in Iran. Some of the sentences imposed by your judges on my colleagues are right off the pages of that book. How can you justify six years imprisonment, five years of internal exile and a lifetime of deprivation of social and political activities imposed on Ahmad Zeidabadi, a freelance journalist? I am sure the judge who imposed the sentence wanted to make you happy because Zeidabadi wrote a few articles in which he criticized you.
Ayatollah Khamenei, you may aspire to become as popular as Ayatollah Khomeini was in February 1979 when he triumphantly returned to Iran. People would not have adored him as they did had he called for mass arrests and mass trials of his enemies, as you have. He became popular for telling a Reuters reporter on Oct. 26, 1978, “The foundation of our Islamic government is based on freedom of dialogue and will fight against any kind of censorship.”
Do you think you can stop dissent by throwing those who report it in jail? I’m not sure what your advisers are telling you. But we live in an era in which you cannot stop the flow of information.
Even though your government has banned satellite television, a great number of Iranians still get their news from the BBC and Voice of America by using illegal satellite dishes. Currently your police may be able to find and punish dish owners. But soon the dishes will become smaller and cheaper and everyone will be able to have one in the safety of their homes.
By arresting accredited journalists your government has made every Iranian a citizen journalist. Your government has blocked most Web sites that are critical of your government, but Iranians have learned to use filter-busters to access them. Your government has narrowed the Internet bandwidth and has passed cyber crime laws, but that has not stopped your compatriots from using the Internet to inform the world about the situation of their country. YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are full of the latest news about the crimes of your regime.
You may feel safe in your modest house, protected by thousands of revolutionary guards. But beyond them the world is changing. Iran is changing. In 1978, as the shah was doing his best to stifle his people, Ayatollah Khomeini promised that “in an Islamic Iran the media will have the freedom to express all Iran’s realities and events.”
Hoping they could realize that promise, Iranians rose up and overthrew the shah. Ayatollah Khamenei, those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.
Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian reporter for Newsweek, was imprisoned in Tehran from June to October 2009.
Binyam Mohamed: Continuous Cover Up
A stain on this nation’s name
This article was originally published in the Daily Mail
Every time I reassure myself that this government cannot sink lower, it surprises me.
The attempt by the Foreign Office to suppress evidence that the British security services colluded in the torture of at least one detainee is a stain on our public life.
For months David Miliband has tried every trick in the book to try to suppress a court judgment which condemns the UK for its ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading’ behaviour towards Binyam Mohamed.
Miliband was not acting alone. Egged on by Downing Street, officials at the Foreign Office and the leadership of MI5 and MI6, desperate to keep their dirty secrets out of the public eye, he repeatedly went to the courts to try to keep the information secret.
Initially, Miliband argued that release of the torture trail would damage Anglo-American relations, of which intelligence sharing is a crucial part.
The only problem with this argument is that the Obama administration said it had no problem with releasing the evidence. The British then went behind the scenes and begged the Americans to forget this line of defence and insist that, after all, it would have grave repercussions for the ‘special relationship’.
It is a testament to the zeal of several senior lawyers that Miliband was eventually defeated yesterday in a Court of Appeal decision which could have major repercussions for Britain’s beleaguered culture of free speech.
Now, at last, we know the truth, or at least most of it. The seven key paragraphs that Miliband demanded be taken out of an original High Court judgment in August 2008 make for damning reading.
Mohamed was ‘intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation’, it says, before adding chillingly: ‘The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed.’
This evidence leaves a terrible taste in the mouth. The prisoner was kept under suicide watch, such was the ‘significant mental stress and suffering’ that he was undergoing.
The court implied – without actually feeling able to say it in black and white – that the connivance of British agents in the Americans’ violent practices contravened the UN Convention on Torture which the UK signed in 1984. This expressly bans sensory deprivation, hooding and other stress techniques.
Binyam Mohamed seen arriving back in Britain in February 2009
Some people argue that the ends justify the means. Just as America came under attack on September 11, 2001, so Britain, too, should do whatever it takes to keep the terrorists at bay.
Yet when Tony Blair declared, after our own attacks on July 7, 2005, that ‘the rules of the game have changed’, did that really mean helping the Americans – or any government for that matter – employ torture tactics of which dictators would be proud?
Instead of holding their hands up and apologising profusely on behalf of the Government, both for the original actions of the MI5 and MI6 agents, and for the attempted cover-up, David Miliband and his aides were at it again this week.
On Monday night, the Government’s QC, Jonathan Sumption, wrote to the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, urging him to delete from yesterday’s final judgment one paragraph which was particularly revealing about British participation in torture.
In an astonishing action which tramples on 400 years of legal custom that guarantees all sides are given due notification of any request, Mr Sumption failed to inform the other legal parties.
Government QC Jonathan Sumption has written to Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger
Amid fury from the other legal representatives, this led a somewhat embarrassed Lord Neuberger to admit that he had been ‘over-hasty’ in acceding to this latest attempt at censorship.
He has asked all parties, including my campaigning organisation, Index on Censorship (which was one of the original parties seeking publication), to submit our complaints by tomorrow. It is possible that this further evidence will be published then.
We know its gist already, as the court ruled that Mr Sumption’s letter could be published. It says the paragraph that was being withheld is ‘likely to receive more public attention than any other parts of the judgments’.
In other words, it is even more damning. It talks about the previous ‘form’ of the security services, presumably a deeply worrying reference to a history of connivance in, or participation in, torture.
To cap it all, it says officials of the services ‘deliberately misled’ the all-party parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, reflecting a broader ‘culture of suppression in its dealings with the Committee’.
A more devastating verdict would be hard to find. A more disreputable set of actions would be hard to identify, and this from a government which proclaims it is a leader in human rights around the world.
David Miliband attempted to put a brave face on the humiliation. In a statement to the Commons yesterday, he said the most important aspect of the judgment was that it had upheld the ‘control principle’ of intelligence sharing.
Depressingly, Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague echoed the sentiment. He expressed concern about Mohamed’s treatment and the time it took to resolve the issue, but his tone suggested that an incoming Conservative government would be equally likely to put underhand practice ahead of civilised behaviour and free expression.
If so, the Conservatives would destroy in one fell swoop the credibility they have been seeking to build up on issues of good government and propriety.
This latest court ruling, whatever the last-minute caveats, is a major victory for free speech and civil liberties. A government and Whitehall culture which lives off threats and secrecy has been dealt a blow.
Once the details of this case recede into history, the line in the Court of Appeal’s judgment which is likely to have the most profound effect is this: ‘(In) principle, a real risk of serious damage to national security, of whatever degree, should not automatically trump a public interest in open justice.’
John Kampfner is Chief Executive of Index on Censorship