The real Abu Ghraib

Abu Ghraib was disgusting and, I hope, anomalous. The real deal, the torture that makes Torquemada look like a nice guy, goes on publicly every day in Iran, as Jonathan Last reminds us in his article about a movie detailing Iranian torture:

In Iran, however, torture and abasement are not just a province of the secret police. They are also a matter of public policy. Consider the November 2005 hanging of two Iranian men for the crime of homosexuality. As Human Rights Watch explains, "Iranian law punishes all penetrative sexual acts between adult men with the death penalty. Nonpenetrative sexual acts between men are punished with lashes until the fourth offense, when they are punished with death." If you can imagine, these poor souls got off easy. In July 2005, two teenage sexual offenders were also put to death, but before their execution, they were given 228 lashes--just for good measure. Reading about these atrocities is terrible. Seeing them is worse. Akrami's film shows video of how Iran deals with its common criminals: thieves, gays, women who have been victims of rape. A Few Simple Shots shows Iranian authorities setting out a big circular saw in the town square and cutting away at fingers and limbs. The most disturbing sequence develops slowly. First, shovels work at the dusty ground in a public square. They dig two holes, about four feet deep. Then two bodies are carried out, and although they are wrapped in white sheets, they are animated. Hands lower them into the holes. They jerk and wobble while dirt is packed around them. Then the stones start flying. Dozens of men--ordinary Iranians, some young, some old--begin pelting the white bags with hundreds of rocks the size of a fist. As the ghoulish spectacle unfolds, the most alarming aspect--more sickening than the way the white bags wriggle and dance--is the demeanor of the men doing the killing. For them, this is not grim work; they are euphoric.

And they say they've almost got the bomb.... By the way, in the face of these real images about grim Death, some enterprising Hollywood actors have gone abroad to make a film that accuses Americans of massacring Arabs in part so that Jews can harvest their organs. Who needs ugly facts when we can create even more ugly fictions, especially if the facts damn the Iranians and the fictions threaten the Jews? Talking to Technorati: Iran, Torture