From an e-mail that came my way... I do not know (of) Mr. Alex Agahi
-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Agahi [mailto:alex@agahi.net]
Sent: Monday, June 07, 2004 4:44 PM
To: Alex Agahi
Cc: ted.turner@turner.com; Christiane.Amanpour@turner.com; asieh.namdar@turner.com; lklshow.ideas@cnn.com; tom.hannon@cnn.com; wolf@cnn.com; rudi.bakhtiar@turner.com; cnnfutures@cnn.com; sundays@cbsnews.com; uttm@cbs.com; sat@cbsnews.com; 2020@abc.com; thisweek@abc.com; nightline@abc.com; tony.snow@foxnews.com; fns@foxnews.com; oreilly@foxnews.com; brit.hume@foxnews.com; hannity@foxnews.com; colmes@foxnews.com; fnc.wash@foxnews.com; cavuto@foxnews.com
Subject: story from prison
First story:
Twice they took me to the courtyard in ????, where the executions are carried out. They tied my feet. They took off my blindfold. One man was saying: "Tell me why you lied. Tell me what you did." They hung me from my feet, and they put a bag over my head. For what I think was 30 minutes, they were kicking me and hitting me. They hit my chin, and the skin broke. Blood began to fill the bag that was tied over my head. Blood began to drip on the floor, and this is when they stopped.
The second time they took me in there, they hung me from my hands. They used a baton to beat my torso. They broke my hand, and I fell unconscious. When I regained consciousness, they said, "If you say you lied, we will stop." I could not speak. It is not because I am brave that I did not confess, it is because I couldn't talk.
Second Story:
In the first few hours, it is very hard. You have never been this close to walls in your life. You don't want to sit, because it is chalk, and you are not used to sitting on chalk. You stand. You pace. You start to get dizzy. After you get dizzy, you lean on a wall. After three or four hours, your legs get tired, and you sit. And then you scream and no one hears you.
And you feel like they are holding you, like they are physically holding on to you. Your hair and nails grow faster. A lot of prisoners say that solitary is like being like "the dead in their coffins" because we had heard that the dead's nails grow in their coffins. Even if they had given me something to read, they had taken my glasses. Even if I had had my glasses, there wasn't enough light.
To our wealthy, successful working only for what it pays journalists;
These are real stories but they are not from Al-Ghrib Prison in Iraq, they are new but they are facts and they are the way of life in Iran, it does happen every day but nobody has ever heard about them.
I am sure that Ted Coppell, Peter Jennings, Mike Wallace, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, even our own Christiana Amanpour and many more news salesmen can not even call themselves journalist since they are only a salespersons who are trying to sell their products and at this time this is not the product that has a big market.
Human dignity is not a product, all we ask of you is to be human and to report the same way that you report other products.
If you would please go to http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2004/06/07/iran8774.htm
{{{ Iran: Torture Used to Suppress Dissent (Brussels, June 7, 2004) -- The Iranian government has intensified its campaign of torture, arbitrary arrests, and detentions against political critics, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Iran's outgoing reformist parliament in May passed legislation to prohibit torture, but without effective implementation, the law remains an empty gesture.....}}}
Its time to give back, be a Journalist, be human.
Alex Agahi