Iranian Bloggers Prison Experiences

The LA Times:

His name is Hanif Mazroui, and the tools of his crime are a handful of ideas and skinny fingers flying over the keyboard. He is one of about 20 Iranian Web loggers and journalists who have been arrested and jailed in recent months. ...

Asked about his time in prison, Mazroui dropped his chin, studied his shoes and said, "I prefer not to talk about it."

Then, after a moment of awkward silence as he slumped at his father's side, he fished into the pocket of his peacoat, drew out a bundle of black cloth and handed it over. It was a frayed blindfold, cut from thick canvas, with a tiny triangular wedge sliced out for a nose. He'd been forced to wear it in prison, he explained, and he'd smuggled the blindfold out with him as a keepsake.

"I just want to remember where I was," he said. "I'm grateful for my time in prison, because I realized how much we should pay for freedom, and that freedom can't be got easily. I'm a small drop of that." ...

Mazroui is still free, but soon after going public with his allegations of torture, he stopped responding to e-mails from the Los Angeles Times. According to a Human Rights Watch report, Mazroui and the other journalists and bloggers had been menaced by death threats. ...

Another Internet writer, who agreed to an interview shortly after his release on the condition that neither his name nor any revealing details be given, said he'd been interrogated mercilessly, beaten and held in solitary confinement until he became suicidal. ...

He described being held in an underground cell no larger than a coffin, a claustrophobic place burned around the clock by an overhead light. He lost track of days under the unblinking light, and slowly came to believe that he would be forgotten there, he said, trapped eternally. "It felt like a grave," he said. "I thought I would be there forever."

The writer described something he said interrogators called the "miracle room" — an interrogation cell where his captors terrorized him, bragging of the reformist politicians and journalists they'd broken down through psychological torment. He began to dream of killing himself, and plotted how it could be done.

He couldn't sleep, not even after he was released. He'd lain awake weeping in bed until 4 o'clock in the morning the night before the interview, he said. For the first time in his life, he added sadly, he was beginning to understand why Iranians give up and leave their country. more

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