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This story from the NY Times details how one Iranian dissident escaped the torture cells of modern day Iran:

After three days on the run, Ahmad Batebi picked his way down a rocky slope to the stream that marked Iran's border with Iraq. His Kurdish guides, who had led Mr. Batebi, an Iranian dissident, through minefields and dodged nighttime gunfire from border guards, passed him to a new team of shadowy human smugglers.

At the age of 31, after nearly eight years in Iranian prisons, subjected to torture and twice taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose, Mr. Batebi had fled.

It's an amazing tale that tracks his development into a student protester:

His own awakening began in fourth grade, when his teacher, fed up with the distortions of an official history textbook, burst out: "Go out and read other things to try to get the truth."

"The teacher probably doesn't even remember," Mr. Batebi said. "But he changed the course of my life."

A few weeks later came the stoning. Though forbidden by his mother, he slipped out of the house to see the commotion near his school. He saw a man, accused of adultery, buried to the waist, his head covered with a sack that turned red as Revolutionary Guards hurled chunks of concrete. A mullah standing atop a wall gave the orders, and an ambivalent crowd of neighbors looked on.

"I was utterly shocked," he recalled. "My hands and legs were shaking." Afterward, he suffered from nightmares.

Years later, he would witness public hangings and dismemberments. "But nothing had the impact of that stoning," he said. "I thought, This can't be Islam."

And what did he suffer from once he ended up in prison?

Mr. Batebi described 17 months in solitary confinement, including repeated torture by interrogators trying to force him to say on television that the famous T-shirt was stained with paint or animal blood.

His jailers thrashed him with a metal cable, beat his testicles and kicked in his teeth, he said. They held his face down in a pool of excrement. They tied his arms behind his back and hung him from the ceiling. At other times, strapping him to a chair, they kept him awake night after night, cutting him and rubbing salt into the wounds.

Twice he was led blindfolded to the gallows. Once the noose was left around his neck for 45 minutes, and he passed out from fear, he recalled. The second time, he sat, waiting, as a prisoner on each side of him was hanged.

This man's story is completely compelling and reveals how disgusting the state terror system is in Iran (it also makes you wonder what exactly has been going on in GITMO all these years). Yet, the most revealing part of the story is this:

He recoils when asked about the possibility of American military action against Iran, saying that if the United States attacked, "I might go back and fight for my country myself."

Italics are mine.

Here's a man who was tortured for years and led to believe that he would die by hanging, not once, but twice. And yet, given the scenario that if his country, which tortured him and denied him dignity, were attacked by the United States, he would go back to defend his country. It's an amazing admission that just goes to show that any attack by the U.S. against Iran will do nothing except strengthen the hard-liners there...

Read the entire story to get the full impact.

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