Saeed Mortazavi: butcher of the press - and torturer of Tehran?

Saeed Mortazavi, who has reportedly been given the job of pursuing Iranian democracy protesters through the courts, is a formidable hardliner with a decade-long track record of cracking down on reformists.

As prosecutor-general of Tehran since 2003 and as a judge before that, he has earned the nickname "the butcher of the press" for ordering the closure of more than 100 newspapers, journals and websites suspected of being hostile to the establishment.

He oversaw the arrest and trial earlier this year of Roxana Saberi, the American-Iranian journalist sentenced to eight years for spying, and it has been Mr Mortazavi's name on the arrest warrants of prominent reformists rounded up since the unrest started, such as Saeed Hajarian, a close aide of Mohammed Khatami, the reformist former President.

He has also led the clampdown on Islamic morality in Tehran that has seen women arrested for immodest clothing.

But it is the death of Zahra Kazemi while in Iranian custody on July 11, 2003, that has made Mr Mortazavi infamous around the world.

"The leading role of Saeed Mortazavi in the crackdown in Tehran should set off alarm bells for anyone familiar with his record," said Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch.

Saeed Mortazavi, who has reportedly been given the job of pursuing Iranian democracy protesters...

It's soooooo simple... The oppressed millions of Iran need to pursue him (and every SOB like him), until they seize him one night in some alley somewhere and skin him alive. These tyrants cannot all live out every moment of their lives in a cocoon.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was right.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, polkers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

Journalists from all opposition countries are being rounded up, kidnapped, put on ytial or put in prison without a trial.

If Iran can do this to foreign journalists, just think what they do to their own people - which we have seen over the past ten days.

Great quote! It was harder in Solzhenitsyn's time to organize such a thing. But in the age of the internet, it'd be so easy.

I'm having a hard time understanding the Iranian people's reluctance to do what's necessary. Yes, it'll take courage, but they've got that. Yes, it'll take a tremendous sacrifice, albeit, I believe, a brief one. But what are they doing now, if not sacrificing -- interminably? Their future, their suffering, their happiness, is in their hands. So act, already.

They need to quit waiting on Americans to save them, particularly with the group of 'rats we have in office now.

(Iran: Please, just kindly don't start screaming 'Death to America,' 'Death to Jews,' 'Death to Christians,' etc., again when it's all over, as muslims always seem to do, when the killing of their own kind is done.)

Forced confessions have been airing on Iranian state run tv.

Mortazavi is an incredibly vile, evil creature whom I hope spends an eternity in Hell.

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