Free Republic

Writing about the death of #MichaelLedeen is something I always feared a quiet dread I carried in my heart for years. Today, with overwhelming sorrow, I find myself doing just that. @michaelledeen was everything. Everything I have today my safety, my second chance, my voice I owe to him and his beloved wife, Barbara. In 2008, after surviving a decade of imprisonment and torture in the Islamic Republic in #Iran, I managed to escape to Iraq. It was Michael who intervened. He engaged directly with the U.S. government and secured my entry into the United States as a political refugee....

(CBS) Much of the attention on Iran over the last few years has focused on its mysterious nuclear program. Another mystery that has received far less attention is torture in Iran's prisons. It's a story the Iranian government doesn't want you to hear; a story a man risked his life to tell. His name is Ahmad Batebi, and quite by accident he became one of the most famous dissidents in Iran. He says he endured years of torture in an Iranian prison, after his picture appeared on the cover of The Economist magazine. He escaped from Iran last year, and...

"I wish each and every Iranian could travel abroad, come to the U.S. or go to Europe, for just one week, and feel, smell, and breathe freedom, human dignity, and realize the value of their lives." Ahmed BatebiVoice of America Interview Washington DC, USAJune 30, 2008AHMED BATEBI HAS ESCAPED TO THE UNITED STATES-- The brave Iranian student activist who was sentenced to death and who was severely tortured for years in the notorious Evin Prison in Iran has arrived safely in the United States! During a break from prison, Batebi fled Iran traveling through Iraq and Austria and finally arriving...

Tehran, 22 Feb. (AKI) - Sommayah Batinat, wife of Ahmad Batebi, a student who has been in jail since protests in July 1999, was arrested on Wednesday night after denouncing to the international media, including Adnkronos International (AKI), that her husband was still in detention despite his poor health. Plainclothes officials reportedly brought the woman to an undisclosed location. Batinat had said that her husband was in very serious condition after reporting a concussion at Tehran's Evin prison but had been transferred back to jail despite the protests from the hospital where he was treated. Batebi was arrested in July...

August 03, 2005 Youngbloods Meet a key to a golden Iranian future. By Rachel Zabarkes Friedman You may not know or recognize his name, but you’ve probably seen Ahmad Batebi’s face. In the picture that made him famous six years ago, Batebi, then just 21, his longish dark hair held back with a cloth band, is holding a bloody t-shirt above his head. That picture was taken at a student demonstration in Tehran in July of 1999, and the t-shirt belonged to a colleague of Batebi’s, a victim of government-backed violence against the peaceful protesters. Soon after that demonstration, The...

Iranian police arrested a Protestant Christian pastor in northern Iran three days ago, jailing him along with his wife and two teenage children. CWNews.org – ISTANBUL, (Compass) -- Iranian police arrested a Protestant Christian pastor in northern Iran three days ago, jailing him along with his wife and two teenage children. Pastor Khosroo Yusefi and his wife Nasrin were arrested on May 23 in Chalous, a town along the Caspian Sea coast in Mazanderan province. Together with their 18-year-old son and a daughter age 15, they remain imprisoned without known charges. Today sources in Iran confirmed to Compass that the...

Kidnapped, jailed, beaten ... over a bloodied T-shirt Sunday April 4, 2004 The Observer Repression goes on while Iran seeks friendship with the West. Dan De Luce reports from Tehran His handsome face was seen around the world. The photograph, used on the front of the Economist magazine, showed Ahmad Batebi, his hands holding the bloodstained T-shirt of a fellow student beaten by paramilitaries. His look of indignation captured the mood of young Iranians demonstrating for democracy in the summer of 1999. Just holding that shirt earned Batebi a 15-year prison sentence for endangering national security, served in the notorious...

"If I have no news of my son and if the security of my family is not assured, I will contact human rights defence organisations," his father told the agency. (Ahmad Batebi's Father) Follow The Story & Free Iran at ActivistChat.com Tehran - A prominent Iranian student activist who met with a visiting United Nations rights envoy over the weekend has gone missing, the student news agency ISNA reported on Tuesday. The agency also quoted Iran's prosecutor general, Abdolnabi Namazi, as dismissing the integrity of the UN's Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Ambeyi Ligabo, who spent...