Iran: Torture Used to Obtain ‘Confessions’ Judiciary’s Secret Squads Whitewash Repression, Incriminate Political Detainees HumanRightsWatch (New York, December 7, 2004) Secret squads operating under the authority of the Iranian judiciary have used torture to force detained Internet journalists and civil society activists to write self-incriminatory “confession letters,” Human Rights Watch said today. Evidence obtained by Human Rights Watch confirms that secret squads of interrogators—primarily former intelligence officers purged in the late-1990s by President Mohammed Khatami but now employed by the judiciary—forced the detainees to write these “confession letters” under extreme pressure as a condition for their release on bail. In...
