Mick Hartley

More on the delightful Ebrahim Raisi (yesterday), Iran's new president-elect, and his bloody history:

Former prisoners who were tortured, interrogated and sentenced to death by Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s next president, have condemned his claims to be a “defender of human rights”.

In interviews with The Times witnesses said that as a young prosecutor in the 1980s Raisi presided over beatings, stonings and rape, as well as ordering the mass executions of prisoners by hanging or throwing them off cliffs.

The head of the judiciary, 60, who will become president after a landslide victory last week, was a member of notorious “death commissions” accused of killing at least 5,000 prisoners under the orders of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988.

The victims were mainly political prisoners held in Evin and Gohardasht prisons near Tehran who supported groups opposed to the Khomeini regime and were accused of taking part in insurrections during the Iran-Iraq war.

It is claimed that during a career in which he rose from a hardline young prosecutor to become Iran’s most senior judge Raisi has been complicit in a litany of abuses that have prompted calls for him to be tried for crimes against humanity.

Farideh Goudarzi was jailed for six years in 1983 for supporting the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI), a banned political and militant group. She was arrested in 1983 and flogged while heavily pregnant, then forced to give birth in prison.

Goudarzi, 59, recalled that Raisi was present as Revolutionary Guards dropped her month-old baby on the floor during one interrogation and then stripped the child naked to search for compromising evidence.

She also claimed that as a 23-year-old prosecutor Raisi watched while she was whipped with power cables by guards in Hamedan prison, western Iran. “I was arrested aged 21 just a week before I was due to give birth,” she said yesterday, adding that her husband and brother were also arrested and executed as supporters of the left-wing PMOI.

“I was taken to a revolutionary court and then directly to an interrogation room, where Ebrahim Raisi was present. Despite my condition I was sat on a bed and whipped on the face and hands with cables, while he watched.”

In his first press conference since being confirmed as president-elect, Raisi responded publicly for the first time to allegations about his role in the 1988 killings that led to him being placed on an American sanctions list in 2019.

“I am proud of being a defender of human rights and of people’s security and comfort as a prosecutor wherever I was,” he said. “All actions I carried out during my office were always in the direction of defending human rights . . . Today in the presidential post, I feel obliged to defend human rights.”

Goudarzi claimed that the doctrines of Iran’s revolutionary courts required prosecutors such as Raisi to be present, along with judges, when interrogations or sentences were carried out.

“I was held in solitary confinement for seven months,” Goudarzi, who fled Iran five years ago and is living in Albania, said. “While there I gave birth to my son. I met Raisi several times, as I was being interrogated and questioned several times a day, and I heard the cries of others as they were tortured, day and night.” […]

Shortly after the end of its war with Iraq in 1988 three-man “death commissions” were convened in every Iranian province to eliminate all political opposition. Over the next three months thousands of political prisoners were killed in secret, their bodies dumped mostly in unmarked graves.

Prisoners, many of whom were convicted without due process, or for peaceful activism, were interrogated about their religious views, or if they would walk through uncleared minefields to prove their loyalty. Giving a wrong answer would result in execution. The exact number is unknown, but estimates range from 5,000 to 30,000 deaths.

Iran’s next president, Ebrahim Raisi, who was deputy prosecutor-general in Tehran in 1988, sat on one such commission. Like others, he has not been held accountable, while Tehran continues to shroud the killings in secrecy, admitting only that the number who died was “insignificant”.

More than three decades on Raisi remains a favoured candidate to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 82, as Supreme Leader.

The kind of man Biden would want to do business with? Apparently so:

Biden administration officials are insisting that the election of a hardliner as Iran’s president won’t affect prospects for reviving the faltering 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. But there are already signs that their goal of locking in a deal just got tougher.

Optimism that a deal was imminent has faded as the latest talks ended Sunday without tangible indications of significant progress. And on Monday, in his first public comments since the vote, incoming Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi rejected a key Biden goal of expanding on the nuclear deal if negotiators are able to salvage the old one.

At the same time, Raisi is likely to raise Iran’s demands for sanctions relief in return for Iranian compliance with the deal, as he himself is already subject to US human rights penalties.

“I don’t envy the Biden team,” said Karim Sadjapour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has advised multiple US administrations on Iran. “I think the administration now has a heightened sense of urgency to revise the deal before Raisi and a new hardline team is inaugurated.”

US President Joe Biden and his team have made a US return to the deal one of their top foreign policy priorities. The deal was one of President Barack Obama’s signature achievements, one that aides now serving in the Biden administration had helped negotiate and that Donald Trump repudiated and tried to dismantle as president.

Despite Raisi’s impending presidency, Biden administration officials insist prospects for reaching an agreement are unaltered. They argue that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who signed off on the 2015 deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, will make any final decisions regardless of who is president.

“The president’s view and our view is that the decision leader is the supreme leader,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday. “That was the case before the election; it’s the case today; it will be the case probably moving forward.”

“Iran will have, we expect, the same supreme leader in August as it will have today, as it had before the elections, as it had in 2015 when the JCPOA was consummated for the first time,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said.

Oh dear. They sound desperate.