NEW: The United States is preparing to lift sanctions on several of the Iranian regime’s most notorious human rights abusers implicated in the torture and execution of political dissidents, the murder of protesters, and the persecution of Iran’s LGBTQ community.
Details in🧵:
2. The pending deal being finalized in Vienna would lift sanctions on Ebrahim Raisi, who reports to Supreme Leader Khamenei with the misleading title of President. He helped execute around 5,000 Iranian political dissidents and religious minorities in the 1988 Death Commissions.
3. Raisi presided as a judge overseeing the sham trials – including of young children – that typically only lasted a few minutes before the guilty verdict was delivered.
Raisi’s victims were loaded by forklifts in groups of six up onto cranes and hanged every 30 minutes.
4. One of the few survivors “spared” was a pregnant woman, who was taken to the torture chamber instead of the crane.
She was repeatedly lashed and tortured by several men, including Ebrahim Raisi.
The U.S. sanctions imposed against Raisi will soon be lifted.
5. As former Deputy National Security Advisor @VictoriaCoates noted today - he was also very involved in suppression of the nationwide Green Movement Protests.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…
6. The deal also lifts sanctions against Ahmad Jannati, one of the regime’s most powerful and brutal clerics.
Jannati's main day job is rigging the country’s elections, but in his spare time he leads the massive rallies in “Death to America/England/Israel” chants.
7. I personally helped place sanctions on Jannati. He is pure evil. He routinely pushes for the regime to kill protesters.
In 2010 he said: "I thank the judiciary chief for executing two protesters and urge him to execute others if they do not give up such protests.”
8. In the early days of the regime, Jannati was told a prison in Khuzestan province was filling up with dissidents, so he volunteered to go serve there as a “judge”.
He proudly recounted: “I got busy working…for there was some doubt whether we should execute them all or not.”
9. As one might expect, both Raisi and Jannati lead the persecution against Iran’s LGBTQ community. Raisi called homosexuality “nothing but savagery”.
Jannati prefers harsher language and “judicial” sentences that I won’t repeat in writing here.
9. You may ask: why haven’t you heard of these disgusting people before? That’s mostly the accomplishment of Javad Zarif, who served as the regime’s chief propagandist from 2013-2021.
He had the misleading title of Foreign Minister, but that wasn’t his role in the regime.
11.Zarif had little power to negotiate deals or set the foreign policy of the regime (that’s the IRGC’s job), so he was tasked with talking with reporters and think tankers in Europe and the U.S. to deceive them of the regime’s true nature and radical intentions.
12.He also readily defended the regime’s executions of gay people. While on a PR roadshow in Germany, Zarif was asked by a gay reporter: “why are homosexuals executed in Iran because of their sexual orientation?” washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/…
13.Zarif responded with classic moral relativism: “Our society has moral principles. And we live according to these principles. These are moral principles concerning the behavior of people in general. And that means that the law is respected and the law is obeyed."
14.Zarif was covering up for the fact that his regime has executed thousands of gay Iranians – 4,000-6,000 according to some estimates. Zarif’s other lies and involvement in the regime’s international terror apparatus earned him U.S. sanctions in 2019.
Those will be gone too.
15. These sanctions – and on other worse regime officials – are set to be lifted in the next few days when President Biden lifts all sanctions against the Supreme Leaders Office (Executive Order 13876) as part of the Russian-negotiated Iran Deal.
16. I’ll end on a personal note: one of the most challenging responsibilities I had working on Iran issues at the @StateDept was directing the human rights portfolio for two years.
It was hard – I had to document massacres like this one in 2019.
17. I’ve seen more photos of Iranian torture victims and executed children than I hope to ever see again.
But sometimes a day or two after the U.S. placed sanctions on these evil men, I would get a phone call or email from an Iranian who lost a loved one by those twisted men.
18. It was the first time in years they felt they had received a semblance of justice - that their pain had been heard. And they profusely thanked me and the United States through their tears.
These sanctions are not merely economic tools – they speak truth to the face of evil.
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