Dissent Crushing 101, right out of Mao, Stalin and the CIA torture and repression Playbooks

A female poet whose “death” became the focus of an Iranian state propaganda campaign against Bahrain has been brought before a military tribunal in the island kingdom.
By Adrian Blomfield, Middle East Correspondent
1:33PM BST 02 Jun 2011

Ayat al-Ghermezi, who is 20, was charged with incitement and insulting members of the Al Khalifa royal family.

Arrested after reading a self-penned poem to anti-government protesters in the Bahraini capital Manama, she has been in custody for two months.

Bahraini human rights activists say that although Miss Ghermezi was not raped, she was badly tortured while in custody. Her purported crime centres on a poem she read to protesters at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, the epicentre of the street movement until it was destroyed by the authorities.

Its lyrics include the lines: “We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery/We are the people who will destroy the foundation of injustice/Don’t you hear their cries, don’t you hear their screams?” She said the poem was addressed to King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and his hawkish prime minister and relative Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa. …source

Ayat al-Ghermezi (Arabic: آيات القرمزي‎) is a 20-year-old poet and student at the Faculty of Teachers in Bahrain From Sadad, Bahrain. She was arrested on 30 March for reciting a poem critical of the government during the pro-democracy protests in Pearl Square, the main gathering place for demonstrators, in February. She was forced to give herself up after police raided her parents’ house and made four of Ayat’s brothers lie on the floor at gunpoint. She was not there at the time. One policeman shouted at their father to “tell us where Ayat is or we will kill each of your sons in front of your eyes”.[1]

Wiki Note: Masked police and special riot police later took Ayat away telling her mother that her daughter would be interrogated. Her mother was told to pick up her daughter from Al-Howra police station, but has not seen her since her arrest. She did speak to her once on the phone when Ayat told her that she had been forced to sign a false confession. Her mother has been told confidentially that Ayat is in a military hospital as a result of injuries inflicted when she was tortured.