In late October 1976*, when I was arrested as an opponent of the Shah in Iran, Jimmy Carter was still a presidential candidate. “The Committee” where I was initially taken – and where I spent the first six months of my year-long incarceration –  had by then an infamous reputation as an urban inferno, where “Apollo” referred not to the New Frontier of science, but to a new nadir of inhumanity. There was no water-boarding in those days, but even in this shameful litany of human ingenuity for pain, Apollo, I was told, was the worst. It was one technique from a long list of tortures – flogging, cigarette burning, crucifixion, sleep depravation, hook-hanging, needles pushed under finger-nails, genital electric shock. A helmet was placed on the head of the tortured victims, creating a powerful reverberation of their primal screams of pain, deafening them with the sounds of their own suffering. It was also meant to underscore the prisoners’ utter isolation – no one but you, it implied, will even hear the sounds of your pain. Turning prisoners into defenseless, atomized, isolated individuals, Hannah Arendt taught us, is the ultimate goal of every warden.

By the time I arrived at the “Committee” much of this machinery of torture had stopped in anxious anticipation of Carter’s presidential victory. Occasional beatings by the guards, and threats of execution or life in prison hurled at us by interrogators, were all we got. And of course, there was solitary confinement—a torture of the soul, where the passage of every minute weighs heavy on the mind. Cells were three and a half steps by four; no windows, no lights; dates and occasional slogans scratched on the walls were the only signs of past human habitation. The rug bore marks of past festering wounds, powerful reminders of the infamy of those who had inflected the pain and of the heroism of those had suffered it in silence. There was no soap in the communal bathroom, where you were taken, blindfolded, only two times a day, and then only after knocking on the cell-door and after waiting for the guards’ good grace. There were also no eating utensils – a security precaution, they said, lest the prisoners attempt suicide.

And then one day a bar of cheap soap appeared in the bathroom; and at night, plastic spoons were distributed with the food. A few days later, the rugs were changed, and now instead of odors of human suffering, a smell of plastic wafted in the air. Torture stopped altogether. In my third night at the “Committee,” I was taken to the infirmary with high fever and pneumonia – results of Tehran’s unusually cold winter that year and the fact that we were each given two threadbare blankets to be used as pillow, cover and bedding. As my blindfold was lifted by the guard inside the room, I first smelled and then saw a heap of bandages bloodied and stained by the infected wounds of torture victims – a scene worthy of Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell and the last reminder of the torture in the “Committee.” Finally, on the day an orange was served with our meager, rat-infested food, we knew who had won the election in America. We called the changes in prison omens not of democracy but “Jimmocracy.” We knew Carter’s human rights policies were changing the Iranian political landscape, and life in prison, particularly where political prisoners were held, was invariably a good barometer of democracy in a society. We soon had visitors from Amnesty International and the International Red Cross, and within a year, nearly all of the almost four thousand political prisoners were “pardoned” by the Shah.

For scholars, concepts and ideas in politics and international relations are often mere abstractions – at best subject to the rigors of empiricism, and more often a “mummified reality,” bereft of any existential flavor, the passive object of distant contemplation and categorization. Only “reified” realities can lend themselves to the rigors of numbers and models, of equations and graphs. But invariably, these concepts have a human dimension, a way they translate into, or transform the lives of individuals. It is as perilous to ignore this dimension as it is to try and quantify it – human suffering and joy, as Jeremy Bentham learned, are ineffably hard to measure and codify.

At one time during his term in office, Carter had an approval rating of nineteen, far lower than Nixon after Watergate. But in my life, and the lives of hundreds like me in Iran, and thousands around the world, his human rights policies sometimes saved our lives, and always spared us much agony. It even saved the torturers, forcing them to walk away from their own darker angels.

But then some say, with considerable evidence to support their claim, that Carter’s human rights policies, and his confusing approach to implementing them, particularly in Iran, caused the Islamic Revolution. They say, and they are right in saying it, that the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini to power was the first domino to fall in the rise of radical Islam. America, they say, has interests, not friends, and seeks profits, not values. On that cold winter night, as the fragrant aroma of orange wafted in the air, when for the first time after forty days I was given an extra blanket to fight the cold, I could only think of the letter I would one day write to Carter thanking him for his humanity and decency.

Abbas Milani is the Moghadam Director Iranian Studies at Stanford University where he is also a Research Fellow at Hoover. His last book, Eminent Persians, a two-volume study of the Iranian elite before the revolution, was recently published by Syracuse University Press.

*The year was originally listed, incorrectly, as 1978