Roxana Saberi, Scapegoat, Martyr, or Spy?

Joe Klein
Bill O'Reilly

Just when relations between the US and Iran looked likely, the trial and sentencing of Roxana Saberi became the thorn in the lion's paw...

CNN reports: "Saberi's father, Reza Saberi, said in March that his daughter called him on February 10 and said she'd been arrested 10 days earlier.

He said his daughter initially thought she was detained for buying wine. "She said she bought a bottle of wine last year and kept it to take to a friend for her birthday," he said. "She said authorities told her the person who sold her the wine turned her in." Alcohol is banned in Iran.

But a report last week by Iran's Press TV said Saberi was arrested in January for working illegally as a journalist after her press card was revoked in 2006. Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hassan Qashqavi, also said in March that Saberi had been working in Iran without a permit. "Her press card was revoked," Qashqavi said. "Without a permit, she should not have been engaged in news and information gathering in Iran."

Saberi moved to Iran six years ago, and worked as a freelance journalist for the BBC and NPR. Two years ago her press credentials were revoked. Neither Saberi or the government has said why they were revoked, and honestly, that was when she should have left Iran.

She kept on making friends in official places and gathering information for a book that she was working on for the last two years, until she was arrested in January. She says that it was because she illegally bought a bottle of wine for a friend, a crime punishable by death, who then snitched on her. The government's prosecutors said that it was because she continued to work as a journalist without credentials. Iran keeps a tight watch over its media outlets, there is no such thing as a free press. A couple of weeks before her trial, it was announced that she was also being tried for spying and passing information on to US officials. In an Army Day report that was broadcast on NPR she did a report about: "missiles that are hard to track with radar, super-fast torpedoes recently tested in war games, and other domestically produced weapons" in addition to its "tanks, armoried personnel carriers, missiles and a fighter plane."

She was tried quickly in a court that was cut off from all media, including any representatives from the US or Switzerland, whom the US had been using as an intermediary. None of the full charges or evidence have been made public, and she was sentenced to eight years in prison. Of course, her lawyer has appealed the decision.

This is where it gets interesting. Less than 24 hours later, Iran's news service released a letter sent from the President to the Iranian court. From the NY Times: "Reuters’s Parisa Hafezi reports from Tehran: IRNA said the letter from Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff, Abdolreza Sheikholeslami, to prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi dealt with Saberi’s case as well as that of detained Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan.

“Based on the president’s insistence, please make sure that all the legal stages about the mentioned people be based on justice,” the letter said. ” … and you personally make sure that the accused people will enjoy all freedoms and legal rights to defend themselves and their rights will not be violated,” it added." Now, it could be that he wants to make sure that the prosecutors had an honest case and that she wasn't railroaded, or to make sure that all rights were accorded to her because it would then get international scrutiny.

This may be Iran's way of using her as a bargaining chip in any negotiations with the US, probably either in reducing her sentence, dismissing the charges during an appeal, or releasing her to be deported back to the US. It's nice to know that spying in Iran gets you a similar sentence to throwing shoes in Iraq...

I don't know why we keep insisting we are bringing democracy to these countries. Not one other country has based their government with the US model. They all have chosen the British model instead, including Iraq. That they continue to have elections, real or make believe, is a miracle in itself... What we really need to be concerned with are human rights, but we can't admit that because it would give legitimacy to Jimmy Carter's presidency. Besides our right wing extremists have more in common with Iran's Ayetollahs and Aghanistan's Talibans...

So everyone should be happy with this nugget reported from Newsweek: "Human rights still appear to be a luxury in Russia. Recently, Lev Ponomaryov, director of the Moscow-based Organization For Human Rights, and a leader in the new political opposition movement Solidarity, was reportedly beaten by a group of men outside his home . Stanislav Markelov, whom the Wall Street Journal called one of Russia's top human rights lawyers, was murdered in late January, as was Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old freelancer for Novaya Gazeta, which, according to the New Zealand Herald, is the last major publication critical of the Kremlin. Novaya Gazeta also lost three other journalists in the last decade-- Anna Politkovskaya, Yuri Shchekochikhin, and Igor Domnikov." With American Nazi groups recruiting in Utah, gun dealers in Texas defending their right to sell to Mexican drug lords, and children celebrating the anniversary of Columbine, we don't have far to go before taking the next irreversible step...

The most people who will be affected are those who go back to Iran to visit family on a regular basis. And you do have to be careful going back to somewhere that has less freedoms, its so easy to break the rules... A friend of mine related that his parents still lived in Tehran, and that they were having persistent colds and coughs, and could he please sent a Western remedy that might help? So, he sent them some Nyquil... He was then wondering why his parents then kept asking for him to keep sending them the miraculous cold medicine, until he looked at the ingredients on the label. Yep, it contains alcohol, and he put them in danger of jail and a death sentence if an Iranian customs officer ever opened the boxes he sent to them...