As if we needed another reminder that we’re trying to cut useless deals with the wrong sort of people, this headline came roaring off the front page today:
Iran Sentences American Journalist to 8 Years in Prison.
The journalist in question, Roxana Saberi, was born in North Dakota to an Iranian father and a Japanese mother. She has lived in Tehran for the last six years, working as a freelance reporter for the BBC and NPR and finishing off a Master’s degree on Iranian Studies.
A few days ago, in a one day trial held behind closed doors, a judge in the Revolutionary Court condemned her to eight years in prison for (get this) espionage. Yes, evidently she was working for the United States government. What’s the proof? No one knows. Even her lawyer seemed a bit confused about the whole thing. He did catch a lucky break though, as he was allowed to be in the court room with his client for the trial. Supposedly there will be an appeal, though it is doubtful the sentence will change unless significant international pressure is brought to bear.
Of course the United States denied she is a spy, but that’d be par for the course no matter what, so it hardly seems worth mentioning. It is pretty plain to see that Roxana Saberi is most likely just another victim of the mentally repressive Iranian state.
The government wanted her arrested because she is a dissident voice, a supposed perpetrator of “soft” revolution. She is guilty of the greatest sin in Iranian media: not towing the official state line. Since the fresh wave of conservatism rose in Iran, marked by the rise to power of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (and I say rise to, not election to, for specific reasons) the state has waged war on non-state controlled media, either driving it out of business or imprisioning individual journalists and editors. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) cites at least six journalists imprisoned for crimes as nebulous as “propaganda against the regime”.
