TEHRAN TIMES - Zhila Keshvari
(May 25, 2009)

While the world seems to rejoice in the release of the journalist Roxana Saberi from an Iranian jail, and conspiracy theorists are busy weaving tales of the conspiracy for her arrest, and release, The Times of London revealed on May 12 that she had indeed committed the serious offences of which she had been accused.
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One of Miss Saberi’s attorneys -- Mr. Saleh Nikbakht -- made the startling revelation, on the day she was released after three months in detention. He confirmed that Miss Saberi -- who was initially arrested for the illegal purchase of an alcoholic beverage -- had later been found to have in her possession classified documents without the necessary permits.

Her lead defense attorney, Mr. Abdolsamad Khorramshahi, said that during the hearing, his client had “accepted that she had made a mistake and got access to documents she should not have.”

The documents, coming from Iran’s Expediency Council, were apparently secret reports of aspects of Iraq under U.S. occupation. She had admitted the offence during interrogations, which -- according to her father -- did not include torture, and had apologized for her act. She claimed that she had obtained the documents “out of curiosity”.

That was the reason for her conviction under Article 505 of Iran’s Criminal Code, which carries a maximum three-year prison sentence. Admittedly, the court showed her great leniency by suspending her two-year sentence for five years, which was academic, as the former Miss North Dakota left Iran in a few days to the waiting media, probably to be followed by chat-show appearances and the almost inevitable book and even biopic Hollywood movie, filled with greasy-type Iranian prison guards and the other usual clichés.

Whether her extraordinary release was the result of political games between Tehran and Washington we do not know. But what we do know is that she was subject to a far greater degree of due legal process than the many Iranians who have been kidnapped by the U.S. in recent years.

Foremost among them are the three consular employees who were violently detained by U.S. occupation forces in Iran’s Consular Office in the Iraqi city of Irbil.

The three were among five employees who were kidnapped when their office in Iraqi Kurdistan was raided by U.S. soldiers in January 2007. Two of the five were released months later, but two other Iranians were arrested separately and added to prevent the hostage numbers going below five.

None of the five has been formally charged, let alone tried, and there is no indication as to when they will be freed, or indeed why they are still in detention, other than as hostages. Consular visits to them had been refused for months and their families have been allowed to visit them only very occasionally.

Their original arrest and continued detention are completely illegal. Since the handover of the affairs of Iraq to the elected Iraqi government, the U.S. no longer enjoys ‘occupier’s privileges’ that could include detention of anyone it considers a threat to security. As a result, it has no jurisdiction to continue their detention and must hand them over to the Iraqi government without delay.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani declared in February that immediately upon receiving the Iranians, Iraq would release them and “even would throw a party to celebrate their release together.”

Indeed, Iraqi officials have persistently called for their release since their kidnapping, but the U.S. has simply ignored these calls, from what it claims to accept as the rightful government of Iraq.

These are five of the many Iranians who have been targeted as part of Uncle Sam’s world-wide ‘Iranian-napping’ campaign.

Numerous Iranians have been detained on spurious grounds in third countries for allegedly breaking extraterritorial U.S. laws on trade between the U.S. and Iran, and sought for extradition to the U.S. to face “enhanced interrogation techniques” and draconian punishment in lopsided trials.

Foremost among these is former Iranian ambassador Nosratollah Tajik. Upon completing his stint as Iran’s ambassador to Jordan, Mr. Tajik went to Britain’s Durham University for a doctorate research program.

Perhaps he did not know that he had been designated by the U.S./Israeli axis as a “supporter of terrorism” for the audacity of assisting the transfer to Tehran of a number of Palestinian civilians who had been wounded in Israeli air raids for hospital treatment.

After arriving in the UK, Mr. Tajik was contacted by a team of undercover U.S. agents who offered to sell him a number of night-vision goggles. He did not sign a contract with them or make any payments for this unsolicited offer.

Nevertheless, the U.S. used the secretly-recorded meetings to request his extradition from the ever-obliging Britain. This, despite the fact that the use of entrapment by police agents provocateurs is strictly illegal in Britain, and, had the British police attempted the same entrapment, they could be facing jail time and the case would have been thrown out.

Nevertheless, British courts rubber-stamped his handover, and now Mr. Tajik, who is seriously ill, is awaiting his fate as a hostage to the whims of the British government, which wishes to use him as a bargaining tool in nuclear negotiations with Iran. It must not be forgotten that extradition is largely a political affair and is ultimately decided by the British home secretary (internal affairs minister).

The U.S. attempts at hostage-taking do not end here. In late 2006, U.S. agents lured an Iranian government employee -- Jamshid Ghassemi -- from Iran to Thailand specifically to kidnap him under pseudo-legal grounds of violations of U.S. sanctions, although he had never visited the ‘Land of the Free’.

Still, the Thai courts showed more backbone than their British counterparts and rejected the extradition request, albeit after keeping him in detention for more than two years while they made up their minds, and the Americans used every trick in the book to delay his release, even literally running after him at Bangkok Airport and trying to seize his personal possessions as Mr. Ghassemi was boarding a flight back to freedom in Iran.

Separately, but as part of the same campaign, the U.S. arranged for the detention of another Iranian in October 2007. Mr. Yousef Boushvash was arrested by Hong Kong police. Beijing, which has no extradition treaty with the U.S., and is independent of U.S. claims, intervened in April 2008 and ordered his unconditional release, to the chagrin of the U.S. kidnapping machine.

However, U.S. officials are nothing if not shameless, and -- despite all these setbacks -- for their patently illegal acts, have had the occasional ‘success’ too.

One case was that of Mr. Ardabili, who was lured to Georgia, where he was arrested. The puppet regime of Shakashvili promptly surrendered him to the U.S. without completing the proper legal procedure, and Mr. Ardabili has since disappeared into the vast network of secret detention centers in the U.S.

Such behavior is perhaps not unusual from a state claiming to be above international law and with grandiose imperial ambitions above its station.

But, would it not be to the credit of international human rights organizations, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and the many Iranian citizens who compassionately called for the photogenic Miss Saberi’s release without knowing -- or even caring about -- her admitted offenses, to occasionally call for the freedom of the captured Iranians, and demand that the U.S. cease its vindictive and foolish Iranian-napping drive around the world.

How else can the claims of independence of these august self-appointed defenders of human rights be believed if their hackles are raised only when persons of certain political or skin colors are detained?