STAFF & WIRE REPORTS— Iran denied on Wednesday two U.S. hikers’ claims saying they were arrested due to political motives and treated with brutality while in an Iranian prison for two years, state media reported.
“The three US citizens have had all the rights of a prisoner and even beyond…
Excerpts:
- “Many times, too many times, we heard the screaming of other prisoners being beaten and there was nothing we could do.”
- “Sarah, Josh, and I have experienced a taste of Iranian regime’s brutality…It is the Iranian people who bear the brunt of this government’s cruelty and disregard for human rights. There are people in Iran who are imprisoned for years simply for attending a protest, for writing a pro-democracy blog, or for being a member of an unpopular faith. Journalists remain behind bars and innocent people have been executed.”
- “You may ask us ‘Now that you are free, can you forgive the Iranian government for what it has done to you.’ Our answer is this: ‘How can we forgive the Iranian government when it continues to imprison so many other innocent people and prisoners of conscience?’”
- “They [the Iranian regime] do not deserve undue credit for ending what they had no right and no justification to start in the first place.”
- “Solitary confinement was the worst experience of all our lives, it was a nightmare that Sarah had to endure for 14 months.”
- “No evidence was ever presented against us [regarding charges of espionage]. That is because there is no evidence, because we are completely innocent.”
- Two court sessions we attended were total sham. They were made up of ridiculous lies that depicted us as being involved in elaborate American and Israeli conspiracy to undermine Iran.”
- “If the Iranian government wants to change its image in the world and ease international pressure, it should release all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience immediately. They deserve their freedom as much as we do.”
Two American hikers imprisoned for more than two years by Iran on extremely dubious espionage charges and in highly oppressive conditions, Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, were released last week and spoke yesterday in Manhattan about their ordeal. Most establishment media accounts in the U.S. have predictably exploited the emotions of the drama as a means of bolstering the U.S.-is-Good/Iran-is-Evil narrative which they reflexively spout. But far more revealing is what these media accounts exclude, beginning with the important, insightful and brave remarks from the released prisoners themselves (their full press conference was broadcast this morning on Democracy Now). Fattal began by recounting the horrible conditions of the prison in which they were held, including being kept virtually all day in a tiny cell alone and hearing other prisoners being beaten; he explained that, of everything that was done to them, “solitary confinement was the worst experience of all of our lives.” Bauer then noted that they were imprisoned due solely to what he called the “32 years of mutual hostility between America and Iran,” and said: “the irony is that [we] oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility.” After complaining that the two court sessions they attended were “total shams” and that “we’d been held in almost total isolation - stripped of our rights and freedoms,” he explained: In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they’d remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S. We do not believe that such human rights violation on the part of our government justify what has been done to us: not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments - including the government of Iran - to act in kind. [Indeed, as harrowing and unjust as their imprisonment was, Bauer and Fattal on some level are fortunate not to have ended up in the grips of the American War on Terror detention system, where detainees remain for many more years without even the pretense of due process — still — to say nothing of the torture regime to which hundreds (at least) were subjected.] Fattal then expressed “great thanks to world leaders and individuals” who worked for their release, including Hugo Chavez, the governments of Turkey and Brazil, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, Mohammad Ali, Cindy Sheehan, Desmond Tutu, as well as Muslims from around the world and “elements within the Iranian government,” as well as U.S. officials. Unsurprisingly, one searches in vain for the inclusion of these facts and remarks in American media accounts of their release and subsequent press conference. Instead, typical is this ABC News story, which featured tearful and celebratory reactions from their family, detailed descriptions of their conditions and the pain and fear their family endured, and melodramatic narratives about how their “long, grueling imprisonment is over” after “781 days in Iran’s most notorious prison.” This ABC News article on their press conference features many sentences about Iran’s oppressiveness — “Hikers Return to the U.S.: ‘We Were Held Hostage’”; “we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten” — with hardly any mention of the criticisms Fattal and Bauer voiced regarding U.S. policy that provided the excuse for their mistreatment and similar treatment which the U.S. doles out both in War on Terror prisons around the world and even domestic prisons at home. Their story deserves the attention it is getting, and Iran deserves the criticism. But the first duty of the American “watchdog media” should be highlighting the abuses of the U.S. Government, not those of other, already-hated regimes on the other side of the world. Instead, the abuses at home are routinely suppressed while those in the Hated Nations are endlessly touted. There have been thousands of people released after being held for years and years in U.S. detention despite having done nothing wrong. Many were tortured, and many were kept imprisoned despite U.S. government knowledge of their innocence. Have you ever seen anything close to this level of media attention being devoted to their plight, to hearing how America’s lawless detention of them for years — often on a strange island, thousands of miles away from everything they know — and its systematic denial of any legal redress, devastated their families and destroyed their lives? This is a repeat of what happened with the obsessive American media frenzy surrounding the arrest and imprisonment by Iran of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, convicted in a sham proceeding of espionage, sentenced to eight years in prison, but then ordered released by an Iranian appeals court after four months. Saberi’s case became a true cause célèbre among American journalists, with large numbers of them flamboyantly denouncing Iran and demanding her release. But when their own government imprisoned numerous journalists for many years without any charges of any kind — Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj in Guantanamo, Associated Press’ Bilal Hussein for more than two years in Iraq, Reuters’ photographer Ibrahim Jassan even after an Iraqi court exonerated him, and literally dozens of other journalists without charge — it was very difficult to find any mention of their cases in American media outlets.
Counsel For The Two American Hikers Prevented From Leaving Iran : http://newish.info/17284-counsel-for-the-two-american-hikers-prevented-from-leaving-iran
Counsel For The Two American Hikers Prevented From Leaving Iran ! http://newish.info/17284-counsel-for-the-two-american-hikers-prevented-from-leaving-iran
My Psychology textbook is the greatest book I’ve ever been forced to spend money on. Huge props not only to the writers, but to the editors who let this stuff get published.
Argentine Hikers Merlo Eliminated On Penalties ! http://newish.info/24654-argentine-hikers-merlo-eliminated-on-penalties
