Tim lawsonWhat's so special about Roxana Saberi?
March 31st 2010 04:19
Roxana Saberi’s story is intriguing to say the least. The Iranian-American journalist, who is of Iranian-Japanese descent, was arrested in February of last year whilst in Iran, where she had been working as a freelance reporter since 2003. The initial pretext for her arrest was for supposedly buying a bottle of wine (which is illegal in Iran), although the charges were later changed to working without press credentials – Saberi’s were mysteriously revoked by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in 2006.
Following this, the charges were elevated once again, this time to espionage for the U.S. government. Saberi was found to be in possession of a classified government document detailing U.S. tactics towards Iraq, which she had obtained while working as a translator at a powerful clerical lobby.
The possession of this document was the main source of evidence used by the prosecution in the case against Saberi; this was also backed up by an alleged confession she made stating that she was a U.S. spy whilst under interrogation. The trial was unusually short, purportedly as little as fifteen minutes, it was held behind closed doors and was conducted with no defence lawyer present. On April 18, 2009, Saberi was convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison – where, according to Amnesty International, reports of torture and ill treatment of detainees are commonplace.
In early March, a collection of international news organisations wrote an open letter to the Iranian government, requesting that it allow independent access to Saberi. Signatories included the president of National Public Radio (NPR) Vivian Schiller, the president of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) David Westin and the Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Robert Thomson. The letter expressed grave concerns over the health and wellbeing of Roxana as well as the need for protection of her basic human rights.
The letter stated “We now ask that one or more international organisations that have responsibilities and rights under the Geneva Conventions be permitted access to Roxana immediately to ascertain her health and well-being and to determine the conditions under which she is held. If no charges are filed, we now urge her immediate release and ask that she be given permission to return to her home country, the United States.”
Saberi’s conviction in April, as well as her ensuing incarceration, became a cause célèbre. Roxana’s story spread throughout the international community as well as the mass media in epidemic proportions. U.S. President Barack Obama proclaimed her innocence and U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton took a special interest in the case, dismissing the charges as “baseless” and demanding her immediate release.
On April 19, 2009, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote to the prosecutors stating: “Please, personally observe the process to ensure that the defendants are allowed all legal rights and freedom in defending themselves and that their rights are not violated even by one iota.”
On April 20, 2009, Saberi embarked on a hunger strike in protest of her imprisonment, although she abandoned it after two weeks due to serious health concerns. This kept the momentum of her freedom movements rolling and helped ensure her case was not dropping from the media spotlight.
On May 10, 2009, Saberi appealed the sentence. The appeal hearing was also closed; although, unlike the original trial, it lasted several hours and Saberi's lawyers were able to present arguments in her defence. The main contention of her defence was that the documents in her possession, although classified, could not be constituted as an act of espionage since the United States and Iran were not technically at war.
Another main component of the defence was that although Saberi had confessed to certain accusations of espionage, these confessions were prompted by certain tricks employed by Iranian officials during interrogation.
The following day the Iranian court overturned the original sentence and lowered the charge from espionage to possession of a classified government document. Saberi was released from prison and received a two-year suspended jail term; she was also banned from practicing journalism in Iran for five years.
After her initial release, Saberi did not discuss her experience in any detail with any media organisation, apart from saying that she was all right and was looking forward to spending some time with her family. She returned to the U.S. on May 22.
Her first in-depth interview was conducted with National Public Radio (NPR), a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership news organisation that Saberi had worked for in a freelance capacity.
In this interview, Saberi attempted to clear up some of the confusion that surrounded her case. She explained that she was never arrested for buying a bottle of wine and that this is something that the Iranian authorities instructed her to tell her father when she was finally allowed to contact him. Saberi stated that “they forced me to tell him a lie — to tell him that I didn't know where I was and that I had been arrested for alcohol, but these were not true.” Saberi explained that to this day she still does not why she was arrested and that her interrogators claimed she was a U.S. spy, stating: “the first charge against me was taking steps against national security, which can mean various things in Iran.”
In reference to her possession of a classified document, which was used against her in her initial trial, Saberi explained that the document was not marked as classified and that she actually brought that document to their attention, “they pressured me to confess that I had classified documents and I didn't have any, but I started describing the documents that I did have, and so, later, they brought me to my home and I gave them the ones that they didn't already have: but when I gave them this one, I looked at it and I said, ‘see, there's no classified stamp on it; it's not classified.’” She also made it clear that the document was only taken because she wanted it for historical perspective, and that it was not a document she was actively translating – just something that she came across.
Saberi explained that the document was not obtained from a clerical council that advises Iran’s supreme religious leader, as was stated by her defence lawyer Mr Nikbakht. She denied working for the Expediency Council, and stated, “I was just editing the English grammar of a few of these academic articles for publication for the website of the Center for Strategic Research, which is a governmental think tank. Some of the research that this think tank does goes to the Expediency Council, but I was working on those articles that were to be publicised on their website or for journals in the West.”
Saberi’s defence lawyer, Mr Nikbakht, also disclosed an allegation that she had met with someone from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a Mr Peterson, who tried to recruit her. Saberi denied ever meeting with this person; she remarked that “I have to say, first of all, that — about this document — in court, both my attorneys argued that it was not classified. So I can't assess why Mr. Nikbakht is saying now that it is. A lot of the things he has said since my release have been either incomplete or untrue, and I don't know why it is — maybe they believe whatever the court has told them or maybe it's because they live and work in Iran and they have to be careful of their relations with the authorities. In Iran, there have been, even, attorneys who have been jailed for representing clients with sensitive cases, such as mine.” In reference to meeting with a man from the CIA she stated, “He may have been referring to the false confession I made, but that was — my confession was false, and I thought I had to fabricate it to save myself: so I don't want to really say any more about this person, because it was false.”
When asked about whether she thought that trips she had made to Israel might have caused suspicion amongst the Iranian authorities, and if these trips were used as evidence against her in her initial trial, she said, “No, and it was never a charge against me.”
When questioned about whether the sudden turnaround on her conviction and the subsequent suspended sentence she received could have been some sort of power play between the hard-liners and reformists in Iran, she said: “You know, it's difficult for me to speculate because I don't know, and as I said, it's not a very transparent country. But I can guess, perhaps, that if the hard-liners had their way, I would still be in prison today, especially the hard-liners in the judiciary and in the Intelligence Ministry. But the people you could maybe call more pragmatists — they seemed to reach the conclusion that it was more costly to keep me, amid all this international pressure, instead of to release me.”
Roxana’s story is difficult to unravel. It appears that she attempted to dodge some of the questions in her interview with NPR, and it remains unclear whether she actually did anything wrong.
It has been speculated by many individuals both in the media and even throughout Roxana’s support groups that the rapid turnaround of her sentencing at her appeal is extremely unusual. One Journalist on the ‘Free Roxana’ Facebook group remarked that because Iran does not recognise dual citizenship, an Iranian-American dual citizen who had been living in Iran for the past six years would be treated no differently than an Iranian national. Also, considering the comparative strength of the case against Saberi - her possession of classified government documents, the fact that she working as a journalist without proper press credentials, a confession of espionage (whether under duress or not), an alleged meeting with American Intelligence personnel and speculation that the documents were copied in Israel (a serious matter, given the current state of relations between Iran and Israel) - it would normally have been an open and shut affair for the Iranian prosecution, who have been known to imprison journalists and bloggers for much less, making the outcome all the more surprising.
The heavy involvement of the U.S. administration and the massive media attention in rallying for the release of Saberi has also raised accusations of a double standard of the U.S. in relation to similar cases.
American civil rights activist Glenn Greenwald, whilst stating that Saberi’s conviction was unjust, has pointed to the hypocrisy of the U.S. mainstream media, which rallied to Saberi’s defence but have voiced little, if any, criticism about the treatment of other journalists in similar positions, such as Sami Al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who was held for six years in Guantanamo by the U.S. government.
I was fortunate enough to be able to interview Bob Dietz, the Asia Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), whom in regards to the comments of Glenn Greenwald, stated that “CPJ has been really strong on confronting the U.S. government's detention of journalists – we’ve been pushing those cases every opportunity we get. Check
CPJ.org and search Guantanamo and Bagram and you'll see what I mean. I'll let others decide why the cases mentioned haven't been as heavily covered, a blind eye (willing or not) to American government transgressions or just a culturally based lack of concern. But I'm a journalist who's worked overseas for most of his career and I know the difficulty of getting the American media's attention for anything that doesn't have a U.S. citizen involved in it - the newsdesk's obsession with covering the ‘local’ angle for Americans reading foreign news, I think that is a factor at play here. But I do agree these sorts of cases deserve more coverage.”
During the interview, Dietz also raised an interesting point in regards to the treatment of foreign correspondents. He explained that he has a son in the U.S. infantry and that upon reading the Counter Insurgency Field Manual (COIN FM), the U.S. Army’s most recent play book for dealing with asymmetrical warfare and an attempt to lay out ground rules on how the U.S. military should conduct operations against an enemy deeply embedded within the civilian population, he noticed that there is no mention of how U.S. troops should deal with local journalists they come across in their operations. He stated that, “I’m trying to get the army to include guidelines like that in the next manual and add the concern to its training schedule.” He explained that the CPJ has raised the issue many times with the U.S. government and mentioned it in letters to President Obama, saying “I still feel I haven’t been successful in bringing it to the army’s attention. It’s a good time to raise it, with the ramp-up in Afghanistan. Afghan journalists barely even bother to call us when they get hassled by U.S. or ISAF troops anymore.”
Whether Roxana, actually did anything wrong is difficult to determine. Amnesty International has stated that Saberi is merely a pawn to the ongoing political developments between Iran and the U.S. administration led by President Obama.
It has been speculated that Saberi’s initial arrest and conviction are a way for some in the government to disrupt President Obama’s effort to engage Tehran, although a move by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to offer a fuller defence to Saberi as part of her appeal damages the integrity of this motive. Despite this, political analysts have suggested that the conflict was not between the conservatives and reformists in Iran, but within the conservatives.
An op-ed piece, Iran's power struggle, published in the New York Times on April 29, states that Mehdi Karroubi, a former Iranian politician, asserted that certain conservatives own 63 ports that are outside government control and stand to lose money if U.S. economic sanctions are removed, thus giving them a financial incentive to oppose reconciliation with the U.S.
It appears that Roxana’s case was deeply influenced by the current political climate in regards to American-Iranian relations, possibly even as a simple deflection of international scrutiny, led by Israel, over the current Iranian nuclear program.
I believe that Saberi’s story has been beneficial in that it has raised concerns in the media as well as the international community over freedom of the press, and the plight of journalists in similar situations, whether they are U.S. citizens or not, regardless of the intricacies and possible political motivations behind the drastic overturn of her original sentence.
Following this, the charges were elevated once again, this time to espionage for the U.S. government. Saberi was found to be in possession of a classified government document detailing U.S. tactics towards Iraq, which she had obtained while working as a translator at a powerful clerical lobby.
The possession of this document was the main source of evidence used by the prosecution in the case against Saberi; this was also backed up by an alleged confession she made stating that she was a U.S. spy whilst under interrogation. The trial was unusually short, purportedly as little as fifteen minutes, it was held behind closed doors and was conducted with no defence lawyer present. On April 18, 2009, Saberi was convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison – where, according to Amnesty International, reports of torture and ill treatment of detainees are commonplace.
In early March, a collection of international news organisations wrote an open letter to the Iranian government, requesting that it allow independent access to Saberi. Signatories included the president of National Public Radio (NPR) Vivian Schiller, the president of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) David Westin and the Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Robert Thomson. The letter expressed grave concerns over the health and wellbeing of Roxana as well as the need for protection of her basic human rights.
The letter stated “We now ask that one or more international organisations that have responsibilities and rights under the Geneva Conventions be permitted access to Roxana immediately to ascertain her health and well-being and to determine the conditions under which she is held. If no charges are filed, we now urge her immediate release and ask that she be given permission to return to her home country, the United States.”
Saberi’s conviction in April, as well as her ensuing incarceration, became a cause célèbre. Roxana’s story spread throughout the international community as well as the mass media in epidemic proportions. U.S. President Barack Obama proclaimed her innocence and U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton took a special interest in the case, dismissing the charges as “baseless” and demanding her immediate release.
On April 19, 2009, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote to the prosecutors stating: “Please, personally observe the process to ensure that the defendants are allowed all legal rights and freedom in defending themselves and that their rights are not violated even by one iota.”
On April 20, 2009, Saberi embarked on a hunger strike in protest of her imprisonment, although she abandoned it after two weeks due to serious health concerns. This kept the momentum of her freedom movements rolling and helped ensure her case was not dropping from the media spotlight.
On May 10, 2009, Saberi appealed the sentence. The appeal hearing was also closed; although, unlike the original trial, it lasted several hours and Saberi's lawyers were able to present arguments in her defence. The main contention of her defence was that the documents in her possession, although classified, could not be constituted as an act of espionage since the United States and Iran were not technically at war.
Another main component of the defence was that although Saberi had confessed to certain accusations of espionage, these confessions were prompted by certain tricks employed by Iranian officials during interrogation.
The following day the Iranian court overturned the original sentence and lowered the charge from espionage to possession of a classified government document. Saberi was released from prison and received a two-year suspended jail term; she was also banned from practicing journalism in Iran for five years.
After her initial release, Saberi did not discuss her experience in any detail with any media organisation, apart from saying that she was all right and was looking forward to spending some time with her family. She returned to the U.S. on May 22.
Her first in-depth interview was conducted with National Public Radio (NPR), a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership news organisation that Saberi had worked for in a freelance capacity.
In this interview, Saberi attempted to clear up some of the confusion that surrounded her case. She explained that she was never arrested for buying a bottle of wine and that this is something that the Iranian authorities instructed her to tell her father when she was finally allowed to contact him. Saberi stated that “they forced me to tell him a lie — to tell him that I didn't know where I was and that I had been arrested for alcohol, but these were not true.” Saberi explained that to this day she still does not why she was arrested and that her interrogators claimed she was a U.S. spy, stating: “the first charge against me was taking steps against national security, which can mean various things in Iran.”
In reference to her possession of a classified document, which was used against her in her initial trial, Saberi explained that the document was not marked as classified and that she actually brought that document to their attention, “they pressured me to confess that I had classified documents and I didn't have any, but I started describing the documents that I did have, and so, later, they brought me to my home and I gave them the ones that they didn't already have: but when I gave them this one, I looked at it and I said, ‘see, there's no classified stamp on it; it's not classified.’” She also made it clear that the document was only taken because she wanted it for historical perspective, and that it was not a document she was actively translating – just something that she came across.
Saberi explained that the document was not obtained from a clerical council that advises Iran’s supreme religious leader, as was stated by her defence lawyer Mr Nikbakht. She denied working for the Expediency Council, and stated, “I was just editing the English grammar of a few of these academic articles for publication for the website of the Center for Strategic Research, which is a governmental think tank. Some of the research that this think tank does goes to the Expediency Council, but I was working on those articles that were to be publicised on their website or for journals in the West.”
Saberi’s defence lawyer, Mr Nikbakht, also disclosed an allegation that she had met with someone from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a Mr Peterson, who tried to recruit her. Saberi denied ever meeting with this person; she remarked that “I have to say, first of all, that — about this document — in court, both my attorneys argued that it was not classified. So I can't assess why Mr. Nikbakht is saying now that it is. A lot of the things he has said since my release have been either incomplete or untrue, and I don't know why it is — maybe they believe whatever the court has told them or maybe it's because they live and work in Iran and they have to be careful of their relations with the authorities. In Iran, there have been, even, attorneys who have been jailed for representing clients with sensitive cases, such as mine.” In reference to meeting with a man from the CIA she stated, “He may have been referring to the false confession I made, but that was — my confession was false, and I thought I had to fabricate it to save myself: so I don't want to really say any more about this person, because it was false.”
When asked about whether she thought that trips she had made to Israel might have caused suspicion amongst the Iranian authorities, and if these trips were used as evidence against her in her initial trial, she said, “No, and it was never a charge against me.”
When questioned about whether the sudden turnaround on her conviction and the subsequent suspended sentence she received could have been some sort of power play between the hard-liners and reformists in Iran, she said: “You know, it's difficult for me to speculate because I don't know, and as I said, it's not a very transparent country. But I can guess, perhaps, that if the hard-liners had their way, I would still be in prison today, especially the hard-liners in the judiciary and in the Intelligence Ministry. But the people you could maybe call more pragmatists — they seemed to reach the conclusion that it was more costly to keep me, amid all this international pressure, instead of to release me.”
Roxana’s story is difficult to unravel. It appears that she attempted to dodge some of the questions in her interview with NPR, and it remains unclear whether she actually did anything wrong.
It has been speculated by many individuals both in the media and even throughout Roxana’s support groups that the rapid turnaround of her sentencing at her appeal is extremely unusual. One Journalist on the ‘Free Roxana’ Facebook group remarked that because Iran does not recognise dual citizenship, an Iranian-American dual citizen who had been living in Iran for the past six years would be treated no differently than an Iranian national. Also, considering the comparative strength of the case against Saberi - her possession of classified government documents, the fact that she working as a journalist without proper press credentials, a confession of espionage (whether under duress or not), an alleged meeting with American Intelligence personnel and speculation that the documents were copied in Israel (a serious matter, given the current state of relations between Iran and Israel) - it would normally have been an open and shut affair for the Iranian prosecution, who have been known to imprison journalists and bloggers for much less, making the outcome all the more surprising.
The heavy involvement of the U.S. administration and the massive media attention in rallying for the release of Saberi has also raised accusations of a double standard of the U.S. in relation to similar cases.
American civil rights activist Glenn Greenwald, whilst stating that Saberi’s conviction was unjust, has pointed to the hypocrisy of the U.S. mainstream media, which rallied to Saberi’s defence but have voiced little, if any, criticism about the treatment of other journalists in similar positions, such as Sami Al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who was held for six years in Guantanamo by the U.S. government.
I was fortunate enough to be able to interview Bob Dietz, the Asia Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), whom in regards to the comments of Glenn Greenwald, stated that “CPJ has been really strong on confronting the U.S. government's detention of journalists – we’ve been pushing those cases every opportunity we get. Check
CPJ.org and search Guantanamo and Bagram and you'll see what I mean. I'll let others decide why the cases mentioned haven't been as heavily covered, a blind eye (willing or not) to American government transgressions or just a culturally based lack of concern. But I'm a journalist who's worked overseas for most of his career and I know the difficulty of getting the American media's attention for anything that doesn't have a U.S. citizen involved in it - the newsdesk's obsession with covering the ‘local’ angle for Americans reading foreign news, I think that is a factor at play here. But I do agree these sorts of cases deserve more coverage.”
During the interview, Dietz also raised an interesting point in regards to the treatment of foreign correspondents. He explained that he has a son in the U.S. infantry and that upon reading the Counter Insurgency Field Manual (COIN FM), the U.S. Army’s most recent play book for dealing with asymmetrical warfare and an attempt to lay out ground rules on how the U.S. military should conduct operations against an enemy deeply embedded within the civilian population, he noticed that there is no mention of how U.S. troops should deal with local journalists they come across in their operations. He stated that, “I’m trying to get the army to include guidelines like that in the next manual and add the concern to its training schedule.” He explained that the CPJ has raised the issue many times with the U.S. government and mentioned it in letters to President Obama, saying “I still feel I haven’t been successful in bringing it to the army’s attention. It’s a good time to raise it, with the ramp-up in Afghanistan. Afghan journalists barely even bother to call us when they get hassled by U.S. or ISAF troops anymore.”
Whether Roxana, actually did anything wrong is difficult to determine. Amnesty International has stated that Saberi is merely a pawn to the ongoing political developments between Iran and the U.S. administration led by President Obama.
It has been speculated that Saberi’s initial arrest and conviction are a way for some in the government to disrupt President Obama’s effort to engage Tehran, although a move by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to offer a fuller defence to Saberi as part of her appeal damages the integrity of this motive. Despite this, political analysts have suggested that the conflict was not between the conservatives and reformists in Iran, but within the conservatives.
An op-ed piece, Iran's power struggle, published in the New York Times on April 29, states that Mehdi Karroubi, a former Iranian politician, asserted that certain conservatives own 63 ports that are outside government control and stand to lose money if U.S. economic sanctions are removed, thus giving them a financial incentive to oppose reconciliation with the U.S.
It appears that Roxana’s case was deeply influenced by the current political climate in regards to American-Iranian relations, possibly even as a simple deflection of international scrutiny, led by Israel, over the current Iranian nuclear program.
I believe that Saberi’s story has been beneficial in that it has raised concerns in the media as well as the international community over freedom of the press, and the plight of journalists in similar situations, whether they are U.S. citizens or not, regardless of the intricacies and possible political motivations behind the drastic overturn of her original sentence.
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