11 May 09 | Uncategorized
We always knew the charges against Roxana Saberi were trumped up, and that she would be freed eventually — but when the news flashed from Tehran on Monday morning that she was being released, my feelings of joy and utter relief were overwhelming.
For weeks now I have had a vision of my friend Roxana — who was always something of a free spirit — being cooped up like a caged bird in Evin: Iran’s most infamous jail.
Now at last she can taste freedom for the first time since February. Fantastic!
I first met Roxana Saberi in the summer of 2005 when we were both working in the Baghdad bureau of Fox News. I was a correspondent and she was one of a team of energetic producers. Roxana was a typical all-American girl: driven, confident, smiley, utterly charming and a fitness fanatic who would astonish us all by running round the galleried hotel floors to stay in shape even in 45C heat!
Baghdad was extremely violent in those days with almost daily bombings in the street outside. I remember one week when the hotel took four direct hits from Katyusha rockets, but Roxana always stayed calm and cheerful, even though she must have been terrified.
Roxana, 31, from Fargo, North Dakota, was very ambitious and after Baghdad she told me she thought Teheran was the place to make a name for herself in journalism , which in the circumstances is ironic.
I begged her to reconsider, having worked there myself and knowing what difficulties Western journalists face just doing their job in Iran. For a woman it would have been doubly difficult.
She is a talented and dedicated journalist and soon started picking up work as a freelance, working for the BBC, Fox News and America’s National Public Radio.
Then in February this year came the horrifying news she had been arrested and initially charged with overstaying her visa.
Then weeks later we heard she’d been charged with spying an offence which can carry the death penalty in Iran. In a revolutionary court trial, held behind closed doors, she was found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison. It was like a hammer blow to friends and amily and, f course, utterly devastating for her.
Her old alma mata North Western University and National Public Radio started to a campaign to get her released because her family and friends knew she was no spy. Media organsiations all over the world helped to highlight the case, including Britain’s National Union of Journalists, to whom I say many thanks.
Getting the right tone for a campaign was tricky. Cause too much fuss and the Iranians would become upset and dig their heels in. Make no noise at all and she would rot away in jail.
It also soon became clear Roxana was a political pawn in the high stakes game being played between Iran and the US over Teheran’s quest for nuclear power. An American journalist in jail held on the whim of the Iranian regime was a strong bargaining chip in this ongoing saga.
There was another issue too: Iran’s presidential election race is in June, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could perhaps score points on the international stage by demonstrating his sense of justice. Was that what he was doing when he personally intervened in this case earlier this month?
By the time Roxana’s appeal was heard last Sunday the US President Barak Obama had also called for her to be freed.
As we celebrate Roxana’s release I would ask readers to spare a thought for countless innocent prisoners in jail in Iran who will not be freed and including those who face execution. Remember too, Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi, who died in hospital in Tehran on 10 July 2003 after falling into a coma, having received head injuries during more than three days of interrogation.
Roxana’s ordeal will be over when she leaves Iran. Many others must stay behind bars and face Iran’s version of justice.
This is a guest post by John Cookson
John Cookson was a senior correspondent at Sky News from 1989 to 1999, and later worked with Fox News and Al Jazeera. He is now senior features producer at Euronews in Lyon France, and is working on Iran: the perfect storm — a book about the Islamic Republic’s quest for nukes.
20 Apr 09 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Jameel Jaffer
Last week the Obama administration released four legal memos that supplied the basis for the Bush administration’s torture programme. The memos, which were disclosed in response to a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed five years ago, include detailed descriptions of the interrogation methods that CIA interrogators were authorised to inflict on prisoners in their custody. Described methods included ‘the facial slap’, ‘the water board’, and perhaps most grotesque, ‘cramped confinement box with insect’.
These revolting memos shouldn’t have been written in the first place, but the Obama administration was right to release them. The public can now better understand the nature of the CIA’s interrogation and detention programme, and the role that Justice Department lawyers played in developing and implementing it. CIA officials reportedly pressed President Obama to withhold key passages in the memos, but the president rightly recognised that redacting these passages would have enmeshed the new administration in a cover-up of the Bush administration’s crimes.
In a self-serving op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Mukasey (who served as attorney general from 2007 to 2009) and Michael Hayden (who served as director of the CIA from 2006 and 2009), contend that President Obama’s disclosure of the memos makes the United States less safe; they argue that the disclosure of the memos, and of the interrogation techniques discussed in them, unwisely broadcast to terrorists ‘the absolute limit of what the US government could do to extract information from them’, and they warn that terrorists will now ‘supplement their training’ so that they can resist the described techniques. They add that the disclosure of the memos will make CIA interrogators timid and risk-averse, unwilling to use ‘aggressive’ methods even when Justice Department lawyers assure them that such methods are lawful.
But the methods described in the memos are illegal under both domestic and international law, and they were illegal when the Bush administration endorsed them. For years, the US State Department’s human rights reports have described these methods as torture. And after the Second World War, the United States prosecuted Japanese commanders for having inflicted some of the methods that the memos purport to authorise. It does not compromise national security to broadcast to the world that the US will eschew methods that are criminal under US and international law, that the State Department has described as torture, and that the United States has previously prosecuted as war crimes. Indeed, to propose that the nation’s security would be compromised by that message is to propose that the nation’s security would be compromised by the rule of law.
Nor will it be unfortunate if CIA interrogators hesitate before relying on legal advice that strikes them as implausible or wrong. Indeed, there is something astounding about a former attorney general characterising this kind of hesitation as ‘timidity’. Anyone who reads the memos will understand immediately that the CIA and Justice Department each sought to absolve itself from responsibility for torture by basing its actions on transparently worthless assurances from the other. It would be a good thing if CIA interrogators hesitated before entering into this kind of arrangement again.
Jameel Jaffer is director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) national security project and co-author, with Amrit Singh, of Administration of Torture (Columbia University Press 2007) available at Amazon
05 Nov 08 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Anthony Dworkin
Among the many things to celebrate in Obama’s convincing victory is American voters’ rejection of the ‘culture war’ agenda that Sarah Palin brought to the Republican ticket. Opinion polls showed clearly that, while Palin was loved by Republican voters, she put off independents and moderates and probably cost the McCain ticket a good number of their votes. Palin’s attempts to suggest that Obama did not see America the same way as ‘real Americans’ did not gain much traction, nor did the inflammatory claim that he had been ‘palling around with terrorists’ because of his association with William Ayers. Faced with real economic problems and a challenging international environment, the swing voters who decided the election were not interested in Palin’s wild attempt to stoke cultural divisions.
By conviction and by temperament, Obama is clearly inclined to consensus-seeking and toleration, and as president he can be expected to foster a more inclusive and respectful national dialogue.
Internationally, too, he will almost certainly shift the United States further away from the strident ‘with us or against us’ approach that Bush adopted in his first term and never entirely discarded. It’s becoming fashionable to say that people will be disappointed in Obama because the substance of his policies will not represent as much of a shift as people have allowed themselves to hope for. Perhaps, though there will be noticeable differences in America’s counter-terrorism policies, with an end to military tribunals and more genuine due process for detainees. In any case, political style and tone is important in itself. Obama will shift public debate in America, and America’s public engagement with the world, in the direction of greater respect for different opinions, outlooks and cultures. That will be an important benefit in itself.
Anthony Dworkin is executive director of the Crimes of War Project and senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
