Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American journalist sentenced to eight years of jail by the mullahs for the crime of embodying everything after the hyphen in that description of her, has been released from her cell, but not from her state of jeopardy. According to the Associated Press:
Iran's intelligence chief insists American journalist Roxana Saberi is guilty because an appeals court did not acquit her of spying charges even though it reduced her prison sentence to a two-year suspended sentence.
Iranian state TV has quoted Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi as saying Wednesday Saberi's release from jail doesn't mean she hasn't violated any laws.
Saberi, imprisoned on espionage charges in Iran for four months, was freed Monday and reunited with her parents. The 32-year-old dual Iranian-American citizen was originally sentenced to eight years in prison in a short, closed-door trial.
Saberi's lawyer revealed Tuesday that she was convicted of spying for the U.S. in part because she had a copy of a confidential Iranian report on the U.S. war in Iraq.
So she can be tossed back into Evin Prison (the Lubyanka of Tehran) at any time before her expected departure from the country next week. News of Saberi's release was greeted by some with perhaps undue optimism that the Obama administration's make-nice approach to dictatorial regimes was working. However, it is worth recalling that a few years ago Haleh Esfandiari, another Iranian-American (this one a scholar at the Brookings Institution) was similarly locked up when she arrived back home to visit her aged mother. A prodigious letter-writing and human rights and blogging campaign -- of which I was proud to be a part -- put pressure on her jailers, and Esfandiari, too, was eventually let go. (She's now back in the U.S.)
If there is a positive political takeaway from Saberi's homecoming it is that the state now has harder time of disappearing or killing its citizens with impunity. A societal amnesia toward the individual is becoming impossible in the age of the coaxial cable. This is not to oversell the liberating potential of technology, which also has the ability to enslave, but it is a nice irony that assorted riffraff desiring mankind's return to the seventh century are being undermined and hobbled by the twenty-first.
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