A Travesty of Justice: Iran's Imprisonment of Roxana Saberi

From the Grand Forks Herald, hometown newspaper of Roxana Saberi, the American journalist currently imprisoned by the fascist regime in Iran:

Iran’s imprisonment of Roxana Saberi is an international outrage, a flagrant violation of the norms of civilized conduct. But it should come as no surprise.

The Iranian government has shown its disregard for those norms before. This latest example should give great pause to the Obama administration, which came in to office plainly willing to give Iran the benefit of the doubt — and now has seen Iran repudiate that gesture as it has so many before, with cynicism and contempt.

Saberi, imprisoned since January, has been convicted of spying, news stories reported Saturday. Now, whenever these kinds of accusations surface, there’s always a chance that the accused is guilty and was caught in the act.

But in this case, that chance seems vanishingly small. There are ways to credibly accuse and convict someone of espionage, but the Iranian court system has not employed them. Just the opposite: It has mocked those norms by disregarding their substance, while using the norms’ vocabulary — “trial,” “attorney,” “defense” and so on — to give the government’s actions a patina of justice.

Here is all one needs to know about justice as it seems to be practiced in modern Iran. The quote is from a story in Sunday’s New York Times:

“Ms. Saberi’s father, Reza Saberi, who came to Tehran two weeks ago from Fargo, N.D., to secure her release, said Sunday that neither she nor her lawyer was aware that the trial was taking place last Monday until after it was under way.

“‘The lawyer was only told to go meet Roxana last Monday,’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘No one knew that they were trying her. Roxana found out 15 minutes into the session that she was being tried.

“‘None of them, neither Roxana nor the lawyer, were ready to defend her.’

“Mr. Saberi said that the trial took less than an hour as he waited outside the courtroom, believing that the lawyer was only meeting his daughter in the presence of the judge.”

So: Saberi didn’t know she was on trial until after the trial started. She met her defense lawyer the very day of her “trial.” Neither Saberi nor her lawyer had any time whatsoever to prepare her defense.

And the proceedings took less than an hour.

No conviction by such a kangaroo court can be believed. Just the opposite: By behaving toward Saberi in such an absurdly lawless fashion, Iran has made it even more likely that Saberi is entirely innocent. The harsh judgments rendered by North Dakota Sens. Kent Conrad, who called Saberi’s eight-year prison sentence “preposterous,” and Byron Dorgan, who spoke of “a shocking miscarriage of justice,” seem fully justified.

But again, the Iranian government’s conduct should come as no surprise. The government came into power alongside an act of even graver disregard of international norms: the capture of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. The government then kept the embassy workers hostage for more than a year.

To this day, the Iranian government not only has refused to apologize for the incident, but has gone on to repeatedly show its contempt for world norms.

Political regimes are like racehorses, in that their performances yesterday and today are pretty good indicators of their performance tomorrow. At this point, the Iranian government’s conduct suggests that trust isn’t something that America should hurry to extend. It’s something Iran must earn.

— Tom Dennis for the Herald

Today is Ms. Saberi's birthday. Pray for her release and safe return to her family and loved ones.