Great! yet another mess is made in the case of Roxana Saberi! A prison sentence of eight years after one day of closed trial. It seems as if someone well inside the Iranian pool of power has an allergy for peace or rather "less tension" between Iran and the US. Whenever there is a slight sign of relief, there it comes, another messy situation. I wonder how a foreign journalist can be called a spy? They can only come with valid visas and can only report with valid permits and can only enter places that they are supposed to. How can someone who reports for public broadcasting service be a secrete agent? Hard for me to buy it! oh, I remember a while ago there were some Iranian reporters who were jailed by US forces in Iraq with the same spying charges. US was saying they were not really journalists! I don't know what eventually happened to them! Some people are just more equal than others when it comes to media coverage.
The funny thing now is the letter from president Ahmadinejad on her behalf, asking for "necessary measures to ensure that the process of examining the charges against the aforementioned individuals are being carried out carefully and fairness, justice and regulations are observed". Oh, That is nice! and equally means that having a fair trial has become such a scarcity in Iran that you may only have it if the president writes a letter for you! I thought it was a default process for any judicial system to observe fairness in trials(?) Imagine all those poor Iranians with only "one nationality" who won't have all these letters backing their cases.
It is just a few month to election and I expect anything from this president who loves his chair so much although his feet can not reach the floor when he sits on it. Either this or it is just an old game of good cop/bad cop that the Iranian government is playing. Do you also hope it would end like this:
...and then the merciful, beloved leader came out from behind the blue curtain and pardoned the sinner. The president smiling from ear to ear, taking picture with the freed reporter who holds a bucket of flower and is escorted to the plane. She lands in the US surrounded by camera flashes, settles back and publishes her book with an extra chapter on jails in Iran. The books becomes the best seller and everyone lives happily ever after... and no one would ask the government of Iran: "Don't you have anything better to do?"
