Iran

I hope Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad checked his fax machine this morning because he received an important letter urging the release of three American hikers held now for five months without charge. I joined 79 signatories from a dozen countries in signing the appeal because I am gravely concerned that the hikers are being used as political pawns in a frightening game of nuclear diplomacy.

Maziar Bahari’s chilling account of his 118 days in an Iranian prison is the cover story of Newsweek this week. Bahari, a renowned journalist and documentary filmmaker, was arrested soon after the disputed June 12 elections. While in prison, he was subjected to psychological and physical abuse. His captors wanted to convince him that he was alone, that the world had forgotten about him. When Bahari, left, discerned that there was in an international campaign to win his release his spirits were bolstered.

The families of Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal, and Sarah Shourd, the three hikers detained in Iran, said today they are concerned about their children’s emotional well-being after nearly four months in prison. They asked supporters to send letters, which they will seek to deliver to them in Evin Prison in Tehran, where the three are being held.

A basement in the gray, Gothic heart of the University of Toronto is home to the CSI of cyberspace. “We are doing free expression forensics,” says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, based at the Munk Centre for International Studies. Deibert and his team of academics and students investigate in real time governments and companies that restrict what we see and hear on the Internet. They are also trying to help online journalists and bloggers slip the shackles of censorship and surveillance. Deibert is a co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a project of the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. ONI tracks the blocking and filtering of the Internet around the globe.

On Monday, two weeks before her October 26 due date, Paola Gourley, the wife of jailed Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, at left, was rushed to the hospital after she suffered bleeding due to stress. From the London Metropolitan Hospital, her pleas for the release for her husband—who is nearing his 120th day in prison in Iran—on humanitarian grounds so that he may be there for his child’s birth, a potentially complicated one, have taken on new urgency.   

I'm a cartoonist so even when writing a story or working as radio correspondent, I'm checking out the empty half of the glass. As blogger it's no different; my inner cartoonist lurks in the dark. I've followed the Iranian "Bloggistan" since day one, and started my Persian blog after learning how to type. Funny? Not at all! Many Iranian journalists didn't start typing until 2002, when they found out that they could publish their censored stuff under different pseudonyms.

The notion that three American hikers could innocently wander across the border from Iraqi Kurdistan into Iran has elicited some understandable skepticism. But a statement from their friend who stayed behind in his hotel because he was ill helps explain how the situation unfolded. 

CPJ will be collecting signatures until July 31 on a Facebook petition in support of Maziar Bahari, Newsweek's Tehran correspondent, who is being held without charge in Iran.

Among the dozens of journalists detained in Iran is Majid Saeedi, a freelance photographer working for Getty Images. Jonathan Klein, the photo agency's co-founder and CEO, describes Saeedi as a "dedicated photojournalist" who was simply trying to document events in Iran. Below are examples of Saeedi's work, courtesy of Getty.

My friend and colleague Iason Athanasiadis spent three weeks in an Iranian prison last month. In the ongoing roundups of journalists since the June 12 election, Iason has seen his own friends and colleagues thrown in jail, including Majid Saeedi, a freelance photographer for Getty Images.