Now They’ve Gone Too Far
By Mitch Berg
Former Miss North Dakota and current freelance journalist Roxana Saberi has been arrested in Iran
Roxana Saberi, 31, has not been heard from since her last call on Feb. 10, her father, Reza, told The Associated Press on Sunday.”We haven’t heard anything,” he said. The family decided to go public, he said, “because we wanted to get some information.”
Officials in Iran have not publicly confirmed the arrest. A duty officer at the U.S. State Department said Sunday officials were looking into an AP request for information on the case.
Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized Iran for arresting journalists and suppressing freedom of speech. The government has arrested several Iranian-Americans in the past few years, citing alleged attempts to overthrow its Islamic regime. The most high-profile case came in 2007, when Iran arrested four Iranian-Americans, including the academic Haleh Esfandiari. The four were imprisoned or had their passports confiscated for several months until they were released and allowed to return to the U.S.
Roxana Saberi is a freelance journalist who has reported for National Public Radio and other media and has lived in Iran for six years.
Does this smell as fishy as anything else in the land of the mullahs?
Her father said that in her last phone call, she told him she was arrested after buying a bottle of wine.
“We asked others and they said, `There’s no detention for that.’ So that’s kind of an excuse,” he told the AP.
What will the Obama Administration do?
Given their response to the drug war in Mexico – abrogate the Second Amendment and ban “assault weapons” – the answer seems obvious; impose Sharia in the US.
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:15 am
[…] Roxana Saberi has gone missing, and the Iranian police are the prime suspects. The independent journalist’s family last heard from Roxana on February 10th, when she told them that the police would only hold her a couple of days. She advised them to remain quiet, but three weeks of silence later, they’re going public in an effort to pressure Tehran (via Mitch Berg): A U.S. journalist has been arrested in Iran, and her father said Sunday she told him in a brief phone call she was detained after buying a bottle of wine. […]