Posted on 05/13/2009 8:07:16 PM PDT by BlackVeil
The American journalist Roxana Saberi was jailed for espionage in Tehran after obtaining a confidential Iranian document about the American invasion of Iraq, it was claimed today.
Saleh Nikbakht, one of Ms Saberi's Iranian lawyers, revealed that a document Ms Saberi had obtained while working as a translator for a powerful clerical lobby had been used as evidence to convict her on charges of espionage.
Ms Saberi, 32, was released on Monday after an appeal court dismissed charges of spying and reduced her eight-year prison term to a two-year suspended sentence.
Abdolsamad Khorramshahi, the lead defence counsel, said that she had “accepted that she had made a mistake and got access to documents she should not have".
Ms Saberi apologised for keeping the document, and the court reduced the charge against her from espionage to possessing confidential documents.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
CIA?
How important could the information be if they are letting her go?
Someone translate this into western for me. Was she a guilty perp? Or was she played?
If she'd looked like Helen Thomas she could have walked out of the country with the makings for a nuclear warhead and no one would have stopped her.
‘had secret document on war in Iraq’
Ya’ think someone in the U.S. media would DARE to ask why someone associated with the Soros “Open Society Institute” would be doing with Secret Iranian Documents???
No...
I didn’t either. Nothing to see here. Move along...
I'm waiting for someone to come along and work it out for me. She was was working as a journalist, but was unaccredited, having let her papers lapse ... she was working as a translator in an Iranian govt post which would expose her to sensitive information ... she went to buy a bottle of wine, which is illegal there, although the law is rarely applied ... she was also an attractive woman, I just can't help wondering about her relationships to highly-placed Iranian men.
Anyway, if someone is being played, who knows who? As the Arabs would resentfully tell you, the Persians are notorious for the duplicity and deceit.
what does that mean?
It seems likely that they let her go in response to Obama’s sending a personal agent to Iran to talk with the Mullahs.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2250099/posts
She is a Muslim that obtained the release of other Muslims.
CIA non-official cover operatives (even the rock-bottom end of the spectrum like Valerie Plame) are not stupid enough to go out and buy a bottle of wine in a militant Islamic country where alcholic beverages are absolutely illegal. Of course, we’ll never have first hand evidence of whether she actually did that or not, but the Iranian authorities said she did, and her father appeared to say she did in an interview shortly after her arrest. So unless buying the wine was some elaborate ploy to try to make it appear that she couldn’t be CIA (not impossible, but very unlikely), I don’t believe she is.
http://tinyurl.com/r3lx2r
Her boyfriend was some Iranian bigshot moonbat movie auteur.
http://tinyurl.com/qzojqv
I think she was set up and played. But that's just me.
The real question: what did the kidnappers win, in the negotiations?
What was she doing with that document?
Do you suppose perhaps she didn’t have any document.
Sounds like a face-saving story to this poster.
“We’ll let you go because this is making us look like scumbags, but you need to say this”.
IMHO there was no document.
If you refer to the arrest, trial and now release, Iran demonstrated to the world who is the boss there. The USA was permitted to beg for pardon, and Iran showed its kindness by reducing the sentence. The USA gained nothing in this episode, and Iran gained a lot.
With regard to guilt or innocence, she may well be just a journalist anxious to get hold of some unique information to write an article about.
But far more likely she, not being an official employee of The Company, was briefed before the trip, and specifically told what The Boss would like to have. An amateur Mata Hari, so to say. This would explain her posession of a document and at the same time total lack of skill to hide it, and complete ignorance of basic rules that no trained spy can forget.
A question was posed "why is she being released, are those documents worthless?" I can only suggest that once Iranians learned of the leak they made the document worthless by changing reality that the document talks about. For example, if it had a set of passwords then all these passwords had been changed. There would be no other way because Iranians can't be sure who else saw that paper.
Do you have a link you could provide about her being associated with Soro’s OSI? I haven’t followed her story much and would love to have that link for my ‘Soros File’. Wonder if she was a ‘graduate’ of his ‘Institute For War And Peace Reporting’? That organization helped to instigate the internal/civil strife in Iraq from the very beginning of the war and is responsible for getting our soldiers killed.
Yes, we always let pretty reporters carry out espionage, just like James Bond......
posted on Sunday, April 19, 2009 4:53:23 PM by gandalftb To: zaphod3000
Good post, spot on. What has not been reported is that Saberi made a lot of sensitive Iranian dissident contacts and had forwarded their complaints privately to congressional aides where they were incorporated into government reports and intelligence analyses. This type of private reporting is an American treasure but treasonous in Iran. She also confessed to the same and now wants to recant.
Bambi’s personal emissary is supposedly in Iran visiting with Ahmadinejad right now. So this may be a way to provide cover for that or may, at any rate, be connected with it in some way.
Note that the Secy of State, the diplomatic apparatus and the legitimately elected or appointed officials who are supposed to be handling US government foreign policy are no longer doing so. It’s all Obama and his unknown, unvetted, personal representatives, engaging in who knows what kind of negotiations in obscure and murky situations like this one.
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