Free Republic

Since his arrest last July -- he was accused of helping to plan the post-election uprisings -- Kian's family and friends have made countless appeals for clemency to the Iranian government, written letters to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pleading his innocence, and signed dozens of petitions. All to no avail. I've come now to realize that the regime probably thinks we're obtuse. Indeed, they know better than anyone that Kian is an innocent man. As the expression goes in Persian, "da'va sar-e een neest," i.e. that's not what this fight is about.

Well it took a while. “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at Columbia University last night in response to a question about the recent execution of two gay men there.“In Iran we do not have this phenomenon,” he continued. “I do not know who has told you we have it.” Fareed Zakaria claimed that Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari was sentenced to prison in part for posting this photo on his Facebook page.And now they’ve been discovered in Iran. (via Religion of Peace) An 82-page document recently issued by Iran’s parliamentary research...

MOSCOW, October 17 (RIA Novosti) - An Iranian court has released on a $300,000 bail a Newsweek journalist with dual Iranian-Canadian citizenship, arrested in the wake of the disputed presidential elections in June, Iranian media said. Maziar Bahari, 42, who worked as a Newsweek reporter since 1998, was arrested on June 21 during the post-vote protests in Tehran "for his role in instigating events occurred after the presidential election," the Press TV said. "Bahari was released on 3 billion rials ($300,000) bail from Evin prison on Saturday night," the semi-official Islamic Labor News Agency said citing a judiciary source. Bahari...

Iran's trial of more than 100 people who it has linked to post-election unrest is a "sign of weakness" and shows that the Islamic republic "is afraid of its own people," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CNN Thursday. "It is a show trial, there's no doubt about it," Clinton told CNN's Fareed Zakaria in a wide-ranging interview to be broadcast on his "GPS" program Sunday. "It demonstrates I think better than any of us could ever say that this Iranian leadership is afraid of their own people, and afraid of the truth and the facts coming out." Clinton...

A Canadian journalist working in Iran was arrested without charge on Sunday and has not been heard from since. Maziar Bahari, 42, a correspondent for Newsweek magazine, has been reporting on Iran for the past decade from his base in Tehran, where he was born. His most recent article for Newsweek, published in the aftermath of Iran’s disputed presidential election, examined opposition supporters’ concerns that groups loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were staging violent incidents at their rallies to undermine support for their movement. “Newsweek strongly condemns this unwarranted detention, and calls upon the Iranian government to release him immediately,”...