as always, the question is who benefits from this?
I spoke to an Iranian who lives nearby some time ago and quizzed him about his life in Iran and outside. He now lives in Germany and will probably never return to Iran because all of his family has left. The ones in the US, especially California are all gung ho for invading and destroying the mullahs.
anyway, he told me that he was in Germany studying when Khomeini returned to Iran with the fall of the Shah. He protested at the Iranian embassy here in Germany and pretty much made a nuisance of himself. Then he started getting messages from relatives in Iran telling him that someone had come by and told them to tell him to knock it off. He did.
from what I am reading about this woman, it seems she is very active in working to overthrow the present government of Iran. I doubt that the Woodrow Wilson Institute is entirely benevolent. Links to Israel are not that unlikely either if what I heard about Savak being trained and equipped by Israel in times of the Shah. she probably is a nuisance to the Iranians. so they arrested her, it probably would have been easier to arrange an accident for her but maybe they are trying to let others know that they can reach out and touch….should they need to.
please, these are only wondering musings……nothing concrete

Posted by: dan of steele | May 21 2007 21:06 utc | 3

I’m pragmatic, if I had just emigrated from Iran and was offered a good-paying job at the Wilson Center I would take it. However, considering the fact that the center was established in 1968 by an act of Congress, is partially funded by the US Government, the board of trustees is appointed by the US President (Condoleezza Rice is a board member), and Wilson Center lecturers and authors has been advocating regime change in Iran for years… I would not return to Iran with that on my resume.

Posted by: skeeter | May 21 2007 22:35 utc | 5

alamet
their ignorance is total

Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 22 2007 1:12 utc | 7

The Guardian and not the Daily Telegraph????!!!
Have you noticed who wrote it : Simon Tisdall
This sounds a little bit too much jewish to me.
That will certainly diminish the credibility of what is written in this article :
“Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq”.
Obviously the US does not know what lie to invent to accuse Iran and find an excuse to attack it.

Posted by: anon_imus | May 22 2007 3:00 utc | 9

I agree anon_imus
Two weeks ago all that weekend the AIPAC website ran a lead article claiming that Iran was refusing to let the IAEA inspecters in to inspect its Nanatz facility. Meanwhile, the IAEA was attempting to expose the deception by issuing public statements that they did in fact already have a team at the Nanatz facility, and Iran had engaged in no such blockage of the inspection process.
Instead of a retraction, AIPAC, sometime the following Monday morning, removed the article, and interestingly enough, did not archive it. It simply disappeared.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 22 2007 3:40 utc | 11

@Neil – Holding someone for six weeks without charges, …
According to the Woodrow Wilson Center “On Monday, May 7th, she was summoned to the Ministry of Intelligence once again. When she arrived for her appointment on Tuesday morning, she was put into a car and taken to Evin prison.”
On my calendar today is May 22. So where did you pick that additional month from?
Just asking.
And thanks for the link in 12.

Posted by: b | May 22 2007 4:34 utc | 13

@b: I was mistaken about the time involved. This is the sentence in the Robin Wright story that misled me:

originally in Iran to take care of her 93-year-old mother when her passport was taken in a robbery as she was en route to the airport Dec. 30. When she went in to get a replacement, she was put under interrogation for six weeks.

Esfandiari was functionally under house arrest for the four months preceding her jailing. Without a passport she was unable to leave the country.
Noam Chomsky has apparently joined this vast conspiracy to overthrow the mullahs by way of academic exchanges. Who knew he was part of The Cabal?

Posted by: Nell | May 22 2007 14:22 utc | 15

Ok – it is a fair question.
From Cole’s web site: I know Haleh and have enormous respect for her
Maybe you take a chance based on a number of factors including past history of all parties involved. Perhaps it is akin to religion – a matter of faith.
Look at Hurricane Carter for further confusion on how does one know.
Perhaps that is partially why we reject torture and capital punishment – because there is no complete answer to the question of how does one know.

Posted by: edwin | May 22 2007 21:41 utc | 17

Tehran Detains 4th Iranian American Before Talks

Iran has imprisoned a consultant for philanthropist George Soros’s Open Society Institute programs, according to sources who work with the Columbia University-educated social scientist. Kian Tajbakhsh becomes the fourth dual U.S.-Iranian national to be incarcerated, detained or put under house arrest in recent weeks.
Tajbakhsh was picked up around May 11, although relatives and colleagues learned of his imprisonment only this week, the sources said.
…
Tajbakhsh, 45, has worked with the Open Society Institute in Iran since 2004 and also has done work for the World Bank in Iran, colleagues said. An Iranian government official said yesterday that Tajbakhsh had also advised Iranian ministries and was widely respected as a social scientist.
His arrest came about three days after the May 8 imprisonment of Potomac resident Haleh Esfandiari of the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Esfandiari received funding from the Open Society Institute to sponsor Middle East programs in Washington.

This is weird – the headline speaks of the 4th imprisoned but it only names Esfandiani and Tajbakhsh. Who are the other two? Do they exist?

Posted by: b | May 23 2007 6:12 utc | 19

Glass houses??!!
Wouldn’t you give a prisoner of the U.S. the benefit of presumption of innocence in an analogous situation? Why, then, do you assume that Esfandiari is guilty?
Noam Chomsky, to his credit, does not need to know that Esfandiari is innocent of any of the charges made against her to demand that she be given her rights. Holding persons incommunicado without charges is wrong, period.
Your position is the obverse of those Americans who feel that kidnaping and holding people without charges or lawyers on the basis of suspicion is just fine.

Posted by: Nell | May 25 2007 1:11 utc | 21

Dual American-Iranian National Believed Detained in Iran, Sources Say

Human Rights Watch today reported the disappearance of another U.S. citizen believed to have been detained during a visit to Iran.
Ali Shakeri, a businessman from Irvine, Calif., who has lived in the United States since he graduated from University of Texas in the 1970s, was due to leave Tehran to return to the United States in early May after a visit to his ailing mother, who died while he was in Tehran. But he has not been heard from since he left for the airport, according to Human Rights Watch and two Iranian friends who expected him in London en route home.
Shakeri, who is in his late 50s, would be the fifth dual American-Iranian national to have been imprisoned, detained or prevented from leaving Iran in recent weeks. “We have every confidence that Shakeri is in detention,” said Hadi Ghaemi, Iran analyst for Human Rights Watch.
…
Paula Garb, co-director of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California at Irvine, said the center had expected him back about three weeks ago. Shakeri is a founding member of the center’s advisory board.
…
Only three of the four other dual nationals who have been imprisoned, detained or prevented from leaving Iran have been publicly identified. They include Haleh Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Parnaz Azima of U.S.-funded Radio Farda, and social scientist Kian Tajbakhsh. The fourth person has requested not to be identified by The Washington Post.
A sixth American, former FBI agent Robert Levinson, has been missing in Iran since he disappeared on Kish Island in early March.

The center is partly financed by USAID

Posted by: b | May 25 2007 8:45 utc | 23

Okay, I’ll stop commenting on this post after this, but:
Those of us who are actively protesting the treatment of Haleh Esfandiari are not “wonder[ing] why Iran is suspicious of bi-national U.S. scholars” or, in fact, necessarily convinced that she is absolutely not “guilty” (where ‘guilty’, in the view of most MoA participants, seems to mean, ‘responsible for activities that might in any way strengthen the hand of internal opponents of the regimr’: women, homosexuals, those seeking more popular control over who becomes candidates for office, etc. etc.).
Iran is not merely ‘suspicious’ of binational U.S. scholars, it is holding one incommunicado and without charges.
To use your own analogy, why are you so convinced that Jose Padilla is absolutely innocent? See, isn’t that an offensively missing-the-point question? Isn’t it completely irrelevant to your outrage about the U.S. government’s treatment of him?

Posted by: Nell | May 26 2007 12:07 utc | 25

I swore I was going to let this go, but I can’t. I should have included your own words in the post in my first comment, because there is the heart of my objection:
Cole and others are demanding her release because they assume she is innocent. That may well be, but how do they know?
Cole and others are not demanding her release because they assume she is innocent, but because she is being held illegally and denied communication with counsel or with her family or anyone in a position to help her.
Cole doesn’t claim to know she’s innocent, but he does presume so. Chomsky and other academics who have joined the campaign to release Esfandiari are doing so not on the basis of knowledge or even presumption of her absolute innocence of efforts to support political opponents of the ruling government, but on the basis of human rights concerns. It is also the case that this kind of action by the Iranian government puts U.S. opponents of a military attack on Iran at a severe disadvantage.
It’s yet another case of the worst elements in the U.S. and the Iranian government reinforcing each other.

Posted by: Nell | May 26 2007 18:22 utc | 27

are doing so not on the basis of knowledge or even presumption of her absolute innocence of efforts to support political opponents of the ruling government, but on the basis of human rights concerns.
Ok – well, they certainly are busy than.
Look, Esfandiari has Iranian nationality and an Iranian passport. Iran has certain laws. Iran has certain legal procedures. We don’t know these in any detail.
There are lots of curious laws and procedures around the world.
In Germany, if you publicly refute that us Germans did a genozide on Jews, you go to jail.
In Turkey, when you publicly confirm that Turks did a genozide on Armenians you go to jail.
In Japan any police station can legaly keep you in their “investigation jail” for some four weeks and interogate you 12 hours a day without ever seeing a counsel.
In Poland discussing homosexuality in schools will get you some prison time.
Now I find all of these laws/procedures above stupid, inherently illegal and violating various human rights (and I did spare you the U.S. examples here.)
Still I don’t see anyone calling for immediate release of prisoners in Germany, Turkey or Japan or Poland. I wonder why.
An Iranian-American scholar from the Congress funded “spread democracy” circus gets jailed in her own country. It is somehow by far the most democratic country around the Persian Gulf. At the same time there are several public reports that the U.S. is secretly financing the overthrow of the government of Iran through influence agents form its “spread democracy” circus.
I am quite certain that Iran has, like any country, laws against the overthrough of its government.
It might be or might not be that Esfandiari has done something against such Iranian laws. We don’t know. It might be that her imprisonment in Iran is legal and normal under Iranian law. We don’t know.
We should assume she is innocent like we should with anybody under investigation. We should ask for fair handling under the rules of law.
We do not know if she is innocent. Again, why call for her unconditional release without knowing any facts instead of letting the legal process take its way?
Why do so in her case and not in thousands or millions others of maybe dubious law enforcement?
What is the last time Chomsky and Cole asked for clemency for some Saudi wife that gets stoned for alleged unproven unfaithfullness?

Posted by: b | May 26 2007 19:44 utc | 29

Iran: Western spy networks discovered

Iran said Saturday it has uncovered spy rings organized by the United States and its Western allies, claiming on state-run television that the espionage networks were made up of “infiltrating elements from the Iraqi occupiers.”
The Intelligence Ministry has “succeeded in identifying and striking blows at several spy networks comprised of infiltrating elements from the Iraqi occupiers in western, southwestern and central Iran,” said the statement, using shorthand for United States and its allies.
The broadcast did not elaborate, saying further details would be published within days.

Do we know this to be true? NO!
Do we know this NOT to be true? NO!
So why, in absence of further information, call for one version to be true and neglect the other?

Posted by: b | May 26 2007 20:58 utc | 31

3 Iranian-Americans charged with spying

TEHRAN, Iran – U.S. academic Haleh Esfandiari and two other Iranian-Americans have been “formally charged” with endangering national security and espionage,
Iran’s judiciary spokesman said Tuesday.
“Esfandiari has been formally charged with endangering national security through propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners,” spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi told reporters. “She has been informed of the charges against her.”
…
Jamshidi said the same charges also had been lodged against Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant who also has worked for the World Bank, and journalist Parnaz Azima. No trial date has been announced and Jamshidi said the investigation against all three is continuing.
Azima, who works for the U.S.-funded Radio Farda, was detained but released and barred from leaving the country. It was the first time the government has confirmed the arrest of Tajbakhsh, who was believed to have been taken into custody around May 11, according to George Soros’ Open Society Institute.
…

Posted by: b | May 29 2007 11:45 utc | 33