her role in smuggling military goods to Iran has told Iranian state television that she has been brutally torture by the US government.
PressTV, the English language outlet of state broadcasting, said it had gotten an exclusive jailhouse interview with Shahrazad Mir-Gholikhan, 33.
“The US government invited me for government business,” she said. “They even took a ticket for me.… They put me in handcuffs at the airport and put me in the prison and started to torture me in every possible way.”
She said she was duped into visiting the United States by authorities who then tried to “make me a spy” and use her to track down her ex-husband, who was accused of being the principal in the smuggling scheme.
She said her conditions had grown worse in the month since Iran released Sarah Shourd, one of the three American hikers jailed on July 31, 2009. She said US media censorship of her case increased after Shourd’s release.
Indeed, a computer search shows no mention of Mir-Gholikhan in the American press in the weeks since Shourd was released. But then there has been only one mention of her since she was convicted in April 2009. There are usually few mentions of people in the US media once their trials end and they are sent off to prison.
Mir-Gholikhan did not explain how the censorship of her case had increased if she was permitted to have a telephone interview with PressTV.
She said that on October 23, “Out of the blue, they came and put me in handcuffs and took me to the SHU [Special Housing Units] where the most horrible and dangerous criminals are kept.” Mir-Gholikhan is incarcerated at the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut. It is a minimum-security prison for women only.
Mir-Gholikhan said, “They started to torture me in every possible way, especially mentally. They horribly tortured [me] mentally to become a spy.”
In March 2009, US District Judge James I. Cohn imposed a sentence of five years and three months on Mir-Gholikhan, who maintained her innocence during her trial. Because of time served during her trial, she is scheduled for release in July 2012.
Mir-Gholikhan and her then-husband, Mahmud Seif, were indicted in 2005 by a grand jury in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on charges of conspiring to obtain 3,000 Generation III night vision goggles for the Iranian military.
The pair was arrested in 2004 in Vienna, Austria, after a meeting with two undercover agents working for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE was acting on a tip that Tehran was looking to illegally import the goggles.
Efforts to extradite her and her ex-husband from Austria failed as the pair returned to Iran. But in December 2007, Mir-Gholikhan traveled to South Florida and voluntarily presented herself to the authorities to plead guilty in a deal that was expected to sentence her to no time in jail.
In April 2008, she testified in court that her main role was acting as a translator and go-between for her husband, who does not speak English.
Days after her guilty plea and a sentence of time served, prosecutors said they had used the wrong sentencing guidelines and a new sentence of 29 months was issued
Mir-Gholikhan then withdrew her guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to export the military goggles without a license. But by doing so, Mir-Gholikhan faced re-trial based on all seven counts of the grand jury indictment.
In the re-trial, Mir-Gholikhan insisted she was under Seif’s control and denied using the pseudonym “Farideh Fahimi,” the name of the woman in numerous recorded phone calls and intercepted e-mails linked to the goggles deal. But Assistant US Attorney Michael Walleisa accused the defendant of inventing a “surreal spy thriller” in an effort to escape responsibility. He said Mir-Gholikhan’s testimony was in “direct conflict with the evidence in the case” showing the woman with Seif intimately involved in the crime.
Mir-Gholikhan rapidly grew incensed at her treatment in the United States.
The Associated Press reported that in one of her several handwritten court filings, Mir-Gholikhan said she looked forward to eventually leaving the “devil-land of America.” She also boldly compared herself to a lioness.
“The bottom line is you are playing with … a real and true she lion, who is the Queen of the Jungle,” Mir-Gholikhan wrote. “A she lion is much stronger than a he lion.”
The Generation III night vision goggles are extremely sensitive because they give the United States a key advantage during night operations. Army Col. Kevin McDonnell, testifying in a similar 2008 smuggling case, said US enemies who obtain such goggles would be better equipped to kill American soldiers, shoot down US aircraft and figure out how to design their own competing version of the goggles.