Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American professor at Tufts University, told The New York Times, “The conservatives are trying to establish the fact that Ahmadi-nejad is not their boss. He is a weakened president, and they are perfectly comfortable embarrassing him. It is a signal that it is perfectly okay to attack him and you might get brownie points for doing it.”
The immediate cause of the delay is the failure of one judge to sign the bail decree that would free the men on payment of $500,000 each in bail money. At least that is what the hikers’ lawyer, Masud Shafii, has been told.
Ahmadi-nejad announced last Tuesday morning that the two men-Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, both 29-would be freed, conveniently just before he traveled to New York for the annual UN General Assembly session. The third hiker, Sarah Shourd, was freed last year just before Ahmadi-nejad went to the UN. There is almost uniform agreement among analysts that Ahmadi-nejad wants the hikers released to avoid being challenged over their imprisonment while in New York and to look compassionate.
It took 24 hours for the Judiciary to announce that no decision had been made on freeing the pair. The Judiciary said it was still studying the bail application filed by Shafii. Its announcement underscored the point that the president has no authority to free anyone; that authority lies exclusively with the Judiciary, while the pardon power lies exclusively with the Supreme Leader.
Many in the Judiciary appeared to be offended and angry that Ahmadi-nejad was trying to usurp power. But the deeper issue was likely power politics. Since May, Ahmadi-nejad’s rivals and opponents have delighted in doing anything they could to cut him down to size. They have no interest in seeing him win points in the West for freeing the two men.
Furthermore, hardliners are opposed to freeing the men unilaterally on principle. They believe the men really are spies and deserve to be punished, not sent home to handshakes at the White House. At least, they argue, the Islamic Republic should insist that Iranians being held in US prisons be freed and exchanged for the two hikers.
The irony is that Ahmadi-nejad looks better in the West the more the hardliners foil efforts like the one to free the hikers.
When the hikers’ lawyer, Shafii, went to the Judiciary last week, he was told a bail decree had been drafted and required the signatures of two judges. He was told one judge had signed and the second signature was awaited.
When he returned on Saturday to learn if the second judge had signed, Shafii was told the second judge was not immediately available but was expected to sign within hours. On Sunday, he was told that judge was on vacation and would not return until Tuesday of this week. On Tuesday, he was told the judge had not yet returned.
“The Judiciary officials told me to await their call,” he said. “But I do not think they will call any time soon.” Shafii, who had been very upbeat the previous week, was now very downbeat.
That was where things stood when the Iran Times went to press Tuesday night.
It wasn’t known if the judge was just very loose about his work schedule, or whether the system had still not decided what to do about the two men and was just using tales about the floating judge to avoid anything concrete.
Many politicians are commenting about the case. For example, Majlis Deputy Heshmatollah Falahat-Pisheh, a member of the Majlis National Security Committee, said the Judiciary had sole jurisdiction and advised that the Judiciary should decide what to do based on the country’s interests. He did not mention guilt or innocence.
Deputy Kazem Jalali said Iran must not pursue a policy of appeasement with the United States, for that would make the White House more audacious. “It is not always appropriate to take unilateral but well-intentioned measures,” he said, “because the Americans have negatively interpreted our measures on many occasions.”
Meanwhile, four Americans flew to Tehran to encourage the release. They were: retired Roman Catholic Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, DC; the Right Reverend John Bryson Chane, the Episcopal bishop of Washington and dean of the National Cathedral in Washington; and two officers of the Council on American Islamic-Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad and Larry Shaw. They had hoped to bring the two hikers home with them. But they did not. The Americans met Saturday with President Ahmadi-nejad and Foreign Ministry officials and announced on their return that they expected both men would be freed within days. But they did not meet with anyone in Iran’s Judiciary.
The four Americans also said the Iranians they talked to were hopeful that the United States would reciprocate and review the cases of Americans jailed in the United States. In Tehran, the men were taken to a meeting with some of the relatives of those jailed in the United States.
The Iranian Judiciary wasn’t giving any basis for hope. Mohammad Javad Larijani, who is the head of the Iranian Human Rights Council within the Judiciary and also the brother of Judiciary Chairman Sadeq Larijani, said the two hikers were spies “and we do not reward spies.”
The pair was convicted of espionage earlier this year, but Shafii has said that no evidence to support that charge was ever presented at the trial. The only evidence produced was to support the charge of illegal entry.
The governments of both Oman and Iraq have gotten involved, trying to use their good offices with Tehran to win freedom for the pair. Omani officials have said they sent a plane to Tehran to bring the two men out. They did the same thing when Shourd was released, and it is believed that Oman paid her $500,000 bail. Iraq said a delegation of parliamentarians traveled from Baghdad to Tehran to seek freedom for the pair.
The delay in the release may be a necessary reflection of conflicts with the Iranian establishment. But it isn’t winning any brownie points for the regime.
Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East, was visibly seething over the delays. “The Iranian authorities must stop treating Shane Bauer and John Fattal as pawns, both in their dealings with the US government and in domestic political rivalries. All available evidence and the authorities’ conduct throughout the trial strongly suggests that the Iranian authorities have known all along that these men were not spies. Rather, it appears they were probably held in order to gain political concessions from the USA.”
President Obama has flatly and unequivocally declared that none of the hikers was a spy. He said: “I want to be perfectly clear: Sarah, Shane and Josh have never worked for the United States government. They are simply open-minded and adventurous young people who represent the best of America, and of the human spirit. They are teachers, artists, and advocates for social and environmental justice.”
Many others have loudly protested the continued imprisonment and disparaged the assertion of espionage. Notably, many objections come from left-leaning people who have long objected to US policy in the Middle East. A statement that was signed by many, including Noam Chomsky, one of the most vocal Americans criticizing US foreign policy, said: “We do not understand why two clearly innocent young people who have committed their lives to improving our world continue to languish in Evin Prison. The time for Shane and Josh’s freedom is overdue and we implore you to allow them to go free and return to their families.” Other signers included Ingrid Betancourt, Mia Farrow, Rashid Khalidi, Mairead Maguire, Sean Penn, Desmond Tutu and Terry Waite.