Word: iranianized
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...weeks ago, a senior European diplomat arrived in Washington with a message from the Iranian government. The Iranians saw a parallel between the case of captive American journalist Roxana Saberi and that of three Iranian diplomats held by the U.S. military in Iraq. The Iranians were not demanding an exchange of prisoners, the European envoy told TIME, but were setting up a more subtle test of the Obama Administration's intentions. Now that Saberi has been released, Tehran will be watching the U.S. reaction for signs of a reciprocal goodwill gesture...
...public, the U.S. rejects any comparison between the two cases. While Saberi is a journalist who was jailed in the course of her professional work, Washington says the three Iranian diplomats, arrested in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil in January 2007, are in fact members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which oversees Tehran's ties with militant groups elsewhere in the Middle East. Following Saberi's release on Monday, the U.S. State Department said hers was a humanitarian issue rather than a diplomatic one, and that there was no deal linking it with the detained Iranians. "There...
...Still, the Iranian back-channel message came at an important moment in U.S.-Iranian relations. Washington is pursuing a new policy of engagement with Iran and has tried to reassure the mullahs that its diplomatic overtures are sincere. It is trying to strengthen the hand of Iranian moderates who want to pursue diplomacy and undermine hard-liners who want to maintain hostile relations with the West. The Saberi case offered an opportunity to do both. (Read "Talking to Iran - or Talking...
...political games." Without the international pressure, as well as appeals by both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, many suspect, Saberi could still be sitting in prison, like others charged with similar crimes, whose cases have not received similar international attention. Among them is Silva Harotonian, an Iranian-Armenian humanitarian aide worker charged with "plotting a soft revolution...
...most plausible explanation for Saberi's immediate release came from a source close to the case, who asked for anonymity. "The government simply did not want to have this hugely sensationalized and publicized case hovering over it right before the elections. [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad asked [Judiciary Chief Mahmoud Hashemi] Shahroudi to put an end to this," the source said. (Read why Ahmadinejad was intervening in the Saberi case...