Esha Momeni, that 28-year-old Cal State Northridge graduate student who was arrested in Teheran last month, has been in solitary confinement in one of Iran’s most notorious prisons since October 15. On Monday, however, Esha was released on $200,000 bail. Her father put up the bail—along with the deed to the family’s Tehran apartment.
The LA Times has a story on Esha’s release and the very scary charges she still faces:
Esha Momeni, 28, a dual U.S. and Iranian citizen who was visiting Iran to research a master’s thesis, may not leave the country and must still stand before a political tribunal to face charges of “acting against national security” and “propagating against the system,” said Reza Momeni, her father.
Both are serious charges that can carry lengthy prison sentences.
In a brief telephone interview, Momeni said his daughter had lost about 15 pounds but otherwise appeared to be in good health. He said he had to put up the deed to his family’s Tehran apartment as collateral to win his Los Angeles-born daughter’s release.
“I hope she will go back to L.A. soon,” he said. “But for now, the authorities told us she is forbidden to go out. Tomorrow, we will be in court, and they will tell us what the next step will be.”
(For the back story leading to Esha’s arrest, click here.)
Esha’s boyfriend has created a website dedicated to her release. It features, among other things, a list of nearly 90 university professors and scholars who have signed a statement protesting Esha’s arrest.
Esha was getting her master’s degree in communication and had been in Iran for two months to finish her thesis on the Iranian women’s movement. She had been spending the day interviewing a group called the One Million Signatures Campaign, when she was arrested.
The Turkish Weekly reported that Iranian women activists involved in One Million Signatures say that dozens of them have been detained since they began their 2006 campaign to collect 1 million signatures to protest various forms of discrimination against women in Iran.
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UPDATE: I was so sleepy last night when I put this up, I left off the followng important point:
As loathsome as the Iranians are in this, at least they didn’t arrest her the minute she landed in Iran, take her to a hidden location for questioning for 12 days, without allowing her family to be notified of her whereabouts, then fly her to another nation where she was beaten and kept in a coffin-sized cell for 10 months, before being released when her finally managed finally to find out what had occurred and her government applied pressure since there was no evidence indicating that she had done the things of which she was accused.
At least the Iranians haven’t done that.
The Bush administration has set a swell model. It used to be that we could say, We don’t do that sort of thing, and the civilized world doesn’t allow it. But we gave away that high ground and our claim to decency with extraordinary rendition, the redefinition of torture, Guantanamo, the suspension of Habeas Corpus and the Military Commissions Act.
Thank God or whomever and whatever you believe in, that we have a new president who will at least begin to undo the damage.
If Iran doesn’t want to act civilized, then let’s accommodate them. We need to bomb those Iranian SOB’s back to the stone age–starting with their nuclear plant and ending with their government leadership. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or selective, like their suicide bombers–just total annihilation of their means to wage war and disrupt the world.
I’m still mad about the embassy situation under Carter, and I’m not going to stand for them bullying our citizens around. Talking with them, as Obama suggests, is a joke. U.N. resolutions receive laughs. One million signatures will do nothing. McCain’s joke about “Bomb, bomb, bomb..bomb, bomb Iran” doesn’t sound like a joke now.
Iran wouldn’t do this if we had a leader like Ronald Reagan.
“What a neat idea”
“Iran wouldn’t do this if we had a leader like Ronald Reagan.”
Yea your right Woody, Reagan would have cut a deal unbekownst to the US public, maybe a scenario like guns for hostages, paid for by smuggling drugs from Central America and selling them on the streets to people beat down and maybe thrown out of mental institutions due to hero’s like Raygun.
“What a neat idea”.
Reagan didn’t have any knowledge of that. Iran released the hostages because they knew how Reagan would deal with them, as Libya found out.
Gee Woody now you sound like Raygun when he claimed before Congress that he couldn’t remember that far back, but he did remember the great American Hero’s like Van Heflin and Mickey Rooney who flew with Gen Doolitle on the heroic bombing mission over Japan in “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”, and Sgt Rambo who single handedly freed other hostages in the middle east.
Gosh! For the good ol days.
Straight from Reagan’s mouth:
RR’s response seemed sincere enough. He was never a whiz kid. I think that was general knowledge, but he was a halfway good actor, for a politico anyway. Not too many citizens beyond the age of reason during the Raygun years in CA held any love for him at the national level, at least we folk left of center. The repercussions from that arms deal had devastating effects thanks to Reagan’s “true American hero”, one Oliver North. Cocaine flooded the US and lives were lost. Whether the old dimwit Reagan at that point knew a thing is speculative, but what isn’t is the obvious culpability of Geo Bush Sr. #41 and his CIA cronies were up to their collective asses in the conspiracy. How in God’s name was his son, the dumb one at that, elected to two terms as our President? Who knows? Since that outfit shot JFK and got away with it I’ve been thinking the crew responsible “really knows how to work the room”..
Leave it up to liberals…the Iranians commit an atrocity and the liberals forgive them and turn it into an attack on Ronald Reagan. What kind of minds do you have?
No, actually, Woody it deserves to be an attack on George Bush. (See my update.)
Leave it up to wingnuts: sell weapons to terrorists and complain whern they get caught.
Good grife, Celeste. What’s worse…Iran holding our embassy personnel hostage or the U.S. holding prisoners of war? Is the U.S. always worse than even terrorist nations?
R.P., leave it up to conservatives to fight for freedom in spite of the Democrats are pulling for and helping the communists.
“As the Tower board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.”
Do you still think the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor Woody? Please, stop dispensing your Herman Munster reasoning, your thoughtful contemplation is more along the lines of Grandpa (remember Grandpa’s electric chair) and belong downstairs with him in the dungeon.
R.P., leave it up to conservatives to fight for freedom in spite of the Democrats are pulling for and helping the communists.
Leave it to the wingnuts to believe that they are above the law.
Your concluding that the Iranians aren’t as bad as America under Bush is exactly the kind of music to their ears that allows them to perpetuate the myth that America is worse overall. It’s this kind of argument that has allowed countries around the world to get away with all kinds of things, and claim “America is worse” or “just as bad,” and then use some example that’s an exception to the rule of our principles. This is typical (in fact, virtually compulsory) for all my old profs who were proud of their supporting the Black Panthers in the 60’s and waiting around for their vindication, stashing and ironing their Che t-shirts or at last, hippie gear. Whatever.
Still, it’s terrific news that that this woman was released. You neglect to add that her father is very angry with her for having gone to Iran to document Iran’s oppressive treatment of women and embarrass the regime — last I heard, Bush wasn’t throwing Michael Moore or others in prison for making him and the Administration look bad, and Moore’s parents didn’t have to put up their home as collateral to bail him out, and apologize for him. (Maybe they should, anyway, for his being such a rude slob, if nothing else.) I wonder if she’d have been arrested if she weren’t also an Iranian citizen? What if she were only an American filmmaker?
Nope, WBC, I did not and would not say that the Iranians aren’t as bad as America under Bush. I said that the Iranians weren’t as bad in this one instance as we have been in numerous other instances. Overall Iran is a dictatorship that oppresses its women, locks up journalists and other writers when its in the mood, and imprisons anyone else that happens to piss somebody off in the government. And people frequently die in that prison.
My point was that we’ve given up the moral high ground with our behavior and opened the door to such things as we have done being done to our citizens by other governments. (This is not to say for a minute that the Iranians wouldn’t have arrested her anyway. But we have made such things easier.)
To compare Iran’s government to ours in any generally favorable sense would be absurd. Obviously.
About the father, it is clear from reading all the reports that the father’s negative statements about his daughter to the Iranian press were one of the conditions of her release on bail. The father has made numerous statements elsewhere about how his daughter had done nothing wrong.
Celeste: Nope, WBC, I did not and would not say that the Iranians aren’t as bad as America under Bush.
You sure implied it.
Did no one read the last graf’s? I don’t know much about how free the press is in Iran, but what’s with these last grafs? If these are most likely made up quotes, why were they used? If they weren’t, then what’s the deal with her dad? I’ve heard the parents of convicted murderers speak with more feeling about their children:
On Friday, her father was quoted by Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency as saying he disapproved of his daughter’s activities.
“I had no knowledge about the illegal activities of my daughter,” he said. “But now I have realized that her work was illegal.”
He also denied reports that he had been barred from seeing her, saying that he and his wife “did not want to visit her” in prison “because of our anger in connection to her activities.”