Roxanna Saberi is a liar

[NUR]

from 2011
--
A pattern that is emerging in America's assorted propaganda wars in
the Middle East is that much like its antagonists and adversaries who
transparently resort to the same set of dishonest and deceptive
tactics, the North American media machine (and the assorted big
corporate lobby interests that guide it) will stoop to fabricating any
lie and fiction in the furtherance of their interests and political
ends. Unfortunately for the US media corporatocracy, and the organized
big corporate lobbyists in Washington DC guiding its decisions,
increasingly the informed public at large is questioning many of the
narratives put forth by the official US media outlets - forget about
the US government itself that virtually none of the informed public at
large believes anymore.

Here I wish to question an aspect of the narrative the US media and
Obama administration have represented about the incarceration of
journalist Roxana Saberi in Iran during 2009. But first I wish to
highlight the fact that during a period when the regime in Iran has
unleashed an unprecedented level of brutality and human rights
violations against all minority groups in that country (especially
against the Sufi community of Iran), very little (if virtually
nothing) has been reported in the mainstream Western media about such
incidents when they have occured to these other minority groups yet
the Haifan Bahai organization has emerged in the North American
media's narratives of "persecuted minorities in Iran" as practically
the exclusive persecuted minority of choice to the disadvantage of
other groups whose plight requires greater publicity. While the
producers of the Voice of America run and funded comedy program
Parazit have had a Baha'i representative on their program once before,
not once has either a representative of the Iranian Zoroastrain
community or representatives of the assorted Sufi Orders in Iran been
invited on the show - let alone mentioned. This fact alone highlights
how human rights is represented in the American corporate foundation
scene that then determines who gets the assigned role of official
"victim" and "persecuted minority" in the propaganda narratives of a
given establishment. Anarchist political scientists such Michael James
Barker have questioned the skewed ideological motivations, corporate
linkages and political agendas of the North American Neo-Liberal
foundations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy and similar,
so here I refer the reader to the tally of his articles on the subject
on this blog: http://michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com/



While on assigment in Iran in 2009, Roxana Saberi was arrested on
January 2009 by security officials of the Islamic Repubic of Iran and
subsequently charged with espionage in April 2009 and sentenced to 8
years in prison. Pressure by US officials, and the international media
campaign that was launched on her behalf, saw her sentence soon
reduced and then finally saw her altogether released from
incarceration from the IRI on 11 May of the same year - a month before
the fraudulent elections and the social explosion that followed it.



During the period of her incarceration it has become an official
narrative of the Western media that she shared a prison cell with
Fariba Kamalabadi and Mahvash Sabet. These are two of the women of the
former National Iranian Baha'i body known a the Yaran whose trials
were pending at the time. I wish to submit here that this aspect of
the narrative regarding Roxana Saberi's incarceration may actually be
a fiction of the North American media itself, inserted with very
strategic political aims in mind by parties linked to various lobby
organizations based in Washington DC and NYC who represent the Haifan
Baha'i organization as a client. This specific narrative regarding
Roxana Saberi's fellow inmates emerged only a few short weeks after
Roxana Saberi had already returned to the United States and has been
uncritically repeated ever since. Very few have questioned it, and
those who have such as myself on sites such as Iranian.com have been
quickly hounded by a litany of baseless accusations, ad hominems,
canard and innuendo - or otherwise banned from such sites altogether.
Yet the question still remains outstanding.



Firstly, it is inconceivable that a sophisticated security apparatus
such as the Intelligence Ministry of the IRI would be so foolish as to
place an international journalist of the calibre of Saberi in the same
prison cell as two members of the Baha'i body whose own situation was
being widely publicized in the West at the time. Over the past 32
years the Islamic Republic of Iran has perfected its assorted
mechanisms of both surveillance as well as incarceration, since we are
dealing with one of the worst totalitarian states in recent
experience. Yet the North American media, who wishes us to believe
this story about Roxana Saberi's fellow inmates, wants us to suspend
all judgement and believe that they would be as stupid as to house
Saberi with these women, implying 1) that they had nowhere else to put
Saberi but with these two women or, even more ridiculous thant that,
by taking such an action the 2) IRI officials themselves were
actively and deliberately facilitating some kind of contact between
Saberi, Kamalabadi and Sabet - knowing full well that international
pressure would eventually force them to release Saberi. Even if we
accede that Saberi was imprisoned in the same facility as these two
Baha'i women, why exactly would she be placed in the same cell when
she could just as well be placed elsewhere in the same prison complex?
And why with these specific women and not with others? Surely in a
high profile case such as this the IRI would ensure that it did not
get its bureaucratic wires crossed in such a blatant manner as what we
are being told happened? But this is what the North American media
corporatocracy - and the Obama administration specifically - via the
big lobbyist narratives orchestrated for it, wishes us to believe:
that this is precisely what happened.



In the conflict between the West and the Iranian mullocracy (together
with their Chinese and Russian sponsors) we have entered an era where
Orwell's narrative in 1984 regarding the conflict between Oceania and
Eurasia/East Asia is literally playing itself out before our eyes in
all of its ugly and dubious features. Truth nor integrity any longer
means a thing to the Western media corporatocracy as it doesn't mean a
thing to the propaganda machines of their respective adversaries
either. It is all about perception management. But one thing is for
sure in my mind, at least, and that is, Roxana Saberi did not share
the same cell with either Fariba Kamalabadi or Mahvash Sabet because
this point is nothing more than what Noam Chomsky once defined as a
term of Manufacturing Consent: http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/pdf_articles/manufacturing_consent.pdf
Under such terms people's lives (and who gets to represent it) become
nothing more than fetishes or commodities to be traded and bartered in
the interests of others - usually the powerful and endowed.



To the mainstream North American Iranian expatriate community who
generally clings to everything emerging out of the North American
media corporatocracy, where any aspect of Iran is concerned is
regarded as the unalloyed gospel-truth: a wise man once said to me,
the truth shall set you free but first it'll piss you off! Arguably
Roxana Saberi did not - repeat DID NOT - bunk with Fariba Kamalabadi
or Mahvash Sabet. This story may be a lie.