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Say what you will for the United Nations and its General Assembly. The sidewalk diplomacy almost never disappoints, and the stakes are always high. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran is back in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Thousands of members of the Iranian diaspora plan to demonstrate on Wednesday to protest the crushing of dissent in Tehran since June, when Mr.
Ahmadinejad claimed to have been re-elected president in a landslide.

One prominent member of that diaspora will certainly not be present: Kian Tajbakhsh, a New Yorker and an Iranian-American scholar who was seized by the Iranian security forces in early July and has been confined since then without access to counsel. He has been accused of stirring up revolutionary sentiment and of being an instigator paid by sinister Western forces.

Mr. Tajbakhsh, 47, and his wife and their young daughter were planning to move to New York this fall for a visiting professorship in urban planning at Columbia University.

Instead, he remains in secret detention, surfacing only occasionally in a mass trial where the official narrative holds that all protests in Iran since June are the creations of the United States and its wealthy allies. Perhaps most remarkable to his friends is that Mr. Tajbakhsh, a secular scholar, is being tried alongside Islamist reformers.

The official indictment against him is a haze of inference and inanity: He was raised outside Iran, in London and New ... >>>