An Iranian-American from Michigan who appeared on Iran's state TV is not a CIA spy as authorities in that country claim and was visiting relatives when he was detained, his father said Monday.
Iran's state TV broadcast video Sunday of 28-year-old Amir Mirzaei Hekmati and said he was a CIA spy who sought to infiltrate Iran's secret services. The TV said he had received special training and served at U.S. military bases before heading to Iran.
But Ali Hekmati told The Associated Press Monday that his son was visiting his grandmothers in Tehran when he was detained and never worked for the CIA.
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To be fair
by BacheShirazi on Tue Dec 20, 2011 02:53 PM PSTTo be fair, he isn't going to come out and say yes my son was a spy.
Isn't usually customary that
by darius on Tue Dec 20, 2011 06:28 AM PSTBEWARE: Emigres should not visit Iran nor aid the regime
by FG on Tue Dec 20, 2011 06:09 AM PSTConcerned about the economy, a regime spokesman recently suggested
that emigrees in the West might be able to
help out the regime, especially by bringing back useful skills. That has paid off well for China, India and South Korea so why not Iran.
I assume the emigres he has in mind aren't those of 1979 but the later brain drain flood. Yes they do have lots of skills that would be useful to Iran but why should they help this regime--the one that clubbed, raped, beaten and jailed these emigres, and continues to do so to their
families, friends and neighbors, professors and reformist clerics--in fact, anyone they know who showed a sign of decency?
Aside from all else, anyone who has lived long enough in the West to get use to its political and social freedoms would find life in the Land of Thuggery hard to take for very long. However, the biggest risk is shown by what happened to this Iranian tourist recently.
You would think Iran were Somalia and its ruling clerics pirates from the way they act.
The spying charges in this case are no more credible as a spy as the three American hikers who the regime kidnapped and held for more than a year before shaking down parents for an expensive ransom. Families of human rights protestors are also forced to pay similar high-end ransoms to escape arbitary imprisonment.
In this case the fact that the victim worked as a translator for marines in Afghanistan was supposed to give credibility to charges that make the visitor eligible for the death penalty. Would the CIA waste such an expensive human "resource" by having him moonlight on a second job like that?
What undermines the spying charges even more is their ludicrous nature of the spying. Supposedly the guy wasted his time in Iran doing something the CIA hardly needed when he might have done something useful instead. He "confessed" to trying to encourage a velvet revolution by promoting western ideas about human rights, social freedoms, political freedoms, etc.
It's not as it Iranians had so many good and natural reasons to be happy with Khamenei's dictatorship that only foreign agents could make them engage in large scale protests. Notice how every two-penny dictator--clerical or secular--always makes this same claim people have had enough of his crap?
Of fathers
by پندارنیک on Tue Dec 20, 2011 01:30 AM PST()()()()()()()()()()()
.........
by yolanda on Mon Dec 19, 2011 08:53 PM PSTBut Ali Hekmati told The Associated Press Monday that his son was visiting his grandmothers in Tehran when he was detained and never worked for the CIA.
"He is not a spy. It's a whole bunch of lies on my good son," said Ali Hekmati, a microbiology professor at Mott Community College in Flint, about 50 northwest of Detroit. "They have lied about any American ... captured in Iran for visiting or tourism, or for any other reason."