This comment was not accepted for posting @ Informed Comment/Juan Cole. http://www.juancole.com/2007/05/wright-boycott-threat-puts-pressure-on.html
It is now an open letter to the professor: On the topic of Dr. Haleh Esfandiari's detention. Professor, I have a problem... Cognitive dissonance if you would, believing that director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, *as a job one does*, is NOT intrinsically involved with 'regime change activities'. It is 'baggage', so to speak, that comes with the job description. I don't believe she's a spy... not at all, a patsy, an actor in a... umn.. much larger 'play'. I'll use a couple of quotes from an updated BBC article to illustrate the dissonance I feel: "Earlier this week, Mrs Esfandiari's husband told the BBC his wife's detention could be due to what he described as excessive zeal on the part of Iranian intelligence agents, who seemed to feel exchanges between Iranians and Americans were somehow sinister and destabilising." I couldn't fathom *why* Iran's intel apparatus might feel that way. British & American commandos are operating all along the Iraq/Iran border to find 'illicit arms shipments'. More that we don't hear about. Cross border incursions, hot pursuits... Perhaps legitimate, perhaps in error, perhaps on purpose testing Iran's border defense system No reason for Iran to worry about all that silly stuff. How irrational. [The Buffalo extracts his tongue from cheek] In my humble, and personally removed opinion, Haleh Esfandiari is a pawn in the middle of an increasingly ugly propaganda war leading to an armed (nuclear on our side) showdown and it's a bad bad thing. I can only hope her lawyer's statement: "I will use all legal methods to defend my client and to prove her innocence and I hope that this can be carried out in Iran's courts," ...becomes reality. It would bolster Iran's jurisprudential reputation internationally and perhaps defuse some really nasty propaganda going around about Iran's ...umn... 'civility' in the international arena, and the militarized situations that may become of it. I'll sign the petition, but I'm dissonant. I hate that... <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6671309.stm";>[Source]</a>
