Has the Bush Administration Written Off Americans Held Hostage in Iran?

Apparently so, as has the Left Wing Media:

Yesterday marked 6 1/2 months since masked agents of Iran's Intelligence Ministry robbed my mother, Haleh Esfandiari, of her belongings and passports at knife-point. It had been more than 70 days since her incarceration in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison before I finally saw her this week -- not as a free woman, but in footage of a KGB-style television "confession" broadcast by Iran's state-run television.

The program broadcast nationwide yesterday -- announced with much fanfare by the Intelligence Ministry on Monday and expected to be continued today -- was supposed to show Iran and ostensibly the world my mother's complicity in a plan to undermine the Islamic Republic using, of all things, female activists and academics. But the footage turned out to be a typical secret police job of deception, vicious in intent yet clumsily contrived.


The broadcast began with a lie. My mother was shown sitting on a sofa in what looked like the living room of a house or a pleasant office, a plant next to the couch, a bottle of water on the table in front of her. In reality my mother, head of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington and a 67-year-old grandmother of two, has spent the past 10 weeks in a cramped cell that past prisoners have said lacks a cot or even a mat. For being an American Iranian scholar, she has been forced to sleep on the floor. She has been subjected to hundreds of hours of harsh and intimidating interrogations, often while blindfolded, totally cut off from the outside world and without access to her family or lawyer, despite our repeated requests to see her.

The broadcast showed my mother "conversing" with someone off camera in what was meant to appear to be a relaxed setting. Her voice was strong. But I was shocked at her appearance. She has aged several years in just months. She looked gaunt -- she has lost a considerable amount of weight -- and pale.

Why are we letting Iran murder our troops, blow up our buildings, and kidnap and imprison our citizens?