My colleague Shane Bauer (pictured), along with his fianceé Sarah Shourd and their friend Josh Fattal, have been held illegally in an Iranian prison for 370 days as I write this. As the website freethehikers.org says, the news reports about their arrest conflict. Some outlets say the three accidentally crossed the Iranian border while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan, and others say the Iranian military illegally crossed the border and arrested the three in Kurdistan.

I haven’t met any of the three in person, but Shane wrote a piece for me while I was editing Earth Island Journal. The article, The Ecology of Genocide, was a searing report on conditions in a refugee camp in Chad in 2006. Shane’s sensibilities are manifest in the piece, and it’s those same sensibilities — passionate advocacy of global social justice — that took him to Kurdistan. 

When the three were born, the US was convulsed with outrage over the Iranian government’s captivity of Americans. Thirty years later their friends and families struggle to keep them in the public consciousness. I can only imagine that it is those progressive sensibilities — progressive in the original sense of the word, not in its current meaning of “anyone not belonging to the Tea Party” — that have kept news organizations away from covering their imprisonment. It took the one-year anniversary of their illegal arrest and detention for the US media to mention them. They remain in the notorious Evin Prison, built by the Shah’s political enforcement agency SAVAK and expanded greatly under the theocracy. Shourd has been kept in solitary confinement, and denied medical treatment despite worries about possible cancer symptoms.

Are leftist Americans somehow not Americans? Are Americans who went to UC Berkeley any less worthy of concern?

You can help keep the three in the public eye by checking out freethehikers.org, plugging the site in your Facebook or Twitter feeds, and passing the URL along to others. There are links to ways you can write Iranian officials, submit support videos, and otherwise get involved. Please do.

1. 
   andi 2010 08 20 at 1:38:50 am

   please contact me. i am a uk national just released from evin. luckiy.  did 2 months ofhell there andprttysurei had contact withshane.  want to let therumours i heard be passed on