While the media’s groaning about rather stupid teaser (“A Day in the Life of Iran’s President”) for Ann Curry’s upcoming interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (“Why are you working so hard?”) is becoming louder, we now might get to know the background for her so incredibly harmless and naïve questions on a day tour with Ahmadinejad to Khorasan province. In that interview, which will be broadcast later today, Ahmadinejad had apparently told her that the two American hikers, who had been kidnapped illegally crossed the border to Iran on 31 July 2009 in Iraqi Kurdistan by Iranian border guards and who had recently been sentenced to 8 years in prison each for spying (her hiking mate Sarah Shourd had been released on bail already in 2010), would be freed within two days. Of course, after a bail of $500,000 each had been paid.

So, after German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle’s humiliating photo session in Ahmadinejad’s office at 2 am on 20 February 2011, an hour before German reporters of tabloid BamS Marcus Hellwig and Jens Koch were eventually released from prison, money and proactive subservience seems now to be the price for enhancing the President’s goodwill, sort of ta’arouf. Hellwig and Koch had been sentenced to 20 months each, for illicitly entering Iran on a tourist visa. Bail was only $50,000 each.

Well, President Ahmadinejad wants to get his annual PR show in New York next week where he is attending the UN General Assembly. Apart from giving one of his notorious speeches, he usually wants to visit a number of TV hosts on that occasion and we suppose that it would be hard to answer critical questions about Bauer’s and Fattal’s fate.

Last modification September 13, 2011.