What Sarah Shourd Can’t Tell You [incl. Haleh Esfandiari]

As Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visits the U.S. this week to participate in the United Nations General Assembly, he seeks praise from the media and international community for the release of American hiker Sarah Shroud last Tuesday. Sarah was held in solitary confinement for 14 months on trumped-up allegations of spying. Shroud has been unable to speak about her time in prison because her fiance Shane Bauer, and friend Josh Fattal, both remain in prison. They were arrested along with Sarah in July of 2009 on accusations of crossing the Iranian border while hiking in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. She was released on $500,000 bail and is scheduled to return to Tehran for their trial.

Because Sarah is unable to speak about her experience in detail, Fox News interviewed two Americans who were also wrongfully detained in Iran. Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar, was held in solitary confinement for over 100 days in 2007, and Roxana Saberi, an American journalist, was held for 5 months in 2009 on accusations of spying. Like Shourd, both Americans were held in ward 209 of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, an area reserved for Iran’s political prisoners.

Dr. Esfandiari described how in the days before she was detained Iranian authorities met with her repeatedly to question her about a book she was writing on Iran. After their last meeting she was told she would not be allowed go home. “I just was shell shocked,” Dr. Esfandiari told Fox News in an interview on Tuesday. “I was frightened and we drove through those iron gates of Evin and the next thing I knew I was standing there facing the wall and all I could see were feet of other people who were standing and seeing the wall.”

Dr. Esfandiari said she was never tortured or touched physically, but that the abuse was all mental. “A woman came and blindfolded me, a woman guard... and i must tell you being blindfolded gives you a very humiliating feeling because you feel like a child, you’re dependent on somebody else to take you around.”

There was no worst day, Dr. Esfandiari said. “Every single day of those 105 days was terrible, was awful, because I was cut off from the rest of the world. I was in solitary confinement.”

Roxana Saberi was working as a journalist when she was arrested in January of 2009. She told Fox she was forced to give a false confession that she was a spy and says she was made to tell her parents that she was confused and didn’t know where she was or what charges were brought against her. She knew all along she was in Evin prison.

“I was told to sleep on the floor, I was given a few blankets and no pillow, no bedsheets, and no mattress, and the floor was made of cement and it had a thin brown carpet on top of it,” Saberi said. “There was a toilet in the cell but it wasn’t working... and if I raised my hands to the side I could almost touch both walls.”

Saberi said that although she was never physically harmed she did experience a kind of psychological torture that she said can “devastate” the mind. “It’s a combination of isolation, and manipulation, and intimidation and not being allowed a lawyer and being cut off from the world,” she said.

The worst feeling of all, Saberi said, happened on the day she was arrested. “Getting arrested and knowing that none of the neighbors were around... it seemed like nobody saw me being taken.”

Since the release of Sarah Shourd, President Ahmadinejad has called on the United States to turn over a number of Iranians being “illegally detained” in the United States. Officials say the U.S. will not participate in prisoner swaps and that many of the people Ahmadinejad seeks to repatriate are either in jail for weapons smuggling crimes are are simply not in U.S. custody.

Meanwhile, as Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal await trial from their shared cell in Evin their health is said to be deteriorating. Shane’s mother met with them both in May and said at the time they were thin with discolored teeth, and that both suffered from severe depression.

In addition to Bauer and Fattal the U.S. government is also extremely concerned about Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who disappeared while visiting Iran’s Kish Island in March of 2007. Iran has refused to cooperate on his whereabouts. Florida Senator Bill Nelson told Fox News in January he believes the Iranians are holding Levinson in a secret prison.

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