Iran nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri heads home amid propaganda war
The saga of Iran nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri, who reportedly defected to the US last year, is a special case in the 31-year propaganda war between the US and Iran.
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In a translation on Al Jazeera English, Amiri claims the man at the back “put a gun at my side.”
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“They took me to an unknown location in Saudi Arabia,” Amiri said, according to PressTV. “They gave me an injection. When I regained consciousness, I found myself in a big plane, blindfolded. I could tell from the sound of the aircraft’s engine it was not a passenger plane. I realized that it was a military plane. And when the plane landed, I found myself in the US.”
Iran's state-run TV claims victory over US
Iran’s Fars News Agency, which has close links to the powerful Revolutionary Guard force, echoed Iran’s state-run media when it described Amiri as an “Iranian scholar” and presented the news of his imminent return as a triumph.
“The development is considered a new victory for the Iranian intelligence apparatus which sought hard to present authentic evidence corroborating the abduction of Amiri by the CIA,” Fars reported on Tuesday. “Tehran has long complained about the United States’ terrorist acts in different Middle Eastern countries, specially in Iraq and Afghanistan where a dozen Iranian diplomats have been abducted by the US agents.”
Amiri told state TV in an interview: “My kidnapping was a disgraceful act for America… I was under enormous psychological pressure and supervision of armed agents in the past 14 months.”
PressTV on Wednesday quoted unnamed “analysts” saying that “US intelligence officials decided to release Amiri after they failed to advance their propaganda campaign against Iran’s nuclear program via fabricating interviews with the Iranian national.”
After propaganda coup, trouble for Amiri back home?
Nevertheless, suggests Ansari, any joyful homecoming from this scientists return is likely to be short-lived.
“The Americans must feel, if they are going to let him go like this…. either they’ve threatened his family in Iran, or they’re pretty sure that this guy’s an idiot who, frankly, is going to be severely punished when he gets back to Iran.”
“I cannot, for the life of me, imagine that he is going to go back to Iran and be treated as a hero,” says Ansari. “I think they will make as much capital as they can out of him – that is part of the price of all this… but I’m sure that afterwards they will be taking him aside and asking, ‘What...was going on?”
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