FREE THE HIKERS

I don’t know what the two American hikers Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal were actually doing in Iran when they were arrested there in 2009.  Somehow the answer “Oh, we thought we were hiking in Iraq” doesn’t seem to be a completely satisfactory explanation. 

From what I’ve read and see, Bauer was a freelance photographer and journalist who liked to put himself in risky situations.  He’d made previous trips to Darfur, Ethiopia and Yemen.  Sure, the Iranians love a good American freelancer.  Fattal seems to have been a rather naïve young man with an interest in the “environment.”  Although it looks as though they were both naïve in their different ways.

I understand the joys of a walk on the wild side, and I certainly understand the joys of creative trespass, but a hike on the Iraq-Iran borders still seems to be taking things a bit far.  Of course an eight-year prison sentence seems to be taking things obscenely further.  And it did allow the New York Post to run this less than compassionate headline.

It must have been hard for a tabloid newspaper to resist, but really I think they should have tried to.