Hamid sent us a link regarding the imprisoned blogger Hossein Derakhshan, or Hoder. Hoder is a Canadian-Iranian blogger who went from being a critic of the Iranian regime to a partisan of it. That didn’t help him however, when he was arrested on returning to Iran. Hoder had visited Israel and was allegedly arrested for spying for that country. (In the comments Lisa corrected us, saying he had been officially arrested for “insulting the Supreme Leader.” Given that charges in Iran are often fictions, who knows why he was really arrested?)

According to[fa] the Iranian media President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian jailed blogger and Roxana Saberi, an American-Iranian journalist who was sentenced to 8 years of prison, must have right of defense.

Given the fact that Iran is in the top two for arresters of bloggers and Ahmadinejad is normally about as concerned for the proprieties of law as former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, this statement is clearly propaganda aimed at the international community.