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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is ‘The World.’ Ilan Grapel should be a free man soon. Grapel is a 28-year-old Israeli American. He was detained in Egypt this past June. Egyptian authorities arrested him on suspicion of spying for Israel. He’d been seen in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the heart of Egypt’s revolution. Now Egypt has struck a deal to release Grapel in exchange for 25 Egyptian prisoners who are being held by the Israelis. Grapel’s family in New York says he was in Cairo working as an intern at a legal aid group. Grapel is a law student at Emory University. He speaks fluent Arabic. He also once served as a paratrooper in the Israeli army. His mother Irene spoke with us today from her home in Oakland Gardens, New York. She says she’s hoping the exchange will happen this week.

Irene Grapel: What I’m hearing is that he’ll be released to the Israelis on Thursday. And I am the type of person that will believe it when I see it, but it’s been hell. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. You know I feel for any mother who has a boy in the service now and anybody who’s got a kid over in Iraq or Afghanistan not knowing where your child is, what they’re being exposed to or what kind of danger they’re in.

Mullins: And you yourself have you talked to Ilan at all?

Grapel: Not recently. The last call would have been two weeks tomorrow.

Mullins: And what did you talk about there, if you don’t mind my asking?

Grapel: I just wanted to hear his voice. I can always tell from his voice how he’s feeling. I think he’s very strong internally. He was trained in the Israeli Defense Force as a paratrooper and I always got a lot of solace from the fact that he was given the best training in the world. I mean it’s like being a U.S. Marine. And I’m sure that at some point they were taught how to deal with situations like this.

[Phone rings]

There we go again.

Mullins: Is this what it’s been like for you’¦

Grapel: Yes.

Mullins: Getting non-stop calls?

Grapel: Yes.

Mullins: Official, unofficial, what?

Grapel: Usually the press and’¦

[Phone rings]

‘¦the Israeli press through the night. We didn’t get enough sleep last night.

Mullins: I bet you probably haven’t had a lot of sleep at all, I would think. Just one more thing and I’ll let you go. But I wanted to ask you, has he responded to the accusations he was spying for the Israeli government?

Grapel: Yes. Everybody’s denied vociferously that he was ever spying or connected to Mossad. First of all, they claimed that he was there during the revolution and was helping to foment all kinds of rebellion and he was in Atlanta at Emory Law School. And Emory has been exceedingly helpful in documenting his whereabouts so the charges were totally bogus.

Mullins: I just want to tell you in closing, I don’t know if you’ve heard from an Israeli Parliamentarian who visited Ilan, your son in detention on Monday?

Grapel: No.

Mullins: Have you heard this? The quote that we have is this. He says, ‘We said, ‘˜Shalom,’ to him. He answered me in Arabic. He thought he was in another kind of session with his interrogators. He didn’t quite understand. ‘But then after a short period of time he recovered from it and the rest of the conversation you can ask him about in just a few days. It was an emotional meeting.’They also said he was in good condition and had been treated fairly. I imagine that’s heartening to hear.

Grapel: Oh yes, very. Terrific.

Mullins: We wish you the very best and we’ll be following what happens with your son.

Grapel: Thank you very much.

Mullins: Irene Grapel is the mother of 28-year-old Israeli American Ilan Grapel of New York. Ilan Grapel is being held by the Egyptian government. He has been since June on charges of spying for Israel.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Click on the image to enlarge. (Illustration: Manya Gupta)

The detention operation at the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been a lighting rod for criticism since the first enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere touched down there nearly 10 years ago.

But US involvement in this isolated corner of Cuba dates back a lot further than the opening of the notorious prison camp.

Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Harvard University professor Jonathan Hansen about his book “Guantánamo: An American History.” The book details America’s centuries-long fascination with Cuba, from the Founding Fathers plans to expand US commerce via control of Guantanamo Bay to today’s notorious prison for enemy combatants.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins : I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. The detention facility at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been the lightening rod for criticism since the first captured enemy combatants touched down there. That was nearly a decade ago, but the US involvement in this isolated corner of Cuba dates back much further than that and there’s a lot more to the base than a high profile military prison. Harvard University professor Jonathan Hansen offers this lesser known fact: Guantanamo is a rich nature preserve.

Jonathan Hansen: There’s an irony to this great nature preserve that is Guantanamo Bay in which that is most of us can’t go to most of those places because there’s all sorts of unexploded ordnance and, in fact, people say that from time to time they hear explosions and everyone says, “So what was that? Was that a Cuban trying to make their way to the base?” And more often it was a deer, so if you have a nature preserve in which not even the deer are safe then you have to wonder how much of a nature preserve is it really, but it truly is a spectacular place just to visit and, as I say, the bird life is remarkable.

Mullins: A remarkable bird life at Guantanamo is just part of the narrative Jonathan Hansen weaves in his book “Guantanamo: An American History”. Hansen describes how Americas interest in Cuba and Guantanamo Bay in particular dates back to the 1700s. He says the founding fathers beleived that if the United States wanted to become a global trading powerhouse, it needed to control access to the Caribbean Sea and the biggest passage into the Caribbean happens to flow through Guantanamo Bay.

Hansen: We seized the bay from Spain in the opening salvo of the Spanish-American war. We retained the bay during the US occupation of Cuba between 1898 and 1902 and then we forced Cuba to lease us the bay as part of the notorious Platt Amendment the brought formal occupation of Cuba to an end in 1902.

Mullins: Does the United States now pay rent on Guantanamo Bay?

Hansen: So we paid rent on Guantanamo Bay for a while, a laughable little amount.

Mullins: It’s like a dollar a year wasn’t it?

Hansen: It was more than that. I think it was two hundred dollars a year, but Fidel Castro famously has stopped cashing the checks because he thinks that it’s an offense.

Mullins: You know, there’s so much history there and you go into great detail in the book which is fascinating, but in pushing forward, after Nine Eleven, Guantanamo Bay was not the the logical, in fact far from the logical place for a US prison camp or for Afghan detainees.

Hansen: Right, so the Bush administration set it’s eyes Guantanamo in about, starting about December 2001.

Mullins: They knew we were going to have prisoners that we had to put someplace, but they were looking where else? Guam and…

Hansen: They knew they had prisoners, so they were looking at Guam, they were looking at some other areas in the Pacific, for instance, other atolls, they were thinking about keeping them on ship board, they were thinking about keeping them in Afghanistan, though Afghanistan was not stable then and so they looked at Guantanamo because in the 1990s the US had detained up to 85,000 Cubans and Haitians behind barbed wire at Guantanamo under the same justification that Guantanamo was sovereign territory of Cubans hence US constitutional protections, in this case, do process the rightful council did not apply. So they thought, “Maybe we could use Guantanamo again.” The thing is there were people at Guantanamo who thought that this would be a disastrous place to have a detention facility.

Mullins: People who worked there?

Hansen: Mainly a public works officer, of someone who had, in fact, had been in Military Intelligence himself and who knew, as Americans don’t like to admit, that Guantanamo was actually, though it’s a great place to have anchorage, it makes a disastrous naval base in the sense that it is surrounded by Cuban highland and Cubans were able to photograph every single thing that happened there.

Mullins: Every visitor that comes in. You were photographed when you were there.

Hansen: Everything that happened at Guantanamo Bay. I was photographed at Guantanamo Bay and the people getting off the planes to come look at Guantanamo as a potential site were photographed. At Guantanamo Bay the detainees were later photographed getting off the bay, so those factors mitigated against putting the prison there in the words of the public works officer, but also Guantanamo is sort of a strange place. The major airfield which is used now is on the so called “Leeward Point” which is across from the main base and across from now where we hold, that housed Guantanamo Prison, so there’s a transportation problem. Not only that, but the most remarkable thing Guantanamo Bay in my mind is that Guantanamo Bay is an American suburb full of up to say ten to twelve thousand American civilians now and to transport the detainees around the base, say to move them now from the prison itself to the courthouse, you have to take them right through the main streets of the neighborhood.

Mullins: Which has what?

Hansen: They consist of everything that a suburb would consist of. It consists of neighborhoods, of schools, of supermarkets, of administrative headquarters. This is really ironic because if you think about one the main arguments that’s preventing Barrack Obama from moving these detainees to the United States is that it would be unsafe to have these so called terrorists in American cities, in towns and here you have one town that’s literally ripped in half by the movement of these prisoners every time they have to go from the prison to courthouse.

Mullins: But it’s not here.

Hansen: But it’s not here. Right. It’s in Cuba and it’s on an island.

Mullins: Well, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary at the time said that Guantanamo Bay was the least worst place. Was it just that it was not here in the United States? I mean what made it the least worst place and therefore suitable for a prison camp?

Hansen: Well the major argument, beside the fact that it was in Cuba, that it was highly defense-able and maybe one of, the most defense-able place in the world right now because South-East Cuba is very isolated. Anyway, we have this base, it’s been ours about which Cuba has nothing to say, especially since the rise of Castro. So it’s extremely, I say, and symbolic I think that’s very nice and also it is this place where, as I’ve said, US, Cuban Law, and International Law are thought not to apply and John Yoo, the man worked in George Bush’s Office of Legal Council, insisted that despite the fact that courts had flirted with extending constitutional protections to Guantanamo, he insisted that that would not be the case this time, so that’s the main reason. It was a place where they could do whatever they wanted.

Mullins: So Jonathan, if that’s the case then why is that you think the current detention operation at Guantanamo should remain open.

Hansen: What I have argued is that over the last ten years, humans rights lawyers, excellent journalists have introduced a modicum of transparency and habeas corpus constitutional protection at Guantanamo Bay and that it might be better to keep the detainees in a place where you have that than in other places where we have none of that.

Mullins: Historian Jonathan Hansen, professor at Harvard University. The book is called “Guantanamo: An American History”. Nice to talk to you.

Hansen: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The former presidential candidate has been under house arrest since February.

Recently, Mousavi was allowed to meet briefly with his daughters and according to news reports, he told them that if they wanted to know what his detention is like, they should read a book called “News of a Kidnapping.”

The news caused a run on Tehran’s bookstores as opposition supporters rushed to buy their own copies.

“News of a Kidnapping” is not an Iranian book. It was written in Spanish in 1996 by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The English translation of the book was released in 1997. It describes the abduction of politicians in the author’s native country, Colombia.

Anchor Lisa Mullins talks to Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American Culture at Amherst College, Massachusetts, about why Iranians are seeking out the Colombian author.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Mullins: There is no release in store for the leader of Iran’s opposition, former presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. He has been under house arrest since February. Recently, Mousavi was allowed to meet briefly with his daughters and, according to news reports, he told them that if they want to know what his detention is like they should read a book called “News of a Kidnapping.” That caused a run on Tehran bookstores as Iranians rushed to buy their own copies. “News of a Kidnapping” is not an Iranian book though. It was written in 1996 by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Columbia. Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American Culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts. The book, “News of a Kidnapping”, he says, describes the abduction of politicians in Columbia.

Ilan Stavans: This is the story of a friend of Garcia Marquez, Maruja Pachon and her husband Alberto Villamizar, who in the late ’90s were kidnapped by drug cartels. These two abductions were actually part of a larger orchestrated effort by the drug cartel to kidnap major celebrities in order to be able to put the government in a difficult position and give in to what the drug cartel needed at that time. Garcia Marquez enters the world of these two individuals, Maruja and Alberto, and through them the world of many more that at that time felt vulnerable to this paramilitary entity, the drug cartel, that was actually doing what it wanted without any control from the government. It is a very different context from what is happening in Iran today. But the fact that this can be taken as a metaphor for a larger picture, the larger picture being that if you are going to speak to your mind against the government you are going to end up being pushed aside and silenced, is one that they clearly is speaking very loudly in Iran today.

Mullins: Is the…was the speaking very loudly in Iran today…is there something about Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing that is particularly universal or is it just the circumstances he’s talking about in terms of political persecution in Iran, or those who go up against the drug cartels in Colombia that has a resonance?

Stavans: Not too long ago we read another important book that came from Iran “Reading Lolita in Tehran”, a book about finding good literature and trying to use it as a way to understand a world that was being declothed by the religious fanaticism at that time. That [??] can be embraced in a society like Iran is, in many ways, something similar that is happening to Garcia Marquez. Garcia Marquez is a writer that becomes universal precisely by focusing on the particulars of his country; on the reality in Bogota, in [??], and other parts of his country. I love the fact that a good literature when it is able to transcend its own borders, it proves that it is not only written for the immediate readers of that particular country; that literature has no nationality but it becomes something global. On the other hand, I wonder what it means to become a bestseller in Tehran? A bestseller in Colombia can be 3,000 copies, 5,000 copies. Perhaps it really doesn’t matter how many copies in the end are circulating. What matters is that a book is being used as a message to show that the paradime of a politician in one country is very similar to the one in another country regardless of the differences those two countries have.

Mullins: Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American Culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World. A blogger named Hossein Derakhshan was arrested in Tehran on November 1, 2008. He’d only been in Iran for two months. Derakhshan is a dual citizen of Iran and Canada. While in Toronto in 2001 he created one of the first Persian-language blogs and became a pioneer of the Iranian blogoshpere. It’s been a year since his arrest but details of his case are still murky. Iran has said little about it and his family has largely kept silent. Until now. Cyrus Farivar reports.

CYRUS FARIVAR: Last week Hossein’s father, Hassan Derakhshan, published an open letter in the Iranian reformist newspaper Salaam. It was addressed to the new head of the Iranian judiciary system. In it he said the family has only had just two short meetings with Hossein and they have no information about his legal situation. And that’s why a year after his brother’s arrest Hamed Derakhshan began speaking to the press. In an interview with The World Hamed Derakhshan told me he can’t afford to be silent anymore.

HAMED DERAKHSHAN: They have told us that it would be better for him. His case would be processed faster if there is no unwanted attention to it. But now I feel that you know I’ve got to do something about it.

FARIVAR: Hamed Derakhshan says his family still has very little information about his brother. They don’t even know what prison he’s being held in.

HAMED DERAKHSHAN: We don’t officially know what his charges are. There were rumors in the beginning that his charges are insulting religious figures. And then we heard about spying for Israel. But officially, now we don’t know what they are.

FARIVAR: With no real information out there, rumors have rampant in the Persian-language internet. Some even speculate that Hossein Derakhshan was collaborating with the Iranian government and perhaps spying for them. His brother Hamed Derakhshan denies these charges and says that the family continues to press authorities for more information. The Iranian government isn’t speaking about Hossein Derakhshan’s case and the Canadian government isn’t saying much either. Canadian officials declined to speak on tape about the case. But Rodney Moore, of the Office of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, sent an e-mail saying Canada continues to press for access to Hossein Derakhshan under international law. He added that Derakhshan’s dual nationality makes things complicated for them. And there are other complications in the case. Before he left for Iran in 2008, Derakhshan said something a little surprising to family and friends. One of them was Pedram Moallemian, an Iranian-Canadian living in Los Angeles.

PEDRAM MOALLEMIAN: He was convinced that the Iranian government and the judiciary system is a fair and adequate one and in case he was arrested he would be fairly treated and represented and he made it very clear that if he is arrested he does not want a big noise made about it outside.

FARIVAR: In his early years as a blogger Derakhshan leaned more towards Iran’s Reformist camp. He initially wanted to build bridges between Iran and the West. He even traveled to Israel on his Canadian passport in 2006. But Derakhshan began to change his political views. Derakhshan ultimately began supporting Iran’s hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his policies says Omid Memarian, an Iran analyst with Human Rights Watch in San Francisco.

OMID MEMARIAN: I think Hossein was smarter than that to become a fan of Ahmadinejad. But he was. He was really into the new government and defending their policies and he was after everybody. Like every single person who was into defending human rights issues, like Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel laureate.

FARIVAR: Derakhshan didn’t just go after Shirin Ebadi. He wrote inflammatory things in his blog about anyone he didn’t agree with. He even accused Memarian of converting to Christianity which is forbidden under Islamic law. In 2007, Derakhshan got slapped with a $2 million libel case. But Memarian says none of this should stop human rights advocates from trying to defend Derakhshan’s rights.

MEMARIAN: Hossein’s case is a human rights case. You know, no matter what Hossein did and no matter what damages he created for people, he has been disappeared for almost a year. He’s trapped and he needs help.

FARIVAR: At this point Derakhshan doesn’t have many friends left who are publicly willing to fight for him. For now it appears Derakhshan will likely continue to remain in an unknown Tehran prison. For The World I’m Cyrus Farivar.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.