Not much media for physicist Omid Kokabee, imprisoned in Iran
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8149
Nearly five years ago, Iranian authorities locked up Omid Kokabee , an Iranian who was seeking a physics PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. He was visiting family in Iran. Scientists and scientific publications have followed the unfolding injustice, but the popular press has scanted it.
One exception appeared, though, in the Washington Examiner in April, when physicist Eugene M. Chudnovsky explained in a commentary what appears to have happened:
To understand why Iran is keeping in prison a scientist who has not committed any crime and who stayed away from politics prior to his arrest, one should look at the events preceding his arrest. Just one day before, he was invited to the office of a high-ranking official of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) and offered a job in the AEOI division working on high-intensity carbon dioxide lasers.
Although this was Kokabee’s area of expertise (he studied high-intensity lasers at Tehran’s Sharif University and then at the Institute of Photonics in Barcelona before transferring to UT-Austin), he politely declined. This might have sealed his fate.
One of the uses of high-intensity carbon dioxide lasers is uranium enrichment through separation of isotopes by laser excitation (SILEX). The method was developed in 1990s by an Australia-based company and licensed to the United States Enrichment Corporation.
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking on the 31st anniversary of the Iranian Revolution in February 2010, admitted the existence of the SILEX program in Iran when he declared that “thanks to relentless efforts by Iranian scientists,” the country now possessed laser enrichment technology that allowed uranium production “with a higher quality, accuracy, and speed” than with centrifuges.
Chudnovsky , a distinguished professor at the City University of New York, serves as cochair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists , an international group dedicated to human rights and scientific freedom. In September he wrote again in the Washington Examiner about Kokabee, framing the situation in terms of the nuclear deal between Iran, the US, and other countries.
Over the years the Kokabee case has seen a bit of additional coverage elsewhere in the popular press as well. National Public Radio’s Morning Edition did a piece in October 2011. A commentary appeared last May in Canada’s National Post by James Bezan, a member of the Canadian parliament. Most prominently, the 31 October Washington Post carried an op-ed by Herbert L. Berk, chairman of the American Physical Society’s Committee on International Freedom of Scientists . Berk’s final paragraph urged press and political attention:
Now, Kokabee desperately needs wider recognition and support from the general public and government officials at the highest level. Accordingly, the American Physical Society’s Committee on International Freedom of Scientists calls upon Secretary of State John F. Kerry and President Obama, along with their counterparts in the partner-nations of the nuclear weapons treaty with Iran, to press Iran for the release of Omid Kokabee—a prisoner of conscience.
But there hasn’t been much other attention outside the international science enterprise itself. An online search at the Wall Street Journal turned up no hits for Kokabee. The New York Times‘s search function yielded only two incidental ones. For some reason a search at the Post itself didn’t even yield a hit for the Berk op-ed. Yet beneath the op-ed’s online version, three “read more” links pointed to Post editorials calling for attention to the plight of the Post‘s own reporter Jason Rezaian, also unjustly imprisoned in Iran.
But scientists themselves have paid consistent attention. The five-year story, in fact, can be traced in the headlines at Nature. Here are some of those:
* May 2011: Missing physicist may have been jailed in Iran
* July 2011: Iranian physics student faces trial for spying
* October 2011: Iranian physicist’s trial gets underway
* February 2012: A year in jail without trial for Iranian student accused of spying
* June 2012: Scientists protest against prison sentence for Iranian student
* August 2012: Jailed Iranian physicist loses appeal against 10-year sentence
* January 2013: Scientists voice support for student to mark two years of his jailing in Iran
* April 2013: Iranian says he was jailed for refusing to engage in military research
* September 2014: Nobel laureates call for release of Iranian physicist
Berk’s op-ed summarized how the “world scientific community has mobilized on Kokabee’s behalf":
He has received the Andrei Sakharov Prize from the American Physical Society for “his courage in refusing to use his physics knowledge to work on projects that he deemed harmful to humanity, in the face of extreme physical and psychological pressure.” The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) gave him its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award , and 33 Nobel Prize winners in physics have petitioned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, for his release. Amnesty International has designated Kokabee a prisoner of conscience.
Five days after the Berk op-ed with those three attached “read more” links appeared, the Post ran another editorial about still more Americans detained in Iran. Kokabee’s imprisonment separates him from his science in Texas, but he’s not an American citizen. He wasn’t mentioned.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.