Times reporter recounts life in Iran prison: Via Washington Times.

TEHRAN | Female flight attendants in head scarves had begun attending to passengers inside the Iran Air aircraft bound for Dubai. But as long as the plane remained on the tarmac, I couldn't feel free.

What began as a planned, weeklong trip to cover Iran's presidential elections had turned into a monthlong saga that included nearly three weeks of solitary confinement and a final indignity: a night in a jail cell at the airport for no apparent reason. Perhaps an alternative power center ordered that I be kept, or the same faction that had decided to release me had second thoughts.

So I suppressed my exhilaration and anticipation, and refrained from talking on my obviously bugged cell phone -- unlike the previous day when I had called friends and devoured the news of what had happened in Iran while I was incommunicado. I scanned the aisles of the Iran Air plane for any suspicious-looking characters without carry-on luggage who might move to arrest me again.

Our scheduled departure time of 8 p.m. came and went. The doors remained open to Imam Khomeini International Airport's departure hall. Somewhere inside, Greek Ambassador Nikos Garrylidis was anxiously waiting for me to call and confirm that we were taxiing down the runway. He was taking no chances after the previous evening, when airport police waited for him to leave before rearresting me -- setting off another 24 hours of frantic diplomacy between Tehran and Athens.

I thought I was not taking any exceptional chances as I covered Iran's June 12 presidential elections. Having lived in Iran for 2 1/2 years between 2004 and 2007, I thought I knew the red lines. But the turmoil that erupted after the Iranian government announced a "landslide" victory for incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was like nothing Iran had experienced since the 1979 Islamic revolution. And the rules that had protected journalists, particularly foreign ones, no longer seemed to apply.

Before the protests, the Iranian government appeared delighted to have issued visas to nearly 500 international journalists -- including a fake one from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" -- to cover the elections. Here was an opportunity to flaunt Iran's brand of Islamic participatory democracy and rub the unprecedented turnout into the noses of Western foes and authoritarian Arab rivals.

But many of the more than 40 million people who voted for one of four sanctioned candidates were infuriated by the perception that the results had been manipulated to give Mr. Ahmadinejad a margin of 11 million votes over Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister.

Things turned nasty as tens of thousands of Iranians flooded the streets and faced off against riot police deployed outside sensitive government buildings. The hundreds of journalists suddenly were no longer a prestige project but a dangerous liability whose reporting was besmirching Iran's image abroad.

Read Original Article:(Via Washington Times.)