Blogging can get you into prison

Global blogger action day called acording to a BBC report .

The global web blog community is being called into action to lend support to two imprisoned Iranian bloggers.

The month-old Committee to Protect Bloggers' is asking those with blogs to dedicate their sites on 22 February to the "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day".

Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran.

Blogs are free sites through which people publish thoughts and opinions. Iranian authorities have been clamping down on prominent sites for some time.

The long article then supplies commentary on the above self appointed Committee to Protect Bloggers and blogging in general, but nothing about the bloggers in Iran who have been imprisoned.

A better researched article in the Washington Times tells us that

The blogging phenomenon has exploded in the Islamic Republic. Today an estimated 75,000 Iranians maintain online Web logs, or "blogs," for short, that engage in a brisk virtual dialogue despite an Orwellian government that has a monopoly on public news media.

A lengthy article details the background to blogging in Iraq, and tells when the crack down started

The sudden arrest of online journalist Sina Motallebi in 2003 confirmed the mullahs have wised up. Motallebi, the first blogger ever imprisoned by a government, was charged with "undermining national security through artistic activity."

A petition circulated around an international network of bloggers attracted enough media coverage to bring about his release 23 days later.

And this has followed with further arrests recently

Tehran has harshly cracked down on the online press as of late. Nearly 20 people have been arrested over the past three months, and two Web journalists, Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad, remain in prison.

In January, Iran's prosecutor-general ordered that a number of major reformist Web logs be blocked by Internet service providers. Dozens of others have been banned, and Web journalists continue to be harassed, illegally held in solitary confinement and even tortured for offenses the government deems "un-Islamic."

But in spite of this Iranians do not want help (American help) anyway

"Obviously you have no real understanding of the Iranian psyche," wrote one blogger at the peaceiran.com blogspot. "We would rather live and die under the Mullah's flag than to get 'liberated' by Americans.

So back to "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day". I am all behind freeing these two bloggers, but I am not so sure on the motives of the "Committee to Protect Bloggers". And I certainly support those bloggers that do not wish to be "liberated" by America.