Iranian extradition to US major mistake

Tbilisi’s secret extradition of an Iranian citizen to the United States was a major political blunder, a former Georgian intelligence official says.

Former Georgian minster for state security Anzor Maisuradze on Thursday criticized the government for arresting Amir Hossein Ardebili in 2007 and handing the 36-year-old Iranian over to American law enforcement officials.

“The extradition was not a good idea, even if Ardebili had been accused of terrorism, Georgia should have tired him in Georgian courts or deported him to Iran,” Maisuradze was quoted by the Georgian daily Rezonansi as saying.

According to the former official, this is not the first time that Tbilisi has sacrificed its relations with regional partner Tehran for Washington.

In the past, Maisuradze said, Iran’s Russian-made planes were repaired in Georgia but at some point Tbilisi stopped the activity due to US pressure.

Ardebili, who was an Iranian procurement official, was lured to Tbilisi by the Philadelphia-based US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2007. He was then arrested, and secretly extradited to the United States, where he has been held in solitary confinement for more than two years.

The Iranian national’s lawyer says the confinement has left Ardebili with serious depression as he has had only limited contact with his family, almost all of whom reside in Iran.

The US Justice Department has defended Ardebili’s sentence of five years in prison, claiming that the items Ardebili was trying to buy were critical parts and components for weapons systems “that could” be used against the United States.

Critics have said the move was a “charmingly medieval notion” that the US government could kidnap a foreign citizen from a third country, transport him to a US courtroom and then apply US laws to his actions abroad.

“You can just imagine if a Google executive were traveling in Lebanon and got spirited out by Iranian agents and thrown into solitary confinement in Iran,” Clif Burns, an attorney for the Washington DC-based firm Bryan Cave says.

“We’d be beside ourselves, and there would be people rattling sabers on Capitol Hill threatening invasion, and rightfully so,” he added.

Georgian Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze last week apologized to Iran, saying that the arrest had taken place at a time when Georgia was in a “complex” political situation.