By HELENE COOPER
Published: May 30, 2007
Ms. Rices comments suggested that the rare meeting on Monday between American and Iranian envoys had done little to warm relations.
Its really just a perversion of the rule of law, Ms. Rice told reporters aboard her plane en route to a meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of 8 industrialized nations in Hamburg next week.
Speaking of the three Iranian-Americans charged in Tehran, she said, These are people who are there trying to make life better in Iran, and, in the case of a couple of them, theyre there to meet their families.
On Tuesday Iran charged the three an academic, Haleh Esfandiari; a social scientist, Kian Tajbakhsh; and a journalist, Parnaz Azima who have both American and Iranian citizenship with spying, a day after Washington and Tehran held their highest-profile direct talks in years.
The three have been arrested, detained or prevented from leaving the country in separate cases over the last several weeks and months. Under Irans Islamic law, the charge leveled on Tuesday could carry the death sentence.
Iran analysts have suggested that hard-liners in the Iranian government may be seeking to use the arrests for leverage with the United States, which has accused Iran of sowing unrest in Iraq and of trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Ms. Rice said that the five Iranian Revolutionary Guard members arrested by United States forces in Iraq on Jan. 11 were working to destabilize Iraq and were endangering American troops there. The two are simply not linked, she said.
Iran maintains that the men are diplomats and should not have been detained.
Ms. Rice was headed from Berlin for discussions with her counterparts from Russia, France, Germany and Britain in Potsdam on Wednesday about how to rein in Irans nuclear ambitions.
