Newsweek editor Jon Meacham writes about his jailed journalist in Iran in today’s Washington Post. An excerpt:

Maziar Bahari is a Newsweek reporter, a documentary filmmaker, a playwright, author, artist and, since June 21, a prisoner being held in Iran without formal charges or access to a lawyer. The Iranian state press has attached Bahari’s name to a “confession” made in vague terms and conditional tenses about foreign media influence on the unrest in Iran that followed the declaration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection on June 12.
[…]
For more than a day, his family and Newsweek were unable to determine his whereabouts. After another day, Bahari was allowed to call home to his mother. At 83, Molouk Bahari is still a strong, resolute woman. But her life has been marked by tragedy: In the past three years she has lost her husband, her eldest son and her daughter. Maziar is her only child left in this world, and his arrest has been almost too much for her. “I don’t know when these terrible things are going to stop happening,” she says. “There is no reason for him to be held like this.”
Given the nature of life in Iran in 2009, the government’s attempts to exert control over the country and over the world’s impressions of the events unfolding there are understandable, if regrettable. But history tells us that the degree to which dissent is tolerated is a measure of a government’s strength, not its weakness — and Bahari was not demonstrating, only reporting.