Freed Prisoners Occupy Wall Street

This afternoon at Occupy Wall Street we ran into Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal, and Shane Bauer, who were taken prisoner in Iran in July 2011 while hiking. Sarah was released last year, and Josh and Shane were released a couple of weeks ago. Today, they were passing through Zuccotti Park to get a sense of the Occupy Wall Street protest, and it seemed that they were largely unrecognized. We chatted about what life had been like since their release, and how the protest had evolved over the last few weeks. They were very friendly and accommodating (even letting us charge our video camera from their laptop and giving us cashews). Given their recent hardships, we decided to give them a friendly interview, unlike some of the more hard-hitting ones we gave to the other protesters (footage forthcoming). My one regret is asking them the last question, which seemed to put them off a bit — if I hadn’t asked that question I probably could have gotten more questions in about their hopes about the future of this movement. Below is the on-the-record portion of our discussion with the former prisoners: