No way in hell did these chumps pull that stunt to make money, but if the celebrity-media sleazebags of the world can find dumbshits like Octo-mom and the Gosselins and turn it into shared profits I’m pretty sure that they are already knocking on the doors of these three chuckleheads.
That is a possibility.
However, I think any editor worth his salt would recognize that any autobiographical work from these three would focus more on the plight of the Palestinian unionized illiterate migrant worker; the violence inherent in the Archer-Daniels-Midland-Zionist controlled trade in genetically modified patchouli oil; and helpful vegan/gluten-free/sugar-free/hyper-organic/free-range carob and hempseed pancakes – made without heat, of course, to lower one’s carbon footprint.
Their book would be fucking unreadable.
No publishing house is going to chase these hippies down to sign them for a lucrative contract; they’re going to run from them because the first thing these young activists would do is sue their publisher for not properly supporting the Sandinistas in the 1980s.
We could do a new reality show: The Great Escape.
You get put in an Iranian prison, and the first group to get the Sultan of Oman to fork over $1M gets set free. The rest are sent to Exile Island in the Persian Gulf.
Worth playin’ for?
No, no, it’s Columbia, Maryland. I hear it’s a real hellhole (Hi, Irene)
Roddy
[quote=“Ravenman, post:16, topic:597650”]
Sure, they just need to show up for their next court date in Tehran, and I bet the judge will refund the cash bond.
Time to refreshen those backpack supplies. 
We’re angry that three Americans are home after being imprisoned for two years for, by all accounts, being stupid? The spying thing holds no water with me. If they really were spies, there’s no way Iran would have let them go for a measly million.
I’m all ready and willing to say that going hiking near Iran is stupid, but if we put every idiot in jail for two years, we’d have more people in jail than not. Yes, they should have to pay for their bail and their ticket home, but if some generous people wanted to bring three American citizens home from their cell in an as-close-to-enemy-as-can-be country, more power to 'em.
We gloat at the misfortune of others enough. We really have to Grinch when fools get lucky?
Didn’t we let that hot redhead go for free? If Iran determined that they had no useful information what’s the harm in selling them off.
Not that I think they were spies.
We Grinch (that made me laugh, btw :D) because their stupidity was such that it very easily could have caused a very serious international incident. Fortunately, it really didn’t, but when your stupidity is such that it could jeopardize global stability, that’s a special fucking kind of stupid.
“Jeopardize global security?” Why not say that the tresspass could have turned the space-time continuum into shreds?
And you call the hikers clueless. Huh.
I never get hot redheads for free 
Yeah, I’m really not sure exactly what that’s all about.
It’s not bail; it’s ransom. Nobody expects them to return to Iran.
The Iranians might. Anyway, I did say “theoretically”.
Hey, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad…
There was an idiot named Billy Hayes who had a pretty successful book and movie deal awhile back about his imprisonment in a Turkish jail. Of course, his story had a colorful escape angle.
I expect at a minimum a book deal to come out of the hikers’ story. They can explain in more detail the irony of being tossed in the cooler by the Iranians even though they opposed U.S. policy towards Iran.
Perhaps the OP is a Harvard alum.
Set it in Detroit. No money. No phones. No car. No food.
And as the relevant Wiki article notes, it’s not as though their destination in Iraqi Kurdistan wasn’t widely recommended and regarded by locals as fairly safe:
In fact, tourism in Iraqi Kurdistan is undergoing an actively encouraged boom at present:
While I agree that the three American hikers who were apprehended were reckless and/or careless in not staying far enough away from the Iranian border, it wasn’t prima facie stupid of them to visit that part of Kurdish Iraq in the first place. For Americans living and working in nearby Middle Eastern countries, Kurdistan isn’t an unreasonable tourist destination.
But we shouldn’t allow inconvenient facts to get in the way of hating on the liberal hippies, of course. In particular, let us by all means ignore the fact that one of them was working at the American Language Center in Damascus, a cosmopolitan English-language instruction facility for children of political and professional elites and international employees that’s hardly a hotbed of anti-American activity.
I just want to know what’s so valuable and secret in Iran that is also kept right within walking distance from the border and not protected by some simple security like a fence. If the Iranians are that dumb they deserve to be spied on.
IMHO, the pearl of great price in this case was the rather abstract asset “pan-Islamic” credibility.
Iran, as a demographically non-Arab and non-Sunni Muslim country, is regarded with some wariness by its Middle Eastern neighbors, which interferes with its aspirations of regional leadership. Vitriolic anti-US and anti-Israel rhetoric is a cheap way for Iran to bolster its Islamic-fundamentalist “street cred”.
And flaunting the arrest and imprisonment of a couple of accidentally strayed hikers from the Great Satan makes it look even more badass. The whole thing was deliberate political theater whose target audience was radicalized Arab Muslims.