Sean Penn Reports on Iran

Beginning today in the San Francisco Chronicle, actor Sean Penn chronicles his June trip to Iran. It's really good. Beginning with the pilot's pre-landing announcement: It had been six weeks since my friend, author Norman Solomon and I sat around in my living room deciding to travel to Iran and called journalist Reese Erlich to join us. Reese immediately began applications for visas. Over the month and a half that followed, he slogged through U.N. attaches and the cultural and foreign ministries of the Islamic Republic of Iran and swam doggedly upriver through the multiple bureaucracies that lead to a journalist's visa. This process led to continual rescheduling and revised itineraries.