Maziar Bahari, a Canadian journalist employed by Newsweek who was arrested in Iran while covering the election unrest there, spoke with CTV News Channel on Thursday night. You can find the video attached to this CTV.ca story.

He also had a commentary in Thursday's Globe and Mail: Why we have to talk with Tehran.

Here's Bahari's cover story for Newsweek this week: 118 days, 12 hours, 54 minutes

Those were bleak times for Bahari. He was mainly kept in solitary confinement and suffered beatings, interrogations and psychological abuse. He thought seriously about killing himself a few times, but thoughts of his wife and then-unborn daughter pulled him out of it.

The G&M noticed this darkly amusing anecdote in a story, published Monday, based on the Newsweek article:

One of the more mind-bending interrogations Mr. Bahari experienced stemmed from an interview he gave to Jason Jones, a tongue-in-cheek correspondent for the satirical news program, The Daily Show. For the clip, Mr. Jones dressed in a dark pair of sunglasses and a checkered kaffiyeh, and asked the Tehran-born journalist why Iran was evil.

When his interrogators showed Mr. Bahari footage from the show and asked him why he was meeting with an American who dressed like a spy, he explained that the show was a comedy. But his interrogators did not see the humour in Mr. Jones's demeanour or attire, so they wrung Mr. Bahari's ears and said he would rot in prison.

While he was being held, he was forced to tell reporters from state-run media outlets that he had "masterminded" the Western coverage of Iran's presidential election, and how foreigners and corrupt elites had staged the protests.