Addressing reporters in New York shortly after arriving in the US following their release from prison last week, Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, both 29, said they were hugely happy to be free but felt no sense of gratitude towards authorities in Tehran.
"We want to be clear: they do not deserve undue credit for ending what they had no right and no justification to start in the first place," Fattal said.
"From the very start, the only reason we have been held hostage is because we are American."
The pair were seized along with fellow American Sarah Shourd in July 2009 by Iranian guards while they were hiking in Iraq's Kurdish region, near an unmarked border with Iran.
Fattal and Bauer were convicted of spying last month. Shourd, who became engaged to Bauer during their detention, was released separately last year.
The men, standing with Shourd, 31, on Sunday, said they went on repeated hunger strikes to pressure authorities into passing them the daily letters written by their families. Eventually they were told their relatives had stopped writing.
The last direct contact the pair had came in May 2010, when their mothers were allowed a brief visit to Tehran, and for the most part the men were held in near isolation.
Fattal said: "Solitary confinement was the worst experience of all of our lives. We lived in a world of lies and false hope."
He added: "Many times, too many times, we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten and there was nothing we could do to help them."
He and Bauer were reunited with their families, and Shourd, in Oman on Wednesday. Relatives said the men described trying to keep fit by lifting water bottles and ripping cloth from blindfolds to keep their sandals on their feet, so they could run.
Before Shourd was repatriated she and Bauer forged a romance during the maximum of an hour a day they were permitted to be together. He proposed to her, creating a makeshift engagement ring using threads taken from his shirt.
"In all the time we spent in detention, we had a total of 15 minutes of telephone calls with our families and one, short visit from our mothers. We had to go on hunger strike repeatedly just to receive letters from our loved ones," Fattal told reporters.
"Many times, too many times, we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten and there was nothing we could do to help them," he said, "Solitary confinement was the worst experience of our lives.
"It was clear to us from the very beginning that we were hostages," he added.
They were often blind-folded, occasionally beaten, and repeatedly lied to -- told their families had stopped writing letters and that diplomats had stopped pushing for their freedom.
"We have been held in almost total isolation from the world and everything we love," Bauer said.
To survive in jail, the two kept busy improvising -- testing each other on graduate school exam questions, reading novels, and exercising with whatever they could find.
"They were very serious about their exercise and they used water bottles as weights in their cells to build muscles," Laura Fattal, Alex Fattal's mother said.
Fattal, Bauer and Bauer's now fiancée Sarah Shourd were arrested over two years ago while hiking along Iran's unmarked border with Iraq.
They were accused of spying, and last month Fattal and Bauer were sentenced to eight years in prison.
Journalists remain behind bars and innocent people have been executed," Bauer said. "If the Iranian government wants to change its image in the world, and ease international pressure, it should release all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience immediately. They deserve their freedom just as much as we do."
"We were able to swim in the calm waters of the Gulf. We stayed up all night with our loved ones and watched the most beautiful sunrise we have ever seen. These experiences will be with us for the rest of our lives," said Fattal.
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