Forced ‘confessions’ in Tehran

My heart aches for Shaul Bakhash and Haleh Bakhash, respectively the husband and daughter of the Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who has been detained in Iran’s notorious Evin prison for the past couple of months.
This week, Iran’s state television has been airing a two-part series featuring material from interviews conducted with Esfandiari and with Kian Tajbakhsh, another detained Iranian-American who’s been working on urban planning issues in Iran under contract for George Soros’s Open Society Institute. A slide show accompanying that AP story has image grabs from the series. In them, you can see Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh talking with an apparently off-camera interviewer… But the interviews are reportedly all cut up and edited to be intercut with material about the (US-supported) Orange Revolution in Ukraine and similarly US-supported ‘people power’ movements in other countries, to give the impression that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh are admitting that their activities have been part of some nefarious plot to use their ‘people-to-people’ contacts with their own compatriots in Iran to foment instability and revolution inside Iran.
I find that ‘confessions’ made by people under arrest or detention and broadcast or otherwise publicized by their jailers are always a stomach-turning business. In these images, we see Esfandiari, who normally appears in public immaculately made-up and carefully dressed in her very professional clothing, sitting on a sofa in a black chador with no make-up and looking very tired.
I happen to be a person who doesn’t like to wear make-up. But I recognize that for many women, it is an important part of the way they appear in public; and I should imagine for Esfandiari and her family it may be very demeaning and disquieting for her to appear in public like that.
The content of these interviews, which the Iranian authorities are apparently trying to persuade everyone are ‘true confessions’, is probably nothing more than coerced or carefully edited and re-edited garbage. And we should probably all treat them like that.
At least, though, we do see these two detained people on our screens. Their families say they have lost weight and have been kept in physical conditions far, far worse than the comfy-looking sitting-room where they appear to have been filmed. But they certainly don’t look as if they’ve been treated anywhere near as badly as the US’s former detainees in Abu Ghraib (for example). And they have reportedly been allowed to have short but fairly regular phone contact with one friend or family member each throughout their detention, which is being undertaken by the Iranian authorities during the conduct of a judicial investigation into their activities in Iran.)
Meanwhile, in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, US government agencies are holding thousands of detainees, with most of them being held completely outside of the sphere of anything resembling due process. These detainees include five Iranian diplomats, who were held for some months before they were even given access to the consular service of the government they represented. It is probably also fair to guess that a large proportion of the detainees being held by the US in these places have not had the opportunity to inform their families of the fact or location of their place of detention, let alone to have any form of phone access to their families.
The families of those detainees are every bit as human, and as anguished, as Shaul and Haleh Bakhash. So while my heart goes out to those two, and while of course I hope that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh are either freed unconditionally or brought with due speed to a fair trial, still I wish exactly the same for all those detainees held by the US and its surrogates, and for their families.
Sadly, the US government, which US citizens might hope would be in a great position to petition other governments in defense of the rights of US citizens unfairly detained in other countries, currently has no credibility whatsoever in this matter. Maybe US citizens should understand that when our government abuses the rights of others, it puts all of us who travel overseas at great risk?
My hope for Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh is that these nauseating broadcast ‘confessions are– as with the British sailors back in March– a precursor to the Iranian government releasing them. But who knows?
And my hope for all the detainees held quite unfairly by my own government is that they too can either speedily win either their complete freedom or at least their day in a fair and duly constituted court of law.

15 thoughts on “Forced ‘confessions’ in Tehran”

  2. I find that ‘confessions’ made by people under arrest or detention and broadcast or otherwise publicized by their jailers are always a stomach-turning business.
    Does Iran alone in this business Helena?
    UK and US using same scenarios and more stomach-turning business the invasion of Iraq till now and WMD weapons made by US and UK senior officials some from UN did same business till they make the publics accepted and then lets run to the war Now Or Never as Blair said
    At least Iran did here “a stomach-turning business” with two people but US/UK doing their “a stomach-turning business with 25 Millions Helena, so who should be concerned us more?.

  3. Hi,
    Regarding forced confessions and the use of torture I think http://www.statewatch.org is a good reference. I’m just a music folk but as far as I remember a UK court admitted forced confessions trough torture as legal proof in a trial, were they obtained outside Commonwealth territories.
    Cheers.
    Dodo

  5. Speaking of US prisons, Abu Ghraib is only one of the multiple scandalous prisons allowed by the US government. You have to add all the secret CIA prisons to that. For a while, as prooved by Dick Marty a Senator reporting to the EU parliament of Strasbourg on its request, these blacksites were mostly located in East Europe, mainly in Poland and Bulgary. When this was uncovered, the CIA continued these secret prisonners’ transferts, but moved them to Mauritania. Second Joanne Mariner, of Human Right Watch, the role of Mauritania was suspected since a while, although not voiced publicly, because prooves were lacking.
    It was however recently confirmed by Seymour Hersh of the NewYorker (issue of the 25th June) in a long report he wrote about Taguba, the General who investigated the crimes comitted in Abu Ghraib. The allusion to the secret prison of Mauritania is located in the last paragraphs of this long investigative report; here is what Seymour Hersh writes concerning the CIA practice of interrogation and torture :
    The Pentagon consultant said in an interview late last year that “the C.I.A. never got the exact language it wanted.” The findings, when promulgated by the White House, were “very calibrated” to minimize political risk, and limited to a few countries; later, they were expanded, turning several nations in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia into free-fire zones with regard to high-value targets. I was told by the former senior intelligence official and a government consultant that after the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe was revealed, in the Washington Post, in late 2005, the Administration responded with a new detainee center in Mauritania. After a new government friendly to the U.S. took power, in a bloodless coup d’état in August, 2005, they said, it was much easier for the intelligence community to mask secret flights there.
    At the beginning of July, the involvement of Mauritania made the front cover of several French newspapers, like Liberation on the 4th of July, in Le Monde on the 6th July and Le Temps on the 19th July.
    The report of Liberation and Le Temps digged around that information of “The NewYorker” and both describe that this new CIA prison is located in a Military Fort built by France in the city of Oulata at the beginning of the XXth century. It used to be part of any tourist visit in the city until recently, when the fort was rehabilitated two years ago and closed to visitors. Officially, it is now the quarters of special forces units hunting the Jihadists of the North African branch of Al’Quaeda. These facts were also reported in an independant newspaper of Mauritania “El Calame” and created some emotions in Mauritania, but the government promptly denied that the buildings were used to interrogate CIA prisonners.
    A search for the three words “Mauritania prison CIA” didn’t turn out with any report on this subject in Google.com. So, this is another warcrime ignored by the US MSM.

  6. And let’s not forget all the tens of Lebanese and Palestinians whom oh, so morally superior Israel has kidnapped and is holding hostage – aka “bargaining chips” – in contravention of international law.
    And let’s not forget all the hundreds of wives, children, elderly parents, and other family members that the oh, so morally superior United States has kidnapped and has held as hostages in some cases for years as a means of coercing “suspected insurgents”.
    Oh yes – and the children that the oh, so morally superior Israelis and Americans have tortured in front of their parents as a means of coercion or punishment. Not to mention the father and son who were forced into sexual behaviour together by the Americans (one documented incident means how many more that will never be reported?).
    Oh yes, JES, cling for dear life to that moral high ground you think you occupy.

  7. Always enjoy your “take” on world affairs in the CSMonitor. Would that everyone followed the “Golden Rule”. I’ll keep working on myself!

  8. Shirin, we’d hardly hold you accountable for the documented crimes of your old Baathist friends& dinner-party companions. So why on earth should JES, an Israeli, be held accountable for Abu Ghraib or indeed anything taking place in Iraq? We all agree that human rights violations at Abu Ghraib are horrible… can’t you bring yourself to utter even one sympathetic word on behalf of the illegally held Israeli soldiers?
    I am just in wonder, yet again, at the depth of the hatred you harbor for anyone who disagrees with your view of the world.

  9. There is absolutely no justification for the sordid treatment by Iran of a highly respected 67 year old Iranian American scholar and grandmother…even if people have been known to suffer even worse treatment in places like Darfur and Bosnia.
    Indeed she hasn’t lived in Iran in 32 years and works for the Woodrow Wilson International Center where she has influenced a key director, ex-Rep. Lee Hamilton, to recommend, as co-leader of the Iraq Study Group, the opening of a dialogue with the mullahs.

  10. This story bring to minds the story of The Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft.
    He has been convicted of spying for Israel while working on a story about an explosion at a weapons complex 30 miles (48km) south of the capital.
    The British nurse, Daphne Parish, who is said to have driven him to the site has been jailed for 15 years.
    Daphne Parish was released on 16 July 1990.
    some reports saying Mossad had exploited Farzad Bazoft to the full. His remit, whilst in Iraq, was to investigate the ‘supergun’ operation, Project Babylon, run by the Canadian Dr.Gerald Bull. A cover was arranged which would protect Mossad but clearly indicate that Bazoft was working for a British company, Defence Systems Limited, DSL.
    Since this piece was written an article appeared in the Sunday Times concerning an actual nuclear bomb that had [the article claims] been produced by Iraq. The area where it was produced was apparently highly secret and known only to the few who lived there. The soil sample taken by Farzad Bazoft was rumoured to have come from that site.
    In Iraq as reported by government and media that he caught near very restricted military site north Baghdad not south as other said. he was photographing the site across fences to that site.

  11. Christiane, thank you SO MUCH for contributing all that info and those links here. If I have time I’ll write a main post– and maybe also a column?– about the Mauretania connection.

  12. Here is the translation of the report issued in Liberation concerning the secret CIA jails in Mauritania.
    Mauritania friendly to the CIA
    A former fort could have been transformed in a secret prison.The authorities denie.
    By Lemine M. Ould Salem
    Wednesday the 4th July 2007
    At the beginning of the last century, when France undertook the conquest of Mauritania, she installed one of her biggest garrison regiment in Oualata. A majestic fort was built on the crest of a hill. But, since the summer 2005 the entrance of the fort – once a must see stop for the tourists – is forbidden to any visitor. Recently renovated it has received a new mission. Officially, the building serves as the headquarters of special forces hunting the jihadists of the Maghrebi branch of Al-Quaeda, who are swarming in these lost quarters bordering the Sahara. However, second the influential daily newspaper “Le Calame”, in reality it has become a “black site”, the code name for these famous secret detention centers which the CIA is using in foreign countries to interrogate suspects in the anti-terror fight.
    A site of choice
    This idea isn’t new. ” We suspected it, but we didn’t have prooves of it, which explains why until now we preferred to speak carefully of some countries in North Africa “, comments Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch. It is only after Seymour Hersch, the star reporter of the American weekly, The New Yorker, told about it that the hypothese took shape. Quoting a former high ranking intelligence officer and a consultant of the US government, Hersh assures that after “the uncovering of secret prisons in Europe by the Washington Post in 2005, the administration reacted by opening a new detention center in Mauritania”. Hersh, who had revealed the scandal of the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib, states that this country is a “site of choice, where you can land and take off without any restriction.”. Further, American soldiers can enter the country without any visa, a favour granted by the Mauritanian military.
    The strategical alliance concluded in the mid nineties with Washington was never questionned. The Junta who took power in 2005, before giving it back to the civilians last April, had kept diplomatic ties with Israël and rejected radical islamism. Likewise, the Mauritanian army continues to participate actively in the “Pansahelian initiative”. This military program was launched by the Pentagon in order to help the countries bordering the Sahara to hunt down Al-Quaeda activists established there after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
    For Hersh, the so-called center has housed the ” toughest high ranking prisonners”. Perhaps even the 39 persons”missing”, originating from Egypt, Kenya, Lybia, Morrocco, Pakistan ans Spain.. Second a report written at the beginning of June by six organisations defending human rights, among them Amnesty International and HRW, they were kidnapped by the CIA. These associations say that they have hard evidences concerning the jailing of 18 of them.
    A country of law
    For the new Mauritanian authorities, who succeeded to the military regime, these informations are “baseless”. Answering to the opposition, who declared that these news were “extremely serious”, the government stated that Mauritania was a country of law, respecting the international conventions and denied the existence of such a center.
    Out of the country, the leader of the dissolved military junta, Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, hasn’t yet reacted. But one of his closest collaborator has firmly denied the existence of this secret jail. “The only thing that our Americans friends asked was the granting of a military base in order to watch the Sahara and the Sahel, he stated to Liberation. We refused despite their unrelenting pressures. He adds : “A secret jail was never alluded to in slightest conversation between Mauritania and the United States.

  13. Sy Hersh hasn’t been batting 1000 lately. Between the “Iran invasion that wasn’t” his discredited Lebanese coverage, Sy must be aching for a new scandal to flog. I guess Mauritania wins the prize (extra points for fact-check-resistance!)
    Speaking of fact-checking, I wonder why HRW isn’t trumpeting this scoop in their section on Mauritania (or the USA!) Are they also in Rupert Murdoch’s pocket?

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