Merely a few days after Haleh Esfandiari, who has been in solitary confinement for three months without any contact with her attorney or family, appeared gaunt and frail on national Iranian television and presenting an analysis of “velvet revolutions,” Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Peace Laurette told Rooz Online in an exclusive interview that when Ms. Esfandiari called her mother on the telephone the next day, she told her she was tired and did not know what else to do. Esfandiari asked her 93-year old mother to get her out of prison.

This is what emerges out the repeated accussations made by Kayhan nespaper and other websites affiliated to the Iranian government and official propaganda outlets, including the silence of the judiciary on the subject. Noen of this is new and the pattern has been repeated numerous times before so that today even the conservatives have stopped believing the hue and cry. Still, there is a desire by some inside the security apparatus of the Islamic Republic to continue this exhausted approach as if they are addicted to it.

This chronic addiction in obtaining forced confessions concentrates more on putting pressure on prisoners rather than relying on facts and strengthening investigative methods for gathering information, thereby forcing citizens to pay the price through imprisonment, torture, or deprivation of a normal life through months of solitary confinement. All of this is to force the prisoners to say what intelligence organizations and their related media would like to hear.

This type of television broadcasts are prepared for two types of audiences. Contrary to the notion that this was prepared for the public in general, the program was prepared to issue warnings to academics, university students, and members of the civil and political society. Those who designed the confessions scenarios believed that images of the characers assasinations of prominent scholars would teach others to change their ways. The message is that when the government can do this to those who have stellar backgrounds, higher education, and international standing, local activists have no chance to play the game. (In reality, however, such acts have only had a reverse effect and have in fact not stopped any genuine social movements.)

The other audience are foreign countries who support efforts to overthrow the Iranian regime, letting them know that the Iranian government is alert. This is notwithstanding the degree to which those prisoners of security organizations have or have not been in touch with those countries or whether or not they have been after those objectives. For example, in the case of the current prisoners, there has never been any evidence leading to their involvement in such projects.

The important point is that if intelligence organizations had even one real witness—and I stress just one witness—to corroborate these accusations of illegal activities by the prisoners, they would never engage in taking the prisoners out of their solitary cells into the well-decorated offices of the Evin prison’s warden or some other room specifically decorated for this purpose, to make statements against themselves. They would have quickly conducted the trials with the solitary witness, finding him or her guilty and sentencing them. Everyone knows that under normal conditions devoid of physical and psychological pressures, reasonable individuals would never provide statements against themselves, their colleagues, and their years of reputable activities.

Therefore, with Ms. Ebadi’s report of Haleh Esfandiari’s telephone conversation with her mother in which the prisoner asks to be rescued from prison, the truth is coming out a lot sooner than expected. Obviously, security organizations would use the confessions mechanism to cover their own weaknesses and mistakes in the arrests of these individuals, using the most inhumane way to prove that they were not mistaken, because the suspects are confessing the truth. But the truth has been known for years.

The point is that while security organizations and their related media (such as Kayhan and its friends) are accusing everyone ranging from university students to labor representatives and social activists and even those who participate in peaceful gatherings of “activities against national security,” the continuation of such Stalinistic methods portrays the Iranian regime as a horrible and fearsome state. None of the government’s enemies is capable of doing a better job in this portrayal. This in fact is the type of activity that creates the most damage to the country’s national security.

Such unthoughtful and costly actions distort the country’s image outside its borders, portray the Islamic Republic as a totalitarian regime, invoke a flood of human rights violations resolutions against the country, and inflict political, economic, and cultural costs to our national interests.

And finally, unfortunately, individuals such as Esfandiari, Tajbakhsh, and Jahanbegloo among others, who have served as positive messengers of change within the Iranian society, are now under immense pressure from the regime. These individuals have continually strived to weaken the position of American proponents of war, and have insisted that Iranian society is strong enough to create change from within, as opposed to through foreign intervention.

These individuals never acted as political opposition, and have never harbored anger against the Iranian government per se, traveling to Iran with a positive outlook, but who now have to pay heavily for their optimism about Iran’s political equilibrium. It is not strange then, that these days voices which previously accused the Iranian government of brutality and violations of human rights, and who prescribed military intervention as the only alternative for “changing the behavior of Tehrans rulers,” have now found new resolve.

This may explain why the wiser moderate conservative voices inside the Islamic Republic have expressed their protest against and dismay of these government actions during the past few days.