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The American Sailors: A Forced Confession?

January 14, 2016
Roland Elliott Brown
3 min read
The American Sailors: A Forced Confession?
The American Sailors: A Forced Confession?

The American Sailors: A Forced Confession?

Iran's quick release of 10 detained sailors has been hailed as a sign of healthy relations between Iran and the United States. But, asks Roland Elliott Brown, is the recent broadcast of an interview with one of the soldiers simply part of the Islamic Republic's long-running propaganda operations?

 

On Tuesday January 12, Iranian forces arrested 10 US sailors who had unintentionally entered Iranian territorial waters off Farsi Island, the site of an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps naval base. US Secretary of State John Kerry moved quickly to negotiate their release, and Iran freed the sailors on January 13. Kerry has thanked Iran, and emphasized the uses of US-Iran diplomacy in keeping the Americans safe.

Even so, the incident wasn’t wholly benign. The Revolutionary Guards naval unit that arrested the sailors passed images of the arrest scene to Iranian state media. The pictures showed the sailors on their knees with their hands behind their heads, while presumably being held at gunpoint. Iranian state broadcasters later released a video of one of the sailors, apparently a naval lieutenant, being interrogated about how he and his crew had entered Iranian waters. The lieutenant replies, “It was a mistake, it was our fault, and we apologize for our mistake.” In another clip, he thanks his captors for their hospitality.

While supporters of the Obama administration emphasized diplomacy, other observers alleged Iranian maritime misconduct, and deplored Iran’s exploitation of the sailors for propaganda. Republican Senator Tom Cotton asked why Iran had detained the sailors and not merely escorted them back to international waters. Michael Pregent of Veterans Against the Iran Deal tweeted that the display of captured troops was “shameful” and violated the Geneva Convention. Article 13 of the convention affords soldiers unable to fight protection from “insults and public curiosity.” 

One commentator, John Allen Gay of National Interest magazine, drew an analogy with Iranian state media’s long history of broadcasting videotaped forced confessions of prisoners under duress. He tweeted, “Reminder: airing forced confessions cost Iran its UK broadcasting license.” Gay was referring to the case of IranWire’s founder, Maziar Bahari, who was imprisoned in Iran in 2009, and forced to confess to spying in an interview broadcast on Iranian television. Iran’s international broadcaster, Press TV, later aired sections of the interview, and lost its UK broadcast license following Bahari’s complaint to the UK communications regulator OFCOM.

Bahari’s 2012 documentary Forced Confessions explains how his experience fits into Iranian security forces’ media strategy.

Although Iran held the US sailors only briefly, and did not level any serious charges against them, the sailors were likely aware that at least three Americans — former marine Amir Hekmati, Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian and Christian pastor Saeed Abedini —have been imprisoned for years in Iran in heavily politicized cases. Even if the young lieutenant in the video said what he felt to be true, he would also have felt pressure to speak in a manner pleasing to his captors. Whether he and his crew would have been released so quickly if they had declined to appear on camera is another salient question.

A further matter, raised by Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, is how Iranian hardliners will use the footage of captured Americans ahead of Iran’s Parliamentary elections in February. When Iran seized British sailors in 2007, he writes, footage of their captivity later appeared in the campaign videos of hardline candidates, including long infomercials promoting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  So while optimists see the episode as a sign of better US-Iran relations to come, skeptics see that a cynical security state still calls the shots in Iran.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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