The daughter of a US-Iranian academic being held in Iran said on Thursday Tehran's portrayal of her mother in a state television broadcast was dishonest and "clumsily contrived."
In a commentary published in the Washington Post on Thursday, Haleh Bakhash wrote that Iranian state television had presented misleading, doctored footage of her mother, Haleh Esfandiari, in a broadcast Wednesday.
While the television program was meant to paint her mother as an alleged threat to national security, Bakhash wrote that "the footage turned out to be a typical secret police job of deception, vicious in intent yet clumsily contrived."
Esfandiari, 67, head of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, was arrested after returning to Iran late last year to visit her ailing 93-year-old mother.
She has been held for 10 weeks at Tehran's Evin prison without access to a lawyer or her family, wrote her daughter, a Washington lawyer.
The commentary appeared a day after Iranian state television broadcast "In the Name of Democracy" with separate interviews with Esfandiari and another detained Iranian-American, Kian Tajbakhsh.
The two were shown saying they had contacts with US institutions whose ultimate aim was to bring about change in the Islamic republic. But neither of them made any clear confession to harming national security.
The program, which was condemned by the United States, also showed pictures from popular uprisings that swept Ukraine and Georgia in an apparent bid to link their cases to alleged US efforts to undermined the regime in Iran.
Bakhash said her mother's statements "were cut off mid-sentence and spliced with seemingly endless footage of civil unrest in eastern European countries, as if organizing conferences and talks amounts to revolutionary activity."
The broadcast started "with a lie" as it appeared her mother was speaking from a comfortable setting in a house or pleasant office, Bakhash said. But former inmates say Evin prison's cramped cells lack cots or mats, she wrote.
While her mother said nothing incriminating, her words appeared clearly scripted and seemed to echo statements used by Iran's intelligence ministry to describe the case, Bakhash wrote.
"Her statements, to me, sounded wooden -- unnatural and coerced."
She also expressed shock at her mother's appearance, saying she looked "gaunt" and pale since she left for Iran more than six months ago. "She has aged several years in just months."
Expressing contempt for "my mother's jailers and interrogators," Bakhash wrote that her mother had maintained her dignity in difficult circumstances.
"My mother has nothing to be ashamed of. They do."