TEHRAN: Iran's decision to broadcast video of two detained Iranian-Americans accused of conspiring against the country's security has provoked rare public criticism of the hard-line government.
A two-part state television program that was shown last week included a montage of disparate quotes from the two people being held, Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh. The government called the comments confessions, but the prisoners' families, employers and the United States said the statements were illegitimate and coerced.
In an unusual reaction in Iran, where national security issues normally go unchallenged publicly, some people questioned the government's move to put the detained Iranian-Americans on display.
"The era of televised confessions is over," a reformist newspaper, Hambastegi, said Saturday in a front-page editorial. "If it was an effective weapon," the editorial added, Western governments "would have undoubtedly resorted to it."
Mohsen Shafiei, an independent analyst, also questioned the rationale behind the television program.
"You can't rely on confessions made by people under pressure," Shafiei said. "They were not free to speak. It's only propaganda."
Reaction to the telecast from conservatives, however, was overwhelmingly positive.
Many Iranian clerics, who are appointed by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, praised the program in their Friday prayers as a blow to alleged U.S. plans to overthrow the hard-line Iranian government, newspapers reported Saturday.
"This program showed that the U.S. was after a soft coup in Iran, but was disgraced," one cleric, Ahmad Khatami, was quoted as having said in Resalat, a conservative newspaper.
Reza Ostadi, another cleric, described the statements of the Iranian-Americans' as confessions and a "divine favor" that helped uncover the U.S. plot to change the Iranian government.
Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh have been accused of endangering Iran's national security, and the government has said that new evidence led to intensified investigations. Two other Iranian-Americans are also being held on national security charges.
The television program, entitled "In the Name of Democracy," included clips of the purported confessions, mixed with footage of anti-government protests in former Soviet nations, meant to link them to Eastern Europe's velvet revolutions. The images also showed President George W. Bush advocating the spread of democracy.
In the program's second episode, broadcast Thursday, Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, purportedly said that a network of foreign activists was trying to destabilize Iran and bring about "essential" social change.
Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute, who has been held since May, said in the broadcast that his organization tried to create a "gap between the government and the nation."
Both the Wilson Center and the Open Society Institute have criticized the Iranian government for the broadcast and dismissed the statements as coerced.
Iran and the United States will hold a second round of talks on Monday over the issue of Iraqi security, Reuters reported from Tehran.
The two countries held a first round of direct talks on Iraq's stability on May 28 in Baghdad. Iranian and Iraqi officials had said that a second round of talks between Iran and the United States would take place soon, without specifying a date.
"After a series of ups and downs, Iran and America's ambassadors will hold talks about Iraq on Monday in Baghdad," said Hamshahri, a newspaper with links to the government.
Separately, 11 members of the Revolutionary Guard were reported to have been killed in clashes last week with bandits in southeastern Iran, The Associated Press reported from Tehran.
A majority of Iran's population are Shiite Muslims but minority Sunnis live in southeastern Iran, a region long plagued by lawlessness. The area is a key crossing point for narcotics from Afghanistan, and there are often clashes there between the police and drug gangs.