State-run television in Iran announced on Monday that it would soon broadcast what it called “confessions” by two Iranian-American scholars who have been detained on espionage charges, according to today’s Los Angeles Times.
The two scholars — Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and KianTajbakhsh, an urban-planning consultant for George Soros’s Open Society Institute — have been accused of seeking to oust Iran’s hardline government through a soft revolution, like those that overthrew communist regimes in the 1980s and 1990s, and have been jailed in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison for months. Their detention has drawn widespread protests.
The Times reported that previews of the “confessions” shown on Iranian television were “chilling reminders of the televised confessions of opponents to the Islamic regime aired during the first years of the 1979 revolution.” —Andrew Mytelka
