False Confessions and Iran
This week’s This American Life podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in wrongful convictions, false confessions and Iran (not to mention, in another story, health care reform). The theme of the show is fine print – and the topics range from false confessions to divorces to health care reform.
Journalist Omid Memarian (above) was arrested and forced to give a false confession in 2004, and the story of Iran’s interrogation and confession machine is fascinating and disturbing. Memarian was beaten and interrogated for three weeks until he gave in and told authorities what they wanted to hear. He tells of his interrogators editing his written confession, which was the only unpaid story the journalist had ever written.
“He changed some of the names, he gave me a few pages of analysis and I had to include those lines in my confessions,” Memarian says. “He gave me directions.”
His story is reminiscent of false confessions in the U.S. – every culture has its distinct form of coerced confessions - but the details in Iran shed light on the desperation to force a narrative of guilt, however illogical, onto people arrested under false pretenses.
Videotaped confessions, in (amazingly) talk-show format complete with a beautiful set, flowers and edits are aired on Iranian TV, and confession transcripts are posted online. It took Memarian four hours to shoot a thirty-minute confession. (The state has collected so many confessions during the current crackdown that there’s no way to film even a tiny percentage of them)
“Watching and reading confessions in Iran, it’s impossible not to notice a distinct editorial vision at work here,” This American Life producer Nancy Updike says in the show. She points to the transcript of the alleged confession last month from Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek contributor who is still in custody. It has many of the same phrases of Memarian’s confessions and reads like a statement from the Iranian state - not even close to language Bahari's colleagues and friends say he would use.
It’s a haunting story of the brazenness of the Iranian state in forcing prisoners to submit to the state’s will – and of the universality of false confessions. Give a listen.
Matt Kelley
is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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