Tricks of the intelligence trade

Tricks of the intelligence trade

The Iranians may have used disinformation rather than torture to make the British sailors apologise

Let's say Iran has indeed tricked the British sailors into appearing on camera and apologising for entering Iranian waters.

But what if it is revealed later, when they are finally released, that the Iranians have actually treated them very well and have not used violence or torture to force them to say these things?
A likely scenario, I think, is that the Iranian interrogators have been feeding disinformation to the British sailors and have managed to make them believe not only that they were in Iranian waters when caught but that the British government has also admitted this and apologised for it, and that now they have realised their mistake, a genuine apology would best serve their own and their country's interest.
The Iranian intelligence service has used this technique before on some Iranian dissidents and the results were satisfactory. In one case they had even produced a bogus version of a well-known newspaper to persuade them.
In this way, without even touching the detainees or doing anything that could legally be considered as torture, either physical or psychological, they may have managed to get the words they want from the detainees.
That's why the interrogators don't allow the detainees to have any contact with the outside world, so that the detainees can only be fed with disinformation that could naturally and logically lead them into willingly doing or saying exactly what the interrogators want.
I'm not a lawyer to have an opinion on the legality of this behaviour, but there is no doubt this is morally wrong.
Isn't this exactly what the American and British governments have been doing to their own people through their supposedly free media? Isn't this similar to the way Bush and Blair paved their way to invade Iraq by manipulating information about WMDs in Iraq, Saddam's link to al-Qaida, and Iraqi people's demand to be freed by the Americans?
There the UK and US governments fed the media with disinformation and the media in turn manipulated the people into doing what the government wanted: approving and supporting the invasion of Iraq.
Here, the Iranian Intelligence service has fed the detained sailors with a different type of disinformation to have them do or say what Iran wants: admitting the border violation and apologising for it, and then it has used the media to spread these statements.
What Iran is doing now by using the combination of disinformation and global media has long been used by the UK and US governments. Iran has just learned its lesson very well.