(I post this with the caveat that I am not going to be able to tend the thread very well as I am working right now. I just noticed that nobody has put up a diary about this and it needs to be trumpeted.)
Ok, here is the NPR news item I heard this morning, a press conference in the UK where 9 of the Brit sailors who have just been repatriated describe their ordeal at the hands of the nefarious Iranians. Since the laptop I am borrowing can't seem to cooperate with audio files, here is the BBC version of that press conference.
Money quotes below the fold:
How bad were they treated? Well bad enough, according to one of their officers:
The officer in charge Lt Carman said they were taken to a prison in Tehran where they were stripped and dressed in pyjamas.
They were kept in stone cells, sleeping on blankets and held in isolation until the last few nights and frequently interrogated.
It gets worse; they were blackmailed, according to the Lt:
"If we admitted we had strayed, we would be on a plane back to the UK soon. If we didn't we faced up to seven years in prison".
And the woman in the crew was isolated and psycologically manipulated:
The only woman in the group, Leading Seaman Faye Turney, believed for at least four days that she was the only one still being held.
Could it get worse? Yes:
"We had a blindfold and plastic cuffs, hands behind our backs, heads against the wall. Basically there were weapons cocking. Someone, I'm not sure who, someone said, I quote 'lads, lads I think we're going to get executed'."
So now we have the complete story, if you take these Brits at their word (and I don't see why we shouldn't; the Iranian theocracy has distinguished itself by kidnapping the whole US embassy staff during its inception, by Ahmedinijad's rantings and by the sometimes brutal supression of freedoms of Iranians for the last quarter century). This account, to me, comports entirely with the character of the current Tehran regime: cruel, manipulative and sadistic.
But the larger question is, how does this episode, as described by the recently released captives, rate on a scale of international behaviour? Well, let's see...no one was waterboarded, no one was subjected to sexual humiliation, no one was subjected to sleep deprivation, no one was made to wallow in their own excrement, no one was brutalized with nightsticks, electric wires or attack hounds, and no one was killed.
So, if you look at it in that light, Iran rates several notches above the United States of America on the scale of brutal international behaviour. Congratulations, Iran.
If ever there was a single incident that describes the complete, utter, and devastating failure of the Bush/Cheney foreign policy, this is it.
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(UPDATE) this just in from a Turkish news source (h/t to lipris, link lifted from her competing diary): a national security spokesman speaking from Crawford fails to condemn the alleged violations of the Geneva Conventions by the Iranians in this case, calling the treatment described in the news conference linked above only as "unfortunate" and "disappointing," like someone chastising a child for stealing a cookie.
So there you have it: our country has descended to such a level that we can't even call a breach of the Geneva Conventions for what it is: an atrocity. Prima facie evidence of the collapse of American credibility and moral standing in the world (as if we needed any more of that).