yet another blog

Y’know how it is that you sometimes get a tune in your head (usually some utterly superficial pop tune or advertising jingle) that plays over and over, and simply won’t be dispelled?

Well, since writing my last post I’ve been experiencing a rather similar phenomenon; though this time not a tune but a phrase.
Its that damned sentence I quoted from Faye Turney…
“I want everyone out there to know my story from my side, see what I went through.”

Having got totally fed up with it niggling away at my subconscious I’ve dragged it out into the light of day (or darkness of ridiculously early in the morning, in this particular case), and tried to analyse why its bugging me so much.

The only conclusion I’ve been able to arrive at is because of the subtext as it were… the attitude it betrays. And that attitude strikes me as one of utter self-indulgence, entirely inappropriate for someone serving in the Armed Forces.

I wonder if Ms Turney has paused to reflect on why she was in the Shatt al-Arab River in the first place.
Let’s consider that “why” shall we? Presumably she was ordered there by a superior officer. That order came about because our government decided to support Bush’s scheme to launch an unjustified and almost certainly illegal attack on a relatively defenceless country. As a consequence of which, hundreds of thousands of completely innocent Iraqis have suffered unimaginably. I wonder therefore if our Ms Turney is in the least interested in hearing their story, from their side, and trying to get an understanding of what they’ve been through?
And if she’s got the least concern for those victims of the heinous military aggression perpetrated by the combined US/UK Armed Forces, perhaps she should donate any and all money she acquires from peddling her “story” to one of the organizations seeking to alleviate the suffering and impoverishment her employers have caused.

All this fuss about whether or not the MoD will allow the captured Services personnel to publish their stories¹ could be seen as a response by the government to public opinion. Well, that’s a good thing, and practically unprecedented for this particular government.

However, there could be a rather more Machiavellian plot at work here. For what all the hullaballoo’s also doing is keeping the issue in the forefront of public awareness. And with the added bonus (for the government and its anti-Iranian agenda) of helping to obfuscate the fact that’s there’s actually very little real meat to this story at all - very little real meat to feed the anti-Iranian propaganda machine that is.

Let’s just remind ourselves of what the story’s all about: a handful of British service personnel were “captured” (why not “detained” or “arrested” I wonder?) by the Iranians in disputed territorial waters, held by the Iranian government for about two weeks, and then released. Whilst in captivity they were subjected to treatment which, when compared to the treatment handed out by certain allies of the UK to arguably illegally detained “suspects”, seems quite reasonable and understandable given the circumstances. One could even argue that the experience these individuals went through should actually be regarded as no more than an occupational hazard, given where they were. So what’s the big deal?

And frankly, I’ve very little interest in hearing, as Faye Turney put it: “I want everyone out there to know my story from my side, see what I went through.”²

Had she been subjected to brutal physical torture, rape, etc I might feel differently, but compare her experience to the experiences of those incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay - not for thirteen days, but for five years plus!

And where’s the ongoing huge press coverage of that, I ask myself?

So they played a few mind games with you Ms Turney? Well, how would you like to spend five years as an incarceree in Guantanamo - or an even more secret CIA prison? And perhaps you should think yourself lucky the Iranians didn’t ship you off to some less civilised State for interrogation; “rendition”, is it called?

For as long as there’s no huge public outcry in the media, and from the government, about the human rights abuses that are daily committed by the “allies” Blair has tied us to we’re hardly in any position to criticise the Iranians for the relatively well-mannered treatment of their detainees.

[Addendum 10.04.07: Read this…

“…we must now look at the behavior of counties [sic] like Iran through the lens of “black sites,” CIA renditions, torture memos, Abu Ghraib, water boarding, habeas-stripping statutes, military commissions, and indefinite detentions. Iran’s 15-day detention of British sailors and marines and the subsequent ham-fisted propaganda stunts by the Iranian government look pretty tame by comparison.”

From the JURIST Legal News and Research]

1. Browne under fire after media ban - Yahoo News [↩]
2. MoD ban sailors from selling stories - Yahoo News [↩]