Will they publish, won’t they publish?
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]
