I haven’t written about the British hostages been held in Iran at all as yet: the main reason for that is that while I have enormous sympathy on a personal level for the hostages, some of whom are from my home town, (and especially for the one woman hostage Fay Turney, having been a female member of the UK armed forces myself) nevertheless, on the strategic level I can only agree with Ronan Bennett in this morning’s Guardian:
Turney may have been “forced to wear the hijab”, as the Daily Mail noted with fury, but so far as we know she has not been forced into an orange jumpsuit. Her comrades have not been shackled, blindfolded, forced into excruciating physical contortions for long periods, or denied liquids and food. As far as we know they have not had the Bible spat on, torn up or urinated on in front of their faces. They have not had electrodes attached to their genitals or been set on by attack dogs.
They have not been hung from a forklift truck and photographed for the amusement of their captors. They have not been pictured naked and smeared in their own excrement. They have not been bundled into a CIA-chartered plane and secretly “rendered” to a basement prison in a country where torturers are experienced and free to do their worst.
As far as we know, Turney and her comrades are not being “worked hard”, the euphemism coined by one senior British army officer for the abuse of prisoners at Camp Bread Basket. And as far as we know all 15 are alive and well, which is more than can be said for Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist who, in 2003, was unfortunate enough to have been taken into custody by British troops in Basra. There has of course been a court martial and it exonerated the soldiers of Mousa’s murder. So we can only assume that his death – by beating – was self-inflicted; yet another instance of “asymmetrical warfare”, the description given by US authorities to the deaths of the Guantánamo detainees who hanged themselves last year.
And while the families of the captured marines and sailors must be in agonies of uncertainty, they have the comfort of knowing that the very highest in the land are doing everything they can to end their “unjustified detention”. They can count themselves especially lucky, for the very same highest of the land have rather different views on what justifies detention where foreign-born Muslims in Britain are concerned.
Quite.
As a nation we can hardly go around the world demanding that other countries observe the ‘rules of war’ when we have not done so ourselves.
Because of our actions, because of Iraq, Guantanamo and our continued support of the murderous regime of George Bush our diplomatic and political capital as a nation is virtually nil. We are hoist by our own petard. Pick a cliche – we are a busted flush, clapped out, disgraced, shamed, having our own faces rubbed in our mess…
It hasn’r helped either that our continuing bosom buddies and allies, the USA, recently kidnapped a number of Iranian public servants:
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