ninme

Times Online - PM warns of ‘different phase’ in Iran crisis Iran must obey international law and release 15 British military personnel or face the consequences, says Tony Blair

“Face the consequences,” huh? Where have we heard that before? This is the picture accompanying the article:

Faye Turney, the only woman among the British sailors and Marines captured last Friday off the coast of Iraq

Which I suppose is the “sexing up” of the dossier?

Update:

The Times - Britain’s Hostage Crisis
It is time to stop appeasing those who kidnapped the servicemen

For more than four days British sailors and Marines have been imprisoned in Iran. They have been interrogated, psychologically abused, denied access to the outside world and pressured into giving “confessions”. The 15 were seized at gunpoint by armed Iranian Revolutionary Guards while carrying out the thankless task of routinely searching shipping in Iraqi waters in the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the southern boundary between Iraq and Iran. Their kidnapping is an outrage. In earlier times it would have been an immediate casus belli. It would fully justify the use of force to obtain their release. There is, however, an even greater outrage compounding this insult to international law: the pusillanimous timidity of British officials and politicians, who have failed disgracefully to confront Iran with the ultimatum this flagrant aggression demands.

I long for those earlier times.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said it was “monitoring the situation very carefully and taking the situation very seriously”. Britain’s Ambassador in Tehran had a “businesslike” meeting with Iranian officials. Tony Blair has muttered that the issue was “fundamental” for his Government. The Iranians must be quaking at such threats. With the hubris and hypocrisy of a regime attempting to conceal its guilt, Iranian officials insist that the captured men are being well treated but their case must now follow “due legal process”. What “well treated” means can well be imagined: some of the Britons who were seized in a similar incident three years ago have described the mock executions, the psychological torture and the intimidating way that their captors tried to force admissions of guilt. As for “due legal process”, the denial of consular access, the refusal to provide evidence of trespass and the removal of the men to an unknown location hardly suggest the norms of international law.

Not to mention… everything else they’ve done in the past 27 years. But you know, there’s been a lot of talk about the horrors of torture in our world (Harry Potter, eg), but funny, I haven’t heard about that.

Oh wait, here’s our Harry Potter moment. Picked at random:

Were you equally outraged by the innocent (we have to assume so, unless proved otherwise) hostages taken to Guantanamo Bay who were also denied “due legal process” and most of the other rights you list?
Ian, Sydney, NSW

Perhaps he blacked out a little at the denial of access and unknown location bits. Or perhaps he thinks knowing the name and precise geographical location of Guantanamo qualifies it as unaccessed and unknown?

Update II:

Here’s another one:

The Times - Hang on. We’re taking the soft approach towards Iran?
Our columnist on the lessons of dealing with an erratic state, by Oliver Kamm

I’m getting too tired to keep quoting them. You’d think we’d have figured all this out back during the Carter administration.

Update III:

Even the BBC.

History repeats itself.

Update IV:

Even the Telegraph, still yet so righteous and loud about other sexy dossiers:

Update V:

Telegraph - Iran? Remember the Falklands, Mr Blair. By Andrew O’Hagan

Even if you think, as I do, that Britain has no real business being in Iraq in the first place, it is maddening that a neighbouring power should simply choose to abduct servicemen and women as if they were not human beings but ciphers in a vast political game.

Maddening, huh? Well, it’s a UN-mandated mission, patrolling those waters. How very maddening that must be for him. I think I’ll skip the rest of this one.