AL covered this already, but I have to admit I was kind of flabbergasted by the response. That doesn’t mean I was surprised by it- I fully expected it. I mean I was just flabbergasted by the extent of the idiocy of it all. I mean, what in the flying fuck did they EXPECT to happen when our ships went into someone else’s waters? Even if it was an ally like Britain, they would have sent someone out.
And the fact that this was such a docile encounter is kind of shocking. In my mind, it went something like this:
Navy: Derp.
Iran: Hey guys, whatcha doing?
Navy: Umm, uhh, fishing?
Iran: No, you’re not.
Navy: Ok. You got us.
Iran: Alright, come on now.
And then they gathered their stupid asses and broke-dick crafts up, gave them some pillows and delicious looking snacks which were most assuredly better than anything I can get in this Mediterranean food desert I live in and without question the fucking god awful Halal MRE’s we’d have chucked at their guys. I mean look at this:
First off, those rugs are amazing. Second, I would love some pillows like that but Thurston would chew the fuck out of them. Third, if I saw this while I was on active duty, I’d have thought “I could use some fucking R&R, too.” And then, within fifteen hours, faster than any travel agent I know could arrange a ride home from Iran, they were back in US custody.
That’s it. That’s what big bad Iran did. Oh, yes- they made us apologize. Horror of horrors. We just stumbled into their yard in a drunken stupor, they brought us inside, gave us some snacks, sobered us up and called mom and dad, and we had to say “my bad” while we were getting in the minivan on the ride home.
Now, think for a second what we would have done had a bunch of Iranians been caught floating off the coast of Virginia Beach. Do I even need to give you ideas of McCain or Cotton or one of these other idiots might have handled the situation were they in charge? Thank goodness our military is professional and would not freak out like our elected Republican leaders would
BTW- one of those sailors was black. Which means it is safer for a heavily armed black man in Iran than it is in a park in Cleveland.
BillinGlendaleCA
We know what Grandpa Walnuts would do: “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran…”.
Adam L Silverman
These folks make some of the best
baklava and other Levantine/Middle Eastern baked goods I’ve ever had.
http://www.shatila.com/
And they ship right to your door!
Anoniminous
Obama has managed to cool things down with Iran pretty well.
John Revolta
Okay, I got a confession…………….I thought “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” was pretty funny.
David Koch
David Koch
Omnes Omnibus
@John Revolta: It was funny when the senior class at the homecoming rally did it at my high school in the fall of 1980. I don’t think it aged well.
Jordan Rules
@efgoldman: Please, please, please let us have adults in charge next go round. rAmen!
David Koch
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Cole, thank you for the delightful description of how it may very well have happened, along with your editorial comments. Followed by the heartbreaking and accurate BTW
edit added for emphasis
GregB
@David Koch:
Clearly it was Bill Clinton’s fault.
Mnemosyne
A Monty Python line comes to mind with that picture: “It’s a fair cop, and society’s to blame.”
max
I mean I was just flabbergasted by the extent of the idiocy of it all. I mean, what in the flying fuck did they EXPECT to happen when our ships went into someone else’s waters? Even if it was an ally like Britain, they would have sent someone out.
Bomb bomb bomb
E
G
H
A
Z
Iran!
max
[‘Why didn’t Obama send bombers to prevent those sailors from getting snacks!?!?’]
hitchhiker
If we found Iranians floating around off the coast of Virginia, those Iranians would get a free trip to Guantanomo. Where they would get to stay for a decade or so. But no cushions, no rugs, and certainly they’d be wearing orange all the time unless they were naked and cold.
Anne Laurie
And because my mind works that way, I found it amusing-in-a-grim-way that all the Iranian news shots were carefully framed so as not to show the one American female Sailor captive (although I did catch one fuzzy glimpse of someone-in-a-headscarf in one of the evening news reports). Because a woman mingling with unrelated army guys would’ve upset their godbotherers even more than it does our godbotherers, I’m assuming…
Arclite
And a woman. Without a hajib. And she didn’t even get lashes. Although it looks like from the photos that they gave her one to cover up with at some point.
BillinGlendaleCA
@GregB: As was 9-11.
PhoenixRising
The food looked good and the sharia was pretty loose: the woman sailor was asked to cover her lustrous locks of lust (in ’16, I’m making a practice of mocking cultural habits that impose limits on women because they assume men are horrible) but no one was given the side eye for eating those delicious looking snacks with his or her left hand. So in sum, pretty good treatment from a cautious government with a lot to fear from the US…as the POTUS cast before swine last evening.
Also: the US Navy, where navigation is the task for the one guy no one likes who isn’t allowed to touch any of the cool toys like the throttle or tiller or guns. Yep.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Anne Laurie: Army guys? Eh, sailors.
Omnes Omnibus
@BillinGlendaleCA: Given the Navy’s reputation for cannibalism….
PhoenixRising
@BillinGlendaleCA Our guys are sailors, yes.
Their guys are…Guardians of the Revolution, Waterside Branch (my Farsi isn’t so good).
I share AL’s assumption that their godbotherers would be more concerned about their guys having contact with a source of lustful thoughts such as that sailor’s hair than about our guys’ contact with their coworker.
BillinGlendaleCA
@PhoenixRising: My dad was a sailor, pre-WW2 enlistee.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: Watch it grunt.
John Revolta
@Omnes Omnibus: You mean old Grumpy didn’t come up with that himself? Man, you can’t believe in anything anymore.
Omnes Omnibus
@BillinGlendaleCA: Gunners aren’t grunts. Artillery lends dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl.
amk
@efgoldman: You are joking right? Even under Obama, the noise and the pourage from the wingnutz, the rethug congress critters aided by cowardly dems and the fucking media (ratfucker whiny wolf wanted the sotu to be suspended for this derp, ffs) would have created a big scene and they all be sitting in cells being ‘interrogated’.
Arclite
@Anne Laurie: Anne Laurie, the Iranians tweeted pics including the woman here and here. So they couldn’t have been too bothered by it.
PhoenixRising
@BillinGlendaleCA: One of my cousins is a sailor. It is possible he is part of this crew; I’m still up mainly because I’m waiting to hear from his sister. Typically he doesn’t reveal his location while deployed doing brown water…things…but I know he was shipping to the region 12/26, and if he was captured by Iran and fed snacks, I think we will be apprised.
3 of my other cousins are retired sailors. But I just don’t know what the glorious Revolutionary State calls their Coast Guard dudes.
PhoenixRising
@Omnes Omnibus: My dad was an artillery LT. And that made me giggle.
Omnes Omnibus
@PhoenixRising: One does what one can.
amk
@Anne Laurie: They showed the woman sitting in a corner with her head covered. You must be mistaking saudis for iranians.
BillinGlendaleCA
@PhoenixRising: Best wishes, hope he’s ok. Good thing we have an adult in charge.
Mnemosyne
@Arclite:
@PhoenixRising:
One does wonder if it was as though our sailors had had to take a topless woman into custody. Er, excuse me, but would you mind covering, um, that up? It’s making our guys nervous.
Dollared
Damn, John, that is exactly what I come here for. When you riff, you are on a level with the best of the Daily Show. I mean it.
PhoenixRising
@BillinGlendaleCA: Oh, I’m confident he’s fine if he IS the old guy (seen in the videos but not the photo here). His crew has brushed up against non-allied states in the region* before and the main issue is all the damn paperwork.
*About 5 years ago at a holiday party, I said, ” Afghanistan is a landlocked country with no navigable lakes…so…how come you told your mom you were deployed there?” He said, “You are literally the only person in [Redacted]n County, Ohio who knows that and I’d appreciate it if you’d shut up.” I confirmed later that his sister vaguely understands that in the event that “my unit is deploying to Afghanistan” is a cover story, the truth must be dangerous. So I’d actually be relieved if this was his crew…we’d know where he is and that he’s safe thanks to cool heads at State.
amk
@efgoldman: you must be living in a different america then.
Omnes Omnibus
@amk: Obama let the GOP dictate his actions?
joel hanes
@Omnes Omnibus:
[curmudgeon]
It wasn’t funny then, either. You were young.
[/curmudgeon]
Huntly
Do service members typically carry their passports with them while on duty? Footage I’ve seen about this, could be just old stock, shows someone holding several US passports.
Ruckus
@Huntly:
We didn’t use to, in fact I traveled a lot of the world, and wandered around in other countries and didn’t even have a passport, just a military ID.
But just for efgoldman’s sake it was 2-3 thousand years ago while serving on the Bounty.
amk
btw, great snark, cole.
AxelFoley
Sad, but true.
reality-based (the original, not the troll)
Oh, cmon, JC – I’m trapped in the boonies of NORTH DAKOTA, and I’ve got this Mideast food stuff pretty well covered.
I can get Za’atar, pomegranate molasses, sumac, preserved lemons, Aleppo pepper, saffron – all in a trip to Fargo. Couscous and garbanzo beans for Hummus, pita bread, really good olive oil, fresh cilantro and parsley and mint – they’re at the grocery store!
I’m now working on my fesenjan – if we ever do get normal relations with Iran, I’m going there just to learn from the masters!
(baklava is a pain in the ass to make, though)
Sometime I’ll post my famous recipe for chicken with dates and olives over couscous in a recipe thread here – but if I can cook it in North Dakota, you can cook it in West Virginia!
(During my Silicon Valley days, I worked for an Israeli-based Ethernet Switching company, fell in LOVE with Mideastern food. From Tel Aviv, I’d go to Jaffa for great antiques, great grilled fish fresh from the Mediterranean, , that wonderful mint tea. Makes me hungry just thinking of it.
Joyce H
They’d be shackled, both hands and feet, and have bags over their heads. I know I mentioned the bags in the previous thread, but this is something that really, really irks me. It’s so freakin’ unAmerican! I mean, honestly, are those crafty Muslims so preternaturally dangerous that being disarmed and shackled and escorted by armed guards isn’t enough – we have to make sure they can’t SEE either? Orrrr – are we just being dicks? Cowardly, or dickish – I don’t see any third option.
And the same American politicians who were so pearl-clutchingly outraged at the image of our apprehended sailors with their hands in the air can’t seem to grasp that other countries would be outraged at the sight of their citizens shackled with bags over their heads. Can someone explain to them that foreigners are ALSO humans with the same range of emotions that we have?
SRW1
Thank god their massive pay packages allows these marines to afford a decent pair of socks. Unlike, say, this guy.
Chris
@hitchhiker:
Yep.
According to my apoplectic wingnut relative on Twitter, this was a horrifying event because the Iranians sent out pictures of our sailors and forced them to record a confession, which is against the Geneva Convention! (Also Obama didn’t mention them in the State of the Union address, so he must hate the troops).
I could only think that if that was the worst violation of the Geneva Convention the Iranian military has ever committed, they’re way ahead of us.
Cermet
@Chris: What violation of Geneva Convention? Everyone and the news media are missing a critical point – WE ARE NOT AT WAR WITH IRAN! Soooooo, none of the Geneva Convention rules apply when a country holds foreign soldiers who have violated their borders. That said, standard international norms generally need to be followed and Iran did that and was both proper and apparently exceeded what is normal between two countries that are generally unfriendly. Also, when I was an officer we where briefed that in the event we accidentally crossed into an unfriendly countries’ territory we were allowed to cooperate and we were to act as normal people, not as a military soldier! So, thanking them and apologizing for the trespass was both ok and allowed.
Hillary Rettig
reminds me of the Python “Spanish Inquisition” sketch where the inquisitors torture the guy using the “comfy pillow”
kindness
I’d respect Republican macho more if any one of them had kids who were serving in the military. It’s so easy to have other people’s kids killed to act big and bad. So to me it isn’t just bad theater, it’s a horrible facade that our MSM refuses to call out.
Joy
Rachel Maddow had a fit over the treatment of these sailors. As is her wont, she railed about it for 15 minutes. First of all, hands clasped behind their head on the ship, second, shoes off while eating their rather delicious looking food and bottled water (isn’t that their custom?) and third, they were filmed (they were not POWs but being detained). I thought they were treated respectively. I’m sitting there thinking, what? did she want them to be in a prison cell? I did not get her whole rant. Then Lawrence started along the same theme and had a British military expert on his show. When asked to comment about the hands clasped behind their heads, he said it was basically protocol and explained why. But I’m not a journalist nor served in the military so what do I know, but as a citizen I wasn’t disturbed by their treatment but relieved when they were released. Thank my lucky stars everyday that we have President Obama and not President McCain or Romney. God forbid we get a President Trump or Cruz. God help us all.
amk
@Joy: ah, that’s the librul media for ya.
D58826
John, you just don’t understand. If an American recon aircraft is forced down by the Chinese air force, the crew held for 23 days, a wishy washy apology issued and then the plane returned three months later stripped of its equipment why that is a sign of macho BUSH strength.
Tbone
We’ve officially gotten to the point where Iran has more respect for America and its military, than republicans.
donnah
John, this was a brilliant post and I enjoyed every word. Thanks very much.
FlipYrWhig
@Joy: She was completely around the bend. I was gobsmacked. It was like she was briefly possessed by the spirit of Laura Ingraham.
maya
I’ll reserve judgement on this affair until the surviving members write and publish their memoirs: Not So Swiftboaters For Truth
D58826
The degree that this has gone way past ‘jumping the shark’ is reflected in Marco Rubio’s comment that it was Obama’s weakness that led the Iranians to capture the Americans. Of course no one asked him what it was that lead to their quick release.
Jack the Second
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
You’re still giving too much credit. Tamir Rice was 12; teenager typically refers to 13-20.
He was a preteen or child.
The Red Pen
Apparently, someone still thinks this dead horse just needs a little more flogging:
Iran’s Propaganda Victory in One Illegal Image certainly teaches you a lot about propaganda: how to fail miserably.
Jack the Second
@Joyce H:
That sounds like something a communist sympathizer would say.
WarMunchkin
I’m just so so so sad that it’s Obama’s last year now. Government is significantly closer to a “just works” apple product than whatever clusterfuck the Bush administration was. The state dept does diplomacy now, who would have thought.
El Caganer
@D58826: Yet if IIRC, Bush Elder felt no compulsion to apologize to Iran for shooting down a civilian airliner in Iran’s territorial waters.
D58826
@El Caganer: Actually I think it was the Reagan era. What made it even ‘funnier’ was Reagan had gone on and on about the Soviet murder of the people on KAL 007. It is just possible that that shoot down was a mistake also. But it’s of when we do it.
sigaba
@AxelFoley: It was safe for a black man in Iran, but don’t ask about Armenians…
GregB
@sigaba:
Isn’t Turkey the country responsible for the Armeniam genocide?
Enhanced Voting Techinques
It’s certainly interesting how bored those sailors look for being held at gun point by Iranians. The whole body language there is “so when does this farce end”? That and how fast the Iranians let them lose sounds like both the US and Iran are embarrassed by the whole thing. Want to bet the guy in command of those boats did something dumb like read his GPS wrong.
Interrobang
I have to say, this is pretty much exactly what I thought about it, too, and said as much to the lone frother in my FB feed. So, Mr. Cole, great minds think alike; fools seldom differ — you pick which. ^_^
Tehanu
Well, you see, we’re AMERICANS — so if we float into furrin waters, them furriners need to just let us do whatever we want; they’ve got no rights to stop us from doing anything we want anywhere. How dare they think their borders mean anything?
God, I’m so tired of Republicans.
DavidTC
First of all, hands clasped behind their head on the ship
Yeah, I saw some of the *outrageous* photos being passed around, and one of them was them kneeling with their hands behind their head when the Iranians boarded their boats.
And I’m thinking ‘Have you guys literally never seen anyone get arrested?’.
And then later they were apparently *locked in a room with bars*, quelle horreur…and again, it’s like ‘You guys do know the actual definition of ‘detained’, right? You do know what ‘prisoner’ means, right? Aren’t you the exact people complaining how the Iranians got to roam free over the US’s ship? So why would the Iranians allow US personnel to roam free over *their* ship?’
second, shoes off while eating their rather delicious looking food and bottled water (isn’t that their custom?)
Even if it’s not any sort of custom, taking shoes (Especially boots) away from prisoners is perfectly reasonable behavior.
I swear, 90% of the outrage from the right seems to be restating ‘The Iranians took Americans prisoner and they were treated like prisoners!’ in different ways. Yeah, dumbasses, we already knew that. That was the entire premise of the story.
Telling us things that are *perfectly reasonable and legal ways to treat prisoners* isn’t going to alter that.
and third, they were filmed (they were not POWs but being detained)
See, and the right’s fixation on this is just entirely wrong.
Here is the *actual* text of the thing everyone seems to think forbids photos:
‘Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.’
There is *nothing* in there about photographs, and in fact that section is about *parading* the prisoners around in front of people, or allowing the public viewing of them.
And now add in the fact these photos were not released until *after* the prisoners were released, aka, they literally *weren’t* prisoners of war anymore, and thus could not possibly be in any sort of danger, nor *can* that section even apply anymore.