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War, War, War See other War, War, War Articles Title: US tripped up over Iranian captives WASHINGTON - The George W Bush administration's campaign to seize and detain Iranian Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officials in Iraq, presented by Bush himself in January as a move to break up an alleged Iranian arms smuggling operation in Iraq, appears to have run its course without having been able to link a single Iranian to any such operation. Despite administration rhetoric suggesting that the US military had solid intelligence on which to base a campaign to break up Iranian-sponsored networks supplying armor-piercing weapons, what is now known about the kidnapping operations indicates that the actual purpose was to obtain some evidence from interrogations that would support the administration's line that the IRGC's elite Quds Force is involved in assisting Shi'ite forces militarily. None of the remaining six Iranians now held by the US military, however, has provided any evidence for the administration's case, despite many months of very tough interrogation usually employed on "high-value" detainees. Wayne White, former deputy director of the US Bureau of Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia, told Inter Press Service he believes the administration badly wanted to get information from the Iranian detainees that they could use to make their case, but it has been unable to do so. "I'm convinced that they haven't gotten anything out of them," he said in an interview. "They haven't come up with anything they can shop around." The program has also been a political embarrassment in relations with US allies in Iraq. US military seizures of Iranians whom the US military claimed were IRGC Quds Force officers have been condemned not only by the Shi'ite government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, but also by Kurdish leaders. The US military apologized in August for "a regrettable incident" in which eight Iranians were arrested in Baghdad, and soon freed after Iraqi protests. And the US quietly released nine Iranian detainees last week, two of whom were seized in the Kurdish city of Irbil in January, saying they were "of no continuing intelligence value". What was later learned about the US raids on Iranian officials in Kurdistan in January and again in September and in Baghdad last December shows that the US military was targeting Iranians merely on the basis of their affiliation with the IRGC, while claiming publicly to have intelligence of their involvement in weapons trafficking. The January 10 raid was on an Iranian liaison office that had been operating in the Kurdistan capital of Irbil for 10 years with official Iraqi government approval. The US military issued only a vaguely worded rationale for kidnapping the five Iranians, saying they were "suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and coalition forces ..." That was a thinly veiled allusion to their suspected membership in the IRGC. Iraq's Kurdish foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who demanded the release of the five Iranians, explained that they were not part of a "clandestine network" but were working on visas and other paperwork for travel by Iraqis to Iran. Zebari pointed out that the men were working for the IRGC because that institution has the responsibility for controlling Iran's borders. It is also common for IRGC officers to be given positions in a wide range of non-military Iranian government agencies. That was the case with Mahmoud Farhadi, the Iranian official kidnapped by the US military from a hotel in Soleimanieh, Kurdistan, on September 20. US military spokesman Rear Admiral Mark Fox told reporters that Farhadi was a member of the "Ramadan Corps" of the IRGC command responsible for all Iranian operations inside Iraq and the "linchpin" behind the smuggling of "sophisticated weapons" into Iraq by the Quds Force. But officials of the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, publicly confirmed the Iranian government's assertion that Farhadi was a civilian official of the Kermanshah (a province in Iran) governor-general's office on a "commercial mission with the knowledge of the federal government in Baghdad and the government of Kurdistan". Again, Kurdish authorities did not contest the fact that Farhadi had been in the IRGC. The governor of Iraq's Suleymaniye city, Dana Majeed, acknowledged Farhadi's IRGC membership a week after the US kidnapping, but insisted that his job was to expedite trade and transit across the border. The US military was apparently operating on the basis of information from the Iranian armed opposition group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) that was badly out of date. The political arm of the MEK, the National Council or Resistance of Iran, which had been providing information to US intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program and on Iranian officials operating in Iraq, published a detailed article on Farhadi on September 25 which claimed that he was the commander of the Quds Force Zafar Base and said nothing about his working for Kermanshah on cross-border trade. But an article in an Iraqi Kurdish-language daily on September 24 reported that an "informed source" belonging to an unnamed "Iranian opposition group" - obviously the MEK - had used the past tense in regard to Farhadi's role as a Quds Force commander and acknowledged that Farhadi was now working in a commercial delegation. In December 2006, two accredited Iranian diplomats were kidnapped from their embassy car on the way from praying at a mosque in Baghdad and later had to be released. But four other Iranian officials were kidnapped in the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shi'ite political party the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), who had visited Bush three weeks earlier. They were in the home of the chairman of the Iraqi parliamentary security committee and head of the Badr Organization, the military wing of the SIIC. The official explanation was that the Iranians were being detained on "suspicion of carrying out or planning attacks against Iraqi security forces". But their Iraqi interlocutors are part of the Iraqi government which supports the occupation and opposes the Madhi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. If the Iranian officials detained were actually plotting with their hosts to attack Iraqi security forces, it would have meant that the SIIC and the Badr Organization were planning to attack their own government. US military officials claimed to the Washington Post that they had captured maps of Baghdad delineating Sunni, Shi'ite and mixed neighborhoods that would be useful for militias, lists of weapons systems and "information about importing modern, specially shaped explosive charges into Iran". But Laura Rozen of the National Journal quoted a US official as saying that the evidence was far less conclusive than was claimed. "They are trying to walk this back," said the official. "There are no smoking guns about Iran in Iraq." None of the allegedly damning evidence was mentioned in the February 11 military briefing to the US media on the alleged weapons smuggling of the Quds Force, indicating that these claims were vastly exaggerated.
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#2. To: kiki (#0)
What sort of country kidnaps diplomats in another country, holds them for months without charges and tortures them? I would say an evil country.
Americans certainly thought Iran was barbaric when it kidnapped and held American diplomats back in 1979. And it didn't even torture them.
Well yes, they did torture them by 1979 standards- kept them blind folded and seated on the floor in uncomfortable positions for hours- little chance for exercise. But 9/11 changed everything and that isn't torture any longer. That isn't even "mild abuse" by the standards of our "legal" system.
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