A Hat Tip to Sky News
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (13) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I'm not a big fan of the news media but when they suppress a story that would have been a blockbuster, in deference to the safety of men and women in uniform, I can make an exception.
Just a few days before Royal Marine Captain Chris Air was captured by the Iranians, he was interviewed by Sky News. In that interview he discusses, matter of factly, that part of his mission was to gather intelligence in the course of maritime interceptions. (video here)
Had that video been played durng their captivity, then being accused of entering Iranian waters would have taken on a whole new dimension and the odds of any of them coming home soon would be slim to none.
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A Hat Tip to Sky News 13 Comments (0 topical, 13 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
and the only time our media will sit on a story is if it's evidence the president shagged an intern while saying he'd never do any such thing when being questioned about a sexual harassment suit...
Bravo to Sky News.
I mean running news outlets to benefit society. Shocking.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
The official British and American claims that they weren't were fairly definitive at first but seemed to get a bit conditioned and more vague over the course of the captivity. And the whole issue of the warship being so far away and not rushing to and responding to the capture seemed odd.
You'd think even small inflatable interception and inspection boats by any top rank military like the Brits would have GPS tracking devices or other telemetry devices on them so the mother ship could keep constant track of their position in this day and age, and I was waiting for those data records to be released by the Brits to settle the issue but it never came.
This Marine's interview doesn't settle the matter at all, but is an interesting extra data point.
The Brits released the GPS coordinates in a news conference and a map plotting the HMS Cornwall and the intercept. The Iranians relased data that first showed the Brits were right, then aaked for a do-over and released data that showed the ship in Iranian waters.
Really. The maps and the link to the video of the press conference are posted on this page.
And the interview with the Marine officer was before he was captured so I'd be surprised if it shed light on events that had not yet happened.
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling
stated that they were in Iraqi waters at the time of the attack on them, and that they were pressured to say otherwise.
So your surmise is incorrect.
Wait.... no one in the west is allowed to do that. Heaven forbid!
Since what they describe as "intelligence gathering" sounds a whole lot like the stuff any military man or woman would be doing at any time.
Sky seems to be trying to make it into something much bigger than it actually is, as if they were monitoring Iran somehow and their official mission was just a cover for that. But if they didn't do that, they wouldn't have much of an "exclusive," either.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6530000/newsid_6533100/6533181.s...
The Iranian mullahcracy be puritannical, but they know how to be media whores. Definitely worth a listen.
Imagine that.