I’m sure the country that hangs teenagers for being gay and stones women for being raped will be quite gentle when questioning suspected spies.
I’m quite shocked at the way in which people are making Iran out to be the whiter than white victims here.
I trust Iran far less than I trust Blair or Bush, and I hardly trust them.
Told ya so. 
The difference is, the Iranians know damned well they are going to have to hand the “spies” over to British officials sooner or later, after all the posturing and negotiations. Can’t be giving them any nasty tales to tell about their treatment.
My post was about the difficulties inherent with translated text, not a soap box for you to preach from.
The USA practices torture. Therefore the presumption lies on my side not yours. If you want to claim the USA does not mistreat prisoners in its secret prisons it is up to you to provide sound evidence for the sudden change of heart. The USA has forfeited its right to any presumption of innocence under Bush.
Chirac knows squat and as you keep ignoring - the USA routinely kidnaps people from the streets of Europe and renders them to friendly allied torturers, and currently stands accused of the kidnapping of 3 Iranian generals and a bunch of Iranians in Iraq.
On past evidence Iran will release the British after some posturing. On the same evidence the Iranians will vanish for years only to appear as broken men before kangaroo courts confessing to everything from the Temptation of Adam to the cancelling of Star Trek.
And this is the biggest crime of Bush and Blair - lowering our moral standards and standing to such a level that it makes a medieval fundamentalist regime look good by comparison.
Well, when the USA were about to invade Afghanistan, the Iranians offered to help with any downed pilots. Also Iranian General(s) were talking to the USA and they said that they were using the same military manuals left in 1979.
I got that from the BBC World Service
Also the Northern Alliance speak Farsi - and really do not like the Taliban.
You’ll probably also remember that after 9/11 there was a ‘spontaneous’ demonstration in Tehran in sympathy with the USA
Unfortunately Bush’s Axis of Drivel speech rather upset them.
@Elsie I’m curious, do you suspect that statements are being deliberately mistranslated ?
@All Well it seems that the Iranians have hit on examining the GSM equipment to see where the boats had been. Quite a good idea 
My presumption is everyone has an agenda, so from the pov of the translator it might be your own or your employers overtly political agenda, it might simply be to ‘sex’ up a translation in order to get it and you a higher profile within your translation community, and therefore more work.
Also, if I was in Intell, and given the worldwide media impact of so-called translated phrases such as “wiping Israel off the face of the map” I wouldn’t be doing my job if you didn’t try to manipulate at source.
The torture bit is strange, I can’t see the use of waterboarding except for circumstances where the results are immediately verifiable - like where is that bomb planted.
The only kidnapping that I can think of on the street in Europe was in Italy, my impression is that the majority of non Afghan detainees were picked up by third parties and sold to the USA.
I’ve a feeling that this torture stuff is black propaganda, if I were an Egyptian I would not be much worried by a spell in Gitmo, but I would be terrified of being handed over to the Egyptians. I suspect that some sort of convoluted thinking is behind what seems like too much info on the subject.
We are not sure that the generals were kidnapped, but if they were, I would expect them to be treated pretty well, show trials don’t go down well in the West and there is a huge settled Iranian community in the USA.
I thoroughly agree that ‘lowering moral standards’ is disgusting, and is sure to backfire. It reminds me of the phrase of Nietzsche
|He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.|
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Friedrich_Nietzsche/
A pretty canny guy
But against that, the Guardian is quite capable of employing translators, so lurid versions would be counteracted by factual versions. Warping commonly available information tends to discredit the source.
Similarly forged documents from ‘Niger’ and ‘discovered’ documents from Iraq make future discoveries suspect, even if genuine.
Ahmadinejad does say some pretty wacky things, mind you so does Bush …
Hardly ever, and most media don’t at all. They all rely on exactly the same Agency AP / Reuters sources - not just UK/USA, but the world over. Cheap, efficient, and who the hell knows any better anyway.
Ok, but the BBC Worldwide is heaving with translators.
You’re suggesting a sort of conspiracy theory, but conspiracies normally break down after more than one person is involved.
However, I can think of a similar example.
DeAnne Julius was appointed to the UK Monetary Policy Committee and got a grilling from a House of Commons subcomittee. Acording to the papers she got angry … yadda yadda - but I heard the exchange on the radio, and the papers were wrong.
I assumed that nobody bothered to correct the thing was because one of the main reasons why she was hired was because she was ex-CIA
I suppose you know that Edward Heath actually said: ‘the unacceptable facet of capitalism’.
Oh to be famous for something one never said
Your knowledge of the extraordinary rendition programme is sadly limited it seems. Part of it involves being handed over to the Egyptians among others for torture.
Do you want to try Masri for starters? It’s a very well-known case. Judging from the certainty with which you state your opnions I’d have assumed you were familiar with it. Apparently not.
How about the Marty investigation?
Your unjustified faith in what now passes for american justice however, is extremely impressive. There is no grounds whatsoever for believing they will be treated well and every reason to believe, as the EU report among countless other pieces of information shows, they will be tortured.
And I’m so happy you are sanguine about vanishing for years into the Gitmo memory hole to face a kangaroo court after 5 years if you are lucky. You’ll forgive the rest of the world if we disagree.
At the moment you are just pissing into the howling presumptive gale. We know the US holds many prisoners without trial, we know they are tortured and we know they hold the Iranians claimed to be diplomats. We know 3 generals have gone missing and there are no grounds for assuming they just vanished into thin air.
At the moment the Iranians are angels compared to us. We have no reason to believe our troops will be harmed. The last lot were released.
But we have every reason to believe anyone who falls into Uncle Sam’s claws will be held without trial in a network of secret prisons and tortured.
I loathe the Iranian regime and I particularly loathe the fact we’ve ceded them the moral high ground but there’s no point us getting hysterical about the situation.
Not a conspiracy imo - manipulation of media to your advantage is standard practice and policy the world over.
Alistair Campbell wasn’t a ‘conspiracy’, I don’t think he was anyway . . .
I don’t have that much faith in American justice, but I don’t have much faith in justice.
The David Hicks stuff is a bit bizarre, I can understand a Roo hunter landing up in Afghanistan, but why he stayed in Gitmo for five years baffles me. Anyway, he is off home to Australia to finish his sentence - which will be in a remarkably open prison.
Probably he was tortured with cold tinnies.
What interests me is that we all know too much about torture, we know about the white planes, we know names and places. I think there is an element of FUD going on.
Those Iranian generals are really interesting, we don’t know if they were kidnapped or whether they defected - we don’t know whether the Iranians shot them and stuck them in a mineshaft.
However my arithmetic goes: a general will be about 55 years, 2007 minus 1979 equals 28 years. 55 minus 28 = 27 years. Ergo, around the fall of the Shah they were 27 years old, and would have held rank of captain to major. That means that they were USA or British trained - either explicitly or by others who were.
If they are in USA hands then they are probably chewing the fat with old friends, possibly their old classmates from 1970.
Anyway, I agree with you, torture and brutality are pointless (except for very immediate circumstances) there are subtler chemical and psychological ways of getting people to talk, ranging from whisky to a hypodermic. Although the Witness Protection Scheme, while expensive, is very effective.
What annoys me is that a few years ago, the then Iranian regime was looking pretty good.
I award GWB the Nobel Prize for War
Doubt cast by Iraqi commander on British story.
Craig Murray, a former UK diplomat who got in trouble for being anti-torture opines:
As the border in the shatt al arab waterway is in dispute the most likely thing is the UK people strayed accidentally across a line on an Iranian map. It’s probably a very easy thing to do if a line is as hazy as the 1975 line later repudiated by Iraq. Due to all the other shit being dealt out to them in the form of kidnappings, arrests and accusations of interference in Iraq, (plus the nuke issue) some aspects of the Iranian power structure seized on the accident to make a point.
Sooner or later the mullahs will bang heads together and they will be released unharmed. They will do so to score points with the Iraq govt which is asking for their release. So long as no one does anything stupid in the meantime.
US Navy in show of force off Iran coast
US military strike on Iran seen by April ’07; Sea-launched attack to hit oil, N-sites
I doubt this is true. The same story surfaces every March but I bet, given the US Naval build-up, elements of the Iranian power structure aren’t willing to take a chance on Bush’s judgement.
Regardless, they should release the sailors.
To go with his Pulitzer for Stupidity.
Right. Quite a lot’s happened since. In fact, I’m sure you’ll recall it wasn’t just Tehran that held vigils and solidarity demonstrations for the 9/11 tragegy – it was largely a world-wide movement of empathy…long gone by now due to the US of A’s subsequent actions (read: Iraq)
But like I said, a lt has happened since – especially the openly belligerent stance of BushCo’s USA vs Iran. In light of which, again, I call your statement saying that “Iranian Generals were quite well dispositioned towards the USA” delusional. Especially in light of the fact that it is more than likely they were kidnapped – guess that would tend to sour one’s disposition; it it wasn’t already. Thus if they weren’t traitors – and as of now there’s no factual information that would point that way – as high-ranking members of the Iranian armed forces they might be more than a little bit PO’d.
And please, as tagos has just shown you, I’d ask you to inform yourself a bit better before you come in here calling citizens of other nations “thick as pig-shit,” for your own ignorance on the topic at hand might lead some to come to the same conclusion about your own countrymen and women.
Fortunately, we have a ton of posts from same that clearly belie such a moronic stance. Would that we also had some Palestinians and Iraqis on-board to dispel you of said misconceptions and/or overt racism about them.
Good day.
What in the name of god are you talking about? You made an assertion that the Iranians being held by the United States are being “waterboarded half to death.” you provided absolutely no evidence to support that claim.
Saying, “the U.S. tortures people” in general in no way proves a specific claim, you can’t use as proof of a specific claim a general claim not relating to the actual case at hand. It honestly seems like to me you’re just trying to spout of a laundry list of criticisms of the United States that honestly doesn’t have much to do with this thread.
No shit, the Northern Alliance speak Dari, which is related to Persian and to a lesser extent, Uzbeka Turkic language. The Hazaras of eastern Afghanistan, located around Herat, speak Farsi.
You say Darsi, I say Farsi, lets call the whole thing off !