snatching people

British Marines Captured by Iran: Fake Maritime Boundaries
By Craig Murray
Global Research, March 28, 2007
Craig Murray Web Site

I have been unpopular before, but the level of threats since I started blogging on the captured marines has got a bit scary. It is therefore with some trepidation that I feel obliged to point this out.

The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker.

But there are two colossal problems.

A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force.

B) Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Cornwall and the incident, both were closer to Iranian land than Iraqi land. Go on, print out the map and measure it. Which underlines the point that the British produced border is not a reliable one.
http://iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=122753


For bush and blair to complain about Iran snatching a couple of handfuls of British sailors in contested waters, is ludicrous, and hypocritical in the extreme. The pair have been snatching hundreds of people willy-nilly from all over the world for the past 6 years or so, torturing them, and holding them incommunicado, and without access to legal counsel.

As for the sailors, I have sympathy for them, since they are only pawns in the governments' power games. But bush and blair, please spare us the bleating of pathetic little men.

Legal fog lingers over Guantanamo
by Dan De Luce
3/29/07

GUANTANAMO BAY (AFP) - The case for one Guantanamo inmate, Australian David Hicks, was settled in a plea deal this week, but nearly 400 detainees remain in legal limbo at the US-run prison with no end in sight.

It took years of legal defense work, public pressure and vigorous lobbying from a US ally to resolve the Hicks case, who entered a guilty plea to a watered-down charge of training with Al-Qaeda.

But hundreds of other prisoners face much longer odds in open-ended incarceration at the US naval base in southeast Cuba.

The US administration, which once stridently defended the camp, now says it wants to close the controversial prison eventually and try up to 80 inmates for war crimes.
[...]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070329/pl_afp/usattacksguantanamo_070329141405