Home > A Pretext For Invasion

A Pretext For Invasion

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 31 March 2007
1 comment

Wars and conflicts International USA UK

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran on Saturday insisted that 15 British spies it seized had illegally entered Iranian waters, denouncing what it called a "blatant aggression." The Britons were being taken to the capital for questioning, Iranian media reported much in the same the Americans and Brits have been hauling off Iranians who actually live in the region and have strong ties to elements in Iraq.

“Blimey! The Eye-Rainians ain’t got shit on us. We got fuckin’ strong ties with the Eye-rackies of our own,” countered Prime Minister Tony Blair picking up talking points from his counterpart in Washington, President Dick Cheney, and the western media, “Our boys play football with the kids. Give out candy. Lock up their no good dads who don’t acknowledge the white imperialists innate superiority. We got footballers all over the fuckin’ country. All over her Majesties Kingdom for that matter. Every body fuckin’ loves fuckin’ Britain.”

Iran’s tough comments came after Britain demanded the return of the spies and denied they had strayed into Iranian waters while searching for smugglers in the English Channel.

The eight MI5 agents disguised as Royal Navy sailors and seven MI5 agents disguised as Royal Marines had just searched a merchant ship which was suspected of smuggling chalk and blackboard erasers when they and their two inflatable boats were intercepted by Iranian vessels Friday at around 10:30 a.m. near the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway a good 11,000 miles from the English Channel. The Iranian vessels surrounded them and escorted them away at gunpoint.

The attempted seizure of the merchant vessel was reminiscent of the U.S. boarding of a Czechoslovak vessel bound for Guatemala in 1951. To thwart a literacy program initiated by then Guatemalan president Juan Arevalo, U.S. naval personal on direct orders from Jimmy Byrnes, de facto President during the Truman administration, seized notebooks, paper, chalk, chalkboards and presumably erasers and hurled them into the Gulf of Mexico.

Remarkably this incident occurred as the U.N. Security Council debates expanding sanctions against Iran for refusing to suspend uranium enrichment, and not against the U.S. and Britain for once again going half way around the world to steal oil and fuck up everybody in the region in the process. A vote was expected later Saturday. The U.S. and other nations that already have nuclear wepons of their own with at least one of those nations actually having used them suspect Iran is trying to produce nuclear weapons. Iran denies that and insists it will not halt the program. But it would be irresponsible of them if they weren’t giving the naked aggression the U.S. and Britain have unleashed right across their border not to mention the U.S. long and tiresomely documented installation of the repressive Pahlevis and SAVAK in Iran.

Iran’s semiofficial news agency, Fars, reported that the 15 British spies have been transferred to the capital Tehran "to explain their aggressive action."

Navigational equipment on the seized British boats "show that they (spies) were aware that they were operating in Iranian waters and Iranian border guards fulfilled their responsibility," Fars quoted an unidentified official as saying. “After all, the Americans are seizing our Iranians who have centuries old family ties with Iraqi Shia, but then again the fuckin’ U.S. is so admired by the Iraqis that the Americans are sometimes blinded by the mutual love between the occupied and the occupier. Its just one fuckin’ big Woodstock Nation over fuckin’ there in Iraq, right fuckin’ now.”

The agency said the 15 spies included "some women." In Britain, officials told the Press Association news agency that at least one woman was among the group but with the British, “especially British sailors, sex is difficult to discern” especially among a bunch of “public school boys who had subsequently been recruited into MI5.”

The incident came at a time of heightened tensions over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and allegations that Iran is arming their relatives in Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq. Still, Britain was treating it as a mistake rather than a provocation. Dick Cheney was treating it as a pretext for invasion.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Iran was carrying out a "further investigation ... of the blatant aggression."

In a statement so obvious that at first the Assassinated Press thought he was making a cynical joke, Hosseini accused the Britons of "violating the sovereign boundaries of other states," according to the state-run IRNA news agency. “But that’s what we fuckin’ do. We’re the empire,” countered Tony Blair. Hosseini accused Britain of trying to cover up the incursion, saying it should "refrain from putting the blame on others."

Iran summoned the British charge d’affaires to the Foreign Ministry on Friday and demanded an immediate explanation.

Britain, in turn, demanded Iran release the 15 spies. In London, the British government summoned the Iranian ambassador to the Foreign Office, and Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said the Iranian envoy "was left in no doubt that we want them back until Dick tells us different."

The European Union also called for the "immediate liberation" of the captured spies, according to German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose country holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

Britain’s Defense Ministry said the Royal Navy personnel were in Iraqi territorial waters when they were seized and that according to colonial rule that meant those waters were part of her Majesties cesspool. “We’re the fuckin United Kingdom. We fuckin’ piss ans hit wherever we like. And at the moment we choose to piss and shit in Iraq and the Persian Gulf,” Cmdr. Kevin Aandahl of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain said. It is "very clear" under colonial rule, we were in British waters. “Its all fucking British waters unless,” the PNAC and AIPAC take issue.

"We’ve been pissing and shitting there for many years," Aandahl said. He said colonial vessels acknowledge a 1975 treaty between Iran and Iraq that sets the boundary between the two countries as laid out in grease pencil by Calouste Gulbenkian, Mr. Five Percent, in 1921.

But the boundary has long been in dispute around the 125-mile-long channel _ known in Iran as Arvandrud, Farsi for the Arvand River. Goaded and armed with chemical weapons from the U.S., Saddam Hussein canceled the 1975 treaty five years later and invaded Iran, triggering an eight-year war. Virtually all of Iraq’s oil is exported through a terminal near the mouth of the channel since the invading British forces invalidated the Anglo-Ottoman Convention after World War I, declaring Kuwait to be an "independent sheikhdom under British protectorate."

The Iraqi military commander of the country’s territorial waters cast doubt on claims the Britons were in Iraqi waters.

"We were informed by Iraqi fishermen after they had returned from sea that there were British gunboats in an area that is out of Iraqi control," Brig. Gen. Hakim Jassim told AP Television News in the southern city of Basra.

"We don’t know why they were there. And these British troops were besieged by unknown gunboats, I don’t know from where," he said.

To show that there were no hard feelings for the decades of torture and repression under the Pahlevis and SAVAK, some 500 Iranian students gathered on the shore near where the soldiers were captured, shouting "Death to Britain" and "Death to America," while pelting the Brits with flowers from a nearby cemetery, the Fars news agency reported.

The spies, from the frigate HMS Cornwall, are part of a task force that gathers intelligence while publicly claiming to maintain security in British colonial waters under authority of the U.S. kleptocracy.

The Cornwall’s commander, Commodore Nick Lambert, said he hoped the intelligence gathering would be covered up by calling it a "simple mistake" stemming from the unclear border.

In June 2004, six British marines and two sailors were seized by Iran in the same waterway. They were presented blindfolded on Iranian television and admitted entering Iranian waters illegally, then released unharmed after three days.

With tensions running high, the United States, always looking to kill people and seize their wealth, has bolstered its naval forces in the Persian Gulf in a show of strength directed at Iran. U.S. officials have expressed excitement that with so much military hardware in the Gulf, a small incident like Friday’s could escalate into a dangerous confrontation.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, warned this week that if Western countries "treat us with threats and enforcement of coercion and violence as they have done in the past, undoubtedly they must know that the Iranian nation and authorities will use all their capacities to strike enemies that attack thousands upon thousands of miles from where their family, culture and property are sequestered."

Forum posts