My Reelity

Got this from an email :

Terry Jones
Saturday March 31, 2007
The Guardian

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment
of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their
waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives
like this – allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though
it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor
servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing
the picture to be posted around the world – have the Iranians no
concept of civilised behaviour? For God’s sake, what’s wrong with
putting a bag over her head? That’s what we do with the Muslims we
capture: we put bags over their heads, so it’s hard to breathe. Then
it’s perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate
them to the press because the captives can’t be recognised and
humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to
talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the
Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives,
they wouldn’t be able to talk at all. Of course they’d probably find it
even harder to breathe – especially with a bag over their head – but at
least they wouldn’t be humiliated.

And what’s all this about allowing the captives to write letters home
saying they are all right? It’s time the Iranians fell into line with
the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the
privacy of solitary confinement. That’s one of the many privileges the
US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.

The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn’t rush into
charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it’s just
invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all
the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has
only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush
to parade their captives before the cameras!

What’s more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British
prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that
their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting “stress
positions”, which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so
as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is
where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat
so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense
pain and, finally, muscle failure. It’s all good healthy fun and has
the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.

And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV
appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The
newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the
footage and they all conclude that she is “unhappy and stressed”.

What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have
got her “unhappy and stressed”. She shows no signs of electrocution or
burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is
unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by
forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric
shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in
Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the
civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going
on.

As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not
be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our
servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer –
whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by
getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway,
and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in
Iraq.

· Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python
www.terry-jones.net