Iranian President - 1979 Hostage Taker?

[Harry Tuttle]

Originally posted by GePap
Wow. How irrelevant.

How so? A brutal kidnapper, one who invaded a U.S. embassy and kidnapped U.S. citizens might have just been made the leader of one of the largest arab nations on Earth.

[DanS]

Errrr... ITYM one of the largest muslim nations on Earth?

[GePap]

Originally posted by Harry Tuttle


How so? A brutal kidnapper, one who invaded a U.S. embassy and kidnapped U.S. citizens might have just been made the leader of one of the largest arab nations on Earth.

First, "brutal kidnapper"?

It was a revolution. Stuff happens inRevolutions. Most of the leaders of Arab states are mass killers, and you complain about this?

Second, Iran is NOT ARAB. Its Persian, they speak Farsi.

[lord of the mark]

actually its not clear he was actually there.

[Lancer]

Hey, as long as Jimmy Carter isn't in charge of Iran I'm ok with it.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Harry Tuttle


How so? A brutal kidnapper, one who invaded a U.S. embassy and kidnapped U.S. citizens might have just been made the leader of one of the largest arab nations on Earth.

He can't be worse than other brutal rulers United States has supported.

[Lancer]

MrFun agrees with me yet again.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

arab country? iranians are persians.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
arab country? iranians are persians.

Most Iranians are Persians. There are also minorities of Baluchis, Azeris, Kurds and - guess what - arabs.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
actually its not clear he was actually there.

Yeah, there seems to be conflicting reports:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/06/30/iran.president/index.html

Abbas Abdi, the man well-known to be the leader of the 1979 hostage-takers, told CNN that Ahmadinejad, the Tehran mayor, "absolutely was not" part of the event that involved the captivity of 52 people.

Abdi later became a supporter of reformist President Mohammed Khatami and was recently released from jail for advocating closer ties with the United States.

(So Abdi isn't exactly for protecting a hardliner)

His official biography says that as a student at the University of Science and Technology, he was a member of the Office for Strengthening Unity, the student organization that planned the takeover.

Abdi told CNN that of the Office for Strengthening Unity members involved, none were University of Science and Technology students.

The AP reports that one person who did not recognize Ahmadinejad as a captor was senior defense attache at the time, Col. Tom Schaefer. The AP reported him being more concerned about the return to power of hardliners in Iran than by the thought Ahmadinejad might have been a hostage-taker.

And here apparently is a picture of the hostage taker who is supposedly Ahmedinejad (next to his current pic):



Almost seems like a 'they all look alike' phenomenon.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by GePap
Wow. How irrelevant.

How is it irrelevent that the new head of state participated in taking our own embassy hostage?

[DanS]

Man, this one's mushrooming on the internet...

Ex-Hostages Finger Iran's President-Elect
United States Wants Explanation of Ahmadinejad's Activities in 1979

By William Branigin and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 30, 2005; 4:24 PM

The United States today challenged Iran to answer questions about the reported involvement of the nation's new president in the 1979 seizure of American hostages in Tehran after several former captives identified him as a ringleader.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hard-line mayor of Tehran who decisively won a presidential run-off election last week, was identified by at least half a dozen former hostages as one of the militants who took over the U.S. Embassy in November 1979 and held 52 Americans captive for 444 days. Several former hostages said Ahmadinejad was present during harsh interrogations.

However, former leaders of the takeover said in Iran today that Ahmadinejad was not part of their leadership group, and a spokesman for the president-elect denied that he played any role in the hostage-taking at all.

The controversy revived bitter memories of the embassy seizure and brought to the forefront a dispute that has remained unresolved for 26 years. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were broken over the hostage crisis and have never been restored.

President Bush, speaking to reporters about the upcoming G8 summit meeting in Scotland, said he has "no information" on Ahmadinejad's alleged role in the embassy takeover. "But obviously his involvement raises many questions," Bush said, adding that he was confident the answers would be found.

A State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said the government will "look into this question seriously" to establish the facts. "We have not forgotten" that U.S. diplomats were taken hostage and held for more than a year, he said. "The Iranian government, with respect to this question, has an obligation to speak definitively concerning these questions that have been raised in public by these stories."

The issue is "not a matter just for the United States," McCormack said. "What is at stake here are questions about the ability of diplomats around the world . . . to freely do their work while posted abroad."

For the Bush administration, Iran has presented one of the most challenging aspects of foreign policy. During his first term, divisions within the administration left the White House paralyzed over whether to contain Iran or more actively promote so-called "regime change." The language today reflected a tougher line the administration now intends to take toward the Iranian government, U.S. officials said.

Among the former hostages convinced of Ahmadinejad's role in their ordeal is retired Col. David M. Roeder, 66, who served as deputy Air Force attache at the embassy in Tehran. In a telephone interview from North Carolina, he said Ahmadinejad was present at about a third of his roughly 45 interrogation sessions following the embassy takeover.

Roeder, who was among the most harshly interrogated of the hostages, said Ahmadinejad "seemed to be the next level above the interrogators and the interpreters and the guards." Roeder said the reason he remembers him so vividly is that he was present the first time that interrogators made a specific threat to kidnap his handicapped son in the United States and mutilate him "if I didn't start to cooperate." Roeder said his captors knew his son's school bus number and the time he left home to go to special education classes, apparently as a result of surveillance in the United States.

"That was scary," he said.

Kevin Hermening, a Marine Guard at the embassy and the youngest of the hostages, said of the Iranian president-elect, "It sure seems to me that he was the person doing the interrogations that first day of the captivity. When I looked at his photograph during the election run-off, it looked like him."

Hermening, who ran for Congress twice as a Republican, added: "When I saw his photographs he looked like one of the guards. I do not remember him brandishing any weapons. But I do believe he was one of those leading the interrogations."

Other former hostages said in television interviews today that they also remembered Ahmadinejad as one of their captors after seeing video footage and photos of him from news coverage of the Iranian election.

After several former hostages came forward, federal agencies today began investigating, examining pictures of the hostage-takers and calling in former captives for interviews.

However, Ahmadinejad's office in Tehran vehemently denied the former hostages' assertions. Separate denials also came from two of the embassy takeover's top student organizers, both of whom are considered reformers opposed to Ahmadinejad's election.

"Even if 52 hostages say he was interrogating them, they're either lying or making it up," said Abbas Abdi, one of the former organizers, in a telephone interview from Tehran. "He didn't do it. He wasn't among them at all, for sure."

Iran's president-elect might have come through the U.S. Embassy compound as "many other students came in," Abdi said, speaking through an interpreter. "But he wasn't among the embassy students at all. He was definitely not a member of the students" who organized the seizure.

Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, who for years has acknowledged being the senior mastermind of the takeover, also said Ahmadinejad was not among the leaders.

"The leaders are all well known," he said. "Everybody knows them, and he was not among them."

Iranian officials noted that the three top leaders each represented a major university that belonged to the Office for Fostering Student Unity. Ahmadinejad attended the Science and Industry University, which was not among those universities and is located in a far eastern part of the sprawling Iranian capital.

Since the stunning election upset last week in which Ahmadinejad scored a landslide victory, the Bush administration has ratcheted up its criticism of the theocracy. The State Department Wednesday called for the "immediate and unconditional" release of Akbar Ganji, an Iranian journalist who has challenged Iran's leaders and advocated reform.

"Ganji's courageous efforts to investigate extra-judicial killings by Iranian security forces and his commitment to free speech and democratic government have earned him the respect of many around the world," a statement said.

The administration expressed concern about Ganji's lack of legal representation and his health, saying that "his mistreatment in prison is a serious violation of fundamental human rights."

This week the administration reissued a $5 million reward for three Lebanese who have been indicted for the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847 to Beirut. U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem was tortured and murdered during the ordeal and his body dumped on the Beirut airport tarmac.

One of the alleged lead hijackers is Imad Mugniyah, a member of Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hezbollah organization who has traveled frequently to Iran, according to U.S. officials.

Although the allegations against Ahmadinejad have stirred bad blood over the hostage crisis, some analysts pointed out that many of the former Iranian militants who participated in it have become reformers.

Among them is Asgharzadeh, a former city council member who urged students to "invite all the hostages to return to Tehran" as guests, not hostages, of the Islamic Republic. "Today we invite all the hostages to return to Tehran," he said at the 1998 commemoration of the takeover. "Today we have a new language for the world. We defend human rights."

Mohsen Mirdamadi, another top ringleader, became the chairman of Parliament's foreign relations committee in the late 1990s, at the height of the reform movement. He urged rapprochement with the West, including the United States.

Washington Post staff writer Karl Vick in Istanbul and special correspondent Mehrdad Mirdamadi in Tehran contributed to this report.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by DanS


This is more than a little glib description for what went down.

No it's not. Did we prop up a brutal, unpopular, anti-democratic regime in Iran for decades? Yep. Did that regime regularly torture its own people? Yep. Did the place eventually explode because of it? Yep.

And when it did, what happened? A bunch of Americans -- and not just any Americans but credentialed representatives of the very government that had been propping up their country's murderous dictator -- got taken hostage. Not killed. Not tortured. Just held in captivity. Then released.

Iran has the place it does in our psyche because it was a dramatic moment of loss of innocence, unequaled until it was (far) surpassed by 9/11. It drove home that people around the world hate us, and possibly for good reason; and that we may be helpless to do anything about it. But as these things go, the occupation of the American embassy was practically civil. Ask the marines who lived through the Lebanon barracks bombing; ask Danny Pearl's widow. Compared to the real villainy of the world, both perpetrated against us and perpetrated by us, still being upset about the embassy seizure is like still holding a grudge against the kid who used to give you wedgies in 7th grade.

[snoopy369]

My question would have to be, if he WASN'T involved in the hostage crisis (directly or indirectly), what was he doing not being involved? This guy was at the right age and has the right beliefs (now at least) that he ought to have been part of that group (and is). I have to say I'm slightly annoyed, but not particularly surprised, that a hostage-taker from 1979 was elected. As stated before, he's probably not much worse than many others in the area; and he may have had reasonable moral reasons for doing so.

Regardless, who cares? This guy is nothing more than the Ayatollah's secretary anyway ... (Thanks Time Magazine for that great quote )

[DanS]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
No it's not. Did we prop up a brutal, unpopular, anti-democratic regime in Iran for decades? Yep. Did that regime regularly torture its own people? Yep. Did the place eventually explode because of it? Yep.

And when it did, what happened? A bunch of Americans -- and not just any Americans but credentialed representatives of the very government that had been propping up their country's murderous dictator -- got taken hostage. Not killed. Not tortured. Just held in captivity. Then released.

I thought you were a diplomat? Embassies are off limits. Everybody knows this. Even dumb sh!t Islamists.