TWENTY YEARS! For the crime of being a conscripted
soldier,'cause you can bet there weren't any Field
Marshal types among the 59. Oh, I Wish there were a Hell.I would deny Persian clerics entry into it until they had served 1,000 years as sentient public toilets. THEN I'd consign each to Hell for
some real torment, and - if Allah were real - He'd
concur.

Interesting and well reported right up until the end, when the Post lets its true colors show with a nasty and completely gratuitous dig at the US:

"During their long twilight in captivity, the men had heard rumors and listened to dispatches from their guards' radios. They heard news of the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War in 1991, and then reports of another battle waged this year by the Americans against Iraq. They were not sure who had won, but they remembered that once the Americans had supported their war against Iran."

It makes it sound like the US was to blame for instigating the Iran-Iraq war.

PJ, didn't you get the memo?

The United States is the omniscient, omnipotent power behind all things evil in this world. If it was horrible, unjust, ugly, sickening, criminal, unholy, immoral, or unintelligent then you can be certain the (Evil) United States of America has had a hand in it.

Im, like, totally shocked that you didn't know!

/sarcasm

The United States is the omniscient, omnipotent power behind all things evil in this world. If it was horrible, unjust, ugly, sickening, criminal, unholy, immoral, or unintelligent then you can be certain the (Evil) United States of America has had a hand in it.

Chomskyism in a nutshell! ;-)

Yep. That's why they were driving around Russian tanks, firing AK-47s and French anti-aircraft missiles.

We make those you know. There never was a cold war. The defense industry just made that up so we could start making multiple weapon types here in the good old U.S.A. Worked out well I think.

I just don't get it.

Why in the heck would Iran WANT to hang onto POWs for 20 years? What's the point? General meanness?

Send some assassins in to visit whoever gave the order to hold these Iraqis for that long.

Remember that Saddam gassed Iranian towns. It wasn't just some gentlemanly conflict - you don't have to look far to read about how vicious that war was. It was a war of annihilation with 1 million dead, a lot of those being Iranian citizens. It's really not that surprising that they'd take it out on these poor guys.

Gives you an idea of what kind of people run the show in Iran....

And there were those who criticized George Bush for including Iran in the "Axis of Evil".

Those wacky Iranians- they sent untrained volunteers out with pitchforks to attack Iraqi defense positions...
Back to Why keep'em for 20 years: yes they are just mean! war trophy's. Now we are keeping those prisoners in guantanimo without even a military tribunal's adjudication as to what kind of a threat they might be or what they might have done. We're supposed to be the good guys- becouse (among other reasons) we believe in the rule of law??

Aaron: the prisoners at gitmo are not POW's, as everyone except you seems to know. They are "illegal enemy combatants", ie, terrorists, who have no country to return to, since they weren't fighting as soldiers for any country.

Yes, this is all very old information which has been around for months if not over a year now, but for the cheap seats: the folks locked up at guantanamo are terrorists, and not subject to the protections granted in the Geneva convention et al.

And YES, we ARE the good guys, because the basic ideology of our government (the constitution, bill of rights, etc) doesn't have as one of it's major planks the total annihilation of entire races of people, the desire to acquire and use WMD on our own people or anyone else we don't like, and the construction of prisons in every town designed to hold and torture people whose political views differ from the despotic, dictatorial for-life emporer/king/general who rules the country by force.

Yes, we ARE the good guys. Are we perfect? No. But I'd also argue a lot of our imperfections are shown when we have to go in and deal forcefully with people who won't play nice, it the BAD guys, like Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc. If they'd play nice, we wouldn't have to be the heavy for our own protection.

All this is mostly completely lost of the radical lefties in this country, who have never had to sacrifice a thing in their life and whose biggest problems have been trying to get a good cell phone signal when they're on retreat somewhere.

MityDK: I think most of this is lost on the folks who lean too far to starboard as well, but it's not just those who are listing so bad they're taking on water over the gunwalls. It's just the fact that they are the ones that are spouting like beached whales that makes their plight so apparent to the rest of us, whichever way we're leaning.