WHILE the 15 British sailors were being held in comfortable and well fed custody by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, there was another captive, just across the border in Baghdad, who was not so lucky.
He was the Iranian envoy to Iraq, Jalal Sharafi who was kidnapped in Baghdad by men in the Ministry of the Interior’s uniforms, who were in fact CIA agents.
Sharafi, the second secretary at the Iranian embassy and working under diplomatic immunity, says that he was kidnapped by Iraqi agents operating under the supervision of the CIA.
He was released just before the 15 sailors but had a different story to tell. He was not subjected to being called Mr Bean, or to hearing sawing sounds outside his cell, he was just given the standard US treatment, that has been meted out to ‘enemies’ from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib.
The head of the International Red Cross in Tehran says he saw wounds on the Iranian diplomat who told him that they had been inflicted on him by US forces in Baghdad.
The Red Cross official, Peter Stoeker said there were marks on Jalal Sharafi’s feet, legs, back and nose but he was unable to say if they were the result of torture. Sharafi says that the CIA tortured him ‘day and night’.
The doctor’s report on his wounds says that someone had drilled holes in his feet as well as broken his nose, injured his ear and wounded his neck and back.
Stoeker confirmed he saw wounds on Sharafi’s feet, legs, back and nose but not being a doctor he says that he was not able to say if they were the results of torture, and if they were, who inflicted them.
Perhaps he just fell over.
Gordon Johndroe a White House spokesman dismissed Sharafi’s claim as ‘pure theatricals’ being put on by ‘a government trying to deflect attention away from its own unacceptable actions’.
In fact it is well known that the US has its own torture chambers in Iraq and other countries. It is also well known that US puppets in Iraq routinely carry out the same type of tortures that were inflicted on Mr Sharafi.
In fact, one can safely say that the 15 sailors were lucky that they fell into the hands of ‘desperate Iranian fanatical muslims’ and not into the hands of Christian gentlemen.
Another fact, is that far from torture being the exception as far as the US and the UK is concerned, torture and imperialism are inseparable.
This becomes immediately clear to anybody who reads the Red Cross report into Iraq.
They will see that the whole of the Iraqi people are being tortured by the imperialist occupation and its everyday consequences.
Four years after the US-led invasion, the ICRC says the results of the occupation is inflicting ‘unbearable suffering’.
The report is called ‘Civilians Without protection – The Ever-worsening Crisis in Iraq’.
The ICRC’s director of operations Pierre Kraehenbuehl says that he was horrified by daily Iraqi life. He says: ‘I saw a four-year-old boy sitting beside his mother’s body, which had been decapitated by the explosion. He was talking to her, asking her what had happened.’
He adds: ‘The suffering that Iraqi men, women and children are enduring today is unbearable and unacceptable.’
This is the daily torture that arises from the illegal imperialist occupation.
The 15 sailors, in the words of the president of Iran, had a ‘mandatory holiday’ in his country. They were certainly not the victims of torture.
The victims of imperialist torture are the masses of Iraq and Palestine, and those like the masses of Iran who are waiting for the US-UK attack on them that is currently being prepared.
The only answer to this torture is the struggle for the unity of the working masses of the world to end capitalism and smash imperialism by carrying out the world socialist revolution.