has it all over the front page of their website.

Were they in Iranian waters or not?

from the same people who have been trying to revise history and "correct" the name of the Persian Gulf.

Maybe it's time to coin a new term - cartoganda.

...too much opprobrium on the media. Amb. Murray isn't necessarily correct. He asserts that the boundaries along the Shatt al-Arab have been set - however, the arbitrary co-ordinate that was used as the start point to set that boundary (back in '75, before Saddam went all postal on it and started what a few purists like myself refer to as the "real" Persian Gulf war) was a point identified as "point R" [pdf here] which was at 29 degrees 51.2'N, 48 degrees 44.68E. From there the frontier ran/runs in a straight line to the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab (i.e., generally WNW). According to the Admiralty, the British team was taken at 29 degrees 50.36'N, 48 degrees 43.08'E, which when I feed it through the lat-long converter, yields a result of approximately 3 klicks West South West of point R (i.e., at a heading of 239 degrees).

The short form? Assuming that I haven't forgotten what I once knew about lat-long co-ordinate systems, given that they were a couple klicks WSW of the start point of a border that runs WNW, it's pretty likely that they have reason for believing themselves to have been in Iraqi waters, unless the Iranians have decided that there's another basis for the frontier.

"Political Islam is a dream or a nightmare, but not a sociological reality." - Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah

Why tempt fate. If they were close, they should not have been that close. Why were they that close if they were so innocent? Doesn't make sense to me.

March 28, 2007 at 2:45 PM

Commentary: Iran's tit for tat

By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large

WASHINGTON, March 28 (UPI) -- For the past four years, British sailors and Marines in zodiac-type rubber boats have been patrolling and checking vessels for smuggling in the narrow Shatt al-Arab waterway. So why did Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps boats wait until March 24 to suddenly surround a British boat and take 15 Brits prisoner (including a woman) -- without firing a shot?

Before declaring a casus belli (an event that provokes, leads to, or is used to justify war), the obvious answer was the U.S. helicopter raid in Irbil Jan. 11 that captured five IRGC operatives posing as Iranian diplomats. At first, Tehran claimed the five were officially accredited consular officials. Along with a treasure trove of documents and computer hard drives, the U.S. raid was an intelligence coup that completed the jigsaw puzzle of Iran's involvement in Iraq from Basra in the south to Irbil in the north, a pattern of subversion that gave Iran more influence in Iraq than the United States.

What appeared to be tit-for-tat military raids also lay the diplomatic groundwork for protracted negotiations for a prisoner exchange. The Iranian decision to take British rather than American soldiers was probably designed to avoid military escalation. President George W. Bush has accused Iran of destabilizing Iraq and warned there would be a nasty response unless the mullahs opted for normal diplomatic behavior.

Taking U.S. prisoners could have triggered U.S. airstrikes against Iran's nuclear facilities. A former British first sea lord, Admiral Sir Alan West, compared British "de-escalatory" rules and U.S. Navy rules of engagement, which spell out the obligation to self-defense. "Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight, we Brits try to step back and that, of course, is why our chaps were effectively able to be captured and taken away," waffled Britain's first sea lord.

more

Mar 29, 2007

THE ROVING EYE
British pawns in an Iranian game
By Pepe Escobar

The 15 British sailors and marines who were patrolling the Shatt-al-Arab - or Arvand Roud, as it is known in Iran - were not exactly indulging in a little bit of Rod Stewart ("I am sailing/stormy waters/to be with you/to be free"). They had their guns loaded. These would certainly have been fired against Iraqi smugglers - or, better yet, the Iraqi resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite. But suddenly the British were confronted not by Iraqi but by Iranian gunboats.

This correspondent has been to the Shatt-al-Arab. It's a busy and tricky waterway, to say the least. Iraqi fishing boats share the

waters with Iranian patrol boats. From the Iraqi shore one can see the Iranian shore, flags aflutter. These remain extremely disputed waters. In 1975, a treaty was signed in Algiers between the shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein. The center of the river was supposed to be the border. Then Saddam invaded Iran in 1980. After the Iran-Iraq War that this sparked ended in 1988, and even after both Gulf wars, things remain perilously inconclusive: a new treaty still has not been signed.

The British are adamant that the sailors were in Iraqi waters checking for cars, not weapons, being smuggled. It's almost laughable that the Royal Navy should be reduced to finding dangerous Toyotas in the Persian Gulf. Some reports from Tehran claim the British were actually checking Iranian military preparations ahead of a possible confrontation with the US.

Western corporate media overwhelmingly take for granted that the British were in Iraqi or "international" waters (wrong: these are disputed Iran/Iraq waters). Tehran has accused the British of "blatant aggression" and reminded world public opinion "this is not the first time that Britain commits such illegal acts" (which is true). Tehran diplomats later suggested that the British might be charged with espionage (which is actually the case in Khuzestan province in Iran, conducted by US Special Forces).

more

Jack Straw (remember him-"dangerously soft on Iran") simply apologized to the Iranians and the soldiers were let go.
Different times.

Everything that isn't a victory is a weakness now,

_{"A bad treaty is better than a good missile" ~ Andrei Kislyakov}

Gwynne Dyer | March 28

Independent - "I don't want to second-guess the British after the fact," said U.S. Navy Lieutenant-Commander Erik Horner, "but our rules of engagement allow a little more latitude. Our boarding team's training is a little bit more towards self-preservation."

Does that mean that one of his American boarding teams would have opened fire if it had been them in the two inflatable boats that were surrounded by Iranian Revolutionary Guard fast patrol boats off the coast of Iraq last Friday? "Agreed. Yes."

Just as well that it was a British boarding team, then. The 15 British sailors and marines who were captured and taken to Tehran for "questioning" last week are undoubtedly having an unpleasant time, but they are alive, and Britain is only involved in two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. If it had been one of Horner's boarding teams, they would all be dead, and the United States and Iran would now be at war.

"Political Islam is a dream or a nightmare, but not a sociological reality." - Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah

Pakistan not to allow its territory to be used against Iran or anybody else

ISLAMABAD: The Foreign ministry has made it clear that it would never allow any country to use Pakistan as a springboard for any war against Iran or any other country for that matter.

The government has undertook to have taken a strong notice of news of a European TV, according to which Pakistan is allegedly supporting an anti-Iranian outfit called Jand Allah, as a part of its covert operations against Iran.

The spokesman of Foreign Ministry has strongly rebutted and condemned the baseless allegations made by the European TV, and said that Pakistan had a strong joint commitment with Iran to fight war against terrorism and other crimes affecting both nations, and government would resist any efforts by anybody aspiring to spoil relations between two Muslim countries.