News of the World

Hey, Ho, time for me to critiscise someone whom I have felt the need to support over the past couple of weeks. Our young wren, captured by the iranians. Sorry my dear, but what the hell possessed her, to sell her story to the "News of the world"!!!!

It has been bad enough, the stream of unfounded critiscism which has been aimed at the captives and at women in the military over this matter. But selling your story to the gutter tabloid press takes the biscuit. This has given the "anti" brigade a fistfull of amunition and I am sorry to say, does her cause no good at all.

The decision to allow her, as a serving member of the armed forces, to sell her story, should result in an instantaneous court martial, for whomsoever allowed it!. Whatever did they think they would gain? Whilst I do not doubt her story at all, surely the MOD would have been far better releasing a joint article by all the hostages to explain to the public their ordeal. Thus negating the levels of critiscism levelled at them. To go it alone in this manner has done the "senior service", a great diservice and if any fee has been paid for the story and the interview with Trevor Mc Donald on TV, I feel that all this money should be immediately donated to the armed forces charities, who help those maimed and disabled in combat. Having spoken to some active serving personnel about this whole affair, (both male and female) there is a certain level of disgust about this whole affair, which I feel can do nothing but harm morale and damage relations between men and women serving in the Royal Navy.

The hand of Blair!, seems somewhere to be present in this sorry tale of spin and propaganda I wonder what instructions where given by the government to those who pull the strings at the MOD, in an effort to regain some political standing for "his royal blairness?"
Whilst the way in which we are told the captives were treated, is not up to the standards we would expect. I do not think the way in which we support the Americans treatment and torture of captives at Guantanamo Bay, allows us any moral high ground to critiscise the Iranians for their treatment of our troops...however much I feel their seizure was wrong, we have played a crooked game of international chess with the Iranians for many years and meddled in their internal affairs, been involved in coups and all sorts of skulduggery, so unfortuanately this and incidents like it were always going to happen.

Let us hope that the MOD review its methods and ROE to avoid embarrasing situations like this occurring again.


Big Ian