heywood on 11/1/2012 at 08:33
I'm not saying the guy IS a spy, I just found it strange that Tocky would be so quick to buy the guy's story and assume the Iranians have no good reason to suspect otherwise.
SubJeff on 11/1/2012 at 11:34
They're Iranians, they're always wrong.
demagogue on 11/1/2012 at 16:55
To be more precise, they're a theocracy, a police state autocracy at that, where the only truth that matters is that which validates the state, so like the the reports of the old USSR, North Korea, China, Cuba ... yes, basically everything the gov't says should be immediately suspect and assumed as opportunistic & wrong, especially when we're talking about "covert US CIA operatives". Remember they have to be *everywhere* for a police state to justify it's apparatus.
I'm reading the Gulag Archipelago, the instruction manual for these kinds of gov'ts, and you learn very quickly that for a police state, of course every American is CIA trying to overthrow the state and must be preemptively locked up & threatened execution, along with a quota of innocent people coincidentally standing around them for good measure. Bullshit incarceration & execution is what police states DO. That's the primary purpose of governance there; it comes before garbage collection and water services. If there were a rational basis for the execution that would send a bad signal that the gov't was subject to the rule of law, not the kind of message they want to send!
But everybody already knows this, most of all the Arab states surrounding it. You didn't get the memo because Iranian control isn't a real threat to you & cynicism hasn't been burned into your bones like it is there. But that's just the gov't. It has nothing to do with Iranians per se. Most Iranians I personally know are reasonable & respectable people whose word you can trust like anybody else.
edit: Anyway, we're talking about which side to take for granted before you have all the information (which of course always answers every question; exhaustive documentation is everybody's best friend), but if you have to form an opinion before then and pick kneejerk trust or distrust, I think the case for automatic distrust is the right approach.
edit2: Here's a better story on it: (
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/world/middleeast/iran-imposes-death-sentence-on-us-man-accused-of-spying.html)
heywood on 11/1/2012 at 23:20
After the run up to the Iraq war, I'm also skeptical of my own government's information in these circumstances. I don't believe that just because Obama is in office now, our foreign policy motives have suddenly become altruistic.
Given the recent bombings in Iran, assassinations of people involved in the nuclear program, Stuxnet, and our best stealth reconnaissance aircraft operating in Iran, I think there's a lot more going there right now than what is publicly acknowledged.
And let's not put Iran in the same category as North Korea. Iran has been showing police state tendencies since the election and it's following protests, but it hasn't been cut off from the world and fed nothing but government propaganda.
Sg3 on 12/1/2012 at 00:24
Isn't Iran the one with the barbaric execution methods? Slow suspension hangings and public stonings? Anyone who digs that shit is pure fucking dag-nasty evil. At least China shoots you in the head, which should be over quickly. (No telling what they do to you before they shoot you, though.)
But, yeah, the Persian people themselves don't seem to be all that fond of their government. They don't even like being called Iranian--at least not the ones I've talked to. It looks like Iran is like U.S.A. in that the government is nothing but pricks and the people are sick of it but don't know how to change anything. Only the Iranian government is unambiguously worse than any current American government. (To be fair, U.S.A. had roughly the same barbarity in its past execution methods, even recently.)
Tocky on 12/1/2012 at 03:38
Quote Posted by heywood
I'm not saying the guy IS a spy, I just found it strange that Tocky would be so quick to buy the guy's story and assume the Iranians have no good reason to suspect otherwise.
It's marginally possible he, being an ex marine, could have been asked to probe for contacts among cousins but giving any serious mission to a guy coming in on a commercial flight who is a US citizen is beyond the usual CIA stupidity. Given all I've read it's just not neccessary to be that obvious. I'm sure he asked after the state of affairs there because he has family but slip me the plans for zee reactor agent zero? Nah. The spooks have Iranian citizens in much better positions to send info out in less clumsy ways. This is not the age of land lines and carrier pigeons. As you noted Iran is not so closed a system as North Korea.
Plus there is the whole arrest of hikers to gage the validity of Iranian spy paranoia.
heywood on 12/1/2012 at 08:50
Yeah, it's illogical. Given his work on Kuma War he may as well have walked off the plane with a "Nuke Iran" t-shirt while waving American flags in both hands.
