Posted on 11/13/2006 1:29:31 PM PST by avile
Ahmadinejad - Hostage Taker? November 13, 2006, 2:59 pm by Daniel Pipes*
Soon after his election as president of Iran, on June 25, 2005, pictures of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged showing him as a hostage-taker. An Associated Press photograph showed a man looking very much like a younger version of today’s Ahmadinejad holding a blind-folded man, apparently five days after the U.S. embassy in Tehran was seized on November 4, 1979.
The AP photo of Iranian hostage-takers with American hostages.
Five former American hostages confirmed that Ahmadinejad as one of their captors. William J. Daugherty, a former intelligence officer, said he saw Ahmadinejad 8 to 10 times at the start of his captivity: “I recognized him right off. … I remember so much his hatred of Americans. It just emanated from every pore of his body.”
BBC correspondent John Simpson recalled seeing Ahmadinejad on the embassy grounds. Abholhassan Bani-Sadr, a former president of Iran long living in exile, asserted that Ahmadinejad “wasn’t among the decision-makers but he was among those inside the Embassy.”
But Ahmadinejad’s office denied these allegations and other hostage-takers, some of them now political opponents of Ahmadinejad – including Mohsen Mirdamadi, Hamid Reza, Abbas Abdi, Mohammad-Reza Khatami, and Saeed Hajjarian Jalaiepour – confirmed his account. One former American hostage denied Ahmadinejad had been a captor. Amir Taheri, editor-in-chief of a Tehran newspaper in the shah’s time, concluded that “it is almost certain Ahmadinejad was not directly involved in the US embassy episode.”
Thus did the issue die inconclusively: Ahmadinejad was for sure a central committee member of the main student group behind the embassy takeover, the “Office for Consolidating Unity between Universities and Theological Seminaries,” leaving his precise role in the hostage-taking murky.
A new picture located by Kommersant re-opens this issue, providing new evidence that Ahmadinejad was not some backroom political type but in fact was a automatic gun-wielding hostage-taker. The person pictured here differs from the one in the Associated Press photograph, but should Ahmadinejad’s identity as hostage-taker be established and accepted, it has two implications at this particularly delicate moment in U.S.-Iranian relations.
Ahmadinejad in Kommersant’s newly-located picture (left), and today (right). Click to enlarge.
First, it brings back, especially for Americans over forty years old, the powerful and enduring humiliation of the 1979-1981 embassy takeover, with the likely consequence of hardening U.S. attitudes toward an Ahmadinejad-led government building nuclear weapons. The present alarm over his intentions will be fueled by a renewed mistrust.
Second, although Ahmadinejad is a powerful and dynamic politician, he has many domestic opponents and this evidence provides them with new evidence of his extremism, rashness, and unsuitability to govern the country, which they may be able to exploit.
Given the tepid reception to the picture that surfaced in June 2005, however, I expect that the information in this photograph will also be finessed. The machinery of international politics will likely find it too inconvenient
We must have really done some rotten things there during the Shah's term as our leadership just utterly refuses to bring up the Embassy taking and all that followed. It's like we are afraid of what this guy will say in response.
And when I say rotten things I mean we must have just embraced their methods of getting stuff done. We all know they are rotten.
With all the "biometrics" tools out there, it should have been a relatively simple matter to confirm whether the hostage taker in the photos was, in all probability, Imanutjob. Relative distances between features such as eyes, ears, chin, etc. don't change (without trauma and/or reconstructive surgery). I think there has been a conspiracy of silence about this, because (like him or not) there are people within our own government who believe that we will have to deal with this guy.
will say that i saw Daniel Pipes speak at my college in 2004, and it was great!
it was an amazing thing to hear that mans thoughts
until of course, the MSA (muslim student association) who showed up dressed in the red and white (sort of like a pickanick table) headscarves and started screaming like animals halfway through
pipes was a complete adult about it, though, he just informed them that they could have their turn to question him at the end like the others
campus cops had to come cuz the MSA didn' believe in free speech and dragged them away
great memory though!!
Too bad the science of DNA was in its infancy then. If the hostages had foreknowledge of how we ID people today, one of them could have gotten a piece of Ahm-mad-in-the-head to save for posterity, and to compare with a sample today.
I tend to believe the hostage who ID'd him. You don't forget the face of a rotten bastard who treated you like a dog for days and weeks on end.
Pictures?
None of this matters because of course only George Bush is evil, not Iran or Ahmedinejad, and the US voters just confirmed that they will not want the US to do a G.d. thing about Iran and its evil, tyrannical, genocidal, theocratic leaders. And of course Europe, Russia, China and the UN will do nothing.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he was involved, but that picture doesn't really look like him.
I believe there are people who know. However, sometimes the truth is very unpleasant and people would rather not know it.
On eof the things that rarely change over time is the shape of the nose. Look closely at the left side of his nose. The shape is exactly the same.
It's him.
That's what I noticed. The noses are identical.
Nose looks the same. Can't see the ears on the first pic. That would help.
Maybe Jimmuh Cartuh could confirm or refute this????
The nose of each looks identical to me.
The nose of each looks identical to me.
Since when has truth had anything to do with International politics...
come on u guys
its not ahmadinejad
he spent the entire islamic revolution over at my place
we drank beer, ate fried chicken, and watched south park
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