Iran Used ‘Intimidation Tactics’ on American Sailors

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Free Beacon:

Iran used “intimidation tactics” when interrogating the 10 American sailors arrested in the Persian Gulf in January, according to a Navy investigation into the incident.

 

Members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp Navy interrogated the U.S. crewmembers individually to obtain information about U.S. forces, according to the declassified investigation findings released Thursday. Iran’s detention of the American personnel overnight on Jan. 12 violated international law and sovereign immunity, investigators concluded.

 

Details surrounding the incident, which has fueled efforts by Iran to embarrass the United States, have been sparse since U.S. Central Command released a preliminary timeline of the event days after the arrests. The newly released findings cast light on the events leading up to the sailors’ detention, as well as their treatment and interrogation while in Iranian custody.

 

“Interrogators employed intimidation tactics such as slapping the table, spinning the captive’s chair, or threatening to move them to the Iranian mainland; no crewmember was harmed,” the findings state.

 

Iranian personnel demanded to know what the U.S. boats were doing wading into Iranian territorial waters, where they came from, and “where their ‘mothership’ was.” The Iranians interrogated the crewmembers as a group and later individually interrogated seven of the 10 Americans in a separate room. The sole female crewmember’s interrogation was also recorded.

 

The Iranians asked questions about U.S. forces and also collected passwords to the sailors’ personal phones and laptops during their overnight detention.

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Navy commander surrendered to Iran to protect Obama’s nuclear deal

 

The Navy commander in charge of a pair of patrol boats captured by Iranian forces in January opted to surrender rather than fight back, citing later fears that a confrontation could endanger the Obama administration’s efforts to lock in a deal with Tehran on its nuclear program.

In an interview with investigators looking into the January incident, the commander said he surrendered the vessels after calculating his sailors would not be in danger since Iran “wants this nuke deal to go through.”

The interview was one of a several of stunning revelations in the often scathing 170-page report complied by Navy investigators, chronicling the chain of events that led to the apprehension and detention of the 10 American sailors by the Iranian military, after a pair of American patrol boats drifted into the country’s sovereign waters in the Persian Gulf.

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/30/navy-commander-surrendered-to-iran-to-protect-obam/