Former Hostages ID
Ahmadinejad
NewsMax.com Wires
Saturday, Sept. 17,
2005
by Kenneth R.
Timmerman
NEW YORK - A group of former hostages
from the U.S. embassy in Tehran reaffirmed today there was "no doubt"
that the lead interrogator during their ordeal was the current
president of Iran.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has denied he personally took part in
the hostage-taking, addressed the United Nations General Assembly in
New York today for five minutes, despite a finding by the U.S.
Department of State that he was a "terrorist" and was ineligible for
a visa..
Before he spoke, the former hostages and their supporters held
a vigil in front of the Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran at
3rd avenue and 40th street.
"For twenty-six years, the government of Iran has not been held
accountable for their violation of international law," said Kevin
Hermening, who at 21 was a freshly-arrived Marine guard at the
Embassy and the youngest hostage. "Despite our political differences
as individuals, we all agree as a group that it is time to seek
remedy. Ahmadinejad and his government need to be treated as a
pariah."
Click here for photographs from the press conference.
Barry Rosen, now a professor at
Columbia University, agreed. "We have lived with this for the rest of
our lives," he said. "We were treated like animals."
He said the group of former hostages had resolved to talk anew
about their ordeal in order to put a human face on victims of
torture. "We are talking about the lives of millions of human beings
who are living in pain on a daily basis."
Hermening identified Ahmadinejad as the lead interrogator for
the military and security personnel at the embassy. "He was not an
English speaker, but directed the interrogations. He told [the
interpreters] what to ask. He ordered me to open safes,"
Hermening said.
He said he had spoken to other security officers at the
embassy, including Tom Ahern and Colonel Charles Scott, and that all
agreed there was "no doubt" the lead interrogator was
Ahmadinejad.
Hermening recounted the story of Colonel David Roeder, who has
spoken to reporters but was unable to travel to New York. "Colonel
Roeder's interrogator was the current president of Iran. He told
Rader, 'we know where you live. We know that you have a handicapped
child. We know what time he gets picked up for school. We know where.
If you don't answer our questions as we like, we are going to chop
off his fingers and his toes and send them one by one to your wife in
a box.'"
Iranian human rights activist Dr. Manoucher Ganji helped
convince Hermening, Scott, and fellow hostage William Daughterty to
speak to National Iranian TV (NITV), which broadcasts into Iran from
Los Angeles. In separate interviews this summer, each described his
encounter with the current Iranian president while being held hostage
at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Roeder said that out of his 51
interrogations, Ahmadinejad personally had conducted one-third of
them.
The former hostages said they had recognized Ahmadinejad even
before photographs of the hostage-takers resurfaced in U.S.
newspapers last June, at the time of the first-round of the Iranian
presidential elections. "We knew the man from the movement of his
eyes, his lips. We knew him," Hermening said.
Before the NITV interviews, the U.S. Department of State had
not sought out the former hostages, although they knew that
Ahmadinejad would be applying to travel to the United States to
address the UN General Assembly this week.
"After their statements to an international television
audience, the State Department couldn't do anything else but
recognize him as a terrorist," Ganji said.
Ganji also presented to reporters the former head of a taxi
company in Tehran, who said he was personally assaulted and tortured
by Ahmadinejad in 1981.
Joseph Pirayoff's company was based in the Hotel
Intercontinental in Tehran and provided long-term rentals to U.S.
defense contractors, in addition to taxi services.
During the 1979 revolution, he received a phone call from a
U.S. military attaché at the embassy, asking him to secretly
transport family members of U.S. diplomats to evacuation flights at
the Tehran airport at night.
Nearly two years later, Pirayoff said Ahmadinejad and 25
revolutionary guardsmen stormed his apartment looking for president
Abolhassan Banisadr, who was ousted by Ayatollah Khomeini in a coup
in June 1981. "I told them I didn't know Banisadr," he said.
Ahmadinejad hit him so hard in the face he broke his jaw.
Ganji himself was “on an Iranian
government hit list for eighteen years” while organizing
opposition to the regime from Paris, he said.
Some of the former hostages were so upset that the State
Department had failed to contact them to confirm the reports about
Ahmadinejad that they wrote to Congress last week.
In a letter addressed to the chairman and ranking member of the
House International Relations Committee, Rosen, Doughterty, Roeder,
and Paul Lewis recounted the latest chapter of their saga.
"To our consternation, the administration waited six weeks
[after the election of Ahmadinejad] before contacting ajy
former hostages and then only to arrange future appointment times for
interviews. The State Department began conducting the very first
debriefings on Wednesday, 10 August. Then - incredibly - the very
next day, with the debriefing process scarcely begun. the government
leaked to the media a CIA report that the investigation had already
been concluded that our stated concerns were a case of mistaken
identity."
Initial media reports with the leaked CIA report appeared on
Friday, August 12, just two days after the first debriefings of
former hostages were held. The former hostages have worked with
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R, Fla), who has introduced legislation that
would provide payment to the former hostages and their families.
The new bill, HR 3358, would abrogate the Jan. 19, 1981 Algiers
Accords that prohibited U.S. persons from suing the government of
Iran. The Algiers accords required the United States to release
frozen Iranian government assets in exchange for the hostages, and
sheltered the Iranian government from lawsuit.
More than twenty-four years after their release, the ordeal the
hostages underwent remains with them.
Barry Rosen still recalls with shame signing a "confession"
after his captors threatened to kill him. "I was thinking of my two
young children," he recalled.
Kevin Hermening recalls the day his captors threatened to
execute him, holding him blindfolded and handcuffed while they
shouted execution commands and poked him repeatedly in the back with
automatic rifles. "It was the most frightening experience of my
life," he said.
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