Now here's a guy whose life story I'm willing to option right here and now... maybe even cut him in on the back-end...
Apparently, it's a distinct possibility that Iran's President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage takers who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. If you're too young to remember or appreciate this, let me just say that this painful event was the second reminder (the first being the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics) that Islamic militants played by a very different set of rules -- namely, none. Of course, now we have September 11 to remind us of that, but this was a big one.
Maybe just a youthful indiscretion?
Here's the low-down so far. Five Americans who were held for more than a year in that hostage crisis believe that Ahmadinejad was one of their captors. As another hostage Chuck Scott told FOX News on Thursday, "You don't forget, even years later. Even if he died his hair blond and shaved his beard, I'd still recognize him." On the other hand, the leader of the hostage takers, Abbas Abdi, says that Ahmadinejad was "definitely" not among the students who took part in the storming of our sovereign embassy.
So, right now, it's a group of hostages saying one thing and a group of former (maybe current) militants saying another. It's even possible that after 26 years, anybody Iranian looks like one of their captors, but they don't sound that tentative on the issue.
People are talking, we'll probably know the answer soon.
If it is true, however, according to these former hostages, Iran's new leader said of them at the time, "These guys are dogs, they're pigs, they're animals. They don't deserve to be let out of their cells." Another said Ahmadinejad was present at an interrogation where the hostage takers threatened to kidnap his son in the United States and "start sending pieces -- toes and fingers of my son -- to my wife." This is pretty tough stuff coming from eyewitnesses.
On the other hand, maybe some will argue that Ahmadinejad is only 48 now. That would have made him only 22 back then. Maybe we should write it all off to a "youthful indiscretion"? Yeah, that's one way to look at it...
Giving a guy who thought storming embassies and taking prisoners was all appropriate behavior, well, giving that guy a nuclear bomb, man, could be a bumpy ride. Fasten your seatbelts.
But in this town, his story still could pull a 30-share!
