American Sailors in Iran

Iran has freed 10 U.S. sailors seized on two U.S. Navy [combat] vessels in Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf after determining that the encroachment was due to a failure of navigational systems.

  LA Times

That's damned generous of them.

Wait. What? Both boats had a failure in their navigational system?

Like I said, damned generous.

Iranian officials had vowed to use "Islamic compassion" in determining the fate of the sailors.

Any Donald Trump supporter knows there is no such thing as Islamic compassion, so it could only be incompetence or stupidity that caused the Iranians to release the sailors. Ha ha. We outsmarted them again.

“After considering the technical and operations logs of the boats, we found out they were unintentionally in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s waters,” a corps spokesman was quoted as saying by Fars News. “And after their apologies the two boats were released in international waters.”

[...]

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter applauded the "timely" resolution of the incident.

"I am pleased that 10 U.S. Navy sailors have departed Iran and are now back in U.S. hands," Carter said. "I want to personally thank Secretary of State John Kerry for his diplomatic engagement with Iran to secure our sailors' swift return. Around the world, the U.S. Navy routinely provides assistance to foreign sailors in distress, and we appreciate the timely way in which this situation was resolved."

[...]

The sailors departed Iran’s Farsi Island, where they had been held, on Wednesday morning aboard the same Riverine Command Boats that they had been operating when they “lost contact” with the U.S. Navy, the statement said.

Why is "lost contact" in scare quotes?

What really happened?

I don't know, but if you are a warmongering US citizen (as you SHOULD be, right?), what you heard on your TV last night was something that got your blood boiling.

U.S. media instantly converted the invasion by U.S. ships into Iranian waters into an act of aggression by Iran. That’s, in part, because the U.S. political and media establishment believes the world is owned by the United States (recall how the U.S., with a straight face, regularly condemned Iran for “interference” in Iraq even while the U.S. was occupying Iraq with 100,000 troops). Thus, the U.S. military has the absolute right to go anywhere it wants – even into Iranian waters – and it’s inherently an act of “aggression” for anyone else to resist. That was the clear premise of the bulk of the U.S. commentary last night.

[...]

For the last 15 years, Iran has been almost completely encircled by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. military bases extremely close to Iranian borders. But in the tale told by the U.S. media, it’s Iran that is aggressively threatening the U.S.

[...]

The U.S. does not officially have state TV; it has something much better and more effective: journalists who are nominally independent, legally free to say what they want, who are voluntarily even more nationalistic and jingoistic and government-defending than U.S. government spokespeople themselves.

  Glenn Greenwald

A free (corporate) press.  Freedom of speech, baby.  Freedom of speech.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.