Outrageous!
If the Navy officer is fired, then the Commander-in-Chief should also go!
Via WaPo:
The Navy has fired the commander of the 10 American sailors who wandered into Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf and were captured and held by Iran for about 15 hours.
In a statement Thursday, the Navy said it had lost confidence in Cmdr. Eric Rasch, who was the executive officer of the squadron that included the 10 sailors at the time of the January incident. He was responsible for the training and readiness of the more than 400 sailors in the unit.
A Navy official said Rasch failed to provide effective leadership, leading to a lack of oversight, complacency and failure to maintain standards in the unit. The official was not authorized to discuss the details publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity….
The sailors, nine men and one woman, were detained after their boat drifted into Iranian waters off Farsi Island, an outpost in the middle of the Persian Gulf that has been used as a base for Revolutionary Guard speedboats since the 1980s.
The sailors were on two small armed vessels, known as riverine command boats, on a 300-mile journey from Kuwait to Bahrain, where the Navy’s 5th Fleet is located. The incident, while brief, raised tensions between the U.S. and Iran because of images Iran published of the soldiers kneeling with their hands on their heads. It caused political uproar at home, too, coming on the day of President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address and months after the signing of a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from financial penalties….
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GOP should subpoena every crewman to testify on what happened. If Sec Def doesn’t produce the sailors, impeach him.
POSUS: “The buck stops…uh…there!” It’s unbelievably apparent that the Commander was simply following the “rules of non-engagement and appeasement.” Now who is responsible for developing those guidelines? (Rhetorical)
Although I am not a true believer in Donald Trump, I do believe he would have handled that situation a bit different than Obama
Agree about the Trump support. But, under Trump or most any other leader, it would not have been a situation for the US to handle. Instead, it would have been the Iranian vessel’s captain dealing with the options. The current rules of engagement for US armed forces would be null-and-void under the administration of any real American.
The 0bama administration has been chasing the real men out of the military since day one then fires the OIC for following orders. Gimme a break.
This whole ordeal smells bad from the get go. These guys make this trip routinely and it requires no special navigation skills, though they are all trained to navigate. Coming down from Kuwait, all they need to do is keep the Saudi coast off their right shoulder and drive. All boats have a towing line onboard in the event one boat becomes disable, the other boat just takes the disabled boat in tow and keep moving. You notice, all their weapons were stowed. Why is that?? The NAG (North Arabian Gulf) is an imminent danger area and all weapons stations are to be manned. The provocative actions the Iranian military talked about is more than likely the boat crew breaking out those stowed weapons to defend themselves. On the day of Obama’s final SOTU address, I believe this is all for show. Obama, the great warrior president with exceptional negotiation skills being able to talk down a hostile act with a foreign aggressive nation.
In keeping with Obama’s CINC style, some poor shmuck takes it up the backside, all for the anointed one. This sort of betraying, and deceiving the very men and women who go in harms way for this Nation, is why Obama’s support within the Armed Forces is near, or at, zero.
A few of the issues never explained was why the Navy personnel had their passports and their personal phones on their persons when they were detained? Is that normal for those types of personal items to be on them when they are deplyed?