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Iran has made it perfectly clear that the same old sick regime is still in charge
Some of the Americans who know Iranians best — because they were held captive for 444 days in Tehran — are giving a thumbs-down on the nuclear- arms deal negotiated by the US and other world powers.
“There’s no way you can trust them,” said Thomas Schaefer, who was a military attaché when militants stormed the US Embassy in November 1979.
“There are a lot of good Iranians, but the leaders just can’t be trusted,” Schaefer, a retired Air Force colonel, told The Post. “They’re working to obtain nuclear-weapons capability and they’ll do anything. They’re not going to stop.”
Schaefer said the agreement — designed to limit Iran’s ability to develop plutonium for a bomb — was “foolishness.”
Former Iranian hostage C. Cortlandt Barnes of Leland, NC at his home November 25, 2013APClair Cortland Barnes, a retired CIA officer who was also a Tehran hostage, called it “a win-win for them and it’s a lose-lose for us.”
“And what do we get out of it?” Barnes asked. “A lie saying, ‘We’re not gong to make plutonium.’ ”
“It’s kind of like Jimmy Carter all over again,” Barnes said, alluding to President Carter’s bid to free the hostages through negotiations.
Other former hostages support the negotiations as a way to break the 34-year freeze in US-Iranian relations.
“I’m very glad it’s happening,” said Kathryn Koob, who worked for the Iran-American Society and was one of two female hostages. “It’s long overdue.”
A threatening sign appears at the US Embassy in Iran December, 1979APJohn Limbert, the Foreign Service officer who was shown in the opening scenes of the movie “Argo,” said it’s not a matter of trusting Iran but dealing with a regime that sees the agreement as in its interest.
“I would say there is a consensus among the leadership, and the consensus is, ‘We like to stay in power. We like our palaces . . . We’ve seen the alternatives in Egypt and Tunisia,” Limbert told The Associated Press.
Rodney “Rocky” Sickmann, who was then a Marine sergeant, said one of his Iranian captors told him their goal was to use the hostages to humiliate the American government.
Sickmann, 56, suspects the nuclear agreement is more of the same.
“It just hurts. We negotiated for 444 days and not one time did they agree to anything . . . and here they beg for us to negotiate and we do,” he said.
