I am very pleased that the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee have now asked me to give evidence on the question of the Iran/Iraq maritime boundary, for their inquiry into the Iran captives incident. That gives me hope this will be a real inquiry into what happened, and could be very interesting.

The recent UK/Iranian crisis that followed the arrest of 15 British military personnel in the Persian Gulf is now fading into the archives of old news. However, one of the unresolved sideshows concerned the observation that the British Ministry of Defence appeared to issue two different locations for the site of the incident. A freedom [...]

The government is introducing a new incentive scheme for the military. If you get captured you can immediately make a quarter of a miilion pounds, maybe much more. There is so much that can be said about this turning of the Iran captivity into an extension of the Big Brother house. The most important thing [...]

Most of the Iran captives strand, including the bulk of the maritime boundaries discussion, has now slipped off the front page of this weblog, and you need to click the “War and Iran?” category at the top left of the home page to find it in the archive.

I had the interesting experience of sitting on set at BBC News 24 for over an hour today, intermittently talking and intermittently on camera. I had come in to discuss both the maritime boundaries issue and the question of the behind the scenes diplomatic negotiations. As Oliver Miles said today, there were at least ten [...]

I just heard the Iraqi Foreign Minister on BBC Radio “The World at One”. He said “That border is disputed. It has been for many years. It has moved. That is why we had this war of maps…We have agreed with Iran that our technical levels will fix this border including in the Shatt-al-Arab.”‘ Interestingly [...]

Any life saved is a victory, and I am delighted that the maritime incident has been resolved with nobody being killed or even injured. That is the right perspective on this. Today four more unfortunate British serviceman died in Southern Iraq as a result of Blair’s crass Middle Eastern policy. Think of them and their [...]

csmonitor discusses the consequences and lessons from the anticipated British detainee release. “The release of 15 British naval personnel Wednesday, coming after several days of intensified negotiations, was welcomed in Britain as evidence that a “softly, softly” approach could prove effective with Iran ‘ as it did in a similar prisoner crisis three years ago….” [...]

We really do seem to have turned the media tide on this one. The maritime law experts now feel it is safe to pop out of the woodwork and make plain there is no clear boundary, and the politicos are waking up to the fact that the disputed boundary gives you the diplomatic solution. From [...]

It appears that the British navy may have issued two conflicting sets of coordinates for the location of the Iranian-British maritime incident. LFCM have submitted a Freedom of Information query to try and get to the bottom of it. Go here to read more

Translated from the German: In today’s printed version of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Prof Khan of the University for the Federal Armed Forces in Munich confirms Craig Murrays statement: “In their presentation, the British have effectively drawn a fictitious line in their attempt to prove where exactly the soldiers were when taken captive instead of showing [...]

Firstly, many thanks to the Mail on Sunday for being the first bit of the mainstream media ready to give a fair hearing to what I have been saying, and to try and understand the situation rather than just belt out propaganda. At a working level, Whitehall is trying to get reality back into the [...]

Terry Jones makes the legitimate point that we should look at the mote in our own eye. Nor can we just point at the Americans. Baha Musa was undoubtedly no terrorist; yet this father was also undoubtedly beaten to death by Briitish soldiers when in British detention in Iraq. Nobody was convicted. He was by [...]

Foreign Policy magazine has a blog which has just published an article calling me a “gadfly” and saying I am “missing the point”. The point being a highly contentious statement by former Bahraini government legal adviser Kaiyan Kaikobad that the maritime boundary drawn by the UK MOD has become part of international law by usage. [...]

There is no agreed maritime boundary between Iraq and Iran in the Persian Gulf. Until the current mad propaganda exercise of the last week, nobody would have found that in the least a controversial statement. Let me quote, for example, from that well known far left source Stars and Stripes magazine, October 24 2006. ‘Bumping [...]

The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker. But there are two colossal problems. A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has [...]

My two earlier posts have caused quite a stir, so here are some further observations. Sadly, but perhaps predictably, both the British and Iranian governments are now acting like idiots. Tony Blair has let it be known that he is “utterly confident” that the British personnel were in Iraqi waters. He has of course never [...]

I explained that in international law the Iranian government were not out of order in detaining foreign military personnel in waters to which they have a legitimate claim. For the Royal Navy to be interdicting shipping within the twelve mile limit of territorial seas in a region they know full well is subject to maritime [...]

On the morning of the same day when the British marine forces were detained, British sources were busy briefing on Iranian involvement in attacks in Southern Iraq. Obviously, just a coincidence. It is about one year since the last, failed, attempt by the UK to implicate Iran in attacks on their forces in Iraq. The [...]

The capture of British Marines by Iran has happened before, then on the Shatt-al-Arab waterway. It will doubtless be used by those seeking to bang the war drum against Iran, though I imagine it will be fairly quickly resolved. Before people get too carried away, the following is worth bearing in mind. I write as [...]