After Iran released ten U.S. Navy sailors they had captured and interrogated the day before, several media outlets reported that the U.S. had apologized to Iran prior to the sailors’ release. To play damage control for the humiliating incident—which occurred on the eve of President Obama’s final State of the Union address and just days before the lifting of sanctions against Iran—Vice President Joe Biden appeared on “CBS This Morning” to emphatically deny that the U.S. had apologized.
“When you have a problem with the boat, (do) you apologize the boat had a problem? No,” Biden told CBS News Wednesday. “And there was no looking for any apology. This was just standard nautical practice.”
Biden went on to portray Iran as having “rescued” the sailors and promptly releasing them as any “ordinary nations would do.”
But newly released footage reveals that Biden lied about there being “no apology.” The U.S. did indeed apologize to Iran, calling the incident our “mistake”:
Iran has openly used the temporary hostage situation to humiliate the United States. Iranian General Ali Fadavi publicly accused the American sailors of “unprofessional” acts and claimed that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif had demanded an apology from the U.S. “Mr Zarif had a firm stance, saying that they were in our territorial waters and should not have been, and saying that they [the US] should apologise,” said Fadavi.
Iran has also just released images of the captured U.S. Navy sailors with their hands on their heads, with the obvious intent to humiliate the U.S. military:
Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to the whole debacle: he thanked Iran.