@ Xenocrates
Why do you keep bring up that Vincennes shot down the Iranian airliner? how did it matter at all if the ship was in Iran's waters or not? If it was found out they weren't in Iran's water, would that case be any different at all? They would still be just as wrong.
Also, that was the US, not the UK.
The precedent is that the Iranians were accused of lying about whether an airliner was shot down inside or outside Iranian territory before and whether the ship that shot it down was in or out of Iranian territory. On that occasion it turned out that they were quite correct on both counts.
It doesn't matter whether it was the British or the US; the fact is that the Iranians weren't lying last time.
I looked at the newspapers today and I now know where the lynch mob attitude is coming from - straight from Downing Street. Enough people in the World have lost their heads to unreason without us joining them.
Let me propose two hypotheses:
1) The Royal Navy ordered it's staff into Iranian waters or didn't robustly stop them from operating there.
If the navy admited that they were in breach of law a) they'd embarrass the UK Government at the worst possible time and b) they'd open themselves up to being sued by the families of the arrested sailors.
Under that hyposthesis of course they would lie.
2) The Iranians kidnapped the crew despite being encircled by the armies of the 'victim' nation' and it's ally - which happens to be a superpower. And knowing that said superpower has been hunting high and low for a casus beli against them for two years.
This hypothesis sounds silly, but it may be that they believe war is inevitable anyway and were hoping to either delay it or maybe even push forward the schedule so that the US would be less prepared.
Who's to say where the truth lies? I can only see one more possibility; that this is a mistake of some kind either by the British or the Iranians, perhaps akin to the plot of one of the Bond films where the GPS systems were out of callibration.
