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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (722429)	1/19/2006 7:58:58 PM
From: goldworldnet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

I agree. * * *

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (722429)	1/20/2006 2:20:08 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

It's hard to pinpoint the worst moment of the 444 days, but the mock executions seem a good place to start. For several days in late January and early February of 1980, the captors showed revolutionary films to the hostages, gory movies with scenes that always ended the same way: with a supposed enemy being tortured and shot. Then, one morning, about a week later, Sickmann remembers being jostled awake at 2 a.m. by men wearing masks, just like the executioners in the revolutionary films. Sickmann was pulled out of bed and dragged by his hair to a hallway outside where, he said, the other hostages were lined up against the wall. His heart dropped. "You thought instantly that there had been a military rescue and they're going to shoot us," he said. "You want to be tough in that situation, but everything changes. You lose body fluids. Some were praying, some were cursing left and right." They took Sickmann into a room and told him to strip -- an act of shame in Islamic culture. His mind flew back to the films. There were three men with rifles and he was certain this was the end. They told him to turn around and put his arms in the air, then they blindfolded him, which in the films was the final act before the killing. He braced himself and waited for the bullet to crash into his skull. Only it never came. After a few minutes the guards told him to put on his clothes and go back to his room. And while shots weren't fired, something died in him, in each of them that night. "How does someone ever forget that?" Sickmann, now the director of military sales for Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, said all these years later. "Life was uncertain after that. You didn't know if you would live or die." washingtonpost.com

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (722429)	1/20/2006 2:21:16 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Charles Scott, an Army colonel who was the embassy military attache, often found himself face-to-face at Atlanta Braves games with the man most responsible for his captivity and ultimately his release -- Jimmy Carter. To this day, Scott, now a public speaker, can't forgive the former president for allowing the shah into the country. Still, whenever he would run into Carter, he'd eschew the traditional handshake and bury the former president in a giant hug. Many years ago, Scott offered the Carter Library several boxes of letters he received in the days after his return, but when the library told him he would have to catalogue each envelope, he took the package to the back of his yard and burned it. "Life does go on," he said.