Iranian Hostage Crisis Victims Speak Out Against Nuclear Talks, Support Bibi Netanyahu

The 52 Iranian hostage crisis victims held for 444 days in the embassy in Tehran by the Islamic revolutionaries are speaking out against the Iranian nuclear talks. In a report filed by Cristina Corbin and Perry Chiaramonte, the former hostages and their Alexandria-based attorney Thomas Lankford say they want Americans to know that regime cannot be trusted to in the current negotiations.

“Most of them were tortured horribly,” Lankford said of the hostages. “Even [though some were] soldiers, no war experience can prepare you for what they endured. There’s a large degree of mistrust. It’s hard for many of them to know what’s in those discussions.”

The Iranian hostage crisis victims told Corbin and Chiaramonte that they listened to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday as he spoke to a joint meeting of Congress. In his roughly 40-minute speech that was interrupted by bipartisan applause some 40 times, Netanyahu made an impassioned case against the dangers of the Iranian nuclear negotiations, claiming the “bad deal” doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb, but rather “paves the path for Iran to the bomb.”

That doesn’t sit well with the former hostages who suffered for nearly a year and half in the hands of the Iranian revolutionaries.

“I think it’s very naive because the Iranians talk out both sides of their mouth,” said Clair Cortland Barnes, 69, of Leland, N.C, who was a 34-year-old communications officer at the time he was taken hostage. “Their actions betray their conversations. Their conversations say one thing and then they do something else. They have an agenda that is to wipe out Israel and take over America.”

“It doesn’t seem like this is a good deal for the U.S.,” said North Carolina resident David Roeder, 72, a former U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel who was attached to the U.S. Embassy when it was overrun. “It seems as if we are paying a lot of money and not getting much of a return.”

“If they want to negotiate, they have to deal with the issue of the hostage taking, which the current government is still responsible for,” said Donald Cooke, 61, of Maryland, who was the embassy’s vice consul. “The Iranian government has to take responsibility or you can’t take them seriously in any negotiations.”

“Benjamin Netanyahu had a good point when he spoke to Congress,” Cooke said. “Any negotiation should not be about technical issues. The negotiation should be about changing behavior, and it is not.”

At the heart of the issue for the former hostages is the policy of rewarding a regime without demanding real changes or for the Iranians to atone for their crimes.

“They have never been held accountable for what they’ve done to us,” former U.S. Marine Rodney “Rocky” Sickmann, 57, of St. Louis, who was a 22-year-old guarding the embassy in Tehran told FoxNews.com. “How do you trust a government that publicly says Israel needs to be eliminated? Anyone should understand why Israel needs to be concerned.”

In his speech Tuesday, Netanyahu reminded U.S. lawmakers of the crisis that had gripped the nation at another tumultuous time in modern U.S. history. He also went on to characterize Iran’s current actions to destabilize the region during the nuclear talks.

Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee last week testified that the year “2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years,” and revealed that “roughly half of the world’s currently stable countries are at some risk of instability over the next two years.”

In Mr. Sickmann’s opinion, the global instability due to Islamic radicalization can be traced back to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and the regime change that followed shortly after.

“I truly believe that the war on terrorism started on Nov. 4, 1979, when I was a young Marine standing guard at the embassy,” he said. “I was only 30 yards away from that fence when they came over it. They used Iranian women as shields when they broke in because they knew we’d stand down.”