By Russ Read

A former admiral gave the crowd a peek into his own personal experience conducting aggressive ship boardings — under the eyes of armed helicopters no less — during a brief statement Monday about Iran’s recent capture of U.S. Sailors.

Joe Sestak, a retired U.S. navy admiral and current U.S. Senate candidate for Pennsylvania, was responding to a question from John Baer of the Philadelphia Daily News during the event.

“Earlier this month, the Iranian Navy seized 10 U.S. sailors, photographed them surrendering, filmed the U.S. commander apologizing, and forced a female U.S. sailor to remove-to cover her head in Islamic modesty. Is this consistent with the Geneva Convention?” Asked Baer.

Sestak responded with a detailed comparison to his own experience as a naval officer:

You know, if a North Korean vessel came into our waters here, waters we own, like those waters. Were an Iranian warship, like our riverine craft, went into our waters … we would board it, because they’re in our territory. What mischief are they up to? And I would have the crew go to the end of the boat and hold their hands up. I actually did it. I walked in the shoes of my sailors every day out there. I would go out with them on that same riverine craft, and I scaled 40, 50 foot rope ladders to go up the hull of a merchant ship, with a helicopter with a gun down facing the merchant men and women … who we hustled to the back, so we would be safe climbing up, and then with guns, they held it up as we looked for contraband on this neutral merchant ship that might be going into Iraq or Iran.

That’s tough land out there — water. There’s hundreds of boats that go back and forth every day at night. And often … we would actually take a helicopter and start to wash them away and even if necessary, put bullets in the water.

Our vessel went into their land — territory. Did they take propaganda advantage of it? You betcha. But think of this. I would argue that if we had not done the communications with Iran to stop their nuclear weapons program, we could not have picked up a hotline.

When I was an Admiral out there as I end this question, I put out, after I talked with that 3rd Fleet Commander, because it was so hard out there with hundreds of vessels going back and forth that our Navy needed an Incident at Sea Agreement, an INCSEA agreement we had with the Soviet Union, to where when something happened with the Soviet Union, and we had when people were picked up a hotline and we resolved it. Because remember this, when the British sailors were captured in 2007, 13 of them, it took 15 days before they were released. We picked up the phone and resolved it. Because people can be tough back here at home, talking, be out there where we are. And we want to resolve things. Not having to go into conflagration. Thank you.

Sestak’s assertion about the Iran nuclear deal stands in contrast to what some other security experts have said about the implications of the July agreement between Iran and the U.N. security council.

Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a summary of his congressional testimony on the Iran deal in August that “the agreement almost certainly facilitates Iran’s efforts to promote its national security objectives throughout the region (many of which are inconsistent with our own).”

Haas also warned that “Iran is an imperial power that seeks a major and possibly dominant role in the region.”

Jerry Hendrix, a retired U.S. Navy captain and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, wrote an article for National Review on Jan. 18, just days after the release of the sailors, rebuking the event, and the policy that that he claimed spawned it.

“Obama’s foreign policy, from its earliest bows to foreign leaders to its ‘reset’ with Russia and opening of Iran and Cuba, has been all about presenting a more modest America” wrote Hendrix, “this is where we find ourselves today, kneeling on the world’s stage, with our hands clasped over our heads, all the while trying to convince ourselves that this new position demonstrates our strength and earns respect. Civis americanus sum, I am an American citizen. Let the molesting begin.”

Other experts have fallen on Sestak’s side of the argument. Dan Drezner of The Washington Post called the Republican “freak out” over the sailors “silly” and touted the deal as essential to their timely return. The Obama administration, Kerry especially, touted their quick release as a success in a New York Times story that declared the whole thing a result of “warmer relations.”

Still, at least some international lawyers have questioned if Iran was even legally within bounds to board those boats and take those servicemen. Whatever the case, Iran’s capture of the sailors was just one part of what’s become a recent trend of challenging the American military.

Sestak’s full comments can be viewed below.

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