The adventures of Richard Engel

"Engel said the captors were trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and allied with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militant group."  Now how did Engel arrive at this conclusion?  Let me guess: his captors told him the following: look. We were trained by Iran, which has a nuclear weapon aimed at the US, and that Hizbullah also trained us on kidnapping and we want you to tell the world through you that we also support the Cuban government and we were on the side of the USSR during the Cold War and we were with native Americans during the white settlement of the US, and we are aligned with the Italian mafia.  So basically, instead of the confession being extracted from the hostages, Mr. Engel (with a long undistinguished career as a Middle East correspondent) was able to extract confessions from his captors who were mysteriously defeated by the heroic Free Syrian Army gang.  Let me go on the record and state: this story is as believable to me as the story of Christopher Hitchens when he ran into Abu Nidal at a street cafe in Baghdad.