State Department spokesman John Kirby attempted to define the word “ransom” while discussing the Obama administration’s controversial $400 million cash payment to Iran during an interview Thursday on CNN.
Advertisement
Christian pastor Saeed Abedini, former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, and Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian were the four detainees released on January 17.
But critics have said the carefully choreographed payment was, in effect, a ransom paid in violation of USA policy meant to discourage hostage-taking.
“He denied it was for the hostages, but it was”, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said in a speech Thursday night in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The Obama administration is revealing new details about the links between a $400 million cash payment to Iran and the release of four American prisoners in January.
“We don’t pay ransom for hostages”, Obama said earlier this month, adding that Americans are held prisoners around the world and that “we won’t pay ransoms in the future”.
That news broke earlier this week in The Wall Street Journal – which described a “tightly-scripted exchange specifically timed to the release of several American prisoners held in Iran”.
“We were able to conclude multiple strands of diplomacy within a 24 hour period, including implementation of the nuclear deal, the prisoner talks and a settlement of an outstanding Hague tribunal claim”, Mr Kirby said.
“Clinton’s support for Obama’s Iran ransom reflects the same bad judgment that characterized her decision-making as secretary of State, which left the world a more unstable and unsafe place”, he said.
The shipment, on pallets loaded with Euros, Swiss Franks and other currency, was loaded onto an Iranian cargo plane in Geneva, Switzerland, but not allowed to depart for Iran until a Swiss Air Force craft with the Americans on board was allowed to depart from Tehran, the Journal reported. It’s a dispute that goes back to before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the US has felt no particular urgency to pay the money back for the past 37 years.
It was the first installment on a $1.7 billion settlement stemming from the failed US weapons pact with Iran in 1979 just before its last monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was toppled. Both sides have argued over the account and numerous other financial claims ever since.
This website has never breathed fire when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program, but the process by which the Obama administration’s nuclear deal cleared the U.S. Congress was highly suspicious.
The State Department on Thursday said they had withheld the payment as “leverage” but insisted again that it was not a ransom. And the new fallback position is that the payment and the release of the hostages was linked, but that the negotiations were conducted separately, therefore it’s not a ransom. As in the main deal, the Iranians were told they’d get the money owed them if they cleaned up their act. “Feingold should finally stand with Wisconsin, separate himself from the risky Obama-Hillary foreign policy, and condemn the President for lying to the American people”.
Three of the five prisoners, including Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief, were part of a prisoner exchange that followed the lifting of most global sanctions against Iran following a nuclear deal in 2015.
Advertisement
“It was ransom”, said Republican Ed Royce of California, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
