“We do not pay ransom”. Probably yes and we need to consider ways of responding to hostage taking that disincentivizes the practice without turning imprisoned Americans into pawns.
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Iran released the five detainees on January 16 after the United States had agreed to grant clemency to seven Iranians held mostly for sanctions violations and drop charges against 14 Iranians overseas. And, six months after the Iran deal?
“It is against the policy of the United States to pay ransom for hostages”.
“That was given to us has to be by the Iranians”, he said.
Kerry said he was not aware of any video of the arrival of a bundle of cash, as claimed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Wednesday.
In fact, he said, lawyers had advised him that “there was significant litigation risk, and we could end up losing billions of dollars”. We have two more hostages there right?
Trump went on to speculate that the tape was “given to us” by the Iranians to “embarrass our country and embarrass our president”, apparently concluding that the footage had been released by Iranian intelligence or government security services. “We never have and we’re not doing that now”.
If it does not, “Russia will have shown itself very clearly to be an irresponsible actor on the world stage that is supporting a murderous regime and will have to answer to that on the global stage”, Obama said.
“This story is not a new story”, Kerry told reporters in Argentina. “And, so far as I know, it had nothing to do with any kind of hostage swap or any other tit-for-tat”.
The Indiana Governor was one of the first Republicans to seize the issue beginning on Tuesday night within hours of the initial Wall Street Journal report about the payment. CNN had at the time reported that the transfer had been arranged. Sometimes, a $400 million payoff in laundered money, delivered in the dead of night in an unmarked cargo plane isn’t what it looks like.
“They no longer have the short-term breakout capacity that would allow them to develop nuclear weapons”, he said, adding that even Israel “has acknowledged that this has been a game changer”.
4 that the $400 million cash payment to Iran, which coincided with the release of four Americans held prisoner in Tehran, was not a ransom.
“We do not pay ransom for hostages”, Mr. Obama said at the Pentagon. “It doesn’t represent anything the American people weren’t told by the President and by the administration”. Former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in Iran in 2007, remains missing. The payment was part of a decades-old dispute over a failed military equipment deal dating to the 1970s, before the Islamic revolution in 1979.
Iran has also stepped up its missile program, which United Nations resolutions had banned in addition to proscribing the nuclear program.
Federal law bans the United States from conducting monetary transactions with Iran in US dollars. “Instead what we have is the manufacturing of outrage in a story that we disclosed in January”.
The DOJ did not object to the $1.7 billion settlement with Iran.
These families and individuals had sued the Islamic Republic for damages after the deaths of loved ones or for being the victims themselves of Iran-backed kidnappings or terrorist attacks. You know why the tape was given to us? In practice, it also essentially served as a ransom payment. Marco Rubio of Florida.
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Earnest has insisted that the mysterious cash transfer was due to the USA and Iran not having a formal banking relationship, and was not meant to be secret. State Department Spokesman John Kirby has repeated the Obama administration’s denial, stating that the talks about settling the frozen assets claim and freeing the imprisoned Americans were conducted by entirely different negotiating teams.
