President Obama on Thursday emphatically denied that the $400 million cash payment his administration delivered to Iran on an unmarked cargo plane just as four Americans held hostage inside the rogue nation were released was a ransom payment and charged that his administration had been transparent about the peculiar deal. Donald Trump is wrong to say that the $400 million cash airlifted to Iran was ransom for prisoners.
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Asgard said, “Iran wanted something in exchange for these Americans which is obviously, you know, treating them like bargaining chips, treating them like pawns and getting dollars in exchange”.
The thing about the video, notes the New York Daily News, is that “no one – including American intelligence officials – has any idea what he was talking about”. “We were completely open with everyone again, and it’s interesting to me how this is becoming a story again”, Obama said. They weren’t a secret. The funds were in Swiss francs, not US dollars.
Pastor Saeed Abedini, who was among four Americans released this past January 17, told Fox Business he wound up waiting for an extended time for the second plane to reach the Iranian capital and was never told why the arriving aircraft was so important.
There was “significant litigation risk” as a result of the pending dues which could have cost the U.S. “billions of dollars”, he said, underlining that the United States does “not pay ransom for hostages”.
Obama said there have been gains in weakening IS in Iraq and Syria, but he conceded that the extremist group still poses a threat to the United States as it shifts its tactics to carrying out attacks elsewhere around the world. And they have a ideal tape done by obviously a government camera, and the tape is of the people taking the money off the plane, right?
We’re going to keep going after ISIL on every front across this campaign”, “Even ISIL’s leaders know they are going to lose,”ISIL turns out not to be invincible”.
US President Barack Obama talks about the war on terrorism and efforts to degrade and destroy the IS group.
Republicans were only reviving the issue “because they want to continue to criticize the [nuclear] agreement, and I think they are wrong about that”.
Although it is unclear which video the presidential hopeful was talking about, as many believe there was no such video, he went ahead to attack Obama and said: “We have a president who’s incompetent”.
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After a slow start, the Obama administration appears on track to hit its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States before the end of September. “Now its being characterized by the White House as statecraft”.
