You are reading news and information on LongIsland.com, Long Island’s Most Popular Website, Since 1996. To “retain maximum leverage” over Iran, the USA withheld the payment until the Americans had left Tehran. He said the USA didn’t trust Iran, because it was taking longer than expected to gather all the Americans on that flight and officials were anxious Iran would renege.
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Earlier this month, when President Obama rejected Republican arguments that he had paid “ransom” to Iran in January to obtain the release of four Americans, we suggested that the president had the better of the argument. Iran wasn’t using the hostages to get more from the United States than it was entitled to; the United States was using Iran’s money – funds Iran had paid for weapons that the US never delivered – to ensure that Iran fulfilled its promise to release Americans who shouldn’t have been held. That is the sum, with interest, held frozen by Washington since 1979, when the pro-US government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in the Islamic revolution. Both sides have argued over the account and numerous other financial claims ever since.
Obama has said his negotiators secured the USA a good deal on a busy diplomatic weekend that also included finalizing the seven-nation nuclear accord.
In April, the US Supreme Court ruled that Iran’s $2 billion of assets held in an American bank be turned over to families of those killed in a 1983 bombing in Beirut and other attacks which Tehran says it has nothing to do with.
“This wasn’t some nefarious deal”, Obama said during an August 4 press conference.
The White House announced in January that the US would pay Iran$400 million in the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the USA and Iran reached to resolve a legal dispute over the failed arms deal.
Some observers, however, said Thursday they don’t see the distinction. Iran asked the U.S.to pressure them into leaving, but the American negotiators refused, he said.
Following the deposing of the Shah of Iran, so called Iranian students stormed the USA embassy and held hostage 66 diplomats and US citizens.
Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said in a statement: “If it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck”. 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.
“The president himself talked about the timing”, Kirby said on Thursday. The Obama Administration has continued to prove it will appease our adversaries and fill the pockets of a regime responsible for the deaths of American soldiers on the battlefield in Iraq, and a government that calls for the destruction of our closest ally, Israel. “There was no benefit to the United States of America to drag this out”. “I’m not going to deny that”, he added.
Congress returns from a lengthy recess after Labor Day.
Illinois Senator Mark Kirk, chairman of the Senate Banking national security subcommittee, is demanding congressional hearings on the isse.
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Recent reporting by The Wall Street Journal has established that the planeload of cash – big bundles of euro and Swiss franc notes – sent to Iran that day was timed to assure the American citizens, aboard a plane leaving Iran, were released first, before Iranian officials could put their hands on the money. Duffy wants responses by Wednesday.
