By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, August 05, 2016
One of my all-time favorite lines is from Henry Thoreau:
“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the
milk.”
It came to mind this week when the White House and State
Department insisted that the charge the U.S. paid a ransom to get back American
hostages was purely circumstantial. Sometimes, a $400 million pay-off in
laundered money, delivered in the dead of night in an unmarked cargo plane
isn’t what it looks like.
January 16 was “Implementation Day” for the nuclear deal
between the United States and Iran, in which the state sponsor of terror
received sanctions relief possibly worth as much as $150 billion — which would
be roughly equivalent to 40 percent of its GDP — in exchange for some
guarantees against developing nuclear weapons . . . for a while. (The merits,
and even the nature, of the Iran nuclear deal are hotly disputed, but that’s a
topic for another time.)
That same day, the Obama administration announced a
prisoner swap between the U.S. and Iran, in which we traded 7 Iranian criminals
and removed another 14 from an Interpol “most wanted” list. In exchange, they
returned four innocent Americans, illegally held by the Iranian regime. Back
then, Secretary of State John Kerry boasted about what a masterful diplomatic
breakthrough it was. Those Americans were freed thanks to “the relationships
forged and the diplomatic channels unlocked over the course of the nuclear
talks,” Kerry preened.
Yes, well maybe. But few things really cement a solid
working relationship like $400 million in cash. Kerry failed to mention that
part in his press conferences or Congressional testimony. In fact, the Obama
administration kept the whole thing a secret.
The White House concedes that it all looks very bad. But
it insists this was in no way a ransom payment; the trout got in the milk for
perfectly normal reasons. You see, the Iranians were suing for funds deposited
with the Pentagon in 1979 for a weapons purchase that was later blocked when
the ayatollahs deposed the Shah. The $400 million wasn’t a ransom; it was
simply the first installment of a $1.7 billion dollar settlement of that
dispute. “We would not, we have not, we will not pay ransom to secure the
release of U.S. citizens,” top White House flack Josh Earnest insisted. That
the money was delivered to coincide with the release of our hostages is little
more than a funny coincidence.
And shame on you for thinking otherwise, Earnest seemed
to be saying Wednesday. The $400 million drop-off was actually a great success
for smart diplomacy, because it saved taxpayers “potentially billions” more if
the arbitration over the matter hadn’t gone our way.
Still, one wonders why, if it was such a laudable and
innocent money-saving maneuver, they kept it all secret from the American
people.
Here’s one possible reason from the Wall Street Journal exposé: “U.S. officials also acknowledge that
Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show
they had gained something tangible.”
Catch that? The Obama administration did not think the
huge pallet of Swiss francs, euros, and other currencies dropped off in the
dead of night was a ransom payment — they just wanted the Iranians to think it
was.
And they bought it! “Taking this much money back was in
return for the release of the American spies,” Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, a
Revolutionary Guard commander, boasted on Iranian state media.
Sometimes you just have to marvel at the way smart people
can talk themselves into stupidity. The whole point of not paying ransoms to
terrorists isn’t to save money. The reason we don’t pay kidnappers is that we
understand that it will only encourage more kidnapping. So letting the Iranians
think the $400 million was a ransom payment is doubly asinine, because it
fooled exactly the wrong people, the wrong way. Who cares if the Obama
administration “knew” it wasn’t a ransom? What mattered was to make it clear to
the Iranians that it wasn’t a ransom, not give them every reason to believe it
was.
Now, because of this pas-de-deux of asininity, not only
have we given the Iranians untraceable walking-around money to give to its
terrorist proxies, we’ve also given them every incentive to kidnap more
Americans — which is exactly what they’ve been doing. But at least the folks at
the State Department can sleep soundly knowing that they didn’t really pay a ransom
— it just looks that way.
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