Iran Payment Wasn’t Ransom, but it Was Ransom

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that an American plane carrying 400 million dollars in cash landed in Iran at the precise time the Iranian government released four American hostages.

Critics claim the 400 million was a ransom payment. The White House and State Department deny it emphatically.

They’re right. The 400 million wasn’t a ransom payment, but it was a ransom payment.

The United States sort of owes Iran money. In 1979, the previous government of Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi paid 400 million dollars for weapons. The US never shipped the purchased weapons because Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah’s government and took 52 Americans hostage.

We could have given the money back, but the new Iranian government declared war on us and kidnapped our diplomats, so we didn’t. The Obama administration says we’re just paying Iran back, but the Iranians insist otherwise.

“Taking this much money back was in return for the release of the American spies,” Iranian General Mohammad Reza Naghdi, commander of the Basij militia, said on Iran’s state-run television.

Only the willfully ignorant would claim the American government never lies about anything. Still, Washington is more honest and reliable than Tehran. And State Department spokesman John Kirby insists this is nonsense.

“The negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim…were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home,” he said. “Not only were the two negotiations separate, they were conducted by different teams on each side, including, in the case of The Hague claims, by technical experts involved in these negotiations for many years.”

That’s probably true as far as it goes. If the US owes Iran money, paying it back isn’t the same as paying a ransom because ransom money is extorted rather than owed. Fine.

But that’s not the whole story.

“American victims of Iranian terrorism won judgments against the Islamic Republic in U.S. courts,” Lee Smith writes in the Weekly Standard, “and the Clinton administration, as a Newsweek article reported in January, promised that the settlements would be paid out of the $400 million. But the Clinton White House never reimbursed the Treasury Department, nor did the Bush administration. The $400 million that Obama aides say belongs to Iran should have long ago been distributed to Iran's American victims and their families. Instead, it was U.S. taxpayers who compensated the victims of Iranian terror. And then we paid $400 million a second time, in January, to the Iranians themselves. The $1.3 billion of interest that the United States is supposed to have owed the Iranians is simply a fiction the Obama administration contrived to sweeten the pot, since the United States was under no legal obligation to pay Iran money that was no longer Iran's.”

But let’s put that aside for the sake of discussion. It’s not the whole story either. Assuming the United States legitimately owed Iran this 400 million, what’s up with releasing four American hostages at the very same moment the money arrived?

Did Iran’s ruler just up and decide to release these people because he had a guilty conscience?

Why did the Iranian government snatch these four in the first place? These people had no connection to each other. They were arrested—kidnapped—at different times and in different places. They were all charged with crimes.

Yet they were all released at the same time on the same day and went home on the same plane.

Why?

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/iran-payment-wasn%E2%80%99t-ransom-it-was-ransom?