"Ransom payments lead to future kidnappings, and future kidnappings lead to additional ransom payments. And it all builds the capacity of terrorist organizations to conduct attacks. We must find a way to break the cycle. Refusing to pay ransoms or to make other concessions to terrorists is, clearly, the surest way to break the cycle, because if kidnappers consistently fail to get what they want, they will have a strong incentive to stop taking hostages in the first place."
__David S. Cohen, Treasury Department's Under Secretary for Terrorism and Finance Intelligence, 2012
********quote*****
“As unbelievable as it will be for a lot of people, the two channels [the Iran [nuclear] agreement and prisoner swap] were really separate,” an unnamed U.S. official told Robin Wright of The New Yorker. Yet Iran released these hostages at this opportune time. Unbelievable is a good word for it.
*****endquote*****
Ref: Accuracy in Media
It turns out, . . . it was unbelievable.
********quote*****
The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.
Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.
The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
“With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well,” President Barack Obama said at the White House on Jan. 17—without disclosing the $400 million cash payment.
Senior U.S. officials denied any link between the payment and the prisoner exchange. They say the way the various strands came together simultaneously was coincidental, not the result of any quid pro quo.
*****endquote*****
[boldface added - DD]
Ref: The Wall Street Journal
Well, well, . . . well, . . .
The reader should be pleased to learn that the payoff was made on wooden pallets loaded with Swiss Francs and other European Currency, because it is against the Law to deal with Iran in US Dollars.
The niceties of the Law observed, . . .
