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Shock: Obama Secretly Shipped $400M to Iran

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President Obama has defended his massive cash shipment to Iran as a legitimate payment.

A shocking new Wall Street Journal report has revealed that this past January the Obama administration secretly shipped $400 million in cash stacked on wooden pallets in an unmarked airplane to Iran. Interestingly, the money was transferred at the same time that Tehran was releasing four Americans who had been detained by the Iranian government.

The massive money shipment was just the first payment of a $1.7 billion debt that Iran, during an international tribunal in The Hague, insisted it was owed in the wake of a failed 1979 arms deal that had been signed before the Shah of Iran was deposed and replaced by a fundamentalist Islamic regime.

The Obama administration was accused last week of carrying out what appeared to be a cash-for-hostages deal by coinciding the payout with the detainees’ release. However, US government officials countered that the money delivery was no more than an aspect of settling the nearly 40-year-old debt under the terms of the historic nuclear agreement that the United States worked out with the rogue Iranian government in 2015.

“As we’ve made clear, the negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim . . . were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home,” State Department spokesman John Kirby stated to the Wall Street Journal.

“Not only were the two negotiations separate,” Kirby continued, “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.”

Yet despite the State Department claim, US officials conceded that Iran wanted the cash in direct exchange for the Americans, thus effectively allowing Tehran to trumpet that it received direct benefit from the detainees’ release.

When President Obama commented on the hostages’ release last January, he said, “With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well.” However, he neglected to mention the $400 million ¬simultaneous payment.

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, an outspoken opponent of the Iran nuclear agreement, accused the president of paying off “a $1.7 billion ransom to the ayatollahs for US hostages,” according to the WSJ. “This break with long-standing US policy put a price on the head of Americans, and has led Iran to continue its illegal seizures” of Americans, Cotton declared.

The United States has a longstanding policy to refrain from paying ransom for hostages. But in 2015, the Obama administration eased that policy following the captures of Americans by ISIS, stating it would not prosecute the relatives of any captives who opted to pay ransoms on their own. The government even noted that it would help families communicate with the terrorists involved.

However, some observers are seriously concerned that paying ransom only serves to encourage further hostage-taking for profit. In fact, since January’s $400 million payment, two Iranian-Americans have been held captive by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Boruch Shubert

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