State Department spokesman John Kirby was asked at Thursday’s press briefing: “In basic English, you’re saying you wouldn’t give them $400 million in cash until the prisoners were released, correct?”As someone wrote, it was ransom, but it also wasn't ransom. We owed them the money, having confiscated it earlier. We had refused to return it to them for years, arguing they were state sponsors of terrorism.
“That’s correct,” Kirby replied.
In an Aug. 4 press conference, President Obama said the opposite. “We do not pay ransom. We didn’t here, and we won’t in the future,” the president told reporters, speaking of the Jan. 17 payment and hostage release.
As a sweetener for the recent nuclear agreement we agreed to return the money plus interest. Then we drug our feet until they released prisoners, treating the actual transfer as though it were ransom.
Ransom is at least somewhat inaccurate. What we did resembles a renter who won't pay his rent until the landlord gets the broken water heater fixed.
