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posted by martyb on Thursday August 04 2016, @12:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the waddle-waddle-quack-quack dept.

The Obama administration quietly shipped $400 million stacked on wooden pallets in an unmarked plane to Iran in January — just as Tehran was releasing four Americans who had been detained there, according to a report.

The huge cash load represented the first payment of a $1.7 billion debt that Iran, at an international tribunal in The Hague, claimed it was owed over a failed 1979 arms deal signed before the fall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal Tuesday night.

The Obama administration was accused Tuesday night of making the cash-for-hostages deal by timing the payout to the release — but US officials said the money was simply part of settling the nearly 40-year-old debt under the terms of the historic nuclear agreement hammered out 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 told the Journal.

Source: New York Post

the Obama administration transferred the equivalent of $400 million to their central banks. It was then converted into other currencies, stacked onto the wooden pallets and sent to Iran on board a cargo plane.

Source: The Wall Street Journal


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 05 2016, @08:32PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 05 2016, @08:32PM (#384613) Journal
    Two more things to note here. First, that this story is IMHO is probably retaliation by the Pakistani intelligence, the ISI. It would have been easy to keep this out of the news, if they were so inclined. People only seem to care about the US's contribution to the mess, not Pakistan's. Second, Iran is not some ignorant and paranoid podunk tribes in the middle of nowhere. They understand spying and propaganda just as Pakistan does. If they want to overreact to perceived US spying, then it doesn't matter if the US actually did anything or not. The pretext will be easy to manufacture. And as to real US spying, we're still left with the reality that it's just not going to do that much harm to Iran especially given that the US has as I noted before, other avenues which would be a little more costly and difficult to achieve the same threat.