Posted on 05/16/2009 9:01:51 AM PDT by lewisglad
According to Iranian sources, US journalist Roxana Saberi was released Tuesday, May 12, as part of an exchange deal under which Washington agreed to free four senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers captured in Irbil, northern Iraq in January 2007. Defined as "diplomats" by Tehran, they ran terror operations and covert arms supplies from Iran then to al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent networks.
Those sources reveal that the Obama administration will also release to Tehran information on the fate of the Iranian diplomat who disappeared in Pakistan four months ago. Pakistani officials claimed at the time that he was kidnapped by the Taliban, tortured and executed, while Tehran insisted he was captured - and is still held - by US special forces because of his ties with al Qaeda.
The four Iranian agents captured in Irbil have not yet been freed, but senior Iranian and Iraqi sources say it will happen soon. The date depends on Tehran satisfying Washington's demand for information on the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who has never been heard of from the time he disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007.
On April 23 this year, Mohammad Hossein Aghasi, the Iranian lawyer the Levinson family hired to trace him said he believes the missing American is alive and held at a secret location in Iran.
Our intelligence sources stress that the Obama administration's willingness for this kind of swap goes partway toward admitting to Tehran's charge that Roxana Saberi performed services in Iran for the United States.
After the Tehran court commuted the eight-year sentence against her for spying to two years suspended, her lawyer revealed that part of the Iranian case against her was that she had a copy of a confidential Iranian report on the US war in Iraq which, he said, she had copied "out of curiosity."
Wouldn’t surprise me. That was probably why they took her in the first place.
Zero is still cosying up to the mullahs, when will he ever learn?
He’s already kowtowed to the Saudi king; why shouldn’t he kiss a bit of Iranian @ss?
Comes from Debka, but seems credible anyway.
4 for 1—not an equal trade. Can only imagine the hand wringing going on in mainstream media’s quarters. Having one of their own imprisoned is unthinkable. Never mind the damage the media does to our troops who are stationed in foreign lands and subject to the traitorous garbage mainstream media prints that puts our troops in harms way. And the powers that be will see that she gets the highest journalism award possible for her endurance. Never mind that she’s Iranian, hasn’t worked in publishing for some years and has been willingly living in Iran for 7 years.
Damn filthbag Hussein.Leave it to him to knuckle under to the 9th Century pig fornicators ruling Iran.
Obama’s terrorists for hostages swap.
Give them lobotomies and send them home to sit and drool.
I think it was basically a set-up, and perhaps the objective all along was the release of these 4. Once Bambi, who seems to be panting to be Ahamdinejad’s best friend, got into office Iran knew it was going to be easy sailing from there on.
Hey, if she was over there doing our work, she deserves it! (Though if that’s the case, she’ll probably just return to obscurity.)
Gee, what a great message that sends.
I think the best thing they could have done with these intelligence agents is play mind games on them. Nothing cruel, but that would rattle the heck out of them.
For example, take their fingerprints, foot prints, retinal scans, DNA, voice prints, hair sample, urinalysis, stool sample, blood sample, etc., most of which you can throw away, except for their fingerprints and DNA. Then give them some prettily colored injections of water from syringes of various sizes.
Slip a sleeping pill at random into their food, so they sleep for over a day. When they wake up, a small patch of hair has been shaved on the back of their head.
For some real entertainment, a little medical prussic acid is used to diagnose bladder infections by turning the urine bright blue, otherwise in such small amounts it is harmless. Unless you aren’t expecting your urine to be blue, and are not familiar with the effect. Then it is a tad unnerving.
Acting is also fun. For example, if they accidentally see and hear someone they think is in their high command, casually chatting with their captors, unaware they are being observed through a small crack in a wall, wouldn’t it be entertaining? Especially if it was done when the real person was out of town and alone for a few days, at the time.
Agreed, but if she was over there doing HER work, with no permit from their gov't, why is she OUR problem? We still don't know what happened to the former FBI guy or whatever he was who disappeared a couple of years ago, do we? He's still missing.
“4 for 1—not an equal trade.”
It wouldn’t matter if it were 1 for 1. Negotiating with an unprincipled adversary in this fashion essentially trains them to take high profile hostages whenever they desire a concession from this clueless administration.
When Danny Pearl was taken hostage, Bush didn’t release any high value Al Qaeda operatives. Instead, when Pearl was killed, we went after and convicted Omar Sheikh. The response to this was not an escalating pattern of kidnapping American journalists. Taking a hard line produced a world that arguably was safer for American journalists going forward, however tragic it might have been for Pearl.
Exactly. This just rings the dinner gong.
The worst example of this would be the Gipper’s Arms for Hostages deal that made yanqui-kidnapping big business in Beirut in the eighties.
So much for the ‘Never negotiate with Terrorists’ policy.
I didn’t know that we were in a Cold War with Iran.
Do they have some kind of military equality with the U.S., i.e, nukes?
So much for the strong arm hardball tactics used by the Bush Administration, it is a new era. Now we ask “would you like fries with that?”
Should have left the muslim to rot in the iranian prison!
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