The family of Hersh Goldberg-Polin appears on a screen via video link during a news conference in Tel Aviv

Former US president Trump's hush money criminal trial continues in New York City, USA - 13 May 2024

Trump

The Washington Post

US-POLITICS-JUSTICE-COURT-TRUMP

Contributor

For The Washington Post

(Chris Gash for The Washington Post)

APTOPIX Israel Holocaust Remembrance

op-allen-democracypromo

Stormy Daniels

UGCR

RUSSIA-US-DIPLOMACY-BASKET-COURT

(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-LAMOTT

Sonia Sotomayor,Clarence Thomas,John Roberts,Samuel Alito,Elena Kagan,Amy Coney Barrett,Neil Gorsuch,Brett Kavanaugh,Ketanji Brown Jackson,Michael Dreeben

Children holding hands

ONE TIME USE FOR OP-CARNEY KIDS 

FEDERALISTGALA

Four Dalmatian Puppy

other

People visit the site of the Nova festival, in Reim

Fake Electors Indictment Arizona

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

The new dining reality: Smaller groups and shorter weeks

Commanders will open at Tampa Bay and close against the Cowboys; here’s everything we know

The 26 best new restaurants in the D.C. area

Puppy abandoned with heart-rending note is adopted, named Minerva

Man, 91, shocks tiny firehouse with $500K gift: ‘Nobody knew how much I’d saved’

Retired cop meets abandoned baby he helped 23 years ago: ‘What are the odds?’

Netflix will air NFL’s Christmas games, a major step for streaming service

Sam Feist, longtime CNN executive, will become CEO of C-SPAN

Michael Cohen testimony ties Donald Trump to hush money payment

 Key Senate matchups set for November in Maryland, West Virginia

Senators studied AI for a year. Critics call the result ‘pathetic.’

Even remote and hybrid work can burn you out. Here’s how to avoid it.

Biden’s false claim that inflation was 9 percent when he took office

Did Obamacare ‘massively’ increase the cost of health care?

RFK Jr.’s ‘history lesson’ on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flunks the fact test

Look to the cloud to protect the life documents saved on your computer

Can you spot bad financial advice on TikTok? Take our quiz.

5 myths about Social Security as the program faces a funding crisis

U.S. offers aid as Zelensky drops foreign trip due to Russian advance

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico shot and gravely injured

A mountainous country loses its last glacier

How America tried and failed to stay White

After a borderland shootout, a 100-year-old battle for the truth

D.C.’s secret garden

Some cruise prices are about to get a little more clear

When budget flights actually make good budget sense

Tired of overcrowded national parks? Here’s how to go backcountry camping.

Trump allies call trial a ‘sham.’ Public opinion isn’t cooperating.

Biden and Trump agree to CNN debate in June, ABC faceoff in September

Ask Amy: My mom lied about how much she supported my sister

Carolyn Hax: Aging mom’s increasing anxiety robs child of a valued confidante

Miss Manners: Dinner host hates clearing the table for guests

States see legalized sports betting as a tax windfall — but at what cost?

Haiti’s plight is a case study in the ‘responsibility to protect’

No, Apple, people do not want tech to crush everything in its path 

President Joe Biden Joint Chiefs and Combatant Commanders 

Mohammed Dabbous

Five Americans who have been held hostage in Iran are flying to freedom right now, accompanied by two of their spouses. Three of them — Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Shargi — had for years <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/09/11/us-iran-prisoner-exchange/" target=_blank>languished in the notorious</a> Evin Prison.

Their release brings the number of wrongfully detained Americans brought home under <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">President Biden</a> to 35. This demonstrates both the high priority this White House has put on freeing unjustly imprisoned citizens and the reality that hostage-taking by state actors is spiraling out of control. Two more U.S. residents, Shahab Dalili and Jamshid Sharmahd, remain imprisoned in Iran.

In exchange, the United States will release five Iranian citizens either sentenced or with trials pending. And South Korea will transfer to banks in Qatar $6 billion owed to Iran for the purchase of crude oil. Some critics call this transaction a ransom payment. The reality, as usual, is far more complex.

To unpack the details of the deal, I spoke with Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa — and the official who conducted the secret negotiations that led to my own release in 2016. What follows has been lightly edited for length.

Jason Rezaian: How did the Biden administration weigh its decision to make a deal with Iran for the release of the hostages?

Brett McGurk: Absent an arrangement to bring these people home, they would languish in one of the world’s worst prisons for many years to come. Some of our citizens had a potential death sentence hanging over them. All of them are now safely out of Iran.

We recognize there will be criticism of the deal, but the president ultimately needs to weigh the terms available through diplomacy, against leaving American citizens for years, or even decades, in Evin Prison. In this case, the president made the hard decision to move ahead.

Watch 'Bring Them Home,' a Post Opinions short documentary from 2022

The critics bristle at the thought of Iran being paid to release hostages, even if that money is coming from South Korea.

There is a lot of false information out there. These are funds that South Korea deposited into Iranian accounts during past administrations for the purchase of Iranian oil. Under U.S. sanctions regulations, these funds have been legally available for certain forms of bilateral and humanitarian trade.

These are not frozen funds. Iran spent heavily from similar accounts — in China, Turkey, India — under the last administration. The funds in South Korea were not spent for reasons specific to South Korea. What we have agreed to do as part of this deal is to transfer the funds from South Korea to a bank in Qatar. And under terms that provide confidence, the funds will be spent only on a limited category of humanitarian trade: food, medicine and agricultural products. That’s it.

The funds are subject to more legal restrictions now than when they were in South Korea. And for any transactions, funds are used to pay vendors for the humanitarian goods. No funds whatsoever are going into Iran.

These details matter. We took time to get the details right.

Some of the loudest critics of this deal claim the Trump administration was able to get Iran to release U.S. citizens without offering concessions.

Dual citizen cases are the most difficult cases. There were no dual citizens released during the last administration. The deal today involves five dual citizens and two of their family members. As for the American citizens that were released in the last administration, there were trades made — and there were trades made for pretty significant individuals that Iran wanted back and returned to Iran. All that was happening while Iran was benefiting from funds in accounts that are nearly identical to those we just moved to Doha and that we are placing under even stricter terms than existed years ago.

I’m not criticizing the last administration. These are hard decisions for any president. But let’s be honest about the facts.

Critics believe deals like these embolden Iran, rather than deterring its aggression in the region.

When we entered office, Americans were under fire in Iraq and Syria nearly every week. You may recall that three months before the election, the former secretary of state threatened to close down our embassy in Baghdad. Shortly thereafter, the embassy suffered its largest rocket attack in nearly a decade.

The notion that Iran was deterred before President Biden entered office is baseless. President Biden very early ordered airstrikes against the groups attacking our troops. This past March, after a long period with no attacks we tragically saw the first American killed in an Iranian-sponsored attack, in Syria. The president immediately ordered an attack against a facility used by the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) in Syria. There have been no attacks since. And we are fully prepared to respond, should that change.

Separately, we have issued about 30 rounds of new sanctions in the last year alone, increased our military presence in the gulf, and have built international coalitions to isolate Iran in international forums, removing Tehran from the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, for example.

Given the timing of the deal around the anniversary of the killing Mahsa Amini and the protests, some critics suspect that this prisoner deals is part of a larger reopening of discussions with Iran on other issues. Is that true?

This deal was not linked to nuclear diplomacy. It was negotiated separately, in Doha. At the same time, we have told the Iranians in no uncertain terms that diplomacy cannot meaningfully advance if American citizens are being wrongfully detained.

Similarly, if Iran is escalating conflicts in the region, or supplying drones to Russia for its war on the Ukrainian people, this makes the prospect for meaningful diplomacy hard to envision. We have made that clear to Iran repeatedly and consistently. The nuclear talks to date have stalled, and while we will not shut the door to diplomacy altogether, we are also prepared for any and all potential contingencies with respect to Iran’s nuclear program.

This deal does not change our relationship with Iran. Iran is an adversary and a state sponsor of terrorism. We will hold them accountable wherever possible. This is why the president spoke out on the anniversary of Mahsa’s death, and we rolled out 30 new sanctions designations.

Are you hopeful that we’ll see a day that Iran stops taking hostages like this?

We will do our best to deter this outrageous conduct of detaining foreign nationals. Today, we are issuing new sanctions under the Levinson Act, both against the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, and against Iran’s former president [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. You’re going to see those kinds of efforts continue.

But the only way to ensure you are not taken into custody in Iran is by never traveling to Iran. Do not go there for any reason. We really cannot be clearer on this. We recognize people have families in Iran or other reasons to visit. But don’t do it. We are prepared to work with Congress on ways to further deter any American passport holder from traveling there.

Nieman Fellow, Harvard University, Class of 2017

Terker Distinguished Fellow, George Washington University, 2016-2018

Eugene Lang College, New School University, BA in Cultural Studies

Jason Rezaian is a writer for Global Opinions. He served as The Post's correspondent in Tehran from 2012 to 2016. He spent 544 days unjustly imprisoned by Iranian authorities until his release in January 2016.

Jason Rezaian

washpost

On the Iran hostage deal, Bret McGurk explains Biden’s tough decision

the-washington-post

Americans released in a swap deal between the U.S. and Iran arrive in Doha    

Reuters

Opinions

Editorial Board

War in Ukraine

Submit a guest opinion

Global Opinions

prism://prism.query/global-opinions-english-only&limit=20

The Washington Post's Global Opinions section.

Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for opinions on the biggest questions in politics

Washington Post Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.