His prison swap was a bigger gift to Iran than he ever let on.
The Obama White House’s
high-profile prisoner swap with Iran in 2016 was a much bigger gift to Iran
than the administration ever let on.
That’s the takeaway
from an investigative report from Politico published Monday, which details how
the Obama administration deliberately obscured and downplayed the national
security threat posed by the seven Iranian-born prisoners and 14 fugitives
freed as part of a deal to bring back five American prisoners held captive in
Iran.
A number of them
were involved in helping Iran procure lethal technology for
its military, and
at least one of them was accused of helping Iran procure critical equipment for
the very nuclear programs the Obama administration was trying to halt with the
nuclear deal it struck the year before, according to the article.
If fully
substantiated, the report would underscore that the White House was willing to
go to extraordinary lengths in order to keep Iran on board with the nuclear
deal — so far, in fact, that it was willing to undermine its own efforts to
track and crack down on Iranian weapons programs. It would also mean the White
House was willing to mislead the American public in order to do so.
The prisoners
Obama sent back to Iran weren’t random businessmen
When the Obama
administration announced in January 2016 that it was dropping charges against
seven Iranian-born prisoners as part of the swap, the president and other
senior officials described them as “civilians” and “businessmen.” The
administration said the individuals “were not charged with terrorism or any
violent offenses,” and were merely charged with things like violating sanctions
or the trade embargo against Iran.
But the new
Politico report reveals that the administration’s portrayal of these
individuals, while perhaps technically accurate in a very narrow sense (they
were civilians, and they weren’t charged with terrorism offenses), gave a
deliberately misleading picture of the kind of activity these people were
accused of being involved in.
Indeed, in the eyes
of Obama’s own Justice Department, many of them were engaged in activities that
were directly at odds with the administration’s concerns about Iran’s weapons
programs:
Three allegedly
were part of an illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made
microelectronics with applications in surface-to-air and cruise missiles like
the kind Tehran test-fired recently, prompting a still-escalating exchange of
threats with the Trump administration. Another was serving an eight-year
sentence for conspiring to supply Iran with satellite technology and hardware.
As part of the deal, U.S. officials even dropped their demand for $10 million
that a jury said the aerospace engineer illegally received from Tehran.
Several of the 14
fugitives for whom the administration dropped charges and arrest warrants were
accused of similar activities. The Politico article reports that three of them
allegedly tried to lease US aircraft for an Iranian airline that allegedly
supported Hezbollah, which the US considers a terrorist organization.
Another was
believed to have been part of a smuggling ring that illegally imported US-made
assault rifles into Iran, and yet another was accused of helping procure
“high-tech components for an especially deadly type of IED [improvised
explosive device] used by Shiite militias to kill hundreds of American troops
in Iraq.”
Just so we’re
clear: The Obama administration described a person who had allegedly helped
procure components for IEDs that would be used to kill Americans in Iraq as a
"businessman." That’s like describing Colombian drug lord Pablo
Escobar as an “entrepreneur”: It’s technically accurate, but it's also a
striking omission of critically important details.
The most noteworthy
fugitive on the list was Seyed Abolfazl Shahab Jamili, who was accused of being
“part of a conspiracy that from 2005 to 2012 procured thousands of parts with
nuclear applications for Iran via China” which “included hundreds of U.S.-made
sensors for the uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran.”
What’s important to
note here is that Iran’s progress developing those centrifuges — the ones
Jamili was allegedly helping procure parts for — is part of what prompted the
Obama administration to try to negotiate the nuclear deal in the first place. In
other words, its prisoner swap undermined its own nonproliferation objectives.
“This has erased
literally years — many years — of hard work, and important cases that can be
used to build toward other cases and even bigger players in Iran’s nuclear and
conventional weapons programs,” former Justice Department counterproliferation
prosecutor David Hall told Politico.
When Obama forged
the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, he agreed to lift crippling economic
sanctions in exchange for Iran shipping out a large chunk of its enriched
uranium and taking thousands of centrifuges offline. But the administration
maintained that it still had the right to penalize Iran for developing
ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, and illegally obtaining materials for
its military. The new information about the swap, however, suggests those other
initiatives were not that big of a priority for the administration in light of
the deal.
Obama was well
aware that much of his personal legacy hinged on the outcome of the Iran
nuclear deal. The Politico article shows just how far he was willing to go to
cement it.
Source/Credit: Updated by
Zeeshan Aleem @ZeeshanAleem zeeshan.aleem@vox.com
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