{"id":181910,"date":"2016-02-12T19:52:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-13T00:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/02\/12\/not-enough-bullets-42\/"},"modified":"2016-02-12T19:52:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-13T00:52:00","slug":"not-enough-bullets-42","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/02\/12\/not-enough-bullets-42\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Enough Bullets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that Republican members of Congress <a href=\"http:\/\/www.france24.com\/en\/20160212-republicans-asked-iran-delay-prisoner-swap-until-after-us-election\">made a request to the government of Iran that they not release detained Americans until after the election<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Iran released four US citizens being held in Iran on January 16, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. In return the US said it was offering clemency to seven Iranians being held for sanctions violations and dropped charges against 14 more.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">In his first interview with French media, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, who is secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, told FRANCE 24 that US Republicans \u2013 wary of allowing President Barack Obama to win a public relations victory ahead of the US presidential election in November \u2013 asked for the swap to be put on hold.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWe were carrying out negotiations with the Obama administration, when representatives of the Republican Party got in touch with us,\u201d Shamkhani said. \u201cAs a favour, they asked us to do what we could to hinder the talks and to push them back until after the next US presidential elections \u2013 in other words, after President Obama&#8217;s departure.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cIt seems that the Republicans relegated humanity to second place after political expediency, which I found very surprising. But we succeeded, and the prisoners were released during Obama\u2019s mandate.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>See also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tasnimnews.com\/en\/news\/2016\/02\/11\/998130\/us-republicans-had-urged-iran-to-delay-prisoner-swap-shamkhani-says\">here<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/gawker.com\/iran-official-claims-u-s-republicans-asked-to-delay-pr-1758491133\">here<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nydailynews.com\/news\/world\/iranian-official-gop-delay-prison-swap-article-1.2529160\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Shades of Ronald Reagan&#8217;s and GHW Bush&#8217;s deal with the Iranian in 1980, the so-called &#8220;October Surprise&#8221;, where they promised to release military hardware if the Iranians held the embassy hostages until after the elections.<\/p>\n<p>I misspoke in the title though, traitors should be hung, not shot.<\/p>\n<p>H\/t JR at the <a href=\"http:\/\/stellarparthenon.org\/phpBB3\/v\">Stellar Parthenon BBS<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that Republican members of Congress made a request to the government of Iran that they not release detained Americans until after the election: Iran released four US citizens being held in Iran on January 16, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. In return the US said it was offering clemency to seven Iranians &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,964,1034,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-foreign-relations","category-iran","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181910"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181910\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}