Excellent News: Britney Griner has been released
On one hand I'm very glad that she doesn't have to spend life in a hellhole of a prison in Russia. I wouldn't wish such a thing on anybody.
But on the other hand I don't have that much sympathy for her. Even though she was using marijuana for medical purposes (I have no problem with that) she really should have known better than to bring it into a country where it's outlawed. Especially one as draconian in their laws as Russia.
There's been many stories in the news over time about Americans who travel abroad thinking they can break the laws in other countries and that their own country will simply bail them out of trouble. That bothers me.
Kraichgauer
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But on the other hand I don't have that much sympathy for her. Even though she was using marijuana for medical purposes (I have no problem with that) she really should have known better than to bring it into a country where it's outlawed. Especially one as draconian in their laws as Russia.
There's been many stories in the news over time about Americans who travel abroad thinking they can break the laws in other countries and that their own country will simply bail them out of trouble. That bothers me.
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I was thinking that too. The other guy's family would be wondering why Biden didn't do that for him?
But the ring wing are out of line (as usual) claiming Greiner's anti-American so should have been left in jail. She still a US born and a citizen, What happened to not leave a fellow American behind on the frontlines
Last edited by cyberdad on 09 Dec 2022, 11:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Kraichgauer
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But on the other hand I don't have that much sympathy for her. Even though she was using marijuana for medical purposes (I have no problem with that) she really should have known better than to bring it into a country where it's outlawed. Especially one as draconian in their laws as Russia.
There's been many stories in the news over time about Americans who travel abroad thinking they can break the laws in other countries and that their own country will simply bail them out of trouble. That bothers me.
Russia has women's basketball, and unfortunately, women basketball players make a lot less than their male counterparts and need to go where they can make the dough.
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Kraichgauer
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I was thinking that too. The other guy's family would be wondering why Biden didn't do that for him?
But the ring wing are out of line (as usual) claiming Greiner's anti-American so should have been left in jail. She still a US born and a citizen, What happened to not leave a fellow American behind on the frontlines
From what orifice are they pulling this notion that Griner is Anti-American? Even if she said something that isn't about marching down the street praising America as God's chosen nation, criticism can be the best language of the patriot.
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From what orifice are they pulling this notion that Griner is Anti-American? .
Only in America can a sports star who represents their country be labelled "unpatriotic" when she is in trouble and needs the help of her country. The MAGAs condemning a fellow American who is innocent to incarceration in a hostile foreign country is literally my definition of unpatriotic
Kraichgauer
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Location: Spokane area, Washington state.
From what orifice are they pulling this notion that Griner is Anti-American? .
Only in America can a sports star who represents their country be labelled "unpatriotic" when she is in trouble and needs the help of her country. The MAGAs condemning a fellow American who is innocent to incarceration in a hostile foreign country is literally my definition of unpatriotic
You couldn't be more right, my friend.
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-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
Wait, it does appear Paul Whelan (the other guy) was part of Biden's deal
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/27/poli ... index.html
This is why I'm so reluctant to travel.
Before I go anywhere I have to consider safety, their legal system, their treatment of women, and whether I'd like to spend the rest of my life in their prisons (or brothels, or worse) if I happen to make a mistake.
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We do negotiate with hostage takers, always have, and always will.
That is why hostage-taking works.
We were swindled.
Who is the Russian arms dealer that the U.S. exchanged for Brittney Griner?
"Viktor Bout, in my eyes, is one of the most dangerous men on the face of the Earth," Michael Braun, the former chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told "60 Minutes" in 2010.
Bout insisted to The New Yorker that he was never a spy, but others, including his former business partner and a former CIA officer, said he had once worked for the GRU, the Soviet foreign military intelligence agency.
In 1995, when he was 28, he began spending time at the cargo hangars in Sharjah's International Airport in the United Arab Emirates, eventually launching his cargo airline, Air Cess, with a small fleet of Russian planes that delivered goods to Africa and Afghanistan.
In the years that followed, Bout helped fuel civil wars across the world by supplying more sophisticated weapons, sometimes to both sides of the bloody conflicts. "If I didn't do it, someone else would," Bout told the New Yorker.
By then, he was on the radar of U.S. and British officials. Peter Hain, the minister of state for Africa in Britain's Foreign Office, sounded the alarm as British soldiers in Africa came under attack by increasingly sophisticated weapons.
"Sanctions-busters are continuing to perpetuate the conflict in Sierra Leone and Angola, with the result that countless lives are being lost and mutilations are taking place. Viktor Bout is indeed the chief sanctions-buster, and is a merchant of death who owns air companies that ferry in arms and other logistic support for the rebels in Angola and Sierra Leone and take out the diamonds which pay for those arms … aiding and abetting people who are turning their guns on British soldiers," Hain told the House of Commons in 2000.
The "Merchant of Death" moniker "had come to Hain spontaneously, as he'd read yet another intelligence briefing on Bout's activities," according to the book "Operation Relentless: The Hunt for the Richest, Deadliest Criminal in History," by Damien Lewis. "It struck an immediate chord and the press took up the hue and cry."
In the U.S., the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, unveiled sanctions against Bout and his companies that froze assets and prevented any transactions through American banks. But his business was so concealed by front companies that the U.S. government unwittingly contracted with two of his companies to deliver supplies to U.S. troops in Iraq.
By 2007, the Drug Enforcement Administration devised a plan to lure Bout out of Russia with an arms deal that would be hard to refuse. The agency hired an undercover agent to contact a trusted associate of Bout's about a big business deal. That exchange led to the first meeting between the DEA's fake arms buyers, who were posing as officials of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, also known as the FARC, and Bout's associate on the island of Curacao, a few hundred miles off the coast of Colombia.
Bout's associate, Andrew Smulian, traveled to Moscow to present the deal to Bout. Smulian met with the undercover operatives two weeks later in Copenhagen, telling them that his business partner liked the deal.
Weeks later, Bout was on his way to Thailand, thinking he would be meeting with FARC officials to discuss shipping what prosecutors said was "an arsenal of military-grade weapons" to attack American helicopters in Colombia.
During a March 2008 meeting in a Bangkok hotel conference room, Bout told the DEA informants posing as FARC officials that he could airdrop the arms in Colombia and acknowledged that the weapons could be used to kill Americans.
After listening in on the meeting, Thai police and DEA agents burst into the room and arrested Bout.
"The game is over," Bout said.
Bout was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Now 55 years old, he had not been due to be released until August 2029, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website.
"They will try to lock me up for life," Bout told The New Yorker before his sentencing. "But I'll get back to Russia. I don't know when. But I'm still young.
Why? Because the return of hostages always takes precedence.
Israel has a reputation for being tough on terrorists. Well.
Israel swaps more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for soldier
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