Britney Griner Released In Prisoner Swap

[Dill]

(12-13-2022, 11:59 PM)basballguy Wrote: The chances of Bout contributing to the the death of another human being (within the next 7 years) are far greater than the chances of Griner contributing to the death of a human being….well unless youre married to Griner than the odds are probably the same.

Her sentence was stupid an excessive…I think she was an idiot for risking it.  (It’s possible to think both)

Yay she’s home, sucks she ignorantly put us in a position to have to make a stupid trade like that.

I think it’s totally fair (though I doubt Biden intended it) that she had to stay over there for almost a year to contemplate her choices.  Sorta like missing the bus to school and your parents making you walk the first mile and then they drive you the rest.

I don't read this as the case of a privileged American taking her safety for granted and getting a wake up call in a foreign country. Rather I think this is just hostage diplomacy. Otherwise the usual corruption would have managed her arrest and release in two days.

If I understand your "pros" and "cons" here, leaving the relatively harmless Granger to rot and perhaps die in a Gulag is the better option than freeing Bout because the likelihood of his "contributing to the death of another human being" is greater. The "con" here seems a bit to general, since it could include our own military members, U.S. mercenary corporations, and foreign "friends" who sell arms to the people we want them too. I'm assuming you'd be ok making your "con" more specific--Bout is more likely to contribute to the death of human beings we don't want killed. 

From Nixon to Obama, the U.S. had a policy of NEVER negotiating with "terrorists" to reclaim hostages.* The rationale behind that was that paying ransom would just incentivize hostage taking. That changed in 2014 when Obama traded 5 Taliban for Bo Bergdahl** and a U.S. journalist was beheaded on video by "Jihadi John." Families of hostages developed a stronger lobby for negotiating to get prisoners back. Trump then opened the floodgates, actively negotiating for hostages everywhere, except for Whelan in Russia. Many photo ops there. 

The Bergdahl exchange was more like the conventional exchange of prisoners during war; Griner seems to be on that model, except only one side of the exchange could remotely be cast as a state actor. Now that Biden is president, we should expect people who ten years ago faulted Obama for any kind of negotiation with "terrorists" will now come down on Biden for not doing it enough. 

I tend to agree with C-Dawg here: Bout is only different in degree from any gun merchant who wants guns sold without background checks and other limits, though coordinating his sales with a state's policy agenda; and it is not likely that he will ever be able to step back into the arms trade in his former role.

*The big exception to this was, of course, Reagans trade of arms for hostages--though his intent was to do that quietly. Maybe.
**If you watch Fox, you know the "real" reason for the exchange was to get Iran to sign the no-nuke deal. lol