As Biden correctly said, allies are important. This is something Trump is clearly wrong about. He doesn't believe in allies and partnerships with Western democracies. But he weirdly admires dictators like Putin and Kim Jong-un.
Journalists don't get a pass. There are 190+ countries in the world. A journalist from another country can provide coverage and/or investigate matters for the WSJ. The WSJ can hire a journalist from anywhere. U.S. journalists don't need to be going to Russia and we should not be bailing them out once the reach the find out phase of **** around and find out. If you put yourself in that position, it's stupid, reckless, and selfish and the American people shouldn't be bailing you out. Same with private citizens living in Russia like Paul Whelan, even in 2018, it's absolutely reckless and selfish. People, even in 2018, knew being taken hostage by Putin/the Russian state was a real possibility.
Nah, I don't agree with that. I think we need American journalists in Russia. Sure, a Russian can report from Russia for us, but they will face threats and pressures of their own that may impact their journalism. We won't know what we're missing because we left the field. We should have Westerners there and we should have a State Dept vigorously protecting them. Other professions like basketball player -- they shouldn't be there and I think the Griner episode made that loud and clear.
American journalists shouldn't be there either. They are simply a trade asset available whenever the Russian Federation chooses to make them one. Journalists from any number countries like Bolivia, Switzerland, India, South Africa etc etc can report on Russia and will have far less or no appeal from a state hostage taking standpoint. I don't see any merit behind the argument American journalists must maintain a presence in Russia even though they are subject to becoming a state hostage at any moment.
We don't talk about that here. We don't talk about the American government funding South American right wing death squads for corporate interests.
I understand your stance, but I disagree that they are selfish. Journalists working in Russia take tremendous risks, and there is no guarantee that they would ever be released if held hostage. There may also be circumstances where private citizens knowingly take risks as well (e.g., visiting a dying family member). I don’t want them to take such risks, but I won’t label them as selfish without first understanding why they were there. These individuals also aren’t being “bailed out.” They have already suffered years of false imprisonment.
Of course they are being bailed out. We are spending geopolitical assets - prisoners - to purchase their release on top of the millions of dollars we are assuredly spending in related diplomatic/counselor/negotiation/ travel/hotel/flight services associated with their release. There is, obviously, a geopolitical and real dollar figure price to be paid for all of these folks releases. If you decide to run that risk, go to Russia, that's fine but you should be willing to and made to bear the consequences and the American people shouldn't pay for your freedom. There is no good reason for a private American citizen, journalist or not, to be traveling to Russia. Someone working under the authority of the United States government is an entirely different situation and analysis. I'm personally sympathetic to people, generally, but when you take a reckless and irresponsible course of conduct like they have I don't agree the American people should bear that expense to have them released.
"The expense". There are so many more wasteful things to b**** about. A manufacturer of friction clutch plates sell their clutch plates at 1000 dollars per unit to the DOD and it costs 10 dollars to manufacturer because the executives are buddies with some politicians. There is no expense here that has any tangible effect to American lives or security.
Brittney Griner showed no love for the US in public statements but legit broke laws on foreign soil out of her First World privilege. It's the American way to act ignorant and feel entitled even when you're on the team that feels oppressed and promote slogans of wanting to tear it all down.
Oh, look, "whataboutism" - I'm happy to complain about other government spending as well but that's hardly the subject of this thread.
The government spending you are complaining about is inconsequential especially given how infrequent these type of exchanges are relative to the daily purchase the DOD makes from corrupt contractors. That is my point.
link will work for everyone https://wapo.st/3yq2lhX Opinion: In this prisoner swap, relief, joy — but no moral equivalence Vladimir Kara-Murza, Evan Gershkovich and the others should never have been imprisoned. By the Editorial Board August 1, 2024 at 2:54 p.m. EDT For the political prisoners, journalists and just plain folks subjected to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cruel captivity, freedom on Thursday is an incredible joy. They and their families can savor the end of a long, dark journey that some feared would end in death, as it did for opposition leader Alexei Navalny. We share in their sense of relief, with special satisfaction over the liberation of our Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion contributor Vladimir Kara-Murza and fellow journalist Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal — even as we remember that other innocents, including journalist Austin Tice, remain unjustly held in freedom-starved precincts across the globe. This prisoner swap should never have been necessary because Mr. Kara-Murza, Mr. Gershkovich and the others should never have been imprisoned. They did nothing to justify the long sentences they were given and in most cases did nothing criminal at all. They were seized and imprisoned for exercising their elementary human rights. They were held hostage by a dictator and a police state that reject all principles of civil society and rule of law. What’s more, Russia took them to trade for Russians who committed real offenses, including an assassin, spies and one of the biggest hackers ever apprehended. For the sake of freeing those who were innocent, it is possible to tolerate swapping them. But in the cold geopolitical terms that rule Mr. Putin’s thinking, this is an undeniable win for him. Mr. Kara-Murza, a Russian opposition politician, U.S. permanent resident and protégé of assassinated reformer Boris Nemtsov, twice suffered near-fatal poisoning by Russia for his courageous pursuit of democratic ideals and was sentenced to 25 years in prison on a treason charge that was based in part on a 2022 speech he gave to the Arizona legislature against the war in Ukraine. Mr. Kara-Murza said then: “The whole world sees what the Putin regime is doing to Ukraine. The cluster bombs on residential areas, the bombings of maternity wards, hospitals and schools, and the war crimes. These are war crimes that are being committed by the dictatorial regime in the Kremlin against a nation in the middle of Europe.” Every one of these words remains true. Not one of them should have led to prison. Likewise, Mr. Gershkovich was given a formal press accreditation card by the Russian Foreign Ministry, and he was doing what journalists do — observing and asking questions — when authorities seized him in Yekaterinburg on March 30, 2023, and accused him of espionage. Russian authorities never produced evidence of espionage, and the Journal denied the charges. Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian American journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who returned to Kazan to tend to her elderly mother, was taken hostage last year and sentenced to 6½ years in prison for disrespecting the Russian military. Contrast these cases with that of Vadim Krasikov, one of the Russians just released in the swap. On Aug. 23, 2019, he rode up on a bicycle in Kleiner Tiergarten, a small park in Berlin, and shot to death Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen rebel field commander, who had fought Russia in the Second Chechen War. An ethnic Chechen and citizen of Georgia, Khangoshvili sought asylum in Germany after previous attempts on his life. Mr. Krasikov’s bullets hit him in the head and shoulder from behind. Two teenagers spotted the shooter tossing the weapon, a wig and the bicycle into a river; German police tracked him down and arrested him. Germany sentenced Mr. Krasikov to life in prison in 2021; judges said he acted on the orders of the Russian government, who had given him a false identity, passport and the resources to carry out the killing. This is but one of the many assassinations, within Russia and abroad, that Russia has carried out during Mr. Putin’s quarter-century in power. Also set free was Roman Seleznev, whom the United States sentenced to14 years in prison in 2017 for taking part in a $50 million cyber-fraud ring and for defrauding banks of $9 million through a hacking scheme. In 2016, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison for hacking into point-of-sale computers to steal and sell credit card numbers to the criminal underworld. It became necessary to trade these guilty parties for innocent ones, but let there be no hint of moral equivalency between them — much less between the democracies that sought humanely to end the captivity and the Russian despotism that cynically initiated it.
Why didn't he do it when he wasn't president? If you have the connections, use them. Look at everything Carter did after his presidency; he was a one-term loser, too.
Liberals have a different sense of humor. It's not weird, just different. I would never call someone weird. LOL?
