WNBA player Britney Griner arrested in Russia: updated: wokes expected sellout crowd, nope lol

Dude you are regurgitating basic Twitter rants and this sentiment has been repeated many times here already. Provide something new.


And no, if the Biden administration wanted to pander to the widest voting base they would have released the former Marine.

The Biden administration doesn't have to pander to the left. Biden's angle since he was running in the primaries is his appeal to the widest electoral base.

 

Why would that even be a thing. It would be a slam dunk for the Biden admin to get both. Why would anyone believe this?

 

I don't think it's a political move.

It's just your modern day trade r2pe

 

I dont have twitter so I have no idea what you are accusing me of regurgitating, but ok bro.

You must be smoking crack if you think Biden admin would rather release a Marine which would most certainly be favored by conservatives over an outspoken black celebrity who is LGBTQ+x43z

 

You honestly have zero understanding of the actual average American electorate. The favorability of former Marines is still higher in the US than Black lesbian WNBA players.

I thought you guys like spamming content about how no one cares about the WNBA. Seems like Shrodinger's WNBA as I've said before. It's popular enough that it makes a black lesbian more political viable than a Marine in a prisoner exchange swap.

 

I can think of one former marine that's probably not true of

 

"Hypothetically " is a hilarious term. I'm confident if you weren't white knighting for a black lesbian you wouldn't care.

 

The only reason I need to care about a black lesbian because of the amount of dedication your type of humans spam content that directly makes the public hate them more.

 

This is the worst trade I've seen since Hop for David Johnson lol

 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-terrible-concession-to-putins-russia/

A Terrible Concession to Putin’s Russia
By JIM GERAGHTY
December 8, 2022 10:14 AM

Today you’re going to hear a lot of people defending the Biden administration’s deal to secure the release of Brittney Griner by giving Viktor Bout, the world’s most notorious arms dealer with a metaphorical ocean of blood on his hands, back to Russia. (I called the then-potential deal a “moral abomination” back in August.) Not securing the release of Paul Whelan makes this bad deal even worse.

A lot of defenders of the deal will contend that critics are indifferent to the suffering of Griner, which is a dodge and a smear. The question is not, “is it in the interest of the U.S. government to secure the release of Brittney Griner?” That’s a silly question; the U.S. never wants to see its citizens unfairly detained under brutal conditions on trumped-up charges. The question is, what is an appropriate concession to secure the release of those citizens, and does the payment of the ransom make future problems like this more likely?

It is hard to overstate the crimes of Bout; if any human being deserved to rot in prison for the rest of his days, it’s him. Longtime State Department official Witney Schneidman, who tracked Bout delivering arms to both sides of the Angola civil war, called Bout “the personification of evil.” From the end of the Cold War until his arrest in 2008, if there was an arms embargo, Bout flouted it — Liberia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Congo, Libya. Whenever there was a dictator or warlord who needed weapons to mow down his enemies or suppress a suffering population, Bout was there to make a profit off of bloodshed. He earned his nickname, “the Merchant of Death.”

Douglas Farah, a biographer of Bout, laid out his lifetime of monstrous crimes:

Bout provided tons of guns and ammunition to some of the most vicious warlords in the world and empowered them to carry out unspeakable atrocities. He is responsible for enabling murderous groups to kidnap and train thousands of child soldiers; use rape as a systematic method of terror and control; torture through the mass amputations of arms, legs, ears and lips; slaughter civilians, and help the Taliban take power in Afghanistan. Griner may have been carrying vape cartridges that were banned in Russia but not in much of the world. . . .

I covered the wars and victims of Bout’s weapons trade in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Democratic Republic of Congo as a correspondent for the Washington Post. The Nicolas Cage movie “Lord of War” was loosely based on Bout, and I co-wrote with Stephen Braun a non-fiction account of the savagery he enabled. There are no words to describe the human toll of Bout’s activities on thousands of people, from the armless child amputees in refugee camps to the scorched rural hamlets burned to the ground by marauding children traumatized into killing their own families.​

This summer Farah argued trading Griner and Whelan for Bout was worthwhile, contending that as an old man, Bout was unlikely to return to the arms trade. But there were other consequences glossed over, most notably that by giving Vladimir Putin what he wants, we make other Americans in Russia more likely to be detained and used as bargaining chips in the future. And every other two-bit dictator and warlord around the world is watching and learning, too.

After all, if the U.S. government is willing to release Viktor Bout — at one point, the second-most-wanted man after Osama bin Laden! — under enough pressure, then the U.S. government will release anyone under enough pressure: terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, spies like Robert Hanssen.

It is likely that one of the reasons the Biden administration went ahead with this deal was their confidence that enough allies would choose to characterize it as a major diplomatic victory, not an epic concession to a hostile state that is likely to try to use the same strongarm tactics again in the future.
​

 

No, you hate everything because you failed at life. Be honest. You don't know me whatsoever. Continue to embarasss yourself though. You are good at that

 

I wonder what effect this will have on wnba ratings. I doubt Griner plays again, with all the money she's going to make in interviews, book deals, movie and documentary deals, it would be a waste of time for her to play but the league could use this to guilt fans to watch in order prevent another political prisoner

 

Any proof besides a random Twitter post?

 

Couldn't help yourself, eh? Down the rabbit hole Uncle Tom goes...

 

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/brittney-griner-comes-home

Brittney Griner Comes Home
The Russian government’s decision to use the WNBA star as a bargaining chip illustrates the weakness of its diplomatic efforts.
Nicolaus Mills

December 8, 2022
​

Women’s National Basketball Association star Brittney Griner won’t be spending Christmas in a Russian penal colony. Since Griner’s arrest in February at a Moscow airport, there have been plenty of opportunities for the Russian Federation to reduce her nine-year prison sentence for bringing narcotics into Russia. Finally, one was taken: after months of advocacy and an outpouring of support from her fellow players in the WNBA, Griner was released and returned to the United States on Thursday.

Griner’s value as a hostage was undeniable. She came with the kind of name recognition that no other Americans held by Russian authorities, including former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, had. In a prisoner exchange, Griner was Russia’s best bargaining chip to secure the release of arms dealer Viktor Bout, who will now return to his home country as part of a deal between the U.S. and Russian governments.

The long-run benefits of keeping Griner imprisoned were a different story. Griner was a major star in Russia’s women’s basketball league; holding her in prison only made it less likely that other international sports stars, especially women and African Americans, would want to come to Russia. Indeed, Putin’s treatment of Griner is as clear an indication as any of what separates his right-wing nationalist regime from the diplomatic efforts of the Soviet era, when the government reached out to prominent African Americans in order to use them to illustrate the depth of American racism.

In 1922, for example, just five years after the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union invited the Black American poet Claude McKay for a visit. He spoke openly to Soviet audiences about the racism that Black people living in the United States were subject to. In the 1930s, the Soviets continued their outreach to Black Americans. In 1932, poet Langston Hughes traveled to Moscow as part of a group of over twenty African Americans who had been hired to act in a Soviet film about racism in the American South. Then in 1934, the actor and political activist Paul Robeson came to Russia at the invitation of Sergei Eisenstein, the famed director of Battleship Potemkin.

Robeson was a prize the Soviets held onto as long as possible. He was a featured speaker at the 1949 Soviet Union–sponsored Paris Peace Conference, where he denounced an America in which lynching and legal segregation still existed.

Despite her civilian status, Griner’s treatment more closely resembled that of Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane that was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 on a high-altitude reconnaissance mission. Powers was kept behind bars for two years because President Dwight Eisenhower refused to apologize for the mission. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev waited until John F. Kennedy became president before allowing Powers to be released (along with an American student who had been jailed by East German authorities) in exchange for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.

Perhaps Putin was similarly hoping for a change in American government and the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024. He could have released Griner as a gesture of goodwill to a man he thought of as any ally. Now it appears that Trump’s declining fortunes no longer make him the asset he once was. Putin can take some satisfaction in sewing bitterness by not making Whelan’s release part of the deal. But his course reversal raises the hope that he is aware of when, as with his Ukraine policy, he has backed himself into a corner from which there are no graceful exits.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower. He is a member of Dissent’s editorial board.
​

 

Did Trump ever offer anything for Whelan? I don’t remember hearing anything about negotiations

Putin seems to not want to let him go

 

rut oh

https://www.foreign.senate.gov/pres...z-statement-on-the-release-of-brittney-griner

DECEMBER 08, 2022
Chairman Menendez Statement on the Release of Brittney Griner

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued the following statement on the release of Brittney Griner:

“The news this morning of Brittney Griner’s release is a welcome development toward our collective efforts to secure the return of all those wrongfully detained in Russia. I can only imagine the pain and heartache she and her family have been going through since her detention almost ten months ago, and I join them in this moment of profound relief as she returns to her life here in the United States.

“To be clear, Ms. Griner should have been released immediately and unconditionally a long time ago. Putin has known that all along. This should be a moment of deep reflection for the United States government to recognize we have a serious problem with hostage-taking of Americans. The Russians and other regimes that take American citizens hostage cannot pretend that there is equivalence between the Brittney Griners of the world and people like Viktor Bout, the so-called ‘Merchant of Death.’ Nothing could be further from the truth, and we cannot ignore that releasing Bout back into the world is a deeply disturbing decision. We must stop inviting dictatorial and rogue regimes to use Americans overseas as bargaining chips, and we must try to do better at encouraging American citizens against traveling to places like Russia where they are primary targets for this type of unlawful detention.

“My heart also goes out to the families of other American citizens in Russian prisons and labor camps, including Paul Whelan. They have my renewed commitment and determination to use the power of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to secure Mr. Whelan’s safe return and to continue fighting for the release of all Russian political prisoners, like Vladimir Kara Murza, and all other unjustly detained Americans.”

###
​

 

I wonder if Whelan is going to have a Big Chicken Dinner, like he got from the Marines, if he ever gets back to the States. People act like this guy was a Saint. They totally avoid that he was court-martialed and booted out of the Marines for attempted larceny, three specifications of dereliction of duty, making a false official statement, wrongfully using another’s social security number, and ten specifications of making and uttering checks without having sufficient funds in his account for payment. He also lied in a deposition saying he had an MBA when he doesn't even have a college degree. He "somehow" ended up with a USB drive with list of all the employees at a classified security agency. He claimed his buddy that showed up at his hotel must have slipped it in his pocket.

I'm not saying he shouldn't be back in the States, but to act like he is more deserving than Griner is just bullshit GOP outrage.

 

Bolton seems to say the U.S. turned Russia down:

John Bolton: Well, I really can’t get into specifics, but I’ll just note that Paul Whelan, who was likewise set up by the Russians back in late 2018, so when I was at the White House, is still in custody. And I’ll just note the historical fact that the possibility of a Bout for Whelan trade existed back then, and it wasn’t made, for very good reasons having to deal with Viktor Bout.​