Vox Sentences: Did the US really pay Iran a $400M ransom?

The belated scandal over the $400 million the US paid Iran in January; hundreds of suspected drug users and dealers killed in the Philippines; President Obama shortens another 214 prison sentences.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

A debt payment dressed up as a ransom

Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

• On Tuesday night, the Wall Street Journal published an article alleging that the US "secretly organized" to pay Iran $400 million in January when Iran agreed to release four Americans detained there.

  [WSJ / Jay Solomon and Carol E. Lee]

• Given that the US had to ask for the release of 10 soldiers detained in Iran when they accidentally entered Iranian waters later that month — and given many hawks' feelings that the US/Iran nuclear deal ratified last year was a gift to Iran — a ransom payment would call into question who really has the power in the relationship.

  [NYT / Michael S. Schmidt]

• Except that this wasn't secret. The US announced in January that it was paying the $400 million, along with future installments totaling about $1.3 billion.

  [NYT / David E. Sanger, Rick Gladstone, and Thomas Erdbrink]

• And it wasn't a ransom payment. It was a settlement. Before the shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, the US sold him $400 million in military equipment — which it never delivered, because the shah was then overthrown, but never paid back either.

  [CNN / Elise Labott, Nicole Gaouette, and Kevin Liptak]

• The US was reportedly concerned that a tribunal in the Hague would order the US to pay $10 billion to Iran in the dispute — so paying them the $400 million balance, and $1.3 billion in interest, seemed like a pretty good deal.

• Of course, the timing of the deal did give the Iranian government the ability to portray the payment as a ransom. And Ann Althouse points out that since the point of not paying ransoms is to keep people from thinking you pay ransoms, there are good questions about whether the US made the right call.

  [Ann Althouse]

• It will not surprise you to learn that Donald Trump is not raising those good questions, and is instead going with the "secret ransom payment" line, and is wrong.

  [AP]

The deadliest campaign promise

Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images

• As many as 700 Filipinos have been killed in the three months since Rodrigo Duterte was elected president.

  [The Guardian / Damien Gayle]

• The killings are part of Duterte's crackdown on suspected drug users and dealers — the platform on which he ran for president, and an expansion of his policy as mayor of the city of Davao. (Most of the deaths are at the hands of police, but about a quarter are vigilante killings.)

  [The Rappler / Pia Ranada]

• From a certain perspective, the crackdown is working. Police say that 114,800 people have turned themselves in for drug crimes, and that crime fell 13 percent from May to June.

  [NYT / Jason Gutierrez]

• But at the very least, the killings are targeting street-level dealers and users. At worst, they're targeting innocents. Rickshaw driver Michael Siaron may have been either; his death (and a front-page newspaper photograph of his widow crying over his body) has raised a public outcry against the otherwise popular Duterte.

  [Philippine Daily Inquirer]

• The people of the Philippines can't say they didn't know what was coming. Under Duterte's mayoralty, Davao saw the rise of "Davao Death Squads" killing drug dealers. Duterte maintained enough distance to claim he had nothing to do with the death squads, but he certainly encouraged vigilantism.

  [The Rappler / Pia Ranada]

• Before Duterte was elected, he promised that he'd kill 100,000 drug dealers. At the time, his campaign shrugged it off as "a strategy to attract voters."

  [CBS News ]

• By the time Duterte (even after the election) called for citizens to kill drug dealers, though, Filipinos should have known what was going on.

  [NYT / Jason Gutierrez]

One weird trick Obama is using to get people out of prison

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

• President Obama shortened the sentences of 214 federal prisoners Wednesday — all but one of whom were serving long sentences for drug crimes.

  [The White House]

• It's more sentences than any president has commuted in a single day in history (though there's a huge asterisk there, since most presidents have focused on pardons of ex-prisoners instead of commutations of current sentences).

  [USA Today / Gregory Korte]

• Notably, dozens of the prisoners Obama granted relief to Wednesday were serving life sentences. Even though many will not be released until Obama leaves office, they're only now able to look forward to release at all.

  [Huffington Post / Ryan J. Reilly]

• This is all part of a targeted White House initiative to reduce the sentences of drug prisoners, who were given sentences during the "tough on crime" era that would be out of line today.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The Obama administration initially speculated it could reduce 10,000 sentences in its last three years. For the first two, the pace was unbearably slow. Now it's finally picked up.

  [NYT / Mark Osler]

• You should expect a lot more commutations before Obama leaves office. The last year is traditionally the biggest year for presidents to use the pardon power — and with criminal justice reform likely dead in Congress, this is probably one of the most powerful tools Obama has to reduce federal mass incarceration.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Leah Libresco]

MISCELLANEOUS

Jonathan Franzen got a lot of flak for admitting he doesn't have many black friends. But he's hardly alone: 75 percent of white people report having no close nonwhite friends at all. [The Guardian / Lindy West]

• A lot of factors are driving Donald Trump's support. His opposition to free trade isn't one of them.

  [Demos / Ned Resnikoff]

• If you're looking for a country whose economy mirrors that of the whole world, you could do a lot worse than Brazil.

  [New Republic / Patrick Iber]

• These days, the worst thing the Olympics does to cheaters is bar them from participating. In ancient Greece, punishment by flogging was also an option.

  [Smithsonian / Naomi Shavin]

• A brief history of manure fires.

  [Wired / Brendan Cole]

VERBATIM

"An Ontario family was having a nice hike Tuesday when Justin Trudeau emerged, shirtless, from a cave." [BuzzFeed / Lauren Strapagiel]

• "Before she stood for the Green Party, [Jill] Stein and Ken Selcer led the alt-folk-rock band Somebody's Sister, which was active during the 1990s. Though the band drew on many different influences, most of the tracks on their albums — 1999's Circuits to the Sun and 1996's self-titled (both available on Bandcamp) — sound like a barefoot Christian rock group striving to capture a Sheryl Crow vibe."

  [The Stranger / Rich Smith]

• "Considering Ali's backstory — do I or do I not remember a little lady faking her own disappearance and subsequent murder? — I think she should be cooler about people suspecting her of crimes and misdemeanors."

  [NY Mag / Jessica Goldstein]

• "More than 90 percent of bulldog puppies are delivered by Caesarean section. That’s because the puppies have such enormous heads that they can’t fit through the mother’s birth canal — and that’s just the beginning of bulldog medical woes."

  [Washington Post / Karin Brulliard]

• "In recent days, I’ve come to wonder whether Khan’s decision to move from the private sanctuary of grief to the most public forum conceivable was directed at their fellow South Asians just as much as it was at Trump and the Republicans — an urgent, at times uncomfortable call to the aunties and uncles of America to rethink their notion of sacrifice."

  [Siddhartha Mahanta]

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