This is the New Yorker, could be liberal but this important story was not posted on.... and that was we exchanged a prisoner of Iran and got one back.
The Real Deal Behind the U.S.–Iran Prisoner Swap
By Robin Wright4:10 P.M.
Donald Trump celebrated a surprise prisoner exchange with Iran in a tweet on Saturday, just hours after a Princeton graduate student and an Iranian scientist were traded on the tarmac of Zurich’s international airport. “Thank you to Iran on a very fair negotiation. See, we can make a deal together!†he wrote. The swap was a rare moment of détente following months of escalating hostilities, which came within minutes of a military confrontation in June, after Iran shot down a sophisticated U.S. drone.
It ended the traumatic saga of Xiyue Wang, an American student in the fourth year of a ten-year prison sentence in Iran on two charges of espionage. He had been arrested, in 2016, while doing doctoral research in Tehran’s national archives on the nineteenth and early twentieth century Qajar dynasty. The swap also ended the controversial case of Masoud Soleimani, an Iranian stem-cell researcher who was arrested when he landed in the United States, in October, 2018, en route to a visiting-scholar position at the Mayo Clinic. He had been charged with trying to export proteins used to culture cells for medical research without a U.S. license, a minor form of sanctions-busting.
Both men had been caught up in the decades of tension—played out in human lives—between Washington and Tehran. Both were widely seen as pawns. A senior Trump Administration official told reporters that he hoped Wang’s release was “a sign that the Iranians are realizing that their practice of hostage-taking diplomacy really should come to an end.†Six other Americans are still detained in the Islamic Republic, including Robert Levinson, who disappeared inside the country twelve years ago. The Trump Administration has arrested at least thirteen Iranians in the U.S. in just the past two years.
Read more at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-real-deal-behind-the-us-iran-prisoner-swap
