Why Did the State Department Abandon the Sixth Hostage?

The bankruptcy of the Biden administration’s policy of appeasement of the Iranian regime is on full display as it struggles to account for its failure to include an American permanent resident, Shahab Dalili, in a tentative $6 billion ransom deal. That deal is for the release of five Americans from a Tehran dungeon. Adding an insult to injury, the State Department now publicly impugns Mr. Dalili’s character. On Monday a State Department spokesman, Vedant Patel, told reporters that although more than seven years have passed since Mr. Dalili was first confined to Evin prison on trumped up espionage charges, the striped-pants set is yet to verify whether he was “wrongfully detained.” In our reading, the statement suggests that the mullahs might have “rightfully” arrested an American resident whose crime was traveling to Iran to attend his father’s funeral.A former American hostage who was wrongfully detained at Evin, Xiyue Wang, was held at the same ward as Mr. Dalili. As he told our Benny Avni, all those who were in that section were accused of the same trumped-up “crime” of collaborating with and spying for America. Had Mr. Dalili been an American spy, Washington would have an extra incentive to free him, Mr. Wang argues. As Mr. Dalili’s son, Darian, testifies, though, his father is no James Bond. It beats us what game State is playing here. It could be an attempt to cover up for an ill-thought-out statement by Secretary Blinken last week. The secretary claimed that no Americans were left behind in the $6 billion ransom deal. It turns out that State Department officials have communicated with the Dalili family for years. It is hard to imagine, or at least credit, the possibility that the Secretary of State was unaware of the case.Maybe the administration is red-faced about leaving an American behind while, despite protestations otherwise, it relaxed its own sanction regime by releasing billions of dollars frozen in South Korean banks as punishment for Iran’s violations. All in all, State has released more than $10 billion in sanctions-related funds similarly held in various parts of the world. America no longer seriously enforces an oil embargo that previously had crippled Iran’s economy. Mr. Biden’s top Iran negotiator, Robert Malley, was eased out of his position in April, while the FBI investigated his alleged mishandling of America’s secrets. A veteran of the 2015 articles of appeasement known as the nuclear deal, Mr. Malley has long been considered an Iranian sympathizer. Yet, even after his suspension from duty, he remained in contact with the families of the Evin hostages, indicating he may not be divorced from policy-making. The failure of the administration to account for the Malley affair to Congress and its blanket blackout of press inquiries is a typical but no less shocking feature of America’s entire Iran policy. Congress, moreover, is failing to push back. Although several acts of congress authorize it to probe this area of policy, the House hasn’t conducted an open hearing on Iran for more than a year, and the Senate has failed to hold one since 2020. Yet, public accounting is necessary, as it increasingly seems that the $6 billion ransom deal is just an appetizer. The administration is reportedly cooking up a new nuclear deal that would leave Iran with enough enriched uranium to build a bomb at a time of its choosing. If so, the deal will likely be dubbed an unwritten set of “understandings.” It is unlikely that any deal with Iran could gain a formal adoption by the Senate.The argument in favor of the business about an unwritten set of “understandings” is supposedly necessary lest Iran hawks decide to trigger the 2015 Nuclear Agreement Review Act and take a peek under the diplomatic hood. Before an inept State Department deal-making is completed, though, the right move is for Congress to interrupt its summer vacation and call Mr. Blinken and other key officials to testify. Our diplomats owe an explanation as to why, despite paying the largest ransom in American history, the 60-year-old Mr. Dalili, who in retirement decided to make America his family home, is still in prison while his reputation is trashed at Washington. The State Department, too, owes Americans an account for two and a half years of begging for a rapprochement with a regime that has as its core ideology and raison d’être “death to America.”

Why Did the State Department Abandon the Sixth Hostage?

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