Prior to leaving on his last summer vacation to Martha's Vineyard, President Obummer held a press conference in which he handled reporters' questions ... some of which focused on America's $400 million cash payment to Iran on the same day this past January in which four American hostages were flown out of Iran. He patiently explained that this was not ransom ... but the reason we gave Iran pallets full of hard foreign currency (rather than dollars) was that the United States had no banking relations with Iran ... see: NTK Video.
Since the White House reporters have no desire to follow up on such presidential obfuscation (taqiyya?), I would like to have asked the following question, "Mr. President, we must have wire transfer banking relationships with other countries which have wire transfer relationship with Iran. Could we not have transferred this money by wire through one of these countries?"
Also, it has also been disclosed on Fox Business channel on Thursday by one of these four hostages that they were delayed in a plane on a runway in Tehran for over two hours until, as he was told, such time as "another plane landed." Was this other plane the one with the cash? Most likely it was ... which surely suggest that this was a tribute payment.
Furthermore, I would have asked another question, "Mr. President, was this payment the equivalent of $400 million or $1.7 billion?" It seems that there is some purposeful confusion about the actual amount of this ransom ... and pallets full of cash suggests to me that it was more money than $400 million.
It would have been nice to know the real facts in this matter and not get the typical administration runaround ... that doesn't pass the smell test.
Afterward: See also: Powerline Blog.
2 comments:
Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.[Note 1][1] It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
Did you crib this from a Michellle Obama speech? But you are right ... there is no reason to suspect our president of lying ... in his seven+ years he has never lied even once before.
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