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Comment by RyJones | Hacker News Reader

sent them another plane load of cash, probably

Please keep Facebook-style misinformation off here: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/obama-didnt-give-iran-150-...

Unless their comment was edited, I'm not sure what part of it is you're accusing of being to be misinformation. It's pretty well-established that the US sent 3 planeloads of cash from Geneva to Iran (equivalent to about 1.7b USD in various European currencies)

I think it is misinformation if one omits that the cash the US sent to Iran was the Iranian government's own money. Omitting that crucial fact makes it sound like the US government is sending US taxpayers' money to Iran, as opposed to simply returning to the Iranian government some of its own funds which the US government had previously frozen.

I don't buy your line of argument. The settlement that was reached with the Islamic regime was negotiated by the Obama administration, and gave funds to the Islamic regime coincident to a release of prisoners. The provenance of that payment (if we view it as more than the fruits of a prisoner-swap negotiation with the Islamic regime) was money that originally belonged to the monarchy. So when you say "the Iranian government's own money," that statement is not technically true. At best, it was the money of a different Iranian government. The two governments are fundamentally different, with little overlap in the power structure (the new regime executed many powerful members of the old one), and very little effort by either to carry out the will of the people.

The disputed comment itself, I think you would agree, is factually accurate.

Obama didn’t carry out any part of it on his own. The deal did lift some sanctions, which lifted a freeze on Iran’s assets that were held largely in foreign, not U.S., banks. And, to be clear, the money that was unfrozen belonged to Iran. It had only been made inaccessible by sanctions aimed at crippling the country’s nuclear program.

Secondly, $150 billion is a high-end estimate of the total that was freed up after some sanctions were lifted. U.S. Treasury Department estimates put the number at about $50 billion in “usable liquid assets,” according to 2015 testimony from Adam Szubin, acting under secretary of treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.

The part that the meme gets right, though, is that the deal didn’t get congressional approval.

It is disingenuous to call this misinformation. Whether you believe it was lawful or illicit, wise or foolish, there was definitely a large cash delivery made by airplane.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sent-cash-to-iran-as-americ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/03/...

https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-iran-payment-...

https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/03/politics/us-sends-plane-iran-...

https://fortune.com/2016/08/05/money-america-iran/

I agree that the comment you're responding to was off-topic, but calling it "Facebook-style misinformation" goes too far. It's well documented that the Obama administration sent multiple plane loads of cash to Iran in 2016. [0][1][2]

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/03/politics/us-sends-plane-iran-...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sent-cash-to-iran-as-americ...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sent-two-more-planeloads-of...

1. The money was Iran's to begin with and not U.S. money

2. The money was being returned to Iran based on an international agreement

Anyone that fails to include these critical facts is (most likely) intentionally participating in the spread of misinformation/propaganda.

Anyone responding with just a link to politifact or factcheck that titles their articles as "this didn't happen" — and then talks about how it happens in the body — is engaging in propaganda as well.

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