Openly gay, black, 32-year-old basketball player American Brittney Griner walked away free as a bird from a Russian gulag seven hours east of Moscow in a prison swap with Russian Viktor Bout (pronounced “boot”) who, according to the New York Times, was “…an illegal arms merchant to some of the world’s most violent forces, including some intent on killing Americans.” Bout had served 4 years of his 25-year prison sentence. Griner is a two-time Olympic gold medalist and WNBA basketball star caught red-handed with cannabis vaping cartridges in her luggage at an airport outside of Moscow, and had served nearly 10 months of her 9-year sentence.
Russia apparently really wanted to swap Griner for Vadim A. Sokolov, who was arrested in Germany’s Kleiner Tiergarten Park in August 2019 when two witnesses saw him throw his bike and bag into the Spree River and shoot a Chechyan separatist commander, but Sokolov was inconveniently imprisoned in Germany serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Perhaps a bit more principled than the U.S. about returning murderous felons who want to kill you back into the world for political Brownie points, Germany took the high road and refused to release Sokolov under any circumstances. The U.S. then settled on the lesser felon Bout, who was convicted of espionage in the U.S. and had served over 14 years of his 25-year sentence at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Marion.
What’s wrong with this picture?
As usual, American exceptionalism raised its hoary head. From the White House, Biden thundered that Griner was “unjustly detained in Russia under intolerable conditions.” Really? Ever heard of Gitmo? Abu Ghraib? The cherry atop this hypocrisy confection is the hard fact that, according to worldpopulationreview.com, the U.S. has by far the largest number of imprisoned persons on Earth. It was astounding that Biden could keep a straight face while delivering this hypocritical nationalistic nonsense.
Unjustly detained? There are Americans who believe, for some unfathomable reason beyond even hubris, that the long arm of U.S. law can somehow magically extract them from their legal misadventures abroad. T’ain’t so, and in hindsight it might not have been such a bright idea to replace all those formerly required high-school civics classes of yesteryear with math, science, and tech.
Fact: Drugs are illegal in Russia. No U.S. medical marijuana prescription will keep you out of gaol if you’re caught. It is not your right to possess them, anymore than it is your right to drink beer at an international soccer match in a country where alcohol is illegal. Different country, different rules. You’re not in Kansas, anymore.
But the naïve expectation of leniency on Griner’s part isn’t the worst of the deal. Trading an athlete, however high-profile, for a convicted international arms smuggler likely responsible for the deaths of many Americans, was nuts. Worse than that, it was cynical; the PR payload for bringing an openly gay black American basketball star was way higher than for the hapless middle-aged, white male American Paul Whelan, who was initially thought to be part of the prison swap but was ultimately dropped from a potential deal and remains imprisoned in Russia since his conviction for espionage by a Russian court. We probably won’t ever know what went on behind closed doors in the negotiations for both Griner and Whelan, but in the end it was Griner who grabbed the brass ring and boarded that homebound plane.
When I was 19 and heading home after living six months on a kibbutz in Israel, I was pulled out of the boarding line in Haifa for a ship bound for Piraeus after chatting with a couple of other young Americans in line behind me. It turned out that the Israeli police suspected them of drug smuggling and my chatting with them had ensnared me in their suspicions. I was taken to a windowless room where a female Israeli cop ripped open the seams of my clothes looking for drugs. I was lucky, especially since another American at my kibbutz had tried to slip a joint into my pack of Marlboros that morning when I said goodbye. (When I was 19 almost everyone I knew still smoked.) In retrospect, handing that joint back to him was probably the most consequential decision of my life.
The official line of most western countries is that they do not negotiate for hostages; a prisoner swap is a subset of such a negotiation. The reasoning is that high-profile kidnappings and other detentions would increase with greater opportunities for greater returns – like getting one of your top arms dealers back in the saddle, for example.
But because this is America at this point in time, the rich, the powerful, and other high-profile, PR-rich individuals get a leg up to the head of the line. If Griner had been a student on holiday in Russia when she was caught with the goods, nobody would know her name.
“Hapless” Paul Whelan was court-martialed for multiple crimes and lies and discharged from the Marines for bad conduct, then wound up in Russia with shady contacts and activities (he was also a big Trump fan). He was arrested with $80k in mysterious cash and was apparently trading in confidential info. Griner was caught with a gram of hash. Poor judgement on her part indeed, but while the “trade” may have been a bad deal and bad optics, at least the right American was freed.
Griner as you mentioned is not only black but openly lesbian. Anyone who follows or knows anything about Putin knows that he and his disgusting government are openly hostile to LGBT community to the point of executions. A straight white male like Whelan cannot be compared to Griner. Perhaps as I suspect they used the ridiculous excuse of drugs to imprison yet another LGBT person. She made a mistake thinking a prescription would make her an exception to the drug laws. What about prescriptions to narcotic pain medication? Would they have arrested her also for that? You over simplified a situation which is way too complex. Puitin is an evil individual who deserves no excuses from people like yourself.
“Putin knows that he and his disgusting government are openly hostile to LGBT community to the point of executions.”
Really now, “executions”?
I’m willing to see the evidence.
” Paul Whelan was court-martialed…”
I guess that makes Whelan less than the special interest poster girl of Joe Biden. But really, what this sloppy deal does is show how terrible the negotiations were.
Here the US is. The most potent rich country on the planet, and it caves to an economy the size of California. And a two-bit thug who knows he has much more to lose than gain.
But “be afraid, be very afraid,” the media screamed.
They sold out straight up…
Be well,
Laz
Welcome to Hell: Brittney Griner and the Russian Prison System
— The health and human rights abuses in these detention facilities run deep
https://www.medpagetoday.com/popmedicine/popmedicine/102345?xid=nl_popmed_2022-12-23&eun=g1187798d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PopMedicine_122322&utm_term=NL_Gen_Int_PopMedicine_Active
I send prayers and hope for the others… left behind.
Merry Christmas,
Laz
We’ll never know if Ms. Griner had the drugs or if they were planted. What we do know is that Ms. Griner went to Russia to play basketball and was annually paid $1,000,000 to do so by a Russian women’s basketball federation, more than four times her annual WNBA salary of $221,515. Somehow I don’t feel much sympathy for her.
The prisoner swap became an unfortunate publicity stunt and so grossly one-sided in favor of the Russians that what little sympathy I did have (and it was minuscule) for Ms. Griner evaporated the day the swap was consummated. In my opinion the US played a months-long game of Three-card Monte with Russia holding the cards and the result is what one would expect.
The sentence in the piece that “Bout had served 4 years of his 25-year prison sentence” is incorrect. Bout was arrested in March 6, 2008 and was released on December 7, 2022. That is 14 years and 9 months. In the US federal system, inmates serve 85% of a sentence (the 15% is called “good time” and earned if you comply with prison rules). Bout was sentenced to the mandatory minimum of 25 years (his judge, Shira A. Scheindlin (RET), said she would have imposed a much lower sentence if she was legally allowed to do so. Her comments and the reasons why she would have done so are available with a simple google search). 85% of 25 years is 21.25. This means that at the time of his release, Bout had served 70% of his sentence. One would only hope that the author of this article was simply negligent as opposed to purposeful. We will know if the correction is made.
You make it sound like being sentenced to a Russian gulag is a cake walk. I know you to be better educated and more well-read than this, Marilyn. Surely you are familiar with the writings of Solzhenitsyn. Or the conditions under which Navalny is being held. I agree incarceration has become a capitalist enterprise in the U.S.; it is over incarceration (disproportionately…hmm…Blacks.) But if you think justice is a 9-year Russian prison sentence for a vape cartridge, because someone used a bit of bad judgement, your idea of justice has changed since we were once friends. Britney Griner has never killed anyone, to my knowledge. But she’s the one deserving of such harsh punishment? Yeah, let’s take our political frustrations out on the tall, Black lesbian. Fits right in with the new world vision of the GOP. What happened to you that you have developed this viewpoint? Never would I ever have expected it from you. Many other things, yes…you pushed some boundaries yourself as I recall..but not this.