Families of Hostages Held by Iran: "We Will Remain Quiet No Longer"

Weird, I keep hearing about this Jamal Kashoggi fellow but I never heard much about the Americans still held hostage by Iran when Obama was delivering them $150 billion.

I'm sure there are reasons for that.

Families of hostages held by Iran, including Americans, declared in an open letter this week to world leaders, media outlets and human-rights organizations that they "shall remain quiet no longer."

"We come from many countries, with different backgrounds and different perspectives, but we have banded together now to come to you as one voice," they wrote, noting that in September, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, "several of our families gathered together for the first time to share stories and struggles about getting our loved ones released."

"We met again a few weeks ago, this time to share our testimonies with the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran," they added. "The similarities between our loved ones’ cases is striking. Each story is not just a case of arbitrary detention, but deliberate and tactical moves by the Iranian authorities to secure bargaining chips."

The coalition includes the family of hostage Baquer Namazi, 82, who was arrested in Tehran in February 2016 after trying to secure the release of his son, Siamak Namazi, a U.S. citizen and businessman who was arrested in October 2015 while visiting a friend in Tehran.

Read the whole thing and then ask yourself why the media only seems to care about the information op being run on us by the Turkey-Iran-Qatar access.

It might have something to do with the media relying on the liberal Brookings Institution to tell them what foreign news is important and worth covering, and which isn't.

And it might have to do with Qatar paying huge money to the Brookings Institution.

From Wikipedia:

An investigation by The New York Times, reported on September 6, 2014, found the Brookings Institution to be among more than a dozen Washington research groups to have received payments from foreign governments while encouraging U.S. officials to encourage support for policies aligned with those foreign governments' agenda.[108]

The New York Times published documents showing that Brookings Institution accepted grants from Norway with specific policy requests and helped the country gain access to U.S. government officials, as well as other "deliverables".[109][110] In June 2014, Norway agreed to make an additional $4 million donation to Brookings.[108] Several legal specialists who examined the documents told the paper that the language of the transactions "appeared to necessitate Brookings filing as a foreign agent" under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.[110]

The Qatari government was named by The New York Times as "the single biggest foreign donor to Brookings", having reportedly made a $14.8 million, four-year contribution in 2013. A former visiting fellow at a Brookings affiliate in Qatar reportedly said that "he had been told during his job interview that he could not take positions critical of the Qatar government in papers".[108] Brookings officials denied any connection between the views of their funders and their scholars' work, citing reports that questioned the Qatari government's education reform efforts and criticized its support of militants in Syria. However, Brookings officials reportedly acknowledged that they meet with Qatari government officials regularly.[108]

Of course, Brookings is just one of Qatar's smaller investments.

posted by Ace of Spades at 03:00 PM

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