The New York Times ran several dramatic articles about a story that eclipsed the Middle East wars yesterday, the latest one thrillingly headlined, “
Behind the Prisoner Swap: Spies, a Killer, Secret Messages and Unseen Diplomacy.” Unseen diplomacy is this Administration’s calling card.
Wall Street Reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested by Russian police in Yekaterinburg in March 2023, while working on a story about the Wagner Group, Russia’s private military force, its version of our Blackwater (now rebranded as ‘Academi’). Yesterday Evan was released in a multi-country, multi-prisoner exchange, as part of what the mockingbird media chirped in concert was a very “complicated” deal.
Indeed, the Times “Prisoner Swap” article was complicated. Among the longest NYT news articles I’ve ever seen, it tediously ran for page after page of disjointed detail. Maybe it makes more sense if read slowly and carefully, but that remains to be established. The bottom line was readers of this and the blizzard of other articles on the story were only told names of two American releasees: Gershkovich and US Marine Paul Whelan.
Call me cynical, but swimming in the ocean of text was this circuitous and ambiguous description of the released prisoners:
So … how many were
Americans? And who were they? Was any money involved? What were the other terms? Who did Russia get? Those facts, perhaps unimportant to Whelan’s and Gershkovich’s relatives, were obscured under lasagna-like layers of corporate media complexity.
But the obsequious narrative running like a silver thread through all the stories, including this story, was that Joe Biden
personally effectuated this complicated multi-country prisoner exchange. One WaPo story quoted national security advisor Jake Sullivan, who glowingly opined it “honestly could only be achieved by a leader like Joe Biden.” The headlines echoed Sullivan’s sycophantic sentiment. For example,
the Beeb:
Politico:
Reuters:
Let me know in the comments whether or not you believe President Cabbage engineered this indescribably complicated prisoner exchange with the Russians.
Bringing Americans home is good, regardless of what they did to get there. But the deal was, evidently, too
complicated for us dummies to understand. Or so the media says.
The development was good news in at least one other way. Whatever else it might have been, however bad the deal was (or wasn’t) for the U.S., it did involve
diplomacy, a dusty tool long unexercised by the Biden Administration, especially when it comes to Russia. This deal could serve as a stepping stone to a larger deal to resolve the Proxy War.
Joe Biden claims credit for indescribably complicated prisoner swap; no death penalty for 9/11 mastermind; SpaceX rescues Boeing-stranded astronauts; NYC real estate, Moderna stock collapse; more.
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