Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Whom to believe?

The Washington Post tells us that
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he intends to grant a “unilateral pardon” to two Americans who have been jailed on charges of espionage for two years and release them this week.

“I am helping to arrange for their release in a couple of days so they will be able to return home,” Ahmadinejad told The Washington Post in an hour-long interview at his office here. “This is of course going to be a unilateral humanitarian gesture.”
Setting aside the fact that they were not spies but young idiots who decided to hike along the Iran-Iraq border, there is something missing from this story.

The Telegraph puts it differently:
Bail for two US hikers held on espionage charges in Iran has been set at $500,000 (£315,000) each, their lawyer has said, after Iran's president said they would be released "in two days."
Indeed, their friend, Sarah Shourd who had been released on medical and humanitarian grounds last September had also had the same "bail" paid for her.

It comes to something when the Daily Telegraph is more accurate than any other newspaper in the more or less free world but even they have it wrong. I know bail is a shorter word than ransom and easier to spell but for all of that, what was paid over was ransom. Those idiot kids were ransomed. Let us call a spade a spade and a ransom a ransom.

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