Outrage over Brittney Griner-Viktor Bout swap hypocritical
Viktor Bout who was swapped for WNBA star Brittney Griner, at an event in Moscow on Monday. Credit: AP/Aleksandr Sivov
As the hammering of President Joe Biden over the swap of WNBA star Brittney Griner, a prisoner in Russia, for arms dealer Viktor Bout, a prisoner in the United States, built, I had to wonder: Is there now a factory producing philosophical takes apt for performative Facebook posts, tweetstorms, letters to the editor or dinner-table debates?
And more importantly, where are acknowledgments of the complexity of the issue, including the circumstances of America’s other celebrated prisoner in Russia, former Marine Paul Whelan, and the existence of America’s other citizen jailed in Russia for medical marijuana, Marc Fogel?
Griner, 32, was arrested in Russia in February on smuggling charges after hash oil prescribed to her was discovered in her bags. The substance is illegal in Putinville.
Having spent years pondering how to transport small caches of drugs gulag-free, I’ll argue that “In your luggage, in Russia,” is never the answer.
But as soon as she was arrested, some Republicans began hammering Biden because he wasn’t able to spring Griner instantly, as if she were jugged on a trumped-up loitering charge in London. The opinion factory also produced a conflicting line of argumentation: that Griner’s failure to stand for the national anthem and her support of Black Lives Matter would also paint Biden as a simp if he did get her home.
Then, last week, Biden got her home.
And criticism that we should never have let arms dealer Bout go, and should have gotten Whelan out as well, or instead, was immediate.
The United States has no doubt that Bout transports and sells arms to the world’s most dangerous hot spots, because in 2004 he was doing so for us. Bout was contracted by our government to take 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 80,000 pistols from our caches in Bosnia to Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in August of that year.
They apparently never arrived. There. They arrived somewhere, where Bout likely sold them for zillions, and they were used to terrorize nice people. We’d been contracting with Bout’s air transport services since we got to Iraq.
Bout also sold scads of arms to the Taliban and al-Qaida, and on every side of various African and Middle Eastern conflicts, and that’s terrible, but a kind of terrible that shouldn’t engender so much pearl-clutching in the United States.
We armed and trained many of these same forces.
As for the idea that Biden should have gotten Whelan out, too, that’s . . . complicated. Russia argues Whelan is a spy, our denials are unconvincing to them, he holds passports and citizenship in four nations, and two years of Trump administration attempts to get him out fizzled too.
It’s good that Griner is home. Her treatment was a political attack on the United States, thus it fell to our political establishment to help her.
It would be better if Whelan were out.
It’s worse that Bout is.
And if you want to focus on hypocrisy, asking why the famed Griner is home and Fogel, 61, a Pennsylvania teacher at the Anglo-American school in Moscow, is still jailed after 18 months, is more apt than comparing Griner with Whelan.
But none of it’s easy. And none of us is well-served by tribal, simplistic, hypocritical mudslinging so uniform that you’d swear it was coming off an assembly line in Dubuque.
Or Moscow.
Columnist Lane Filler's opinions are his own.
Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
