On 9/11 Anniversary, Joe Biden Facilitated the Payment of Cash to Iran for U.S. Hostages

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

51% : Asked if the money would be used for other purposes apart from humanitarian needs, Raisi said: "Humanitarian means whatever the Iranian people needs, so this money will be budgeted for those needs and the needs of the Iranian people will be decided and determined by the Iranian government."The prisoner exchange calls for the release of five American citizens held in Iran in return for five Iranians under detention in the U.S., and also grants Tehran access to the $6 billion in oil revenues that have been blocked.
51% : The original plan involved transferring the Iranian money, currently held in South Korean banks, to banks in Qatar -- a close ally of Iran.
47% : "Iran will be allowed to access the funds only to buy food, medicine or other humanitarian purposes, in accordance with existing U.S. sanctions against the country," reported NBC News at the time.
47% : "This money belongs to the Iranian people, the Iranian government, so the Islamic Republic of Iran will decide what to do with this money," Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi told NBC.
46% : "In every negotiation the United States has undertaken, Iran ignores the plain language of an agreement's text and substitutes its own interpretation of the written word.
44% : "How is the U.S. going to have "oversight" of Iranian funds in Qatar banks when Qatar is a close ally of Tehran?
42% : The deal was that the U.S. would unfreeze $6 billion and Iran would release five American hostages held on trumped-up charges.
42% : Secretary of State Antony Blinken thinks the U.S. will have a say in how the unfrozen funds will be used.
40% : It's still unknown how much Iran -- if any -- was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
40% : The biggest concern of opponents of the deal is that paying about a billion dollars per hostage is likely to encourage Iran to take more Americans prisoner.
38% : This doesn't seem to bother the administration despite proof going back to the 1980s that Iran is not only a terrorist state but a pirate state as well that uses hostage-taking as a matter of government policy.
36% : But Iran shed no tears for Americans on 9/11.
33% : The fact that the radical Sunnis of al-Qaeda and the radical Shiites of Iran usually hated each other didn't stop numerous interactions between the two.
31% : The Biden administration continues to insist that Iran will only spend the money on "humanitarian" concerns.
25% : Not even when Iran announces that it has every intention of spending that $6 billion any way it wants to does the Biden administration pull back on the deal.
23% : Several al-Qaeda members hid out in Tehran following 9/11, and several of the hijackers transited Iran on their way to Afghanistan, making it hard to track them.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.