Pictures: Iran Completes Biden's $6 Billion Hostage Deal

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

53% : Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said in a press conference on Monday that two of the Iranians released by the United States would return to Iran, while the other three would remain in America.
52% : Vaez said the deal would be presented as a "political win" for Biden by "bringing Americans back home," but also a major political victory for the regime in Tehran, which gained an opportunity to "demonstrate to their own constituents and to their opponents that even their adversaries are dealing with them.
49% : Few additional details about the agreement have been made public, but the Financial Times (FT) on Monday said the U.S. wants Iran to "agree not to target Americans and to cap its uranium enrichment at 60 percent purity, a level below weapons grade."
47% : "After a successful team effort, five innocent Iranian compatriots in American prisons will be free today and two of them will enter Tehran via Doha," said Kazem Gharibabadi, Secretary-General of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, an agency controlled by the brutal theocracy in Tehran.
43% : According to the BBC on Monday, the U.S. was required to transfer the $6 billion to Qatar before Tehran would release any of its prisoners.
43% : "The issue of swap of prisoners will be done on this day and five prisoners, citizens of the Islamic Republic, will be released from the prisons in the U.S. Five imprisoned citizens who were in Iran will be given to the US side reciprocally, based on their will.
41% : Namazi's mother Effie Namazi and Tahbaz's wife Vida Tahbaz, both of whom have long been prevented from leaving Iran, were reportedly aboard the plane with the freed hostages.
39% : "Vaez said this potent signal that the regime is "here to stay" was much-needed on the first anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish-Iranian woman murdered by the "morality police" of Tehran for wearing her mandatory headscarf improperly.
38% : The Associated Press (AP) quoted a senior Biden administration official who said all of the American hostages departed Iran on Monday.
36% : Levinson was a former FBI agent who disappeared under highly suspicious circumstances in Iran in 2007.
36% : The U.S. also wants Iran to stop selling drones to Russia for use against Ukraine.
35% : Mehrdad Ansari was sentenced to 63 months in U.S. prison for helping Iran obtain missile and nuclear weapon equipment, while Kambiz Attar Kashani was serving 30 months in prison for purchasing banned dual-use electronic equipment.
34% : Iran, in turn, allegedly "expects Washington to refrain from imposing additional sanctions that further strangle the economy.
30% : Qatar is supposed to monitor the funds and ensure Iran does not use them for military development or terrorism, a restriction Iranian leaders mocked last week as meaningless.
27% : The Biden administration refused to make statements on the record for weeks, instead leaking details of the hostage deal to friendly media - a strategy presumably intended to minimize controversy from the gigantic payoff to Iran.
23% : The United States and Iran reportedly exchanged prisoners on Monday, largely completing a deal that also included President Joe Biden unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian assets that have been held in South Korean banks since former President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.
21% : The White House called on Iran to release other Americans it is still holding, reminded American citizens that the U.S. State Department has a "longstanding travel warning" about the dangers of visiting Iran, and announced sanctions against former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence for their "involvement in wrongful detentions" under the Levinson Act.

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