Why trading an arms dealer for Griner was worth it
At long last, Brittney Griner, convicted in Russia of possessing a few cannabis-infused vape cartridges, is coming home. In exchange for her freedom, President Joe Biden commuted the 25-year sentence arms dealer Viktor Bout is serving for conspiring to sell heavy weapons to Colombian guerrillas. The deal might look unequal. But the Biden administration was absolutely right to make it.
Their misdeeds are hardly comparable. If Griner had been treated like most defendants on minor drug charges in Russia, she would not have been jailed at all, let alone sentenced to nine years in a grim penal colony. Bout, on the other hand, was dubbed “the merchant of death” by Western intelligence officials for a two-decade career spent allegedly providing deadly arms to rebels and terrorists around the world.
Did Russian President Vladimir Putin cynically use Griner, who admitted her offense, as a pawn to get Bout sprung from the federal prison? Of course. Should the nature of the deal rankle Americans? No, it shouldn’t.
The only alternative would have been to let Griner suffer indefinitely, in unspeakable conditions. She had already been incarcerated for nine months. When U.S. citizens are unjustly held overseas, it is the duty of our government to do everything it can to bring them home. To understand why, all you had to do was look at the joy and relief in the face of Griner’s wife, Cherelle, as she appeared Thursday at the White House with Biden to announce Griner’s release.
Prisoner swaps between democracies and despotic regimes are rarely equal. In 2010, for example, 10 Russians were swapped for four Americans; in 2014, three Cuban spies were exchanged for one U.S. intelligence agent. Putting a higher value on human life is a strength of democratic societies, not a weakness, and it is one we should be proud of.
It would have been even better if the Biden administration had also been able to secure the release of Paul Whelan, a U.S. citizen imprisoned in Russia since 2018 on espionage charges that he and the U.S. government say are bogus. But Biden said Thursday that “sadly, for totally illegitimate reasons, Russia is treating Paul’s case differently than Brittney’s.” Biden added, “We are not giving up. We will never give up.”
The inability to include Whelan, however, was no reason to fail to move forward to secure Griner’s release. Reached Thursday by CNN at the penal colony where he is being held, Whelan said in a phone call that he is “greatly disappointed” but still happy for Griner. And his family in the United States has said the same thing.
As for Bout, I’m willing to believe the intelligence officials who say that in the 1990s and early 2000s, he was one of the biggest illegal arms dealers in the world, violating U.N. arms embargoes in Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo and providing weapons to al-qaida and the Taliban. But he wasn’t in prison for doing any of that.
Bout was arrested in 2008 in a U.S. sting operation. A Drug Enforcement Administration informant, posing as a representative of the Colombian rebel group FARC, negotiated a deal for Bout to supply the group with surface-to-air missiles and rocket launchers. The weapons were to be used against the Colombian military and also against DEA agents seeking to disrupt the illegal cocaine trade that provided much of the FARC’S income.
The informant lured Bout to a meeting in Thailand, where he was arrested. Two years later, he was extradited to the United States. In 2011, he was convicted in federal court on charges of conspiring to sell weapons to a U.s.-designated terrorist group. And in April 2012, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison — the minimum, under sentencing guidelines, because the judge ruled there was no evidence that Bout would have committed the crime if not for the sting operation.
He has already served 10 years, a penalty even the judge in Bout’s case suggested this summer was fair, relative to the offenses on which he was convicted. Meanwhile, in 2016 the FARC agreed to a peace deal with the Colombian government, and in 2017 the rebels surrendered their weapons under U.N. supervision. Until Thursday, Bout remained in prison while the onetime terrorists he was accused of arming had blended back into Colombian society. Some serve in the national legislature.
In addition to valuing life, democratic societies must also value justice. We imprison people not for what we know they did, but for what we can prove in a court of law that they did. If nine months was too long for Griner to be in prison, 10 years seems reasonable for Bout. And swapping him for Griner was the right thing to do.