What the U.S. Must Do For Americans Detained Overseas

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Too often, ordinary citizens get caught up in the days’ geopolitical dramas. Take the recently released Anglo-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe who was held for six years held by Tehran and the American basketball star Brittney Griner who is being detained right now in Russia since its war on Ukraine, rather a little before. Our next guest has experienced these cruel tactics firsthand. Jason Rezaian writes for the “Washington Post Global Opinions” and while serving as the paper’s correspondent in Teheran, he spent 544 days unjustly imprisoned on trumped up charges by Iranian authorities. And here he with Hari Sreenivasan discussing how to help those who are too often used as bargaining chips.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Jason Rezaian, thank you so much for joining us. You’ve got a unique perspective on this. I want to talk about Brittney Griner, I mean, we’re talking about quite possibly the best basketball player out there. She’s a phenomenal athlete. And you wrote recently, Jason, that you are really concerned for her and her detention in Russia. How come?

JASON REZAIAN, WRITER, WASHINGTON POST GLOBAL OPINIONS: Well, thanks for having me on, Hari, and asking these questions. I think, first the red flag for me was that this arrest was announced through Russian media, state media. We can call it propaganda. I think that’s fair to say. With a mug shot. That announcement through their media was made a couple of weeks after her arrest. Then we learned that she was being denied consular access to officials from the U.S. government whose job it is to the end to the needs of Americans in trouble abroad. Whether there’s any credibility or truth to charges against her, she has those rights. And the fact that those two things were our initial sort of understanding of the situation were red flags for me. I’ve been following cases of other Americans detained abroad since my own detention in Iran, and this one leapt out at me as being problematic from the get-go.

SREENIVASAN: So, for people who might not understand. Why was this WNBA player in Russia in the first place?

REZAIAN: So, Brittney Griner is one of the greatest basketball players of all-time, probably the — as you noted, the best or one of the best in the WNBA. But many WNBA players have the opportunity to play in a foreign league during the off season, do so to earn another income. The contracts that we hear about from the NBA or Major League Baseball or NFL astronomical numbers in the tens of millions are unfortunately not available to WNBA players. And so, you know, those like Brittney Griner who have these immense talents seek an opportunity to, you know, have financial gain, and they go to another country and Russia being one of the leading ones.

SREENIVASAN: So, she’s out there, basically a second job to make ends meet, so to speak. But — and to keep playing. And she is detained in Russia right now. And I wonder if this is just a semantic difference. What is the difference between a pretrial detention on whatever charges they think she’s being guilty of versus basically being held a hostage?

REZAIAN: I think that there are very subtle differences, but when you talk about a pretrial detention in a country like Russia, in a country like Iran, in a country like China where we know that the judicial processes that a lot of people and often, usually, foreign people go through are not, you know, similar to the ones that we know in the West where due process is a right that’s guaranteed to all. One wonders very quickly what are the motivations here? So, to me, as someone who has been through this, the idea of a pretrial detention is more to explain to the Russian public why this superstar is being held for an extended period of time. What is there to investigate? Right? She arrived on an airplane. Her bags were searched. There was a substance in there or there wasn’t. Why do we have to wait two months while she’s being kept held incommunicado unable to speak to representatives in the U.S. government? It is very, very fishy, and I think by keeping it quiet, we haven’t done her any favors.

SREENIVASAN: (INAUDIBLE) minimizing this. But it seems like these human beings are just pawns in a much larger, you know, game. This is just stable stakes. Well, I have got two of yours, you have two of mine. You want to talk about this. Let’s get this other thing over with. And the higher profile person that I have maybe is worth more in my stack of chips. I mean, again, I don’t want to, you know, belittle it to a card game but it just seems like —

REZAIAN: But that’s what it is. And, Hari, you know, you’ve put it very well. And my deep concern is that with 40-something Americans being held in this way right now, the State Department is spread thin in trying to work these cases and bring people home. What happens when that number becomes 100, 200, 400? My concern is that, at that point, the U.S. government throws up its hands and says, you know, this is not an issue that we can get a handle on. Travel beyond our borders at your own risk. That’s not the future that I want to live in. And I think that that’s the direction that we’re headed. If we don’t come to a consensus with our allies first, and then create credible deterrents to the Hostage-taking nations so that they understand that the cost of doing this, it is going to be higher than the perceived benefits.

SREENIVASAN: You have looked into this, and you have created a documentary at “The Washington Post,” which was fascinating called “Bringing Them Home.” And it looks not at the Brittney Griner case, but you actually look at the case of a single family and talk about how this is actually happening to multiple people.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We haven’t heard from Emad (ph) for 12 days. You just kind of start thinking a bunch of stuff.

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SREENIVASAN: And one of the facts that really leapt out at me was that there are now more Americans being detained by countries or state actors than there are by terrorist organizations. And that was just — you know, it floored me. I had no idea.

REZAIAN: It’s astounding, and I think it’s important to note that there are probably thousands of Americans being held on credible charges of legal violations in different countries, or at least in charges that might be credible that are not, you know, put into the category of wrongful detainees. Wrongful detainees is a determination the U.S. government makes about Americans who are being held by foreign states in situations that clearly either are politically motivated or motivated by trying to extract leverages from the United States. We identified about 43 cases of that. Four cases of Americans being held by terrorist organizations. It’s a stark difference that has shifted over time. And my colleagues at “Washington Post Opinions” and I, as we looked at this phenomenon through the lens of this individual family, the Shargi family, whose father, husband, Emad Shargi is being held in Iran right now, we started to understand that the U.S. government doesn’t have a great approach to dealing with this problem. And actually, the U.S. government’s approach is better than that of, say, the U.K., Canada, Australia. But it’s getting worse and worse. There’s more and more of these cases happening all the time. Well, we’ve done a pretty good job at putting down Hostage-taking of organizations like ISIS and Al Qaeda, we haven’t done so well in terms of these foreign adversaries, usually authoritarian governments, taking American prisoner, putting them through a judicial process that is opaque and not based in — of the rule of law as we know it. And so, we’re trying to shift the conversation and get people to understand that these are not Americans being held for any crimes that they committed, they’re being held as a tool by a foreign state to try to get something in return from the United States of America. And if we want to save those people from these terrible fates, we’re going to have to engage in some kind of negotiations until the time that we have credible deterrents to stop this practice going forward. We don’t have those in place right now.

SREENIVASAN: You know, there’s a scene in the documentary where I think it was a member of Congress who told the Shargi family, hey, you know, look, I don’t think we’re going to completely change our entire stance to Iran based on what we — you know, we obviously want your husband back. I’m paraphrasing here. But that sort of clarity is rarely out in the open. I mean, what you hear from the State Department and other, we are trying our hardest, we’re doing everything we can, but guess what, there’s this elephant in the room we can’t ignore.

REZAIAN: I want to acknowledge that. That was a Congressman Ted Deutch from Florida who has been one of the most vocal and committed advocates for hostage families. Because of one of his constituents, Bob Levinson, a former FBI agent was abducted in Iran, and, you know, never heard from again. The Trump administration announced that it had intelligence that he had died while in Iranian custody in 2020. But you know, the fact of the matter is, very few representatives want to engage in these conversations. The fact that the Congressman Deutsche would be so honest and up front about the challenges of it is admirable. And it also speaks to the kind of very difficult calculations that the government has to make. Ultimately, though, if a citizen’s condition and freedom and safety are a concern, until we find ways to make this less attractive, it’s going to keep happening and we’re going to have to give some kind of concessions to get people out. Historically, since the Nixon administration, the U.S. government has had a policy of no concessions. But that policy has been flouted on dozens of occasions, in instances where the political costs here at home became too high to not frame someone. You can see it in the U.K. right now in their freeing of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anousheh Ansari (ph), those families had raised the cases of their loved ones for years until finally it came to a breaking point. But in the process, they left other Britons behind. This is a really treacherous business, and one that while the U.S. government, the U.K. government, the Canadian government, the Australian government, Western European governments, they’re not responsible for the Hostage-takings that these authoritarians are doing. But they are responsible for the safety, wellbeing and freedom of their own citizens. That’s what governments are for.

SREENIVASAN: What kinds of disincentives can the United States government impose on a Hostage-taking or detaining nation? I mean, you know, who do you penalize, and who do you make life difficult for where they have an incentive to say, you know what, we should probably let Emad out?

REZAIAN: We have, first of all, global magnets, these sanctions, which are part of the international law now, sanctions that are targeted to individuals who are human rights violators and terrorists, terrorism perpetrators. Hostage-taking is one of those crimes by which you can go after officials of states who are involved in these events. You can seize their assets internationally. You can put red cards out for their arrest internationally. You can try them in international courts if they are detained. That’s one. Another is freezing assets of governments and placing new sanctions on economies. I’m not a big fan of blanket sanctions on entire nations and their economies because from experience, I’ve seen that they almost always hurt normal people more than they do the perpetrators of these crimes. But ultimately, it’s going to keep happening until we have those measures in place, and those measures are shared by like-minded governments. We all have to come together and say, hey, you know what? This is not going to stand on our watch. Right now, in the negotiations between Iran and world powers, every single one of the western countries, the United States, the U.K., France, and Germany, along with Austria, the host nation of the JCPOA talks have citizens being held hostage in Iran right now. I think it’s a very compelling argument to say, Iran, we’re not going to talk about lifting these sanctions until you clear the — free all these people and stop this practice moving forward. Unfortunately, those governments have not come together and made that decision that they’re going to take that unified front. And for that reason, I’m worried that we’re going to see a new spate of Iranian hostage-taking in the not so distance future.

SREENIVASAN: I cannot imagine any world in where, for example, if this was Steph Curry, if this was Lebron, that it wouldn’t be on every newspaper above the fold every day for the entire time that Brittney Griner has been gone.

REZAIAN: I agree with you 100 percent. I mean, I think the truth is — I mean, if you look in my case, you know, “The Washington Post” made it a matter of public record. And kept a count on a website, and in the print edition writing stories about me. Same argument could be made. You know, maybe somebody worked at a smaller regional or local paper and was abducted in another country. Are they going to get the same attention? Probably not. All the more reason for me and people who have the understanding of what’s at stake here, and what is likely actually happening in this supposed case against her, all the more reason for us to be waving our arms and trying to shine the spotlight on it. I think that ultimately my great hope is that Brittney comes home very soon, and that I have a chance to meet her and talk to her in the cases of other Americans who have been held wrongfully hostage by other governments. I never had one that I met after the fact that I reported on say, I wish you’d been quiet on my case.

SREENIVASAN: Did you think people did not care about you on the outside? Were you told that?

REZAIAN: I was told that for weeks while I was being held in solitary confinement. The Iranian — my interrogator said that the Iranian state media had announced that my wife and I had been killed in a car accident and that people believed it. I had no way of knowing if that was true or not. They were also saying that I had access to legal representation, which was certainly not true. I didn’t see a lawyer for the first nine months of my detention. So, you know, it’s a period that the first days are ones of confusion. Then that confusion becomes terror. You wonder if you’re ever going to see the light of day again. You wonder if you’re going to be executed. And then, as time drags on, you wonder if you’re going to die in prison, and, you know, your fears, your apprehensions, your anxieties shift multiple times during one of these ordeals. And in every single way, it’s inhumane and it is torture to create the circumstances by which captors are trying to really make the detainee go mad.

SREENIVASAN: Jason Rezaian of “The Washington Post,” thanks you so much for joining us.

REZAIAN: Thank you, Hari.