The mainstream media is reporting that President Biden is offering a trade deal to the Russians. If they will give him Brittney Griner, he will give them Viktor Bout.
Who is Viktor Bout? He’s an international Russian arms dealer who got caught in a sting operation orchestrated by the DEA (yes, the Drug Enforcement Administration) in Thailand, where he agreed to sell arms to what he believed was the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC). Since U.S. officials have labeled FARC a terrorist organization, their sting operation, they claimed, established that Bout conspired to kill Americans. He’s now serving a 25-year sentence in a federal penitentiary.
But there is another factor to consider in the DEA’s decision to target Bout with a sting operation more than 8,000 miles away from American shores. Given that the U.S. government is the biggest arms dealer in the world (something that many in the U.S. gun-control crowd never object to), it’s quite possible that they went after Bout because they didn’t like the competition.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials continue to claim that Griner is a “political hostage,” notwithstanding the fact that she pled guilty to a violation of Russia’s drug laws. At the same time, those same U.S. officials continue to brutally enforce their own vicious drug laws here in the United States, especially against blacks.
It seems to me that if we are going to talk about “political hostages,” it’s worth revisiting the case of Maria Butina, the Russian woman who U.S. officials targeted during the Trump administration, when the extreme anti-Russia animus was getting into full swing, especially at the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, Congress, and the U.S. mainstream press.
Maria Butina. Licensed under Creative Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}
What did Butina do to earn the enmity of U.S. officials? Did she spy on America? Did she violate the old World War I espionage law by releasing national-security state secrets through Julian Assange’s Wikileaks?
Well, no, not exactly. What she did was “infiltrate” the National Rifle Association and other conservative groups.
Oh my gosh! What greater threat to “national security” than that? Just imagine: infiltrating the NRA! What could be worse than that? By the way, it’s probably worth mentioning that when Butina was in her early 20s in Russia, she founded a pro-gun rights organization called Right to Bear Arms. That sure sounds nefarious to me! No doubt her organization was designed to arm the Russian people in preparation for the upcoming Russian invasion of the United States.
But that’s not all. According to the New York Times, she tried to establish a “back channel of communication” with American politicians at something called the “National Prayer Breakfast” in Washington. And she attended the breakfast not just once but twice!
Well that certainly sound ominous, doesn’t it? Imagine: A pro-gun rights young Russian woman infiltrating a prayer breakfast attended by American politicians. It doesn’t get much more dangerous than that. While she claimed that she was simply trying to establish better relations between the United States and Russia, her real motive for attending that prayer breakfast could have been to persuade American Christians to embrace “godless communism”!
U.S. officials ultimately targeted Butina with criminal prosecution for her nefarious actions. After all, let’s not forget that the Russians are coming to get us again, just like they supposedly were doing throughout the Cold War. It was clear, at least to U.S. officials and conservative Cold War advocates, that Butina had to be an advance agent for the coming Russian takeover of the United States.
The feds convicted Butina for being as an “unregistered agent” of the Reds, I mean, the Russians, and meted out an 18-month jail sentence to her. Never mind that she denied ever working for the Russian government, and never mind that the Russian government denied ever employing her. Everyone knows that Russkies lie.
Given the renewed extreme anti-Russia animus that characterized U.S. officials during their Cold War racket, it was clear to them that Butina’s attendance at NRA events and conservative prayer breakfasts proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that that she was serving as an advance troop for the upcoming Russian invasion of America, much as Martin Luther King was deemed to be a front agent for the Russian commies during the Cold War.
After serving her jail sentence, Butina was deported back to Russia. Too bad. If she were still in jail, U.S. officials could have offered to trade her for Griner. My hunch is that the Russians would have instead insisted on Viktor Bout.