Washington Free Beacon Editors
Not three years ago, Brittney Griner refused to take the floor when the WNBA played the national anthem before tipoff. “I think we should take that much of a stand,” she said at the time, arguing that “basketball doesn’t mean anything in a world where we can’t just live. We can’t wake up and do whatever we want to do.” Such is the plight, she said, of being black in America.
Yet it was in part Griner’s race, as well as her sexual orientation—she is a lesbian—that made her detention by Russia in February a high-profile news story and turned her case into a cause célèbre for activists and journalists, but we repeat ourselves.
It is also why the Biden administration on Thursday struck an ill-advised deal to trade Griner’s freedom for that of Viktor Bout, an arms dealer and weapons smuggler who was convicted in 2011 of conspiring to murder American citizens. Not included in the deal was Russia’s release of Paul Whelan, a white, cisgender, heterosexual former Marine arrested in late 2018 on trumped-up charges. For all of Griner’s complaints about being black in this country, she’s gotten far better treatment than her white counterpart.
Whelan told CNN in a phone interview Thursday from a remote Russian penal colony that “I am greatly disappointed that more has not been done to secure my release, especially as the four-year anniversary of my arrest is coming up. I was arrested for a crime that never occurred.”
Then there are the merits of the deal itself…
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