Planes land on U.S. territory every day, but one particular flight touching down has been hotly anticipated for months and brings with it great news and precious cargo: WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was arrested at the Moscow airport in February on a trumped-up charge of bringing illegal drugs into the country and how now been released in a prisoner swap.
Let’s be clear about something: Griner was effectively a political prisoner. Her crime — inadvertently packing a couple of cannabis-oil cartridges, which she had a medical prescription for, into her luggage when traveling to Russia — should have warranted a warning, maybe a small fine. In no rational system did it warrant a nine-year term in a penal colony, an eye-popping sentence even in a country as used to carceral punishment as ours.
The same can’t be said for the other side of the swap, convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout, a man whose illicit businesses scattered weapons across volatile conflicts in multiple continents, and who likely still has the contacts and the resources to do damage. It’s a good thing that Griner was released, but an indisputably bad one that Bout did too, and the U.S. certainly got a raw deal.
No doubt that the Russians will claim that Bout did nothing wrong, but the evidence against him is overwhelming. No case really had to be built against Griner, who committed one minor infraction and did not try to obscure it at all. Let’s hope this doesn’t give the Russians the idea that they can feel free to help themselves to any American visitor who they can plausibly hit with charges that’ll stick with the hope of getting their people sprung from prison.
Left behind are Americans like Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine who was jailed for what seems like a bogus espionage charge levied against him four years ago, and who did not benefit from the same public pressure campaign that kept the administration’s focus on springing Griner. We should not forget about them.
