I remember a press conference at the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was 2006, a year after the three Romanian journalists were kidnapped in Iraq. There was a huge scandal about the money paid by the government for freeing the journalists. I asked how much. The foreign affairs minister at the time, Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, refused to answer my question. He said no comment. We are supposed to know exactly what happened in 2005 with the three people kidnapped in Iraq only in 2055. Cause it's a state secret and a state secrete can only be made public after 50 years. That's why the Romanian Envoy in Iraq at the time didn't come to court to testify in the trial of Muhammad Munaf, the driver and one of the alleged accomplices of the kidnappers. He claims he was kidnapped too. The guy is and Iraqi-American citizen but he has been trialed in Iraq and sentenced to be hanged in october 2006 in a mock trial. A few lawyers from the Brennan Center for Justice in New York took his case pro bono and asked the American Courts for a fair trial. On February 19 this year the Iraqi Casation Court reversed the sentence for Munaf. The reason - no enough proof. Well, the Iraqis didn't think about the Romanian state secrets when they issued the decision. So they wrote a few things about what happened in 2007. One of the American lawyers, Jonathan Hafetz, sent me the translation on the decision. Surprise! The Romanians negotiated and paid the ransom. No comment!
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