For James Foley’s Family, U.S. Policy Offered No Hope
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHISEPT
NEW YORK TIMES (PAGE A1)
September 16th, 2014
The email appeared in Michael Foley’s inbox a year after his brother James disappeared on a reporting trip in northern Syria. It made clear that the people holding him wanted one thing above all else: money.
Cautiously hopeful, Michael Foley and his parents, John and Diane, turned over the email to the agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation assigned to their case. The agent provided general guidance but also some stern warnings: The United States would never trade prisoners for hostages, nor would it under any circumstances pay ransom. Moreover, the government told the Foleys that it was a crime for private citizens to pay off terrorists.
More important, in retrospect, was what the F.B.I. did not tell the family: Mr. Foley was being held alongside a dozen Europeans, whose countries have a history of paying ransoms.
Mostly, the government offered sympathy but little active support, the family and their advisers said, leaving them overwhelmed and unsure of what to do…
…
…“The F.B.I. didn’t help us much — let’s face it,” Diane Foley said in a telephone interview. “Our government was very clear that no ransom was going to be paid, or should be paid,” she said. “It was horrible — and continues to be horrible. You are between a rock and a hard place.”
The Times tells us that when it came to
"much of the hostages' captivity...the administration appears to have treated the abductions as unfortunate but relatively routine cases of Americans falling into the hands of extremists. Europeans, by contrast, treated the kidnappings as national security crises."
...In hindsight, the family criticisms echo broader concerns that the administration did not foresee how the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria could become a major threat…
(Bold type is diarist's emphasis)
According to the NYT, despite the fact the FBI had assigned a three-member team to the family that spoke with them “each and every day,” the agents “were limited by what they could share, both because much of the information was classified and because they did not want to cause further emotional strain.”
Readers are reminded that the government did mount “a risky raid in July, using American troops to try to free the captives, though the mission was not successful.”
From The New York Times
"Inside U.S. Hostage Policy"
(via YouTube)
A look at some very rare exceptions in the United States’ otherwise strict policy of never negotiating with hostage-takers.
(Video Credit By Christian Roman on Publish Date August 27, 2014.)
Note: This video was produced and published after Michael Foley's gruesome execution, but prior to the announcement and widely-distributed video of Steven Sotloff's beheading.
The article informs readers that the U.S. and Great Britain “are among the only countries that abide by a zero-concession policy, refusing to accede to terrorists’ demands, arguing that doing so encourages more kidnapping. By contrast, European countries have repeatedly paid to free their citizens, despite signing numerous declarations vowing not to, prompting condemnation from former American officials and analysts.”
We're told that this isn’t the only difference between the countries on the two sides of this tense (and getting moreso) “debate.” Specifically, “Many European nations take charge of the situation from the moment their citizens are captured and aggressively begin a negotiation. By contrast, relatives in the United States said they were left to puzzle through the crisis largely on their own.”
It’s also reported in today’s Times that Foley and fellow American hostage Steven Sotloff were but two of 23 hostages (including three other Americans) that were held by ISIS, over a four-month period, in the same “jail.”
Unlike the Foley family, as well as the families of other American hostages, all of whom were pretty much kept in the dark throughout their respective fellow family members' ordeals, the article notes “crises cells” were activated “inside the Foreign Ministries of France, Spain, Switzerland and Italy, staffed around the clock with people working in shifts, said a European counterterrorism official who has worked on numerous hostage cases and was briefed on the negotiations with ISIS.”
These European crises cells waited for the kidnappers to contact them, “and when they did, the intelligence services of at least one country took over the email accounts of family members, responding directly to the terrorist group, according to a person with direct knowledge of how the negotiations unfolded.”
By February, negotiations between ISIS and these four European governments had begun; upon receiving absurdly untenable ransom demands, counteroffers were made, “and the average sum negotiated per person” was approximately two million Euros ($2.6 million) per hostage.
Across the pond, all of the American families, including the Foleys, “were left to answer the emails themselves and kept largely in the dark. They were not introduced to one another and had to find the other families on their own, Ms. Foley said. While high-level officials met with them, they shared little information.”
…“They were always very cordial,” Ms. Foley said. “The problem was we never got any information about what the government was doing — if anything — on our behalf. Every bit of information we got was on our own.”…
By May of this year, the four American hostages’ families started comparing notes after finally meeting each other, and they
“began holding group conference calls with the administration, Ms. Foley said.”
By late spring, as more European hostages were released, the Foley’s learned that one of the European hostages was freed for a ransom of $4.5 million.
In conjunction with Foley’s employer, the online news site GlobalPost, whom readers are informed independently spent millions of dollars via “consultants” to obtain information about Foley, an “earnest” fundraising effort finally began. The final goal was $5 million.
But, by then it was late May.
…Although American officials initially advised the family that they could be prosecuted for paying a ransom, the bureau later privately told the Foleys that it was unlikely they would face charges and they could pursue their own course of action, independently of what the United States was attempting, a senior American official said. Once the family made it clear they wanted to pay, the bureau instructed them to stall, according to a consultant working on the hostage crisis.
“What the F.B.I. said is that their experience had shown that you want to draw out the process,” said the consultant, who requested anonymity because he did not want to be seen as being critical of the United States. “You want to have lots of back and forth. You want further proof of life. You want to ask if you can speak to your son by phone — anything that elongates the process.
“I asked, ‘Why do we want to do that?’ What they said is, ‘This is how you get the numbers down to a realistic figure,’ ” the consultant said. “At one point, I said: ‘Are you sure? I think we are just making them angry.’ ”
Times readers are apprised that ISIS wanted more than just cash in return for Foley’s release.
“In one of the early emails to the family, they had demanded the release of unspecified Muslim prisoners, Mr. Balboni said. In subsequent messages to the families of the other Americans, the captors proposed a swap for a Pakistani neuroscientist, Aafia Siddiqui, whose incarceration in a Texas prison on charges of trying to kill Americans in Afghanistan has become a rallying cry for jihadists.”
It’s at this juncture where the family was informed by the “consultant” that that option “was off the table,” due to the U.S. government’s “no concessions policy.”
If readers recall—as the article reminds us--it was May 31st when five Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo were released in exchange for Sargeat Bowe Bergdahl.
The Times quotes Bush administration National Security Council hostage rescue adviser Dane Egli who notes that Bergdahl’s release “introduced a huge inconsistency in our policy.”
The response from the families of ISIS hostages, to directly quote the NYT’s language, was that they were “…aghast. They angrily called their advisers and one another, feeling more than ever that they were on their own, said a person who worked alongside several of them.”
At this point, the Obama administration’s double-speak shifted into overdrive. They…
…argued that the Bergdahl case did not constitute an exception because he was considered a prisoner of war.
By contrast, the families were advised that Ms. Siddiqui’s release was impossible because she had been convicted in an American court, a different situation from that of the Guantánamo detainees, who have never been charged, according to one adviser.
I’m not going to get into the remaining details of this article—while I have skipped through many aspects of this story to provide a broad overview to readers, nonetheless--since I strongly urge people reading this diary to click on the link near the top of this post and learn more about this on their own. But, suffice it say, aside from our country’s failed hostage rescue attempt on July 3rd—of which the Foleys remained
uninformed until just a few weeks ago--the U.S. government pretty much went off the rails from that point forward, as far as assisting the Foley family was concerned. (On the other hand, our government did everything it could to prevent the Foley family from taking any action prior to July 3rd, as well.)
To put it bluntly, readers are informed that the Foley family—when it was most urgently in need of support and assistance from our government in the final weeks of this tragedy--received quite a bit of bad advice going forward, to say the least!
We’re informed that, today, “Two other Americans and two British citizens remain in ISIS custody. At least 15 others held with Mr. Foley, all but one of them European, succeeded in getting out in return for cash.”
But, I certainly hope and pray that the families of those remaining four American and British hostages read today’s NY Times article. Obviously, they'll learn more about how to free their loved ones than any advice they're receiving from their respective governments.
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The post, above, is a bit of a follow-up to a post I published here this past Friday: “ABC: Journalist Foley's Family Threatened w/Prosecution, Repeatedly, by WH If They Paid ISIS' Ransom.”
It should be noted that, also on Friday, both CNN and The Guardian ran stories quite similar to the ABC News article, wherein all three outlets’ coverage confirmed that Diane Foley, and other Foley family members, made significant note of the fact that they were warned by our government that the family would be subject to federal prosecution if they attempted to raise funds or negotiate/pay the ransom demands made by ISIS for their son, Michael.
I find it more than interesting–and, regrettably, typical of the frequent reality that the NY Times, more often than many would like to admit–that our nation’s largest newspaper is now attempting to soft-sell government spin on this story, which is complete with “facts” that downplay a few, key negative aspects of it, as reported by ABC News, CNN and Guardian in reports from a few days ago.
Specifically, the Times article does not focus upon the threats of prosecution against the Foleys highlighted in both the ABC News' and The Guardian's (and, to a lesser extent, in CNN's) versions of this story. (The NYT does make reference, once, to something that is made to appear as a reminder of the federal laws about this matter.) And, going a step further, The Times actually notes that if the Foleys did attempt to raise and pay the ransom money, our government would look the other way—something that was not reported by ABC News, CNN or The Guardian, four days ago, at all.
That being said, today’s Times does “report” the inconvenient truths that our government did make a significant effort to: a.) keep the Foley family totally in the dark, in stark contrast to the way in which these matters appear to be handled in Europe; b.) highlight the fact that our government did make an effort to discourage the Foley family from attempting to do anything on their own; and, c.) if it wasn’t for the efforts of Michael Foley’s contractor/employer—specifically Phil Balboni over at GlobalPost—to learn as much as he/they could about the whereabouts and other pertinent matters relating to the potential release of Foley (and, apparently, doing a better job at that than our own government), his family would not have had any significant information, at all, when it came to aiding their efforts to save their son’s life; albeit too little, too late.
So, in today’s article, we have a bit of a “minor conflict,” information-wise. If readers are to accept the NYT article at face value, by the time the U.S. government said it would “look the other way,” if/when it came to the Foleys making any substantial effort to raise sufficient ransom money, the question must be asked: How sincere could the government’s “support” really have been, since the feds were accomplishing virtually nothing, at least from a material standpoint, to assist the Foleys in succeeding in their efforts to save their son, at least from July 4th, onward? By that time, as far as the Foleys were concerned, they were finally given a tacit okay by our government to make an attempt to raise the ransom money and payoff their son's kidnappers.
Unfortunately, it was too damn late.
In fact—if we’re to take the Times’ report at face value, which happens to fly in the face of reports from ABC, and The Guardian; and, to a lesser extent at CNN--I’d call it gross double-speak; insincere government spin downplayed and reported (either/or/both) as “news” by federal stenographers at the Times.
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