The US has a policy to not negotiate or pay ransom for the release of hostages of American citizens by terrorist organizations. The European countries do. ISIS they say, makes over $200 million from ransoms.
So who’s policy is right?
No the US should not. Morally speaking, it implicitly assumes that kidnapping is something that can be negotiated about rather than to be responded to a crime and practically speaking it funnels money to terrorist organizations and encourages further kidnappings.
Is paying ransoms in counterfeit money dusted with anthrax an option?
Sure…if you want the money to be spread around and the U.S. to get the blame.
Paying ransoms would just encourage more kidnapping.
If any of my loved ones were kidnapped for ransom by terrorists, I’d sure as hell want a ransom paid for their release.
There’s a report that ISIS demanded 100M euro for his release.
There’s no realistic set of negotiations that produces a good outcome in this case. For this particular incident, the point is moot. They were either delusional about how much they could get or not making a serious set of demands.
I understand your feelings, but then you’d have to pay it. In the Big Picture countries should not pay ransoms to terrorists. Anyway, he went into harm’s way knowing that death could very possibly be the result, whether by kidnapping and beheading or simply a misplaced bullet.
Of course you would. So would I. If my daughter was kidnapped I’d pay ten billion dollars and sacrifice the lives of a thousand soldiers to get her back. I’d die a thousand deaths myself. I’d be quite happy if the government did it for me, too. People quite naturally place much greater value on the lives of their loved ones than other things.
The government, however, must take a rational stance that considers the welfare of all its citizens, and the simple fact is that if they’d paid $100 million to get James Foley back, right now terrorists would be putting all the energies into kidnapping Americans and dozens would already have their own ransoms set right now. So James Foley’s family would not be struck with tragedy, but dozens more families would be.
Hell no. First, you incentivize future kidnappings. Second, you give ISIS $100 million (or whatever) to fund more kidnapping.
Paying the ransom funds more terrorism and kidnapping.
I would prefer to send them $200 million worth of heavy ordinance and cruise missiles.
The UK is the other country that refuses to pay ransoms, while most European countries do.
Are all the posters above against ransoms from the U.S. or U.K.? It might be interesting to know the perspective of someone from a country that regularly does pay up.
I can see both sides. Yes, paying ransoms is going to encourage these groups to kidnap more foreigners. On the other hand, the foreigners don’t die. On the third hand, this is a major source of revenue for these distasteful groups.
Right now, the fact that the US and UK don’t pay ransoms probably doesn’t deter a whole lot from the kidnapping, because I doubt that the nationality of the targets is always figured out ahead of time. And you’re still making a big show of sticking it to the West when you kill them and release the video. After all, isn’t the aim or terrorists to cause fear in their opponents?
But that’s just my gut feeling. I don’t have any stats to back it up. Are Americans less likely to be kidnapped in Syria than, say, Spaniards?
I’m from the US.
I’m not against paying ransoms, in principle, actually. But it has to be balanced against the result. It’s not a strictly black/white issue, but the particulars of this case don’t leave much wiggle room.
In this case, 100M euro was way out of line. That’s more than enough to incentivize additional kidnappings, even at great risk. So, all the money gets you is swapping 1 person (plus perhaps a couple more Americans being held) for dozens more kidnappings (and deaths) and more weapons in the hands of bad people. In this case, you’d be paying them to kill and injure even more people than you’d save.
I’d say you could try to negotiate it down, but that’s such a huge amount I don’t see any reasonable chance of bringing it down to the point it doesn’t buy you more deaths than lives saved.
Then you are part of the problem. How many innocent Shia children do you think ISIS would be able to kill with your extra $130 million in funding? Twenty? Fifty? More?
No the U.S. should not have paid a ransom: it just results in more kidnappings.
Foley had the option of staying out of that country; why didn’t he take it?
Should we fubd terrorist organizations and incentivize harming Americans? Let me think for a moment- no.
Terror groups most certainly do research who they are kidnapping and what they expect to get out of it. It is now a, if not the, major source of income for terror operations. It’s a business model. France and others should be ashamed of themselves for being complicit.
This is complicated by the fact that we are bombing them, and what they REALLY want is for us to stop that. If we pay ransom, and continue to bomb them, then they have even more incentive to kidnap more Americans.
It’s not just these guys. Americans are all over the place. There are thousands of Peace Corps volunteers right now happily sleeping in their huts. Thousands of English teachers in their classrooms. Thousands of us doing business. These people have no real protection from kidnappers except the fact that it provides a lot of negatives (the US will hunt you down) and no real positive. Paying ransoms would shift that trade off and attract criminal groups to kidnapping as well as the terrorists whose salaries we would be paying.
It would be interesting to test whether paying ransoms really does incentivise kidnappings.
You’d expect that, right enough, but do the facts bear it out? Are French, Italian, etc. people kidnapped at a greater rate than Americans or British people?
Notwithstanding what even sven says in post #16, I kind of doubt that most war zone kidnappings are carefully planned and researched; I suspect they’re largely opportunistic. Who falls into your hands, to a large extent, is who falls into your hands, and only then do you work out what use you can best make of him. It may well be that if you find out he’s American, and therefore won’t fetch much more than his family can afford, you reckon the best use you can make of him is in a horrifying execution video. In other words, refusal to pay doesn’t protect Americans from kidnapping, but it does make it more likely that, if kidnapped, they will be horribly killed.
I take the point, of course, that if you pay terrorists a bunch of money, the money will likely not be put to Good Use. On the other hand, perhaps kidnapping is a win-win for them; if they get paid, they get a bunch of money which they can use to promote terror. If they don’t get paid, they get an execution video which they can use to promote terror. So by refusing to pay you are not necessarily denying them a victory.
I hate to say it, but a more effective tactic against kidnapping might be measures which reduce kidnappings in the first place. Maybe news agencies should not be sending kidnap-worthy western journalists into war zones; they should be making greater use of local journalists, or of journalists from less targettable backgrounds.
Let’s also note that it would be illegal to give money to a designated terrorist organization. So, the question then becomes: Should the US government break US law? I think the answer to that should be obvious.