News-Info-Alerts

Re: Ransom For Hostages Policy Consideration

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: March 20, 2002

Ransom for Hostages... a new concept?

The State Department's Fact Sheet from 1995 - "International Terrorism: American Hostages
Fact sheet released by the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, U.S. Department of State, October 17, 1995..

U.S. Government Policy

The U.S. Government will make no concessions to terrorists holding official or private U.S. citizens hostage. It will not pay ransom, release prisoners, change its policies, or agree to other acts that might encourage additional terrorism. At the same time, the United States will use every appropriate resource to gain the safe return of American citizens who are held hostage by terrorists.

Definition

Hostage-taking is defined under international law (International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, adopted December 17, 1979) as the seizing or detaining and threatening to kill, injure, or continue to detain a person in order to compel a third party to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the seized or detained person. "

Evidently the above was authored in response to the Iran Hostage Crisis which began 04 NOV 79.

But is that really the case? No.

The USG has previously paid for (and continued to do so) the release of US citizens. In 1979, when the Iranian revolution came about, a NSA secret listening base was left fully staffed in Iran. Over a period of time, the new Iranian regime got wind of the personnel at the facility and took them hostage. The USG paid for the release of these folks and had them whisked to safety in the USA. Brown & Root did the same for its PA&E personnel in certain instances during the Second Indochina War.

In both cases, the personnel were working at the behest of or on behalf of, the USG.

The Iran Hostage Crisis is considered by many as the classic quid-pro-quo trade-off of arms for hostages, regardless of the official USG posturing of no ransom for hostages. Certainly a reward.

Blood Chits are theorhetically a promissory note. Individuals who aid and assist a captured or evading US servicemember are promised a reward. It is aimed at encouraging the local population to intercede on the behalf of the prisoner/evader, but that is not to say that an adversarial party might consider the reward of greater value than the man himself.

There is/was a reward fund created numerous years ago by members of Congress (MOC) that offered a substantial sum to any individual who produced a live POW from SEA. Known as the POW Publicity Fund, it claims to total a combined 2.6 million US (http://members.aol.com/powreward/)... so far, no takers.

The French, although rumored to have done so, did not pay ransom for the long-term stragglers, ralliers and POW nationals kept by Vietnam. The monies paid to Vietnam were ostensibly to pay for the upkeep of French cemeteries established during and after the First Indochina War. It probably did not hurt that the French kept paying for perpetual maintenance on graves and was still carrying several hundred nationals in the disparus (disappeared or missing) category, several dozen as POWs and several dozen more in AWOL/Deserter status. Whatever their status, French nationals straggled back to France for years afterward.

In other words, the US and other governments have what appears to be an "unofficial offical" policy of paying in a variety of circumstances.

"U.S. may pay ransom for hostages under new policy

February 22, 2002 Posted: 3:26 AM EST (0826 GMT)


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a major policy reversal on international hostage-taking, Bush administration officials said Wednesday that the United States might sometimes pay ransom to kidnappers.

However, the officials also stressed that the government would be aggressive in recovering the money once a hostage was safely released.

The message, one senior U.S. official said, is that "we're going to get you. We're not going to walk away."

The amended policy -- which President Bush signed last week -- was announced Wednesday.

The United States will become more actively involved whenever any American is taken hostage -- not just when a government employee is abducted or in high-profile cases such as the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, officials said.

Should the U.S. pay ransom for hostages?

Pearl's kidnappers had made a series of demands in exchange for his release, including that the United States free Pakistani detainees in the Afghan war. But U.S. and Pakistani officials said Thursday that they had received a videotape containing "indisputable" evidence that Pearl had been slain by his kidnappers.

U.S. officials said the change in the government kidnapping policy -- which was announced before word came of Pearl's death -- came from an interagency review dating back to the Clinton administration and was not related to Pearl's kidnapping.

The officials point to the October 2000 kidnapping of four American oil workers in Ecuador as setting the precedent for the policy shift. The hostages were freed after their companies paid millions in ransom.

However, the United States and local authorities in Colombia and Ecuador worked together to track down the kidnappers and recover the ransom.

The bottom line, said one senior Bush official, is that paying the ransom "worked" --even though it was not U.S. policy at the time.

The new procedure affords U.S. companies, individuals and the government "more flexibility" and is a reflection, officials said, of the success they found in Ecuador.

A 1995 policy on hostage-taking said the U.S. government "will not pay ransom, release prisoners, change its policies or agree to other acts that might encourage additional terrorism."

That language is missing in the revised plan, which states that "it is U.S. government policy to deny hostage takers the benefits of ransom, prisoner releases, policy changes or other acts of concession. ...

"In the event a hostage-taking incident is resolved through concessions, U.S. policy remains steadfastly to pursue investigation leading to the apprehension and prosecution of hostage takers who victimize U.S. citizens," it continues.

The new procedure also states, "U.S. Foreign Service posts can be actively involved in efforts to bring the incident to a safe conclusion."

U.S. officials repeatedly underscored that the most important thing is to secure the safe release of American hostages.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States still believes that allowing terrorists to benefit from hostage-taking only encourages more of such acts.

"That has always been our view: that paying ransom, allowing the terrorists to acquire benefits from hostage-taking only encourages further hostage-taking," Boucher said.

"Therefore, it's important to make sure that the hostage takers, whether they're doing it for criminal reasons, financial reasons or political statements, that they don't receive any particular benefit from this."

CNN State Department Correspondent Andrea Koppel contributed to this report. "