Daniel O’Shea, former Coordinator for the Hostage Working Group at the US’s Iraq Embassy said that hostage recoveries in Iraq will be more difficult “because we left the country in 2010 with no footprint behind” on Friday’s AC 360 on CNN. “There is a strategy you can apply [to stop kidnapping] but it will be tough, because we don't have assets on the ground and intelligence networks. We have to rebuild that all over from scratch, because we left the country in 2010 with no footprint behind,” he stated. Recently, the US government reported that it launched a mission to rescue recently-murdered journalist James Foley but had the wrong location.
O’Shea added that the recent prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl worried him that the U.S. was reversing its policy of refusing to negotiate with kidnappers and could lead to the U.S. paying ransoms that would encourage more kidnappings, reporting, “France, Germany, Italy, and many others were paying multi-million dollar ransoms and they just escalated [kidnappings], and that's why you have this predominance of this tactic... the U.S. allied with our close partners, the Brits, and Canadians, and Australians, and New Zealanders were the only ones who stuck to the policies of no ransoms paid, but again, we just made concessions to bring back Bergdahl, so we essentially changed U.S. policy in that venue as well.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett Reported by Breitbart 15 hours ago.