Hostage behavior: Case study, Admiral James Stockdale

From the New York Sun on the occasion of his death in 2005:

On the morning of the day he died, it has been said of a few individuals over the years, he was the greatest man alive, and among Americans this could well be said of Admiral James Stockdale, who died Tuesday at the age of 81. He won the Medal of Honor for his leadership of the American prisoners of war held in Hanoi during the years of the Vietnam War, and his death, coming as America is in the early years of a new war, offers much about which to think.

The Medal of Honor, which is impossible to alloy, is usually awarded for acts that disclose the courage of an individual in a few split seconds - in the time it takes to save the lives of one's comrades by throwing oneself on a grenade, say, or by leaping from a foxhole to attack an enemy machine-gun nest. Such medals are worth no less for the fact that the character that won them was glimpsed in an instant.

Admiral Stockdale's courage, however, was disclosed over and over again, and was sustained for the entire span of the seven and a half years he spent in the infamous prison known as the Hanoi Hilton and other dungeons, where he was held four years in solitary confinement and two with his legs clamped in irons. He was a prisoner of one of the most savage enemies America has ever fought. It was Stockdale who invented the code prisoners used to communicate, and he told other prisoners, as Los Angeles Times put it, to defy their captors at every turn and never act like helpless captives.

The Medal of Honor citation refers to Stockdale's efforts at "self-disfiguration to dissuade his captors from exploiting him for propaganda purposes." In plain English, what he did was use a wooden stool to beat his face to a pulp so he couldn't be used in an enemy film. One reason that he is so admired by his fellow prisoners is that, when he inflicted what the citation calls "a near-mortal wound to his person in order to convince his captors of his willingness to give up his life rather than capitulate," the enemy backed off in its torture and harassment of other Americans it was holding.

Afghanistan tries to abort nascent market in hostage-taking

The New York Times reports:

Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, on Sunday ruled out any further deals with kidnappers after a videotape was broadcast showing two French aid workers whom the Taliban claimed to be holding hostage...

“We will avoid the exchange of hostages with the criminals,” Mr. Spanta told reporters. “If we do it once or twice, it will become a procedure. It won’t have an end.”

“The policy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is that criminals should not be rewarded, they should be punished, and the Taliban are a criminal group,” he said.

Recall that the market in hostage-taking in Afghanistan was established when the Afghan government and Italy struck a deal with the Taliban in order to obtain the release of an Italian journalist who had been kidnapped in March.

As the Times reports:

Since then, the two French aid workers have been abducted, with three Afghan colleagues, in southwestern Afghanistan.

Italy creates market for hostages

The New York Times reports that in exchange for a journalist held hostage in "lawless southern Afghanistan" as the Times put it, Italy admitted that it traded five Taliban prisoners.

As the Times writes, this "appears to be the first time prisoners have been openly exchanged for a hostage in the wars that the United States and its allies are fighting there and in Iraq." The move was criticized from Washington to London to Amsterdam.

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists, and we don’t advise others to do so either,” State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said, paraphrasing U.S. policy.

The U.S. and many other governments believe that by conceding to the demands of hostage takers, while one life may be saved, you effectively make hostage-taking profitable, and thus create a market.

As Dutch foreign minister, Maxime Verhagen, expressed this idea, "When we create a situation where you can buy the freedom of Taliban fighters when you catch a journalist, then in the short term there will be no journalists anymore."

Abu Sayyaf leader confirmed dead

The Associated Press reports that DNA tests confirmed the death of an FBI-most-wanted terrorist, Abu Sayyaf leader Khadaffy Janjalani, the head of the Philippines-based terrorist organization believed to have long-standing links with al Qaeda.

Janjalani was killed in a battle with Philippines forces in September.

ASG was behind the 2004 ferry bombing in the Philippines that killed 116 people. The group has also carried out kidnappings and hostage-taking, including the taking of an American missionary couple and tourist who was beheaded.

Osama bin Laden is thought to have provided the group’s $5 million seed money. Bin Laden had met the group's founding leader, Janjalani's elder brother, when the two men fought together against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The group's mission is to establish a pan-Islamic state spanning southeast Asia and including parts of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma and Thailand.

In the mid-1990s Ramzi Yousef, the lead 1993 World Trade Center bomber, and his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, worked with the ASG when they bombed Philippines Air Flight 434 in which a Japanese passenger was killed. This was supposed to be a test-run for Operation Bojinka, their plot to simultaneously explode a dozen trans-Pacific commercial airliners in mid-flight.

ASG is also linked to Jemaah Islamiyah, the Indonesian group that carried out the Bali bombings in 2002.

The group is thought to have 200-400 core supporters. The Philippines also announced that they had killed Janjalani’s possible successor in a battle last Tuesday.