Negotiating with Terrorists and the Jill Carroll Case

With the Korean hostage crisis concluded, more reports are coming out about the under the table payment given to the Taliban which as I have posted was probably laundered by the Saudis. This negotiating with terrorists I have often seen rationalized by people in Korea by claiming the US did the same thing in the Jill Carroll case in Iraq:

At a demonstration on August 15, a South Korean holiday for Liberation Day, a spokesman for a students’ group denounced the US policy of not negotiating with terrorists. He argued that the US is hypocritical and only last year exchanged prisoners for a kidnapped American journalist. He was referring to Jill Carroll, who was freed from abduction in Iraq after five female Iraqi prisoners were released from US custody.

So why not the same for Koreans? The student spokesman insisted that the US bore responsibility for the kidnapping as a result of its “war on terror” and its occupation of Afghanistan.

Of course this claim is made by people who have no clue about what happened with the Jill Carroll case. Prisoners were not released in exchange for Jill Carroll. Her captors demanded the release of all female prisoners in Iraq which they did not receive. At the time US and Iraqi authorities had nine women in jail and five of them were released after they were found not guilty during their trials and were thus released. During this same time frame even more female prisoners were even taken prisoner:

The US military confirmed last week it was holding nine Iraqi women. On Thursday, however, the military said it had detained two more women and three men for alleged insurgent activities in the northern city of Mosul. Detainees are regularly freed in Iraq following reviews of their cases, a process that can take months. US officials say that Thursday’s release of five women and 414 men was part of the routine procedure and not linked to Carroll’s case. [Christian Science Monitor]

Additionally these prisoners were released two months before Carroll was eventually released. The routine release of these female prisoners was linked to the release of Carroll by the kidnappers because of the propaganda value involved. These women were going to be released anyway but these kidnappers could take credit for their release with the kidnapping of Carroll. Because of this propaganda value the US military actually was at odds with the Iraqi government over the scheduled release of the women but the Iraqi government decided to release them anyway.

It is important to remember that there are three types of kidnappers in Iraq, Al-Qaida jihadis, common criminal gangs, and Sunni political insurgents. If Carroll was kidnapped by Al-Qaida she would have received the Margaret Hassan treatment, criminal gangs would have held her until some kind of payment was made, but fortunately for her she was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents who intended to use her for maximum propaganda value. However, these insurgents kidnapped her when she had just left the office of a prominent Sunni sheik, Adnan al-Dulaimi. The sheik was highly offended by this and for those not familiar with Iraqi culture this is a loss of face for the sheik especially since it was a woman that was kidnapped just 300 meters from his office.

The political pressure from prominent Sunnis as well as the Iraqi media strongly condemning her kidnapping thus shifting public opinion against the kidnappers is what facilitated the release of Jill Carroll. The US never held direct negotiations, released prisoners, or made any payment to the kidnappers. In fact since then the kidnappers of Jill Carroll have been arrested. Does anyone think the Korean government will do anything to arrest those that killed two of their citizens? The handling of the Jill Carroll hostage crisis is far different from what happened with the Korean hostages in Afghanistan despite the anti-US hate groups attempts to equate them.