Originally Posted By StillThePassHolder <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/02/10/hostage.journalist/index.html" target="_blank">http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/ meast/02/10/hostage.journalist/index.html</a> So what do you think is going to happen to her? I'm afraid she's going to get killed and we're all going to be able to watch. No way should we release all female prisoners, but just the same, this is a tough one.
Originally Posted By RoadTrip I don't think she will be killed. Have any female American or European hostages been killed? I guess I don't remember any. At any rate, there is no way the United States can submit to blackmail by terrorists. Not to sound heartless, but anyone who is over there knows the chance they are taking. To expect the United States to bail her out is really rather unreasonable. She voluntarily took the chance; now she is paying the price. She should suck it up and not give in to the terrorists.
Originally Posted By StillThePassHolder "I don't think she will be killed. Have any female American or European hostages been killed? I guess I don't remember any." Actually at least one has. I forget her name, but she was with a charity organization.
Originally Posted By StillThePassHolder Her name was Margaret Hassan, and she was killed October, 2004. While checking for Hassan's name, I came across links that discussed other hostages who were eventually beheaded after the demand that all female prisoners be released.
Originally Posted By StillThePassHolder From the L.A. Times: Will we let Jill Carroll be killed? By Peter Singer, PETER SINGER is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and the author of "Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics." JILL CARROLL, the 28-year-old freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor who has been held by kidnappers in Iraq since Jan. 7, appeared on a video last week. "Please just do whatever they want," she said. "Give them whatever they want as quickly as possible. There is a very short time. Please do it fast. That's all." What the kidnappers want is for the United States to free the female prisoners it is holding in Iraq, and they have made it clear that if the U.S. does not do so, Carroll will be killed. Given that other captives have been killed by Iraqi kidnappers, there can be little doubt that the threat to Carroll's life is real. Why then has there been so little discussion of whether we should meet the demands? With a human life at stake, is it right not even to debate her case? Perhaps no one is talking about what we should do because there is a consensus that we should never yield to blackmail or threats of extortion. A look at Colombia, where more than 22,000 people have been kidnapped in the last decade, suggests what can go wrong when payment of ransom becomes the norm. There, kidnapping has become just another way of making money, more lucrative than mugging because the kidnappers get an average of $20,000 for each hostage taken. Apart from the economic cost of the ransoms, and the cost of the increased security, there also has been a considerable loss of innocent human life because many hostages have been murdered, either when they resisted their kidnappers or when their families could not or did not pay. It certainly seems likely that things would've been better if, right from the start of the wave of Colombian kidnappings, no one had paid a ransom; the kidnappers would have realized there was nothing to be gained. BUT IS THE RULE against dealing with kidnappers really absolute? Is it so black and white that we shouldn't even bother to discuss it? Israel, which has a lot of experience in dealing with terrorists, doesn't seem to think so. In January 2004, for instance, Israel released about 30 prisoners in exchange for the release by Hezbollah of Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers. Nor was that the first time Israel had made such a deal. Which of us would not seek to meet the kidnappers' demands if Carroll were our daughter? If one of President Bush's daughters were in a similar situation, do we believe he would not be thinking about whether to meet the demands? Indeed, wouldn't we think worse of him as a human being if he did not? Admittedly, the duties of a president may override the duties of a father. The leader of a nation sometimes has to stand firm, and he may even be required to sacrifice his children for the good of the nation. But of course that would be a last resort and should not be done unless the stakes are truly momentous. Are the stakes that momentous in this case? They don't seem to be. The kidnapper's demands, if indeed they are limited to the release of the five female prisoners being held by the military in Iraq, seem relatively modest, a small price to pay for saving the life of a young woman. As far as we know, none of these female prisoners is a significant insurgent leader or someone whose release would pose a major threat. What's more, the U.S. released five other women on Jan. 26 (although it was careful to say that the release had nothing to do with the kidnappers' demands). A spokesperson said the U.S. military and the Iraqi government had "processed the women's cases according to normal procedures and determined they did not need to be held any longer." Perhaps if the proceedings on the remaining five cases were accelerated, it might turn out that they do not need to be held any longer either. It would be a terrible irony if that conclusion were reached after Carroll had been executed. It is not obvious to me that it would be wrong to release the female prisoners. It may well be the right thing to do, quite independently of the pressing moral requirement that we do everything possible to save Carroll's life. But then, I don't know enough about the grounds on which these women are being held. The Bush administration could at least tell us that. Then we could begin to have an informed debate on what we should do. But as Carroll has said, we need to do it fast.
Originally Posted By gadzuux U.S. Army detained suspects' daughters, wives as leverage By Nancy A. Youssef The Seattle Times Knight Ridder Newspapers Excerpts - BAGHDAD, Iraq — The U.S. Army has been detaining Iraqi women to help track down husbands or fathers who are suspected terrorists, according to documents released Friday and an interview with a female detainee who was released Thursday after four months in prison. A series of e-mails written by U.S. soldiers and an internal Army memo, all released Friday in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, describe two cases of women who were imprisoned because American officials wanted information about their husbands. The Iraqi woman said Friday that she and eight other female detainees in her cell had talked often among themselves. She discovered that all were being held because U.S. officials had suspected their male relatives of having ties to terrorism. In some cases, men in their families were killed during U.S. raids, the woman alleged. The woman said she was visiting a relative in southwest Baghdad four months ago when multinational forces raided the home. Her relative's husband was killed, she said, and she and her husband were detained. She said she was held with eight other women in a small room at Baghdad International Airport. "We were talking about the charges against each of us," she said. "It turned out to be all the same. We were taken because they suspected our husbands or fathers of being terrorists." She said she was cut off from her family during her capture and that she didn't see or hear from her husband until he, too, was released Thursday. The U.S. detention of female prisoners is a sensitive issue for the Iraqi populace, which considers the mistreatment of a woman a dishonor to her family. Iraqis find it particularly offensive that foreign male officers are holding female prisoners, as many Iraqis fear that U.S. soldiers will treat them disrespectfully. Several terrorist groups that are holding hostages — inducing the one that claims responsibility for kidnapping U.S. journalist Jill Carroll — have demanded the release of female prisoners. U.S. and Iraqi officials have said the decision to release five women Thursday wasn't related to Carroll's kidnapping but was the result of a routine review of detainee cases. U.S. officials said that after the release of the five, four of the 14,000 prisoners they were holding were female. The Iraqi Justice Ministry said Friday that six women remain in custody. In a memo written in June 2004 and released Friday, an officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose name was redacted, described the arrest of a 28-year-old woman from Tamiya, northwest of Baghdad. She had three children, including one who was nursing. U.S. forces raided her in-laws' home, calling her husband the "primary target." Before the raid, soldiers had decided that if the woman were at the in-laws' home, they would detain her "in order to leverage the primary target's surrender," the memo's author wrote. "During my initial screening of the occupants at the target house, I determined that the wife could provide no actionable intelligence leading to the arrest of her husband," the author of the memo wrote. "Despite my protest, the raid team leader detained her anyway." The woman was released two days later, the memo said. In the 2004 e-mail exchange, what appear to be U.S. soldiers based in northern Iraq discuss the detention of Kurdish female prisoners. The names were redacted. In an e-mail dated June 17, 2004, a U.S. soldier wrote: "What are you guys doing to try to get the husband — have you tacked a note on the door and challenged him to come get his wife?" A soldier wrote two days later that he was getting more information from "these gals" that could "result in getting husband." The e-mails and the memo were among hundreds of documents that the Pentagon released under a federal court order to meet an ACLU request for information on detention practices.
Originally Posted By cape cod joe To Pete Singer--------It HAS to be absolute black and white---otherwise charges of discrimination would be rightly brought up. It's a terrible moral quandary but I see no alternative way of viewing this?? Any other possibilities?
