Transcripts For ALJAZAM Inside Story 20141209

Hole, i am ray suarez, how do you do the challenging military calculus around operations meant to free kidnap victims . Freelance programmer u. S. Citizen luke somers was said to be running out of time. Hour by hour, closer to the day his captors would finally take his life. The United States doesnt pay ransom to the shadowy networks of kidnappers fighting government as cross the world. That official policy is based on the conviction that americans would be put at even greater risk of kidnapping. Somers was killed by the men who were holding him, as an American Military mission unfolded. This time on inside story, how you make a decision with the potential for terrible consequences. My name is luke some, he i am 33 years old. Reporter from. From this video and other pieces of intelligence, american official believed al qaeda hostage luke somers had 72 hours to loaf. The u. S. Attempted to rescue him once before, but failed. He had been a captive since september 2013. On saturday, around 40 special Operations Forces tried again and descended upon the province of yemen, but the militants heard them coming. Translator there was an attempt to save them. But unfortunately they shot the hostage before or during the attack. They were freed, but unfortunately died on the way. Somers was held with a teach from south africa, pierre corky, both were evacuated by u. S. Forces with injuries, but died from their wounds. Corcorky family had just finishs racinrace racing the 200,000 he takeners said would have freed him and he would have been freed on sunday. Its shocking. That we will have pierre home for christmas. Some at gift of the gives the charity working with the family have criticized the u. S. After the failed raid. Secretary of defense chuck hagel said the u. S. Had no other option an americans life was at risk. His life was clearly in danger. And we all, including the president on down, we made the recommendations to the president of course have to take responsibilities for any action orin action, orin action that we didnt take. President obama issued a statement saturday saying that lukes life was in imminent danger, based on that assessment and as soon as there was reliable intelligent and an Operational Plan i authorized the rescue attempt yesterday. The failed rescue comes four months after freelance journalist james foley was killed by militants of the islamic state. Foley was held hostage for years. The u. S. Had attempted to rescue foley, too, but that Mission Failed because foley had been moved to a different location. The u. S. Has a longstanding policy of not paying ransom to terrorists, now the killing of another american hostage by extremists raises this question, how do you figure out whether negotiations are over and its time to exercise a military option . Hostage takers, negotiations, and attempted rescues this time on the program. When the country in charge couldnt and when it doesnt, the conditions that push planners in to did he si decidie mission is worth a try joining us christopher volunteers former lead negotiator for the Fbi International kidnap Response Team ive yemeni political analyst and christopher swift. Professor of the Security Studies at george town university, he was in yemen in 2012, researching al qaeda in the a arabian p peninsula. Christopher volunteers let me start with you. If the president is right and people were in a position to know had concluded that luke somers life was in imminent changer, what goes in to the choice to pull the trigger and send people in to try to extract him . They have been planning all along. The special forces its their job to plan from for this from the beginning so they can begin calculating houchin tell jenks they have and how risky it is. There are a lot of things that go in to it. They have to think about the consequences. The innocent people that might be nearby. The chances of success, whether or not they can get in and out successfully. They have been working on this for quite sometime. So as they continued to provide those those sorts of information to the president , then the president has to gauge based on the information that he has whats the risk of imminent death to the hostage, whats the possibility that they will be murdered before we can do anything. These are all flexible values, arent they . If its in a place where you have a reasonable suspicion you might lose a lot of personnel to extract one person that, pushes against it, doesnt it in. Absolutely. And its highly immaterial precise because you are are lying on intelligent from a varietyist different sources so its very difficult thing to try to gauge completely accurately and thats why sometimes its not as successful as we would like it to be. Now, christopher swift, with the killing of pierre corky, u. S. Officialed admitted they didnt know the two earn were being held together. Right. Is that brings in to question how much did they know and how much can you know . Its a very difficult environment to begin with. Yemen is a complicated, fly i had, dynamic place, there are a lot of sources of inning that ability. And this was happening out in a province which is a very remote province where even the Yemeni Security forces dont have a good sense of the lay of the land or who is connected to who. When you add on top of the fact that there are private negotiations going on between an individuals employer and the likely kidnappers, the fact that multiple countries are involved, you have all these different vector that his need to be coordinated to the section at the present time that you dont have transparency across the whole system and you dont have collaboration across the whole system, its easy to get wires crossed and create follows expectations and see the kind of disappointment with see from mr. Corkys family today. When you are trying to make the decision whether or not to do this, do you have to take individual National Circumstances in to account . Is it different being kidnapped by yemenis from Pakistani Taliban versus syrian fighters or regular fighters there and what are the differences . In yemen you have to look at where the kidnappers are holding the hostages, some areas are more secure than others. Parts of ye yemen were never controlled bite government. Those are the areas that the kidnappers are likely to keep hostages in because they can roam freely and operate and create a little empire of their own there. So if you look at yemen, a lot of things going on right now. In the north you have the houthi Rebel Movement trying to dominate and is trying to enter the capital sanaa, in the south a suspensionist movement and somewhere a long the way you have little areas where you have insurgents from Al Qaeda Orin inning or everybody other groups now trying to operate as militant or militias. They are trying to carry out operations there. What about expect to go get help when you are trying to, for instance, figure out where someone is from local people, is there a social sanction against kidnapping . Is it thought to be a bad practice . Or is it one that is sort of understood and at least tacitly approved so that maybe the people in the town nearby where this person is being held cant be relied onto tell you whats up . The history of kidnapping in yep be changed drastically. Before aq a. P. Was created before Osama Bin Laden had support nurse yemen, kidnapping was a tradition that tribed practiced they would kidnap foreigners to negotiate with the government. That was a traditional practice when the person was kidnapped the hostages were treated with the utmost respect and well cared for and fed even tourists would come to get the kidnapping experience because it was part of getting to know yemen. Apparently since terrorism took place, you know, when people started targeting americans and westernerwesterners and and whea members came in to yemen things changed drastically since 2011 the fact that the military kind of collapsed. Restructuring rather than building the military making it a stronger National Military led to its total collapse and allowed for these groups to carry out more outrageous operations. Traditional lie speaking yemenis do not endorse kidnapping. We as yemenis the people there hate the idea of kidnapping approximate puts a bad light on the country and its very sad because the average se sit sin cant do much about it whether whereas heavy armed group trying to dictate what will happen. Christopher volunteers these missions fail quite often. This is a hey failure rate. Are there some things with all the planning and gaming and with all the assumptions, you just cant know until you are right there ready to bang down the do are . , thats very true. And to say its a high failure rate, any glitch on any of these were any hostage gets killed or some of the kidnappers if the kidnappers are the only ones that get killed. Those are the successes, but there are levels of failure and, of course, they want to go out and they want all of the hostages to be returned. But the special forces actually operate with a high degree of success also. So to say that there is a high level of failure, they dont go out unless they feel they are going to do well. And they have demonstrated success in the past. There have been missions that have gone out that ran in it more problems than expected and they aborted and came back because the Collateral Damage to innocent People Living in the area was too high. So its you have to take a broader perspective and you just cant say that there is a high level of failure on these missions because they succeed in a lot of ways many times. Well, maybe high level of failure isnt the best phrase. But certainly a high chance of failure given what it means to hold a hostage. Mine, you are guarding them, tremendous straining them, you are keeping them in secret locations. And once you know you are under attack, as we saw in this case just in the last several days, there becomes a incentive to kill these people. There becomes an incentive to kill the people. Sometimes. Depends upon how quickly the special forces people can get there there and be surprised and violence of actions is the equation for successful mission. If they can get in there quickly enough and, they know this, kidnappers will defend themselves before they will kill hostages, they have to preserve their own life. And the speed and the surprise is extremely necessary and why many of these missions are, in fact, successful. Because the kidnappers will get out of the way to preserve their own lives. So unfortunately in this incident they were discovered earlier on, but if these missions didnt have a high degree of success they wouldnt to get out on them at all. Well be with more inside story after a short break. Well continue our look at Hostage Rescue Missions when you tried to avoid them and when you cant. Stay with us. For a way to succeed. The first time that i seen rock cocaine was 1980. The murder rate was skyhigh. South of the ten freeway was kind of a nomans land. He said, ya know, were selling it to the blacks, you go into these neighborhoods, theres no cops, you can sell to who every you want and when they start killing each other no body cares. I was going through like a Million Dollars worth of drugs just about every day. Thats like gold we can make a fortune. He was maybe the biggest guy in la. Freeway rick was getting his dope from a very big operator. I think were into something thats bigger than us, something we really cant deal with. They had been trafficking on behalf of the United States government. She could prove what she was saying. Crack in the system you are watching inside story on Al Jazerra America. A am ray suarez, we are talking about Hostage Rescue Mission on his the program its a messy business with poe shann you would saphone shallupsides but. Americans go to some of the most dangerous place on his the planet to work, they are targets, but washington cant control the ruthlessness, the desperation, or the level of depravity of the people who steal people. And i guess christopher swift, its a requirement that you riley understand who you are dealing with and then what they want to get out of this . Thats true. Look, when i went to do my field work in yemen i spent a year and a half doing due diligent on the people that i would be meeting with, going with and the people that had an interest in my security. When i was down there in the south in the mid of the yemeni armys counter offensive against aq a. P. In 2012 that was all necessary. But even then there were at least two occasion where his my life was at risk and the life of the people i was working with on the ground were at risk. Take that and you get in to a hostage situation and a much more remote area out must mountain or coast lines where the Yemeni Government has little way of insight and we have even less, and all of the factors that chris have been talking are a exacerbated much furtherer. If its well known or well understood that americans dont papay random some. That other nationalities do, that there is no prohibition. Why take americans, whats in it . First of all media attention. The americans pick up on anything that happens to americans. There are hundreds of yemeni dieing and one american is kidnapped or taken hostage then the worlds pays attention to the cause. You kind of see a similar thing happen with drone attacks because they constantly attack people in yemen and killed several civilians but it was bigger deal with the drone killed a u. S. Citizen at some point. That had a huge outcry compared to the lives of other people. Besides that they have had cases where we had hostages and then other countries would pay the ransom. So before qatar has paid pot ran somransom of a dutch woman kidnapped. They are trying to get attention to publicize what they were doing and to also maybe get mon a long the way. If your primary motivation is money, and you take a national of a country thats less clear you are going to get money. Do you worry less about what happens at the end . Once you get your publicity, whether that person lives or dies becomes a little less important, doesnt it . You i cant. Its not just about money, its also about undermining the current government. So since 2011, you have a government led by president huh dee and a bunch of spoilers, you know, around there from Political Party to sheiks and little groups trying to insert themselves in to power now. Because there is a huge power vacuum and so there is this struggle taking place all over yemen and kidnappings have been happening to kind of display how weak the government is or to display how weak the military is and also besides that, everybody is trying to undermine everyone. And everybody has been blaming al qaeda for a lot of the criminal acts that are taking place in yemen, but there is no actual proof that al qaeda is the group thats taking thats committing these crimes. So its easy to put everything on them. But the situation in yemen now is very unclear and since 2011, and significantly since 2013, things have gotten a lot worse. Christopher volunteers, from tripoli on the mediterranean, all the way to the iraqiran border there are 10s of thousands of mostly men, in countries not their own, fighting for causes that they illini themselveally themselvese is a hodgepodge of people from countries, all kind of motivations and all kind of groups fighting in all kind of places. How do you know who you are dealing with and what their reason for pulling off a kidnapping is . Well, a couple of things, first of all, any Movement Like this, any group attracts basically three types, we refer to them as crusaders, criminalss and cays, yo case crazies, you a fair another of true believers who believe the causes oven criminals that want to kill and get support while they do it. Then the misfits just dont exist anywhere else and this is a group who needs extra warm bodies and extra warm bodies for these groups. So you start first dividing them in to those three categories. And then when you begin to communicate in the hostage business, in the kidnapping business and for the kidnappers it is a business and to understand it you have to look at what their Business Model is. Their division of labor. And you have know, your question early enter if its not money that they are after, what is it that they are after . There are different types of the currency, and political advantage is one of those types of currencies. The most dangerous negotiation is the one you dont know you are in when you dont understand what your adversary is really after and in many cases they might be after things such as pub less at this othepublicity y because its a currency that they can trade for other types of influence. I like that division of labor between crusaders being criminals and crazies but i can look at some organizations and say, uhhuh, they are run by crusaders, they employ criminals and make use of crazies because they are people christopher, vitswift. Not frayed to die whether it comes counsel to it. Thats right. Its important the distinctions christopher outlined are very important in terms of the nature of the negotiations one of the other things i would add is dont mistake an organizations initial position for their fundamental interest in the kidnapping and i think she has done a good job distinguishing between groups that might have a local interesting, those that might have a financial interest in the kidnapping and those that maybe have an ideological or meein thekidnapping. If we compare sort of what aqap has done in term of its high profile kid i kidnapping in thee of the last few year old with what we saw in james foley with isis and syria, if you look at the our capacity to respond to these vents they are disk. In part because we have a better sense of the lay of the land and of the organizations and players at work in the yemeni theater than in the syrian theater and i think thats why part of the reason why we saw an effort to go after this particular target at this particular time whereas with the foley situation in sear request, it was much more drawn out, much more complicated and you saw the u. S. Government being much more tim i had in its response. Well be back with inside story on Al Jazerra America in jim. When we are back after the break, more on operations in yemen. The fight against al qaeda and the sometimes uncomfortable triangulation between established governments, antigovernment groups inside countries and the United States. Stay with us. For instance, could striking workers in greece delay your retirement . Im here to make the connections to your money real. We are back. With inside story on Al Jazerra America. I am ray suarez. When American Forces try to extract a kidnap kick victim somewhere in the world the stakes arent just high for the u. S. President and the armed forces the governments in nominal control of the territories where gorillas, rebels and terrorists operate end up being a stake hold third mission. Sometimes reluctantly. Still with us, christopher volunteers former lead negotiator for the fbis International Kidnapping Response Team. Is ma a them eny political analyst and christopher swift. Professor of Security Studies. Sama, would the Yemeni Government have had a role in green lighting a mission like this . Or is this something that the United States would just pull off on its own . I doubt that thats something that the u. S. Pull off on its own, the Yemeni Government is considered an ali of the United States. All of the drones that are happening in yemen, sometimes i do believe that the government is not full aware of whats happening with the drones but the president has come to the United States and okayed and endorsed the use of drones in yemen so because they are allies i say any mission like that would have to be okay the by the president first. Does saying okay undermine his position in some parts of the country. No, because the current president in yemen the i want International Community backs him up. The more likely though alqaeda will gain more popularity because they dont want foreign intervention on their ground so the president has to be careful okaying missions like that because they have to be careful how the public will react to outside presence. How important is country cooperation which you are trying to do Something Like this . Thats sensual. We try to set up a system where we collaborate as much as we can with the existing government in the country. Even if the government is not that official, there are always downstream consequence that his we have to worry about with continuing corroboration so we corroborate as much as we can. Are there worry ms. Some cases that in a leaky governmental structure, for instance, the bad guys fine out you are come something. Yeah, there is always that worry. And thats part of the difficulty of the cooperation of ideally people are veted in advance, people that we can trust. I have been in countries where we have worked on these operations and we have had to have local official that his we placed our own lives in their hands and you get that kind of a relationship and you can fore forward with the government surgery. I. Christopher swift whether you want to get money or not, you can make the president of the United States look a little impotent if you pull off one of these things and hold somebody for a long time and america just cant get bob jones out. Thats a real risk. And its one of the risks that the president and the National Security council and his advisers from the special forces and other organizations within the National Security apparatus consider. But look at the understand of the day, thats really, if you cant handle the big chair you shouldnt be in the big chair. Every government has a dud dutyo protect its nationals whenever they might be to the extent the local government are willing to collaborate with the u. S. Government, british government, whoever it might beers thats what they have to do. That duty to protect your nationals is so fundamental in International Law its one of the very few exceptions that allows you to go in and violate the sovereignty of a foreign country on a very limited basis in order to get your own people out if the Foreign Government is either not collaborating with you or actually the cause of the problem. Is ma and christopher both mentioned one word thats very important in this context and thats relationships. I cant not under score how important it is whether its in a hostage rescue, diplomacy or Counter Terror i remember, how important these relationships are not just it National Level or where people live and govern and try toe raise their families in the communities they live in. If we dont have relationships in those places its difficult to deal in situations like mr. Somers, mr. Foley, doesnt matter what country you are doing with or country you are doing with. S a. Ma before we go looking at yemen and the outcome this operation, the kidnapped people were killed, but the kidnappers were killed too. Is this a disincentive to do this kind of thing in the future. I dont think so. I think it will continue to happen. In the past three years we have seen kidnappingpings go wrong we they tried to take a hostage, the toss ta hostage and was kil. Sometimes its just to create chaos and make pima frayed for irrelevant that lives, i think kidnappings will continue to happen but i think americans can take precautions before they go to yemen, they can read very carefully about the country, they can go there and know who they will be with. Nowhere they are going to. I think if foreigners stick with the yemeni families the families feel an obligation to take care of them and they always do that. In these cases its really rare. I know a bunch of forb eners who are yemen, westerners who have been living there for a while ask are say. Sama, christopher, and 50 officerchristopher, that brees o the end, be with us next time in washington i am ray suarez. On america tonight the fallout. An legislated campus gang rape and the controversial reporting and reportingaround it. Suggest that jackie hurt their trust by being untruthful. What exactly happened to jackie and whats next in the fight against sex crimes in campus. Also, raise the wage