american hostage luke somers, a freelance photographer was killed late friday during a rescue attempt by u.s. special forces. somers was abducted last year and being held by al qaeda in yemen. the murder raises new questions about how the u.s. military will be able to respond to a spike in overseas kidnappings by terrorists. with me now the founder of the investigative project steve emmer son and mike baker. all right, mike. we ve got two rescues attempts, the american hostage dead. is there some truth to what the white house says about our intel not being as good as it should be? well, you know, it s an odd thing to say if they are in fact pushing and saying it wasn t us. part of it is they were concerned that they were getting some flack for not approving the initial unsuccessful raid quick enough. you could argue that you control very lit until a hostage rescue
situation. intel is never perfect in any of these things. we tend to be conditioned by feature films and beach book to think this is a simple thing, you find your target, go and rescue them. we ve had a good success rate. but things go wrong and you can never guarantee success when you re talking about an operation like this. steve, same question. is it good to say that we couldn t find the guy twice? well, you know, it s not good to say it, but on the other hand, i will give them credit for actually trying to carry out the operations, you know. especially for a president that has chewed extra judicial operations. i m glad they re doing it. but the reality is, as mike pointed out, you re relying on local intelligence and that local intelligence is going to shift and it s not going to stay it s not going to stay
stagnant. it s going to shift and you re not going to be able to rely on it when you re on the ground immediately. however, the reality is we re put in a position where we re seen as a paper tiger now. now they re going to take precautions to make it impossible now to rescue other hostages. that was my point, steve and mike. there s in point in saying we tried but didn t get them other than to tell the enemy we re coming after our guys. the group behind this team is al qaeda. we re not talking isis now. we re not talking syria and iraq. how were these guys different from isis in. well, they re not different from isis. actually, they re in competition and what they realized is isis, by the tune of tens of millions of dollars by taking hostages and getting them paid by ransom money, this is exactly what was going on with this set of hostages. they were going to get paid ransom money, had a set of demands.