The White House Tuesday offered few details of any changes it has made to its policy for rescuing hostages overseas as the country mourns the death of Kayla Mueller, a dedicated humanitarian held prisoner by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
The same day that the White House and the Mueller family confirmed Kayla’s death and President Obama held her up as a force for human goodness and the best America has to offer, the president’s press secretaries gave short shrift to questions about a top-to-bottom review of its hostage policies launched more than five months ago.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the review would be completed by the spring and noted that it did not include any type of reconsideration of the administration’s policy of refusing to pay ransom in exchange for Americans held by the Islamic State or other extremist groups.
Instead, he said the review is an effort to better serve the families and streamline the process of communicating with them.
“Because there is a broad interagency approach to each case, that means that these families are hearing from a large number of agencies,” often separately, he said. “We want to make sure that all those communications are carefully integrated.”
But Earnest didn’t elaborate on whether the White House or anyone else in the administration has taken initial steps to change its approach to trying to bring captives home, such as appointing a point person to manage the process and interact with families.
Obama launched the review last year after complaints about how the administration dealt with the family of slain American James Foley. Some of the families of Islamic State hostages have complained that U.S. officials have failed to respond to their inquiries in a timely manner and, in the Foley case, the family said that the government threatened legal action if family members chose to try to collect money to pay the Islamic State ransom for their son.
After the complaints made headlines, the White House promised the families an integral voice in the process. But critics say no real changes have occurred as the Islamic State has continued on its killing spree.
“Family outreach has been abysmal and is still inadequate,” said Joe Kasper, a spokesman for Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who has harshly criticized the administration’s interagency approach to hostage rescue operations and family engagement.
Duncan, who has been in touch with several of the families whose children have been killed, has sent the White House a series of letters offering several steps to better handle hostage-rescue operations. One of his top recommendations would be tapping one individual to lead all recovery efforts for missing Americans, regardless of whether they are held in hostile or non-hostile areas.
The official would develop and pursue a range of options to include military rescue attempts to engagement with the hostage takers through diplomatic channels. The lead official also could establish interagency task forces to streamline recovery efforts of various government agencies, such as the State Department, Department of Defense, FBI and CIA.
“Under a task force that includes personnel representing various organizations, it is absolutely necessary that a single line of authority is maintained to coordinate all activities,” Hunter wrote Obama in November.
The White House did not respond to a Washington Examiner inquiry about whether it has appointed a person to spearhead hostage-recovery efforts or whether it has stepped up efforts to keep the family informed, for instance, by giving family members background checks to allow the sharing of intelligence information about their son or daughter.
A spokesman for the family of slain journalist Steven Sotloff, whom the Islamic State beheaded last September, recently told the Daily Beast that the administration has asked them not to speak to the media about their concerns about the way the government handled their son’s case.
“We want to give the president and his staff the opportunity to repair the damage they caused by refusing to create proper channels during Steve’s incarceration,” said Barak Barfi, a spokesman for the Sotloff family. “For this reason, we are honoring the request. “
The article also noted that the White House reached out to the families in December through a generic form letter sent through the mail and addressed to “Dear Families,” without delineating whether they were addressing individuals whose children had died or were still imprisoned. Lisa Monaco, the White House counter-terrorism adviser, signed the letter.
One of the most incendiary complaints from families, including the Foleys, is the administration’s warnings that they could be prosecuted for paying ransoms or doing anything to collect money for a ransom.
The government has never prosecuted an American for such activity, and they and other critics argue that the Obama administration’s “no ransom” policy fails to take into consideration several instances in which the U.S. used diplomatic negotiations and other types of payments through Qatar to secure the release of prisoners.
Earnest declined to comment Tuesday when asked about reports that the Mueller family had created a video to solicit contributions for a ransom for their daughter.
Qatar facilitated a ransom in a negotiation last year for journalist Peter Theo Curtis, who was held in Syria by a branch of al Qaeda but was released after intense private negotiations.
The administration turned to Qatar again in negotiating a deal with the Haqqani network to swap five Guantanamo Bay prisoners, known as the Taliban Five, for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
Hunter’s office largely blames the FBI for the administration’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to secure the release of Islamic State prisoners before they were killed.
The FBI and the State Department are the agencies most involved in hostage-recovery efforts, but Hunter argues that the FBI has spent too much time guarding its turf and too little time quickly following up on leads from agencies with people on the ground in hostile areas, such as the Department of Defense or the CIA.
“The FBI mission is chiefly law enforcement and prosecution — it is not best-suited or best-organized to manage recovery efforts — specifically in these bad areas,” Kasper said. “That leaves the State Department, and they don’t have the resources.”
Too often, Kasper argues, the FBI has moved at a glacial pace to follow up on leads and intelligence about prisoners’ locations, even though the Islamic State is known to move captives frequently to avoid detection.
Over the summer, Obama ordered a Delta Force rescue operation to free two dozen foreigners, including journalists Foley and Sotloff, as well as Mueller. It failed because the prisoners had been moved 24 hours prior from the location.
Kasper also points to a 2012 report in the New York Times in which a Syrian rebel said he tried to contact the American embassy in Turkey to broker the release of several Lebanese hostages but never received a reply.
In another instance, Hunter detailed in a December letter to Obama, an organization within the government, which he said “currently lacks authority to initiate a recovery effort,” appealed to join the FBI operation and offered credible information that may have led to the return of several Americans.
“So far, this organization has been dismissed by the FBI, which has worked these cases for several years without any actionable leads,” Hunter wrote.
According to Hunter’s office, the White House has ruled out any efforts to strip the FBI from the lead role in handling hostage-recovery issues — a decision critics argue will lead to more hostage-recovery failures.
“If we’re going to change the status quo, it’s really unfortunate,” Kasper said. “Look at the FBI’s success record — they are really not doing too well.”
