The Hostage-Policy Review, Reviewed

Some hard-won opinion about Obama’s hostage-policy review can be found at the NewsHour, where I was interviewed by Margaret Warner, and at Al-Jazeera America and Deutsche Welle TV. My talk last week at the Wilson Center is also online.

Briefly: Obama’s new policy moves in the right direction, since it clarifies who’s in charge during a hostage case and loosens the flow of information. I suspect the new “fusion cell” will create a new layer of bureaucracy, but the old confusion caused by a 2002 Bush directive about hostage cases, which Obama has replaced, should be gone. America’s ongoing “no concession” policy will not prevent kidnappings, compared with European policy — abduction rates for Americans and Europeans are about the same — but Obama’s review was never going to change that. A no-concession policy without consistent, successful rescue by force, I’m afraid, is no deterrent at all.

In that sense my Politico piece from last March is still relevant. More ideas from Austin Tice’s family can be heard at CBS This Morning. Oh, and flip-flops by Fox News on the whole issue have been traced over here.

Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and a novelist, author of a comic novel about L.A., Too Much of Nothing, as well as a travel book about surfing, Sweetness and Blood, which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist. He’s won Fulbright, Logan, and Pulitzer Center grants for his nonfiction, as well as a Silver Nautilus Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting; and Yaddo, MacDowell, and DeWitt Wallace–Reader’s Digest fellowships for his fiction.

He’s been a visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and UC Riverside. He worked for several years as an editor and writer at Spiegel Online in Berlin. Michael was kidnapped in early 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage by pirates for 32 months. The Desert and the Sea, a memoir about that ordeal, became an international bestseller.

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