21st Century Wire says…
This is getting silly now.
For US lawmakers, summer holiday is never enough…
Before disappearing for an additional seven-week fall vacation, the US Senate unanimously passed a root’em toot’em piece of ‘WANTED’ legislation, which earmarks $10 million for, “any information leading to the capture of individuals involved” in the online ‘beheadings’ of American James Foley and Israeli-American Steven Sotloff.
The obvious logic of this one must have escaped the brain trust in Washington. The only people actually able to supply such information are the ones who are involved in the ISIS(L) operation. A $10 million deposit into the ISIS general fund?
Maybe it’s a way of funneling $10 million to someone inside ISIS, presumably because they need, or are owed that cash, but to try and sell it to the American people as a bounty is a child-like proposition. One thing is certain: you will never hear about whether that reward is ever collected or not – that payment will be ‘classified’, but you can be sure it ended up in an important pocket.
Take your pick: Abdel Bary, or Mohammed Emwazi aka ‘Jihadi John’ (photo, above) for example. He starred in at least two ISIS propaganda videos released on YouTube featuring alleged ‘beheadings’. Is Washington going after the voice of Jihadi John, or the image in the video, because as we’ve pointed out already on 21WIRE, they are not necessarily the same thing.
We should also point out here that none of the highly publicized so-called ‘beheading’ videos actually show anyone getting beheaded. So then, you cannot rightly call them ‘beheadings’, unless you are fudging it. Is that too complicated for the Senate ‘intelligence’ committee?
By the way, like Britain’s leading terror mascot for a decade, hook-handed Abu Hamza (photo, left), Jihadi John would make a perfect MI5 informant, if they were able to recruit him (if they haven’t already). Or better yet, he could play Ben Kingsley’s role from Iron Man 3 (if he hasn’t already).
The stupidity gets worse. Apparently, the families of journalists Foley and Sotloff were warned of possible federal charges by Washington ‘Special Agents’ if they dared to pay a ransom to the kidnappers. So what’s the policy? There is none. But it’s OK for the Feds to make a big-time media splash with a Wild West-style bounty.
Who was the driving force behind this Senate bribe to ISIS? Could it be intellectual giants, John McCain and Lindsey Graham? No doubt supported by a gaggle of absent minded vacationers who wanted to do something that made them look tough and involved.
How could so much attention and political energy be dedicated to a collection of staged and edited YouTube videos? Any intelligent lawmakers or media heroes should pay close attention here. If these two cases were murder cases in any police department in the world, both would be still be open cases. All we are really left with is: no body, no way to determine any time of death, no way to determine cause of death, no actual deaths depicted on camera, no murder weapon, no way to determine who the murderer might be (assuming murders took place), and no way to determine location of the murder. When you strip all the politics and sensationalism away, it’s still an open case.
Is that too deep, or should we ‘dumb it down’ for our friends in Washington?
Wanted: US puts $10 million bounty on killers of journalists
Although the parents of slain journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were warned of possible federal charges if they paid a ransom to their jihadist captors, the US Senate has approved a reward for information on the killers.
Just before leaving for a seven-week recess, the US Senate unanimously passed legislation that allocates $10 million for any information leading to the capture of individuals who participated in the beheading of two American journalists this month.
READ MORE: US fear-mongering over ISIS ignores America’s border problem
Members of the Islamic State, a Sunni militant group that has captured large swaths of territory in northern Iraq and Syria, published videos in August and September that allege to depict the beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, two American journalists who were abducted and eventually executed by jihadists.
The actual moment of the beheadings, however, was censored from the videos, a point that has perplexed some experts given the purported savagery of the militants, who have even been accused of beheading Christian babies. In any case, US Senators came out in unanimous support for the reward placed on the killers.
“One way we can honor the memories of James Foley and Steven Sotloff is to bring their evil murderers to justice, which this measure will help do,” Senator Marco Rubio said Friday.
Rubio emphasized it was vital to reinforce the message “that the United States will work tirelessly to ensure that the deaths of these beloved journalists do not go unpunished.”
The next stop for the legislation is the House of Representatives before it heads to President Obama’s desk for his signature, which is unlikely to happen until after November’s mid-term elections.
Bounty allowed, but not ransoms
The announcement of a multi-million dollar bounty for the killers will likely prompt criticism considering that past efforts to secure the release of Foley and Sotloff with ransoms to their captors were rejected by US officials.
The families of the murdered journalists were warned by federal officials that they could face criminal charges if they attempted to pay the Islamic State a ransom.
“We were told that several times and we took it as a threat and it was appalling,” Foley’s mother Diane said in an interview with ABC News.
The Sotloffs “heard the same thing the Foleys did,” their spokesman said in a statement.
The White House believes that paying ransom to the militant group would place more Americans in danger.
“We have found that terrorist organizations use hostage taking and ransoms as a critical source of financing for their organizations and that paying ransoms only puts other Americans in a position where they’re at even greater risk,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said at a press briefing.
Announcing a military campaign last week to destroy the fundamentalist organization, US President Barack Obama called the murders of Foley and Sotloff “acts of barbarism.”
James Foley was abducted on November 22, 2012 as he was leaving an internet café in northwest Syria. Foley’s captors demanded 100 million euros in ransom (132 million US dollars) in exchange for his release.
On August 19, 2014, a video appeared on YouTube entitled “A Message to America,” which shows Foley kneeling in the sand at an undisclosed location with a masked individual, dubbed ‘Jihadi John’ in the media due to his London-English accent. The actual moment of the beheading in both the Foley and Sotloff videos is never shown.
Steven Sotloff was abducted on August 4, 2013, near Aleppo, after crossing the Syrian border from Turkey. In early September, another video emerged that shows Sotloff together with a man who appears to be the same masked individual that killed Foley exactly two weeks earlier.
READ MORE INSIDE NEWS ON ISIS AT: 21st Century Wire ISIS Files
