Obama's new hostage policy should be renegotiated

People should not be too hasty in criticizing President Barack Obama's new policy of privatizing the rescue of Americans held hostage by terrorists.

It can't be much worse than Obama's sorry record when it comes to freeing Americans who have been kidnapped, captured, imprisoned and killed by Islamist terrorists under his weak, passive and confused leadership.

After all, Secretary of State John Kerry is negotiating a nuclear weapons agreement with Iran, the leading terrorist state in the world, which also has imprisoned three Americans on trumped-up charges. A Ronald Reagan would have demanded their release even before anyone sat down to negotiate anything

Let's step back here and think about what this policy involves. I think it's a bad policy, but not for the reasons cited in this article.

1. Most of the Americans who have been abducted by terrorist groups had no business traveling in a dangerous, war-torn area of the world despite the well documented warnings by the U.S. State Department. Many of these people were nothing short of delusional idiots, and their families have no business calling on the Federal government and U.S. taxpayers to pay the cost of getting these people home.

2. The real problem with this policy is that effectively allows terrorist organizations to set up perfectly legal fundraising operations right here in the U.S. Some Somali dude from Minneapolis can venture to the Middle East for the sole purpose of getting "abducted" by his radical Islamic friends, while his family here in the U.S. goes out and raises money from wealthy Muslims to pay a "ransom." Repeat this process on a monthly basis, and you have a funding pipeline set up for any terrorist organization that wants to set this up.

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