Hostage Negotiations Quotes

Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child-killers? No one has a moral right to tell us to talk to child killers.

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

The first to grasp how sensitive Israeli public opinion was on the issue of hostages and M.I.A.'s - and therefore what a powerful weapon abduction could be - was Ahmed Jibril, the leader of a faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The United States does not negotiate with terrorists.

Then came the hostage crisis during which Carter did nothing to rattle the ayatollahs who hung tough until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, when they suddenly backed down.

We've clearly seen that Tea Party Republicans are willing to take our economy hostage just to score political points, but I'm not willing to do that.

I'd like to see the government talk a little bit less about the AP and little more about Bob Levinson.

Spain has been battling terrorism for 30 years while we were trading arms for hostages.

We should refuse to settle for a deal that fails to secure the release of American hostages and paves Iran's path toward realizing its nuclear weapon ambitions.

When you had the World Trade Center go, people were put into planes that were friends, family, girlfriends, and they were put into planes and they were sent back, for the most part, to Saudi Arabia. I would be very, very firm with families. Frankly, that will make people think because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their families' lives.

I am convinced that detentions of individuals for the sake of freeing our missing and captured men constitutes a vital interest of the state.

It's humiliating for Barack Obama and, therefore, the United States to have American sailors held hostage during his final State of the Union.

British diplomats who worked in Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis are deeply upset by Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning film 'Argo,' which suggests they refused shelter to the group who managed to get out of the U.S. embassy.

I was vaguely aware that people used to hijack planes to Cuba. But I didn't know much about how often it happened and what the motives were. I started looking into what was going on back then, and I was blown away by how common hijacking once was.

I have covered Israeli hostage and M.I.A. cases for more than 15 years, including the covert ways in which Israel's powerful espionage agencies operate to bring soldiers home alive or dead. Over that time, the issue has come to dominate public discourse to a degree that no one could have predicted.

Barack Obama's discovering what a nightmare dealing with hostage problems is - a discovery previously made by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, i don't see a lot of room for change in American policy.

Still I was concerned that politics would get between us and our POWs.

President Carter famously said the hostages were the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last thing he thought about at night. It was a downright foolish thing to say, because it made the people holding the hostages realize that they had an awful lot of influence over the United States.

There's really no reason for any musician, writer, actor to ever take themselves seriously. If you work in a needle exchange, take yourself seriously. You're doing good work. If you're involved in hostage negotiations and saving lives, you can have a sense of entitlement.

Here in Israel, we want the boys back home, we demand it from our government, who often pay a steep price to get hostages back. But we need a happy ending. We don't want to deal with those days after release, their post-trauma or reintroduction to society. Yet coming home is only the start of their journey.

The Obama administration, seemingly without any concern or worry, funneled money around U.S. law through foreign central banks to provide a state sponsor of terrorism with $400 million in blood money for American hostages.

There is no way around the contradictions and dangers inherent in Israel's decision to free over 1,000 prisoners in order to liberate Gilad Shalit.