Embedding with America's top hostage negotiator | Hacker News Reader

Embedding with America's top hostage negotiator

vanityfair.com

63 pointsgaplong17 comments

I've read quite a lot of these articles over the years, and they're always the same.

The other side consists of bad guys locking up innocent Americans. The US, meanwhile, has every right to snatch foreigners in Africa, because the American parliament signed some papers called sanctions. That's totally not politically motivated at all.

Weirdly enough, the arrested US humans are often men of military age with military laurels. The involved US spies are, of course, "long retired" and "the details unclear."

Sure, that's why the US government paid Levinson's family 2.5 million dollar in hush money. And that's the CIA spy they name the law after!

Reports of "CIA planes" in Caracas are wrong, because actually, they belong to a contractor with innocent ties to the government. Okay.

Whenever you think there's some real reporting in there, these articles drop another propaganda bomb.

Shows the value of "embedding" "journalists." The government got a great piece of reporting here. But the reader?

Yep, I couldn't even finish this flag-waving trash. I'm curious to see how others on HN read it. In various corners of the internet I'm getting familiar vibes of post-911 rally-round-the-flag sentiments. Except that as you say, it's not as explicit. Rather than PMCs simply there to enable a thin veil of plausible deniability for the government, the strategy is one more layer removed from outright national interest and more values based. Having said all that, this article is a sharp turn back to bald-faced American exceptionalism.

The ex-military guys who were “hiking in the mountains in Iraq and got lost” and ended up captured by Iran was one of the funniest ones. Sure, seems legit.

I've just had a great idea for an action/thriller movie.

The bad guys kidnap some VIPs, say some US senators, and make some demands. They bring in America's top hostage negotiator to deal with the situation. He brokers a deal giving the bad guys large parts of what they want in an unorthodox way. It's revealed then that the bad guys also kidnapped his child and are instructing him on how to handle the negotiations.

Ugh it looked like an interesting article but the jingoism was dialled up to eleven.

> To hear Carstens tell it, his career first took shape when, as an 11-year-old in Spokane, he read about the Cambodian genocide, learning how the world stood by as some 2 million perished in the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. Raised in a Christian home where the Bible was a staple, he was determined to make a difference in the lives of the less fortunate. In time, he came to regard the US Army as “the most successful human rights organization in history when it comes to liberating vulnerable people.”

Indeed. The US army is currently trying to kill 2 million people, but that's different because they're all "terrorists".

Especially considering that the US began arming the "Khmer Rouge" in 1979, and then began heavily arming them a few years later.

And supported them until long after the Vietnamese put an end to their genocidal regime. The US, alongside China, voted for the Khmer Rouge to keep the UN seet until 1993, 14 years after they were removed.

Hilariously the Wikipedia article is titled "Allegations of US support for the Khmer Rouge" even if it describes factual US support (in the UN), and a bunch of "allegations" based on internal reports confirming them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...

Reposting the archive link from the flagged sibling comment for those getting hit with the sign up wall:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240608185808/https://www.vanit...

This is a weird article. It editorialized for negotiations stating “Russia alone. . . seems to aggressively ‘restock the pond’ with Americans.” But writes that claim after admitting Venezuela holds a quarter of American hostages and later in the article documents Venezuela’s ongoing honeypot operation in eastern Columbia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canouan_Airport

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