Seeing the images of Margaret Hassan pleading for her life is terribly wrenching. I hope that she is saved.
Her case and others like it pose a serious problem: how should we react to such vicious extortion? She has been threatened with having her head sawed off by a cold-blooded murderer as others videotape it for distribution on the internet and through videotape. It’s already been done to a number of men, both foreign (Korean, American, Bulgarian, Italian, British, Turkish, and perhaps others) and Iraqi. (She may be the first woman to face that particularly horrible fate, but many other women have been gunned down, tortured, blown up, and otherwise assaulted or murdered by the terrorists in Iraq.)
You can’t give in to such demands. If I am ever in a similar situation, notably one in which I have freely placed myself (as the other western victims did) in a situation of such danger, I hope that any similar plea would not influence the public or decision-makers, except by steeling their resolve to find, capture, or kill the kidnappers to prevent them from engaging in such evil again. One can never know with any certainty how one would react after torture, threats of beheading, and psychological abuse, so one cannot predict what one would do or say in such circumstances. But in advance one can specify that others should not give in to extortion from terrorists.