Hostage Crisis

What Americans require is the release of all hostages. That is the only way that Iran, which controls to some extent the organizations holding them, and Syria, which controls the land where they are held, can prove they are out of the business of sponsoring terrorism.What should the countries whose nationals are captive give in return for their release? Nothing. Because giving something -- say, the release of a terrorist convicted in Europe of planting a bomb -- justifies hostage-taking and encourages more.

The State Department is probably very pleased with the outcome of last week's hostage crisis in Algeria, although given the loss of innocent lives it would be impolitic for officials to say so. In case you missed it, Islamic militants had held an unspecified number of people hostage at a gas field in eastern Algeria, including a small number of Americans. Dozens of militants and hostages - including three Americans, according to the U.S. - were killed during a series of attacks by the Algerian military.

TORONTO -- Worried that time is running out for a peaceful end to the hostage crisis in Peru, the president of Peru and the prime minister of Japan met here yesterday and agreed to begin new talks with the leftist rebels holding 72 people at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, Peru.But while holding out hope for a peaceful solution, President Alberto K. Fujimori and Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto flatly rejected demands from the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement to release hundreds of the rebel group's members who are being held in Peruvian prisons.

We're now entering the fourth week of the "CSI: Benghazi" hostage crisis. That's how long an FBI forensic team has been trying to gain access in Libya to what the State Department still calls a crime scene -- the Obamaadministration's preferred term for the location of the first assassination of a U.S. ambassador since 1979 and the first successful al-Qaeda-backed attack on U.S. soil since the Sept. 11 strikes. (Our embassies and consulates are sovereign U.S. territory.) It is perhaps not accidental that the State Department cites the need to complete the investigation as an excuse to stay silent on the whole matter.

WASHINGTON -- The crisis in Kosovo is offering a direct test of whether President Clinton retains enough credibility with the American people to provide effective leadership over his final two years in the White House.In these early days, opinion soundings indicate that most Americans are supporting Mr. Clinton's decision to conduct an intensive bombing assault on Slobodan Milosevic and Yugoslavia. But, as Mr. Clinton himself noted, most Americans know little if anything about Kosovo or what is involved there.

WASHINGTON -- In all the tribulations of the first two years of his presidency, Bill Clinton is often compared to the previous Democrat to occupy the White House, Jimmy Carter. Clinton is said, like Carter, to try to take on too many problems at the same time and to try to be a micromanager, putting his finger into every pie that comes across the administration table.During and after Carter's single term, many critics faulted him particularly for permitting himself to become too personally, deeply and conspicuously engaged in the hostage crisis that began in November 1979 with the seizing of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the holding of 52 Americans.

Iran is having a good war. If Iran and Iraq were the two losers of their 1980-1988 war, and all their enemies gainers, Iran is the principal winner of the current conflict in the Persian Gulf. To begin with, Iraq settled the 1980 dispute on Iran's terms, to demilitarize their border and free the Iraqi troops there to face the Americans to the south. Then Iran retrieved its prisoners from the hardship of Iraqi camps in their overdue prisoner exchange.More than that, Iran sees its two enemies destroying each other.

WASHINGTON -- Eight Americans held hostage in Iran during the Carter presidency called yesterday for a full-scale congressional investigation of allegations that the Reagan-Bush campaign conspired to delay their release."

WASHINGTON -- Early in 1980, President Jimmy Carter was facing a challenge from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination and the prospect of a general election campaign against Republican Ronald Reagan.He was also being forced to deal with the crisis occasioned by Iran's action in taking 55 American hostages in the embassy in Tehran.But neither Mr. Kennedy nor Mr. Reagan felt free to criticize President Carter's handling of the hostage crisis, lest they be accused of undermining a president dealing with a foreign adversary.

WASHINGTON -- The White House is making an elaborate effort to hold President Clinton politically harmless from the disaster at Waco by focusing, correctly, on the insane behavior of cult leader David Koresh. And the odds are the campaign will succeed so long as Clinton doesn't allow whatever went wrong at Waco to be seen as part of a pattern.Instant opinion polls predictably put most of the blame for the tragedy on Koresh rather than the president, Attorney General Janet Reno or the FBI. And that is likely to be the consensus unless subsequent investigations uncover some evidence of blundering that go beyond a mistaken judgment on what was feasible in ending the standoff.

Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam Mark Bowden Atlantic Monthly Press / 704 pages / $26 If the global struggle between tradition and modernity, tribalism and globalism, religious radicals and the world's sole superpower might be traced to a particular moment, it would be a baleful Sunday 27 years ago. On Nov. 4, 1979, hundreds of Iranian students, followers of the Shiite cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, overran and...

In the wake of the siege of a school in Russia by Chechen militants that ended with 330 dead, some parents across Eastern Europe are apparently afraid to send their children back to the classroom. And they're turning to North Baltimore's private Calvert School - among other American educational institutions - for help. The Calvert School, an internationally known supplier of educational materials for parents who teach their children at home, is seeing a surge of online inquiries from families in Russia, where a school in the southern city of Beslan was stormed by militants last month, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

MOSCOW - Russia acknowledged yesterday that it pumped an aerosol version of the powerful painkiller Fentanyl into a Moscow theater to end a hostage crisis Saturday, breaking a four-day silence on the drug's identity that had drawn increasing criticism in the United States and Europe. Russia's health minister, Yuri L. Shevchenko, identified the gas as the civilian death toll from the 57-hour hostage siege rose by two to 120. All but two of the victims apparently died from effects of the Fentanyl derivative.

The Russian hostage crisis was a terrifying field test for a branch of medical science that has long occupied military and law enforcement researchers in the United States and elsewhere: how to incapacitate people without killing them. And as ghastly as the outcome was - 116 of about 750 hostages were killed by the gas sprayed into the Moscow theater where Chechen extremists held them - American experts say the Russians' plan to use an opiate in aerosol form was probably about the best that could be devised.

MOSCOW - President Vladimir V. Putin said yesterday that he is granting the Russian military expanded powers to fight terrorism and is prepared to follow in the footsteps of the United States by striking at threats beyond its borders. Putin's remarks to his Cabinet came as Russians soberly reassessed the raid led by counterterrorism troops Saturday to free hundreds of hostages held by Chechen guerrillas in a Moscow theater. Officials acknowledged that all but one of the 117 hostages killed in the raid died from the effects of a debilitating gas pumped into the theater.

WASHINGTON - Seeking worldwide support to demolish the Osama bin Laden terrorist network, the Bush administration is cautiously feeling out an American nemesis, Iran. If this effort leads anywhere, it will revive an old Middle East cliche - "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" - and show once again that the United States can't always be fastidious about where it draws support in a crisis. But that's not all. A new, friendlier U.S.-Iranian relationship could have major implications for a much wider region, affecting not only the future of Afghanistan, where bin Laden is based, but Central Asia, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East peace process.

WASHINGTON - Two weeks after the Iranians seized 66 American hostages in November 1979, a reporter asked Hamilton Jordan, the White House chief of staff, what would happen if the crisis continued into the presidential campaign of 1980. "We just can't let that happen," Jordan replied. In fact, it was clear then that neither President Jimmy Carter nor his political advisers believed there was any realistic possibility that the situation in Tehran would become an influential factor in the campaign.

The State Department is probably very pleased with the outcome of last week's hostage crisis in Algeria, although given the loss of innocent lives it would be impolitic for officials to say so. In case you missed it, Islamic militants had held an unspecified number of people hostage at a gas field in eastern Algeria, including a small number of Americans. Dozens of militants and hostages - including three Americans, according to the U.S. - were killed during a series of attacks by the Algerian military.

WASHINGTON - Two weeks after the Iranians seized 66 American hostages in November 1979, a reporter asked Hamilton Jordan, the White House chief of staff, what would happen if the crisis continued into the presidential campaign of 1980. "We just can't let that happen," Jordan replied. In fact, it was clear then that neither President Jimmy Carter nor his political advisers believed there was any realistic possibility that the situation in Tehran would become an influential factor in the campaign.

The shootings, hostages and hysterical parents weren't real, but the gravity of the situation was. Yesterday's "crisis" - a staged shooting at Atholton High School, complete with a hostages, reporters, police and emergency vehicles - was a collaborative effort among the school district, Howard County General Hospital and police, fire and rescue workers, designed to test each agency's readiness for a real crisis. There were some flaws. A reporter from The Sun who was participating in the drill and a handful of parents were able to get into the building after the shooting by climbing through a back window.