Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-44660369?

by rhu86 • 8 years ago

108 49 8 years ago

bbc.co.uk

philip1209• 8 years ago

These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC.

Israel?

simbas• 8 years ago

saudis?

karimdag• 8 years ago

Emiratis ?

rangibaby• 8 years ago

Shortly after the money was flown to Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt began their economic blockade of Qatar. They still accuse Qatar of having a "long history" of financing "terrorism".

sandworm101• 8 years ago

This is why government by royal families doesn't work. When the state and the family are the same thing, the inevitable family crisis become a national crisis. A billion-dollar ransom that then sparks a trade war? This is a group of families fighting a petty grudge match against a background of slight religious differences, reminiscent of the worst of the Tudors.

kurthr• 8 years ago

I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do. See recent events.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-replaces-natio...

ben_w• 8 years ago

While the type of person unavoidably makes some difference, it’s exaggeration to say it’s the only thing which matters. The structure of a government can require consensus. To use a named rather than implied current example, this is why the UK government spent the last two years paralysed over which Brexit to choose, either “hard” or “soft” — no consensus; and also why the process started at all despite the lack of specificity — 498/114 supermajority consensus in favour of some form of Brexit.

dsfyu404ed3• 8 years ago

Good systems are resilient to bad leaders. See the Roman Empire or England for example, neither has any shortage of bad emperors/kings and both avoided violent regime changes or subjugation by a foreign power for many hundreds of years (and counting in England's case)

forapurpose3• 8 years ago

I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do.

I think that citizens in a democracy have the power to protect themselves by voting and taking other political actions. The tools of democracy, unused, are insufficient.

At the same time there seems to be a very high correlation between the system of government and the quality of leaders. Trump is a problem but he stands out as an exception in U.S. history. The leaders of mature democracies seem much higher quality than those of other forms of governments, especially over time.

Also, institutions have a large effect. Their power isn't absolute, but the institutions in the US government are well-established and support the rule of law; they can't be changed overnight. Those institutions are protecting Americans from much worse (though they are also failing to do all they need to).

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

Democracy won't protect your country,

It may, but democracy goes beyond mere voting.

josefresco• 8 years ago

petty grudge ... slight religious differences

Understatements of the century.

dsfyu404ed3• 8 years ago

of the century.

How many more recursive understatements before we hit a base case?

homero• 8 years ago

If Qatar wanted to support terrorism, it's plausible the terrorists could pretend to kidnap those people. The hostages would suffer voluntarily due to religious reasons to make it look legit.

Cthulhu_2• 8 years ago

There's a lot of underhanded ways to fund terrorism that don't involve having your family kidnapped, like the US did with the Taliban by calling them freedom fighters or something against Russia - see also Rambo. It's easy for rich people or even a country to 'lose' money.

peterlk3• 8 years ago

This story reminds me of a book that I read a few months ago called "Never Split the Difference". It's a negotiation book by a former FBI hostage negotiator. I think the context of that book offers some color to this story, and I'd highly recommend it.

EDIT: I think the contextual question that arises from that book is: How does the idea of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" play out in multi-sided negotiations with such high stakes?

Cthulhu_2• 8 years ago

Could you provide a short summary? I've never heard of it.

peterlk3• 8 years ago

It lays out many of the basic principles by which the FBI negotiates with kidnappers. The author writes that the book is meant to first lay out the foundations, and then build on them to give the reader a toolbox (arsenal?) of negotiation strategies. An argument in the book is that these strategies work in business as well - I find this argument compelling. The title of the book is in reference to the fact that you can't split humans. The job of a hostage negotiator isn't to get half a human back by compromising. The negotiator has to get 100% of what they want, or the mission is failed.

paidleaf• 8 years ago

So did they or didn't they? Are they asking the readers? Is this our homework assignment that we are supposed to answer and turn in to the bbc?

Can the news start reporting on facts?

Read the article only to find out that we don't know who the kidnappers are, if and how much they got, how much cash qatar sent to iraq, etc.

Whenever I read articles like this, it leaves me angry and wanting to never read anything from the BBC again. What's even more frustrating is that the BBC is government funded and not dependent on advertisers and they have no reason to clickbait.

cheez• 8 years ago

It's an interesting story. The only reason the information is out because a government hostile to the parties released the information.

21• 8 years ago

How do you even authenticate the info if it's from a hostile government?

jhpriestley• 8 years ago

It would be irresponsible of BBC to simply relay the viewpoint of a hostile state intelligence service without skepticism or framing, or giving the Qataris a chance to have their say.

Sorry, understanding the world requires engagement and judgment. Sometimes there's a lot of evidence pointing one way, but it's been manipulated and the other side is actually correct. When news organizations try to boil down the complexity to simple answers it doesn't go well (see: Iraqi WMDs).

In this case, the Qatari story is pretty ridiculous. They say they talked to terrorists about a ransom, then flew a large sum of cash into Iraq in secret, and then that large sum of cash was taken by some people in black masks, and then they got their hostages back. But it wasn't a hostage payment and terrorists didn't get it, it's being held in an Iraqi bank for development or something. This is a pretty far-fetched story and they probably did pay a large ransom, perhaps $1 billion or perhaps something smaller or larger, but in the same ballpark.

justsomedude43• 8 years ago

Where did they get the txt screenshots from? Looks like these Arabs communicate in perfect English among themselves.

dev_dull• 8 years ago

These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC.

How long until governments with access to required backdoors just start openly blackmailing citizens of “hostile” countries?

Without a doubt it’s already happening. Resist all back doors.

walrus01• 8 years ago

All of the gulf nation states make use of ZTE, Huawei and other Chinese phone system 'core' equipment for SS7, SMS, and for their mobile carriers' LTE networks. The "lawful intercept" abilities built into these systems, being designed for sale both domestically in China and to authoritarian governments around the world, are quite thorough.

Not that the intercept abilities in Alcatel/Lucent/Nokia/Ericsson equipment is much less robust, it's just not as commonly used in these environments.

Here's a really old but reasonably well documented instance of the same type of event:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/greek_wiretap...

In the case originally referenced, I would be totally unsurprised that some other nation-state has inserted an advanced persistent threat into the SMS core infrastructure of Qatar's telecoms. One of the reasons why proper end to end crypto (Signal, etc) is so important. At least if you can be reasonably assured of the security and OS of the endpoint devices, you don't have to trust the network in between them.

londons_explore3• 8 years ago

Bet that government was the UK, as part of the Five Eyes program, which has significant surveillance hardware in the middle east.

Almost certainly the USA used that equipment and grabbed those transcripts to give to close ally Saudi Arabia, who used them to turn states against Qatar.

The first world war was caused by the killing of a duke, the third world war will be caused by a clumsily worded text message from a president to his wife, misinterpreted by another powerful nation state.

eloff2• 8 years ago

There must never be a third world war, it would imperil human civilization itself. There can never even be a total war between two major powers anymore. Our weapons are just too awful.

Unfortunately I'm not sure that our politicians self-preservation instincts, strong as they may be, trump their egos (sorry for the pun.)

defen• 8 years ago

How did Hezbollah AND fundamentalist Salafi groups end up with the money? In my limited understanding those two groups don't like each other. Or is that enough money for them to put aside their differences?

pbarnes_1• 8 years ago

I stopped reading at this bit:

"These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC."

Uhuh. So... how did you verify them?

talltimtom• 8 years ago

Uhh RTFA?

“Qatari officials accept that the texts and voicemails are genuine, though they believe they have been edited "very selectively" to give a misleading impression.”

flukus• 8 years ago

Are they launching another world cup bid?

Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

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