Do you know who Kayla Mueller is?
I should say “was,” because she’s dead.
Unless you paid close attention to news reports, you probably never heard of her, and, in my view, that in itself is a crime.
The life and death of 26-year old Kayla Mueller was something the Obama administration strove to ignore as much as possible.
It was bad enough she was held prisoner by ISIS, but the details of her ordeal are horrendous: Kayla Mueller was held as a personal sex slave of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. She “belonged to him” and was repeatedly terrorized and raped her for his pleasure.
There were other hostages at the home where Kayla was kept – young, Christian Yazidi girls. Kayla tried to help them and, when they had a chance to escape, Kayla refused to join them because she felt her presence as an American with them would attract attention and threaten their already fragile security.
She was probably right. They got away – and she remained in her torture hell.
Kayla Mueller was an aid worker who spent years on various projects helping refugees. But she desperately wanted to help the refugees in Syria and traveled with her photographer boyfriend working on humanitarian projects.
In August 2013, the pair went to Aleppo, where he was installing Internet equipment at a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders. She met with, and talked to, refugees there, planning to write about their situation.
As they left, the pair was ambushed. He got away, but not before being beaten; she was taken prisoner. He believes ISIS spies in the hospital wanted her because she was an American.
A demand for a 5-million Euro ransom was made, but Kayla’s family, in Arizona, was told that the U.S. government does not pay ransom or exchange prisoners.
(Oops, Obama traded five Guantanamo Taliban prisoners for the release of U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl, remember?)
The parents were also told that if they paid any ransom, they would face prosecution.
They were frantic, as were the families of four other Americans held prisoner in the same area: James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig and Theo Patnos. They tried all they could to find out where their loved ones were and how to get them out, but nothing worked and the U.S. government was virtually no help.
Of these five prisoners, only Theo Patnos got out alive. The other three men were beheaded, and Kayla was originally reported to have been killed in a Jordanian air raid. But there was no body and no proof that, in fact, she was killed there.
It was reported that days later her parents were sent pictures proving her death, but to this day no one really knows how Kayla Mueller died.
Throughout Kayla’s ordeal, her parents in Arizona begged the administration for assistance in finding and rescuing their daughter.
They described the White House as being vague about what it could do to help and, in fact, Obama has had nothing to say about Kayla’s rape ordeal and death.
It was reported that British Intelligence notified Barack Obama of the location of the five Americans in June, but it took a month before he acted on the information. By that time, the prisoners had been moved.
Apparently our government didn’t think the Brits were savvy enough to have valid information and stalled any rescue attempts for a month, until it was too late, even after British intelligence confirmed their information – and the world was subjected to the grisly ISIS videos of bloody beheadings and the mysterious death of Kayla Mueller.
It was reported by the Daily Beast that Obama’s national security advisers didn’t want to base a raid on intelligence from a foreign service. “They didn’t trust it” because it wasn’t ours.
Wow!
The parents of the dead hostages aren’t satisfied with the excuses from the White House, though there’s nothing they can do about it.
Obama defended his decisions, saying he “devoted enormous resources … and probably missed them by a day or two.”
Oh, well.
The whole situation casts more of a pall on our relations with our allies. If it’s so clear the Obama people don’t trust them to provide accurate intelligence, then what will that mean in the future when thousands of lives might depend on it?
Twenty-six-year-old Kayla Mueller was a deliberate victim of the terrorism war – the war the president of the United States refuses to even acknowledge exists, much less kills innocent American citizens.
That’s not an exaggeration.
People today might not realize it, but there was a time when American citizenship meant something.
There was a time when an American in danger anywhere in the world would get help from our government.
If they were able, they could go to a U.S. Embassy for protection and, if they weren’t able, the U.S. government would get help to them.
Today, that’s ancient history.
Today, an American in danger is on his own while the president and the president’s men make up excuses for their craven failures.
The blood of the hostages is on their hands.
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