Friends Like These

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

Americans who had high hopes for a better relationship with Germany after Frau Merkel’s accession as chancellor are having second thoughts after Germany’s decision to send a convicted terrorist back to Lebanon after serving only 18 years for murdering an American serviceman. Few will forget the brutality of the killing, in June 1985, of Robert Dean Stethem, who’d been aboard Trans World Airlines Flight 847 when members of Hezbollah, including one Mohammed Ali Hamadi, hijacked it.


After discovering that Stethem was in the Navy, the terrorists beat him mercilessly before shooting him in the head and dumping his body on a tarmac in Beirut. In 1987, Hamadi was caught in Frankfurt, after which he was tried for his crimes by a German court and sentenced to life in prison. But apparently the German for “life sentence” turns out to be “set free whenever it’s convenient for us.”


Convenient because the move happens to coincide a little too neatly with the recent release of a German hostage in Iraq, Susanne Osthoff, who had been held by terrorist kidnappers for three weeks and whose captivity was becoming a political problem for the German government. Officially, the foreign ministry asserts that there is no connection between the two events because a parole board independent of the government decided to unchain Hamadi. This unique alignment of the stars is raising the eyebrows even of some of our German friends who generally support Ms. Merkel’s government.


European governments all too often pay ransoms for the release of hostages, but the foreign ministry has been dodging questions about whether a monetary ransom was paid for Ms. Osthoff, leading to the suspicion that Hamadi himself was her ransom. Although 18 years is a long time to spend in a German prison – even for convicts receiving life sentences – there had been no publicity leading up to Hamadi’s release: no “Free Hamadi” protests, no speculation about his upcoming parole application. The episode seems to have caught everyone by surprise.


Especially so because the date for Hamadi’s regularly scheduled parole hearing was suddenly, secretly, and inexplicably bumped forward. Originally planned for January, the hearing was held last week. German authorities apparently failed to notify the FBI agents who had been monitoring Hamadi’s stay in prison. Word only leaked out after Hamadi was already safely in Lebanon. Hamadi’s own brother was released from a German prison several years ago, halfway through a sentence for kidnapping, in exchange for the release of two German businessmen who had been taken hostage by terrorists. Our Teutonic friends have made a habit of just this kind of devil’s bargain over the years.



Robert Dean Stethem, whose murder led to Hamadi’s imprisonment in the first place, was born in 1961 into a naval family. His parents had met in the service. Robert and two of his brothers went into Navy as well; he had always wanted to be a diver, his younger brother, Patrick, told us yesterday. Patrick remembers Robert as a man of determination, spirit, and good humor. Robert boarded TWA 847, bound for Rome from Athens, on June 15, having just completed a tour in the area. The plane was hijacked. Upon discovering Stethem was in the armed services, the Hezbollah terrorists singled him out for beating and torture; his body could only be identified by his fingerprints.


Yet the traits his brother remembers never seem to have failed Robert during the ordeal. At one point his captors left him, bound and bloodied, next to a 16 year-old Australian girl at the rear of the plane. Seeing her distress, Stethem told her jokes to try to settle her nerves. For his heroism, he was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and now lies in Arlington National Cemetery. A destroyer, the United States Ship Stethem, is named after him, as are buildings or other monuments at several military installations around the country. Displays honor him at both of the Seabee museums, in Gulfport, Miss., and Port Hueneme, Calif.


Ms. Osthoff, the 43-year-old German hostage whose release Hamadi’s freedom may have bought, is resting now at an undisclosed location, which is cause for celebration. The circumstances of her release, however, are not. While Hamadi cools his heels with a brother in Lebanon with whom he must live as a condition of his release, outrage simmers in Washington. The State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, has addressed the issue in each of his daily briefings the past two days, vowing yesterday that “what I can assure anybody who’s listening, including Mr. Hamadi, is that we will track him down, we will find him and we will bring him to justice in the United States for what he’s done.”


But on the matter of Germany’s perpetration of this outrage, so far the State Department has only expressed “disappointment.” Stethem’s family goes further, saying that “the feeling of betrayal by a supposed ally is absolutely overwhelming,” as Katherine Stethem, Robert’s sister-in-law, put it to us. Hamadi’s early and secret release is “unconscionable,” she added. The German government denied extradition back in 1987, citing their objections to what Europeans call an amoral death penalty. This incident puts paid to Germany’s claim to moral superiority, not that such claims were ever creditworthy. Ms. Merkel has flunked the first test of whether she can lead in the war on Islamist terror.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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