There's An Idea

Via Rodger, this cool story from The Australian:

Ex-hostage hires bounty hunters

A hostage held alongside Australian Douglas Wood in Iraq has hired bounty hunters to track down his former captors, promising to eliminate them one by one.

Swede Ulf Hjertstrom, who was held for several weeks with Mr Wood in Baghdad, was released by his kidnappers on May 30.

Mr Hjertstrom has since claimed he shared information with US and Iraqi troops about Mr Wood which led to the release of the 63-year-old Australian engineers two weeks ago, after 47 days in captivity.

Now, he wants to find those responsible.

'I have now put some people to work to find these bastards,' he told the Ten Network today.

'I invested about $50,000 so far and we will get them one by one.'

i guess he didn't buy into that whole Stockholm Syndrome nonsense. Gotta love it.

More: i found this apalling story about the Australian hostage Douglas Wood at Andi's World. It shouldn't shock me, yet somehow it does.

It seems that lunacy isn't exclusive to American journalists. After Douglas Woods, the Australian contractor kidnapped in Iraq, was freed from captivity, he actually expressed his true feelings for his captors by calling them a**holes. These remarks have drawn the ire of one Andrew Jaspan, editor of a left-wing newspaper in Australia.

Jaspan tells us that Woods went way too far with his remarks:

Said Jaspan: "I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood's use of the a---hole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through and I think demeans the man and is one of the reasons why people are slightly sceptical of his motives and everything else.

Woods greatest sin was to say "God Bless America" and praise American and Iraqi forces. Apparently, Jaspan thinks Woods should have been more grateful to his captors and a little less grateful to the forces who freed him. After all, his captors didn't torment him too badly.

Well, unless you count kidnapping him, kicking him in the head, keeeping him blindfolded and bound for 47 days, shaving him bald, killing two of his colleagues, making him beg for his life, and -- according to Hjertstrom -- shooting several other prisoners in front of him.

Wow. What is wrong with the far left? And how can anyone on God's earth take them seriously? It makes me want to bang my head against a wall sometimes.

Australian lefties, while Woods was still in chains, used him as a prop in their crusade against the forces of "U.S. Imperialism." Now that he's free, and free to speak the truth, the lefties have no use for him. And in fact, now they've come to despise Mr. Woods.

But we know what Wood's real offence is, don't we?

Yes, he did not do as did SBS journalist and Left hero John Martinkus after his own brief captivity and declare his kidnappers were "not savages", and say Iraq was 'on the road to s---'.

INSTEAD, he roared 'God bless America' and praised the US-trained Iraqi soldiers -- Iraq's real freedom fighters -- who saved him, saying he was 'proof positive that the current policies of the American and Australian governments is the right one'.

It seems that to a Leftist, this makes Wood the boorish inferior of the killers who beat him and held him captive. It is why journalist Tracee Hutchinson, in an Age column, calls him a 'blustering buffoon', moaning: 'It was enough that his words God bless America had been played over and over on his release.'

Let me ask younger readers still deciding on their brand of politics. Wouldn't you blush to join this Left?

Exactly.

[Cross-posted at A Western Heart.]