The U.S. government could have done more to free slain photojournalist James Wright Foley, his heartbroken brother said Friday.
“I really, really hope that Jim’s death pushes us to take another look at our approach to terrorist and hostage negotiation,” he said.
“We are sitting on prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, for example. It doesn’t even have to be financial,” Michael Foley, 38, told Katie Couric on Yahoo! News.
“There’s more that could have been done directly on Jim’s behalf,” he said.
The U.S. should scrap its zero-negotiation policy for the sake of journalist Steven Sotloff, whom terrorists have threatened to kill next, he said.
“I just feel strongly that more can be done moving forward,” Michael Foley said.
He added, “I don’t believe ISIL can be contained — containment is not a strategy. We need to recognize that they are a threat and we need to deal with them.”
Meanwhile, Foley’s distraught parents spoke about the gut-wrenching email their son’s captors sent — saying they were happy, at first, to hear anything at all after being kept in the dark for months.
“We hadn’t heard from Jim’s captors since December. I actually was excited to see an email, despite the conclusion they would execute him,” his dad, John Foley, told the “Today” show.
“I actually hoped we could engage in negotiations with them,” he said.
The Islamic State thugs had sent them several emails demanding money — but then suddenly halted communication, leaving the Foleys in the dark, said his mother, Diane Foley.
“We had received several emails and then they just stopped communicating … [We] sent multiple messages hoping to engage them,” she said with a furrowed brow.
Philip Balboni, CEO of the Global Post, which employed Foley, didn’t consider the $132 million ransom legit because it was too high.
“We never took it seriously,” Balboni told NBC News.
He considered it “some form of opening gambit that was so wildly excessive that no one could ever raise that kind of money,” he said.
Recent ransoms paid to free hostages in Syria have been in the area of $5 million — so the big fee was a signal to others close to the case that the terrorists weren’t actually interested in negotiating, NBC reported.
Even so, Foley’s family and friends had been working to collect millions of dollars they hoped to offer the Islamic State in exchange for his freedom, the Wall Street Journal reported.