Oct. 13, 2018 - Steve Pieczenik
04:40
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, I'm Dr. | |
| Buchanik. | |
| Today, I just want to congratulate President Trump and his team for having Pastor Bronson released from prison. | |
| Under President Erdogan. | |
| I know that President Erdogan probably should have released Pastor Brunson earlier, but for many other reasons which have to do with national security, I'm certain that Erdogan wanted to keep him until he had certain leverage points that he wanted to use. | |
| Now, I've treated hostages for many years, particularly the ones who were in Iran. | |
| It's not an easy treatment and it's not something that you have to look on lightly. | |
| Let me give you an example. | |
| When a hostage comes out, no matter how long a period of time they've been held hostage, it's important to understand that they've endured an immense amount of stress and isolation which is incorporated both into their psyche and into their body. | |
| Now very often, they will come out without any physical manifestations. | |
| And the physical manifestations will appear only later on. | |
| And as a physician and someone who's taking care of hostages, one has to always be aware that the target organs, like the mind, the heart, the lungs, the stomach, become a very important element when you are a hostage. | |
| And what do I mean? | |
| You're all alone. | |
| You basically have to create a world where you can live in that world even though you're in a cell 24-7. | |
| And in that cell, you have to inspire yourself to walk around, to be active, and to seem alive to the next day. | |
| And you don't know how many next days there will be, and you don't know what will happen the next day. | |
| You don't know if you will be terrorized, if you will be beaten up. | |
| Or if you'll be flattered. | |
| In fact, being a hostage is a very dicey situation. | |
| Under the Iran situation, they had several hostages. | |
| They kept them alive. | |
| And keeping a hostage alive is a far more lucrative business than killing a hostage. | |
| And the reason for that is because the hostage becomes more valuable in terms of money The longer you keep him or her. | |
| But when they come out, psychologically they're traumatized. | |
| In the beginning you don't see it. | |
| It comes out at different points. | |
| A headache, a heart condition, stomach ache, malaise, depression. | |
| Severe depression and often hospitalization. | |
| When that occurs, it becomes a pattern that is hard to break in the future. | |
| So what has to happen? | |
| You have to be aware as a physician that the day that an individual is taken hostage becomes an anniversary reaction or the date in which the hostage will recapitulate the symptoms that he or she has had That made them ill at that particular point. | |
| So if they were taken hostage March 15th in 2016, they will repeat that same type of seizure or stomach ache or headache on 2017 on March 15th, 2018 on March 15th. | |
| It's what we call an anniversary reaction. | |
| And most physicians or caretakers have to be aware of the date in which, in this case, Pastor Brunson was taken hostage and how he was under the care of and how he endured the care of the Turks. | |
| My suspicion is the Turks did not beat him up. | |
| They did not terrorize him because it wouldn't have been to their advantage. | |
| They held him simply because they had other issues that they had to contend with. | |
| So from my point of view, I want to thank all the people involved, including the intelligence community, the boys upstairs with the satellite pictures and all the other assets that we have, as well as the Diplomacy Corps and Secretary of State Pompeo, who was very instrumental in this, as well as the family members of the pastor. | |
| Please remember that a hostage is not something that we want to be. | |
| And often we become hostages to our own fears and our own lives. |
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