The Christian Science Monitor says she was forced to make the propaganda video. Color me unsurprised.
CAIRO – The night before journalist Jill Carroll’s release, her captors said they had one final demand as the price of her freedom: She would have to make a video praising her captors and attacking the United States, according to Jim Carroll.
In a long phone conversation with his daughter on Friday, Mr. Carroll says that Jill was “under her captor’s control.”Ms. Carroll had been their captive for three months and even the smallest details of her life – what she ate and when, what she wore, when she could speak – were at her captors’ whim. They had murdered her friend and colleague Allan Enwiya, “she had been taught to fear them,” he says. And before making one last video the day before her release, she was told that they had already killed another American hostage.
Seems like Jonah Goldberg needs to STFU about Carroll. I cannot tell you how annoyed their slander is making me. Because gee, Jonah knows what Carroll should be saying.
But Jill Carroll is increasingly starting to bug me. The details are still murky and it’s hard to appreciate what she’s been through. And maybe JPod’s right about Stockholm syndrome. And maybe the media’s selectively choosing what to show of her statements. But it would be nice to hear her say something remotely critical of her captors, particularly about the fact that they murdered her translator in cold blood. I’m very glad she’s alive, but I’m getting a very bad vibe. More, no doubt, to come.
That “bad vibe” he was writing about at one a.m.? Well, I’d already read enough several hours earlier to have seen my b.s. detector go off and write the post that’s dated this morning at 7:30 (scheduling function of WordPress).
Yes, more to come. How about waiting for the facts to come in before accusing the woman of being a traitor to her country? I really hate it when bloggers do this, and I hadn’t realized that Goldberg did it first, and the echo chamber effect kicked in.
If Goldberg had waited, perhaps he could have read this:
In making their last video, Mr. Carroll says her captors “obviously wanted maximum propaganda value in the US. After listening to them for three months she already knew exactly what they wanted her to say, so she gave it to them with appropriate acting to make it look convincing.”
Jill Carroll will undoubtedly speak for herself once she’s had time to recover from her ordeal and spend time with her family. But her friends and colleagues say she made it clear that she’s no friend to those who kidnap or harm civilians.
Those who encountered Carroll in a professional context repeatedly praised her fairness and compassion, as demonstrated by some of the thousands of letters the Monitor has received in her support.
“Her professionalism and objectivity were unparalleled within the media community,” Capt. Patrick Kerr, a Marine public affairs officer who got to know Carroll last December, when she spent a month with a Marine unit in Western Iraq, said in an e-mail. “I saw her in Husaybah, on the Syrian border, in early December shortly before I returned to the States. Aside from being very personable and down-to-earth, what really struck me was Jill’s bravery. She seemed to fit right in with the marines and Iraqi security forces,” he wrote in January.
For God’s sake, the woman was kidnapped at gunpoint, saw her translator shot, and spent 82 days in captivity in fear for her life. You can’t wait one effing day to see if maybe, just maybe, she was making the latest video under duress?
Shame on you, Jonah. And shame on all the bloggers accusing Jill Carroll of being pro-terrorist. Let’s wait to hear from her about that anti-U.S. propaganda video, shall we?
