Coercion [UPDATED]

This story makes the smearing of Jill Carroll by certain conservative blogs particularly cruel.

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. [ . . . ]

In fact, Carroll did what many hostage experts and past captives would have urged her to do: Give the men who held the power of life and death over her what they wanted.

"You'll pretty much say anything to stay alive because you expect people will understand these aren't your words," says Micah Garen, a journalist and author who was held captive by a Shiite militia in southern Iraq for 10 days in August 2004. "Words that are coerced are not worth dying over."

Shortly before her release, her captors - who refer to themselves as the Revenge Brigade - also told her they had infiltrated the US diplomatic compound in Baghdad, and she would be killed if she went there or cooperated with the American authorities. It was a threat she took seriously in her first few hours of freedom.

Carroll worked at the Wall Street Journal's Washington office in early 2002 when that paper's reporterDaniel Pearl was abducted and beheaded in Pakistan. "Many of her colleagues knew him and it was very emotional in the office,'' Jill told her father. "She had that memory in the back of her head while she was being threatened."

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.

(H/T to Althouse for the link.)

As far as I know, none of the ugly mudslinging is being done by anyone who has ever been a hostage, much less defied his or her captors' demands and lived to tell. It's being done by a bunch of armchair yahoos who have wet dreams about how patriotic and heroic they would be in a situation they have never risked, much less experienced. In your videogames, jerks.

UPDATE: After arriving at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, Carroll, dressed in cammies and a backpack instead of hijab, sounded like a different woman:

Reporter Jill Carroll yesterday renounced many of the statements she had made while in captivity in Iraq and called the people who kidnapped her ''criminals at best."

In a dramatic statement read by the editor of The Christian Science Monitor, the newspaper Carroll works for, Carroll said she lived through ''a horrific experience. I was, and remain, deeply angry with the people who did this."

She renounced both the propaganda video she was compelled to make as a condition of her release, and her interview afterwards in the offices of the Iraqi Islamic party, which she says broke a promise not to air the interview on TV:

"[F]earing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely. Out of fear I said I wasn't threatened. In fact, I was threatened many times."

While Carroll was undoubtedly strongly advised to issue this statement immediately to counter any doubts or misperceptions useful to the enemy that the views she expressed under duress were her own, it still took real courage to make the statement, to so quickly throw off the disguise of compliance that preserved her life. I would not be surprised if she was explicitly threatened that they'd find her and kill her if she did exactly that. There is no question that personally, she is still very frightened and will not feel safe for a long time.

Comments

[Danny]

While a few of those idiot commenters on Little Green Footballs have apologized for their incendiary statements about Jill Carroll, others still are suspicious of her, and still others who condemned the propaganda video she was forced to make now say she's putting other hostages at risk by repudiating what she said under duress. AAAARGH! I can't look at that website anymore, it's dangerous for my blood pressure.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

... she said gently, having deservedly torn a few people news ones.

(I'm increasingly convinced the problem isn't right wingers and left wingers, it's idiots.)

[AmbivaBro]

I second what Charlie said. Idiots seem to proliferate around extreme viewpoints, like fungus in a dark, wet corner.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

My own take; not as eloquent.

Schlussel and Hinderocker (among others) owe Carroll an apology.

[Tom Strong]

Idiots seem to proliferate around extreme viewpoints, like fungus in a dark, wet corner.

LOL. Now that is well-said.

[geoduck2]

AAAARGH! I can't look at that website anymore, it's dangerous for my blood pressure.

Yes. Back away from the web site. It may cause your head to explode.

PS - I loved your comments on Althouse about this issue. Especially the PCP and kung fo fighting hostage escape scenario.

I wonder if some people live in a video game, detached from reality?

All this reminds me of a school book I read in fifth grade titled , After the First Death about a boy taken hostage by terrorists. The book explores the mental trauma caused as a result of his ordeal.

[geoduck2]

I just looked up the author of the book, After the First Death. It's by Robert Cormier, and it was first published in 1979.

The book is an intense thriller, and written for young adults. But it is quite sophisticated. It deals with concepts like the failure of bravery and the frustration of the central character to act in an ideal heroic way.

The book also explores the Biblical context of the murder of Kane and the ramifications of violence.

I think I'll have to check the book out of the library and re-read it. This is one of those books that stays with you. I have scenes from this book still burned in my brain from reading it years ago.

[reader_iam]

Beware of citizens with pretenses as journalists whose primary "skill" is self-righteously jumping to conclusions.

That's the essential problem with LGF commenters and a whole number of bloggers as well.

Say what you will about bias among journalists/the media (and it indeed exists), most at least have the temperament for the job, some sort of training, and some idea of the basic tenet of the profession.

In fact, not everyone, or any old person, can do it--or, dear Lord, SHOULD do it.

For this reason, while I embrace the blogosphere for all that it does and its stellar gadfly role as counterpoint to the MSM, I have serious reservations about the whole idea of "citizenjournalists" as ultimately somehow "replacing" the formal press.

(And OF COURSE, OF COURSE, there are many fine bloggers without j-backgrounds who do great work and do function as journalists. Frankly, that's because those individuals could indeed actually DO the job. That doesn't weaken my more general point.)