Carroll's release hailed as 'a good day in Iraq'
But right-wing commentators attack her comments, timing of her release.
The day after Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll was freed by her captives, the vast majority of media and political commentators looked at the event, as the
Los Angeles Times described it, as "
a splash of good news during one of post-invasion Iraq's bleakest stretches." Friends, family and co-workers celebrated, and Monitor editor Richard Bergenheim said that while the Monitor was overjoyed at her release, "
the paper would not forget about other Americans and Iraqis still help captive.
A
USA Today editorial says that at a time when the Bush administration is blaming the US media for the erosion of support for the war in Iraq, "Carroll's story is a reminder of the
extraordinary dangers facing reporters trying to get the story there."
Carroll didn't parachute unprepared into this complex and troubling story. To better relate to Iraqis, she learned Arabic and in public wore the traditional veiled dress favored by Iraqi women. She is known to colleagues and friends for her sympathy for the Iraqi people and determination to present a balanced picture of life in that troubled land.
But Iraq has become a killing field for journalists. At least 86 journalists and support staff, many of them Iraqis, have been killed there in the past three years; 69 journalists died in all of World War II. ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff is still recovering from serious injuries in a bomb blast while he was reporting there in January. The deadly threats include kidnapping, a thriving industry in the chaos of the post-Saddam era. Hundreds of foreigners have been taken hostage and at least 55 executed by their captors since 2003.
The targets include not only journalists but also peace advocates, relief workers and others trying to help rebuild Iraq ��� all victims of the country's irrational killers. Carroll's ordeal is a measure of the cost of such commitment.
In the
Moderate Voice political blog, Joe Gandleman writes that reports about Ms. Carroll's release show there are
two lessons to be learned from her ordeal.
-
Journalism has always been a perilous business. In some countries such as Mexico, murders of journalists seem to come in periodic spurts (often to those who are writing about drug cartels). Iraq is a plum assignment but one of the most deadly a journalist can draw (for fully paid staffers) or choose to cover (for special correspondents or "stringers" who are paid by the piece).
-
There are seeming limits, even for terrorists. Unless some new revelation emerges about a behind-the-scenes ransom or some other kind of deal, it appears as if this hostage seizure was a big, fat miscalculation on the part of the terrorists. Why? Because Carroll was apparently a well-connected and beloved reporter who had learned the language and culture. She wasn't just plopping in to write a few stories. She had a built in network of people in many different political camps and had impressed them with her fairness.
Joe Friedman writes in the
Media Watch column for
CBS Marketwatch that as Carroll ends one ordeal, she faces another – the media ordeal following her release. Mr. Friedman writes that the media must treat Carroll's return, and her need to reintegrate back into her regular life, with respect. He writes that it's a test the media has faced before, and
has not always handled well.
Can we treat her with dignity? Can we balance our instincts to perform a full-court press on a newly-famous figure, remembering that the newsmaker is also a very fragile celebrity? The last thing Jill Carroll needs now is for a horde of her fellow journalists to chase and pressure her into telling and re-telling her saga. She's been through enough. Let's treat her with some degree of restraint. When she's ready to tell her story, then we'll know what she's thinking. Friedman writes that, in general, the media performed well during Carroll's captivity, but "it remains to be seen whether we'll find a way to restrain our worst instincts and keep up the good work."
But not everyone was totally happy at the news of Carroll's release. Some right-wing commentators, bloggers and TV personalities did their best to sour the mood of the celebrations, attacking Carroll's comments about her treatment at the hands of the kidnappers, questioning the timing of her release, and remarks she was forced to make in a video the night before her release. One right-wing blogger even accused Carroll of arranging the entire event so that she could
create sympathy for the insurgents. Orrin Judd, at the
BrothersJudd.comn blog, attacks Carroll for commenting that she was treated well by her participants, saying she "May as well just come right out and say
she was a willing participant."
Kathryn Jean Lopez adds to the
right-wing chorus of criticism in one of several anti-Carroll blog postings at the
National Review Online.
"Yes, the Jill Carroll thing is getting a tad irritating. She's just been released, she should take it easy, reunite with family and friends, and doesn't owe us (you, me) anything. One imagines though we'll be hearing her whole story soon though. But in the meantime, does the Christian Science Monitor have to take up her whole I-was-treated-fine/it-was-all-good talk, as they seem to in their main story today, without mentioning a January 30th video release where she was crying--presumably not fine.
Hey, maybe despite being hostage takers, they're salt of the earth (save for the dead translator..). But, while understandable and rightly happy she's free, the paper could be a little more realistic.
A somewhat less strident version of this attitude comes from John Hinderaker at the right-wing
Power Line blog, who wrote "...I want to
register a small protest against her statement, widely quoted in the press, that she was 'well treated' by her captors. This is a sentiment that one often hears from people who have been released by kidnappers; one gets the sense that the victims are grateful–understandably, perhaps–to the terrorists for letting them go.
But the fact is that Ms. Carroll was not "well treated" by her captors. She says that they "never hit me. They never even threatened to hit me." Terrific. But they did threaten to cut off her head, and kept her in fear of her life for nearly three months. To anyone who saw the videos in which she pleaded for her life, her mental distress was obvious. And the kidnappers murdered Carroll's translator in the course of capturing her."
The Christian Science Monitor
filed a report Friday on its website that 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, and she was "mentally and emotionally under their control," as Jim Carroll, Jill's father put it. "She had been taught to fear them," Mr. Carroll says his daughter told him Friday by phone. They told her they had already killed another hostage.
The report also mentions that "Carroll worked at the Wall Street Journal's Washington office in early 2002 when that paper's reporter Daniel 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."
Meanwhile,
Agence-France Presse reports a new video surfaced Thursday, filmed shortly before Carroll's release, that shows her
praising Iraq's insurgents and saying that they would ultimately win in Iraq.
"Did you think the American army or the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) would save you at any time," a muffled male voice asked Carroll in accented English.
"Sometimes I thought maybe that they might come, they might find me, they might find a way to know where I am and come get me," she answered, dressed in the same baggy dress and headscarf she appeared in after her release ...
"Why did not they save you," asked the man.
"I think the mujahedeen are very smart and even with all the technology and all the people that the American army has here, they still are better at knowing how to live and work here, more clever," she said. "Does this mean something to you," asked the man.
"It makes very clear that the mujahedeen are the ones that will win in the end," said Carroll.
The New York Times reports that the video was distributed by SITE, a Washington, D.C.-based group that
tracks jihadist Web sites.
These kind words for her captors were a sharp contrast to her demeanor on the videotapes made shortly after her kidnapping, in which she appeared distraught, weeping and terrified. Ms. Carroll's seeming sympathy for her captors suggested either that she was pretending in hopes of gaining her release or that, after suffering weeks of extreme duress, she had fallen under the sway of her kidnappers.
One reason for Carroll's statements may have been that she was
threatened by her captors just before she was freed. The
Associated Press reports that her kidnappers "warned her before her release that she might be killed if she cooperated with the Americans or went to the Green Zone, saying it was infiltrated by insurgents."
And the Monitor says Carroll's kidnappers made her release dependent on making that last-second video. The report quotes another journalist who was held hostage as saying that Carroll did the right thing.
"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 has help captive by a Shiite militia in southern Iraq for 10 days in August 2004. "The decision is my words that are coerced are not worth dying over."
Mr. Garen was forced to make a propaganda video by his own captors. "I said the US should 'stop the massacre' in Najaf, and they weren't my words, and I felt very uncomfortable saying them," recalls Garen. He says he tried to change some of the text he was fed but "that was very risky.
Finally, the AP reports that German authorities have
arrested a man who tried to extort $2 million from the Monitor by promising to win the release of Carroll before Thursday. The man, a West African native living in Germany, contacted Monitor editors and said he was an Arab who knew who was holding Carroll and could arrange for her release in return for the payment.
Also...
•
Iraq leader warns U.S. to stop interfering (New York Times)
•
Deadliest battle for Canadians in 32 years (Canada.com)
•
Elections officials to query GOP pundit, Ann Coulter, about why she voted in wrong precinct (Palm Beach Post)
• Feedback appreciated. E-mail
Tom Regan
.
|
RSS feed