Look, I'm happy that Jill Carroll has been freed ...
. . . and maybe it's just me and I haven't been paying much attention to this particular story, but why is the fact that Carroll's interpreter was killed during her abduction buried at the bottom of this story? And why, for that matter, is Carroll talking about having been treated "very well." When you are kidnapped and held against your will for months, when your life is threatened -- and when another human being who worked with you is murdered -- I'd call that being treated like . . . something different from "well."
posted by Kate Marie | 10:20 AM | Permalink
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5 comments
5 Comments:
She sounded like a space cadet Valley Girl in the interview that I heard.
Maybe she's suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
I think we should refrain from the impulse to politicize anything Jill Carroll said prior to or just after her release. She made certain statements as a condition of her release and was told that even after being freed she would be watched and might be killed for "cooperating" with the US embassy. The fact that one of her colleagues had to persuade her to come into the Green Zone after her release suggests to me that she was genuinely terrified and that nothing she said under those circumstances can be taken uncritically as her "real" opinion.
Madman, I didn't think of the post as an attempt to "politicize" her statements, but you are right that it's possible, and probably likely, that her claim of having been treated well was engendered more by fear than by callousness to the fate of her interpreter. If that's the case, I was probably being too harsh with her.
On the other hand, the media coverage of this story that I happened to read (or see) took on a tone of unadulterated "good news" that I found slightly offensive and indicative of an American-centric slant that the media often encourages and panders to. After all, this isn't a story chock full of "good news." Except for the fact that Jill Carroll was released alive, all the other aspects of this story seem like decidedly bad news to me, in that it involved the murder of one person and the months-long kidnapping and terrorizing of another.
Dear Kate Marie,
I meant my comment more as a general caveat than as any specific criticism of your post. You're right that in much of the media coverage the fate of her interpreter is given shamefully little attention. If I had to guess I would bet that her interpreter's demise weighed very heavily on Ms. Carroll's mind as she made the comments about being "treated well" before and just after being released. Having seen her captors commit murder once can have left her in very little doubt of their willingness to do it again.
Ms. Carroll's statements have serious implications and it's natural that she be asked to account for them eventually, I just hope that people here in the US will be generous enough to give her the benefit of the doubt in the days and weeks just after a terrible ordeal.
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