If you are not reading Jill Carroll?s first-person account of her captivity in Iraq, running this week as a series in the Christian Science Monitor, I would highly recommend it. Not all of the insights in the piece were intended by Carroll, or perhaps even realized by her, but they are there, nonetheless ? insights about propaganda, manipulation, moral equivalence, moral guilt, and paranoia. Regarding the latter, in one passage she describes her response to her kidnappers? demand that she participate in making a propaganda video:
Seeing my alarm, they said I didn?t have to make the video if I didn?t want to. I assured them I did want to. They were armed,. I didn?t want to know the consequences if I said no. Then the man with the black eyes said, ?Jill, where is your mobile [phone]? Yesterday, the American soldiers came very close, very close to this place where you were. Why did they do that??
Again, they were accusing me of communicating with the U.S. Military. This was bad. ?I am the leader of this little group, and I?m a little more sophisticated than my friends here,? he continued. ?Do you have something in your body, something to send a signal to your government??
Ah, sophistication. Later, Carroll describes the filming of the video, during which the thugs tried to get her to talking about U.S. Marines destroying the homes of innocent Iraqi civilians:
What they didn?t know ? and I hope they would never find out ? was that I had been embedded with the Marines for five weeks in November and December. Back then, the lieutenant of the platoon I was with had said that if anyone ever kidnapped me, a platoon of Marines would come to my rescue. So, in the retake of the video I made a point of emphasizing the word ?Marines.? I said, ?Their government isn?t of the Iraqi people. It is a government brought by the American government and by the MARINES. . .?
I wanted them to know I was thinking of them. Come get me, guys. Please, come save me.
