[Mb-civic] Jill Carroll's ordeal - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Jill Carroll's ordeal

By James Carroll  |  March 13, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

HOW LONG is 10 weeks? How long is 65 days? How long is 1,560 hours? For 
Jill Carroll, the American journalist who was kidnapped in Iraq on Jan. 
7, the passage of time must be excruciating.

What can her life have been like? What is it like today? Who is holding 
her? Where is she being held? How are they treating her? Is she witness 
to the brutalization of other captives? Does she live in a stupor of 
exhausted fear? Or are her senses alive with perception, alert to every 
moment's possibility for ill or good? Has anyone been kind to her? Do 
her captors argue with one another about what to do now? Is she alive, 
despite earlier threats, because someone took her side?

After her capture, a beautiful photograph was published, showing her 
irresistible smile. Her head was covered, a hint of her respectful 
attitude. That picture was an emblem of her goodness. Then, on Jan. 31, 
another photograph appeared, taken from a videotape broadcast on 
Al-Jazeera. In this image, which is before me as I write, Carroll looks 
simply terrified, and her eyes are full of questions. No response 
suggests itself, except other questions.

Does Carroll know what has been happening in Iraq since her capture? How 
the devils of religious and sectarian violence have been loosed? Does 
she know that security forces she might have looked to for rescue have 
been turning into rampaging death squads? Does she know of the regional 
escalations, with Iran and the Palestinian territories more in the grip 
of nihilist Islamist fervor than ever? What would she make of the Muslim 
uproar at Danish cartoons? Was her punishment therefore increased for 
being a Western journalist?

Last week, the Christian Science Monitor launched a media campaign in 
Iraq, pressing for her release. Is it held against her that the 
newspaper has the word ''Christian" in its name? Does the word 
''science" offend as well?

Will those holding Carroll mark the third anniversary of the war's 
beginning as it falls this week? In these three years, an average of two 
American soldiers have been killed in Iraq each day; an average of 15 
have been wounded. By that calculus, staying with averages, 130 GIs have 
died since Carroll was taken prisoner; almost 1,000 have been wounded. 
What is the passage of time for them?

As savage civil war shows signs of closing in on US forces, have 
American soldiers been taken hostage, in effect, by the failed policies 
of their own government? What of the ''enemy combatants" being held by 
our side? Do the dreads of the imprisoned transcend identity, politics, 
guilt or innocence?

And what of gender? Yet again the propensity for mad violence shows 
itself as overwhelmingly male. As friends help me to ask, has Carroll's 
being a woman put her in a position of special vulnerability? Her 
captors began by demanding the release of Iraqi women being held by the 
''coalition." What of that? Have women been released? Why were they 
being held? Is the prudential principle of never dealing with kidnappers 
(lest they be encouraged in their kidnapping) an absolute? Can't a way 
be found to free other women for the sake of this one?

The brutality of Jill Carroll's captors goes without saying. The 
apparent indifference to her fate across an otherwise enflamed Muslim 
world is mystifying. It seems impossible to exaggerate the gravity of 
her jeopardy. But is there really nothing her fellow citizens can do but 
worry and plead? What exactly is the US government doing for her? Where 
is the pressure from Congress? What if constituents of every politician 
in Washington demanded to know what is being done to obtain Jill 
Carroll's release? The war in Iraq threatens to spin out of control. 
Iran has been invited to do its worst, and is responding accordingly. 
Meanwhile, the fearsome gulf between politicized Muslims and the West, 
including a newly politicized Christianity, grows ever larger. We the 
American people have rarely felt so powerless. But today, what if we put 
a single human face on these vast problems? This column became a litany 
of questions, but finally there are only two questions: How would we be 
organizing our lives on her behalf if Jill Carroll were our sister and 
our daughter? But isn't that is exactly who she is?

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/13/jill_carrolls_ordeal/
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