by MzNicky
----
Update: A third videotape of Jill Carroll was released today by her Iraqi captors, who identify themselves as the Revenge Brigades. The tape was aired on al-Rai TV in Kuwait. In it, Carroll appears calm and controlled as she says that she is being held by the “mujahideen”:
“I sent you a letter written by my hand, but you wanted more evidence. I am here. I am fine. Please just do whatever they want, give them whatever they want as quickly as possible. There is a very short time. Please do it fast. That's all."
So far, there are no reports on the letter’s contents. AP reportedly was told by the TV station that it had received the letter and had turned it over to the Kuwaiti authorities. Also unknown is how long “a very short time” may be.
----
It’s been a week now since we’ve heard anything about the plight of Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor journalist who was kidnapped in Iraq a month ago. Carroll’s captors have threatened to execute her if the US military and Iraq authorities do not release all Iraqi women currently being “detained.” In what surely was a coincidence, and all the while claiming that it “does not concede to terrorists,” the US State Department released five Iraqi women on January 26. It’s not known how many more women the military has in custody; some reports say four, others say more.
One of the many questions about this situation that has gone unasked, and thus unanswered, is why any of these Iraq women are being held in the first place. But one distinct possibility is that we now know that wives and children of suspected insurgents have been, well, kidnapped by the coalition forces, in the hope that such human leverage might coerce said suspected insurgents to turn themselves in. That we even know of these latest Geneva Convention-defying actions on the part of the US military is because the ACLU has acquired documentation of the practice, dating at least as far back as Spring 2004. Of course, the Pentagon denies any such action.
Whether these family members of suspected insurgents are the women detainees Carroll’s captors have in mind is among the myriad unknowns in this case. The American public is apparently supposed to accept the one-dimensional, emotion-roiling mainstream-media images of Jill Carroll—kneeling in front of her hooded kidnappers and weeping for her life— in the by-now familiar, grainy videotapes played repeatedly (for a while anyway, until it’s on to the next school shooting or missing child) on cable news channels that offer no contextual background or analysis whatsoever. Thus is reinforced the prescribed racist stereotype of irrational Muslim bloodthirst, apparently springing fully-formed from their rabid hatred of our freedom and inexplicable ingratitude over our having “liberated” their country.
What we are left to piece together, from disparate bits of information we are not supposed to know, is, again, who are these Iraqi women detainees, and why are they being detained? Could Carroll’s kidnapping be not simply an action, but rather a reaction, to the terrorizing of Iraqi women by US forces? And is it beyond our collective national awareness, ironically heightened by the very administration that has striven so mightily to manipulate it, to imagine that the sacrifice of Jill Carroll would, in the administration’s cynically arrogant (and increasingly inaccurate) perception of American sentiment, bolster its portrayal of her captors as motiveless “evildoers,” rather than desperate men taking desperate measures to free their women from captivity?
Sources: ABC News; San Francisco Chronicle; MSNBC; Seattle Intelligencer; PEJ News
Jill Carroll Iraq Geneva Conventions
Posted by egalia for MzNicky
