Assuming The Worst

by digby

Howard Kurtz isn’t satisfied quite yet with Jill Carroll’s explanations as to why she didn’t get herself beheaded for George W. Bush. Apparently, until he can “see into her soul” he can’t judge whether she was truly not being a terrorist collaborator even though she said her statement was coerced. Here’s Kurtz:

Jill Carroll is now back in Boston. (Here’s the Christian Science Monitor piece on her return.) Since I was among a number of journalists expressing puzzlement about her videotaped interview in an Islamic party office in Baghdad after her release, I was glad to see the statement she released over the weekend. I just wish it had been in front of a camera, since it’s hard for a written statement to catch up with a piece of video that’s been endlessly replayed.

Yes, because the media failed to provide proper context for her statements, she now needs to submit herself for inspection on television so that people can properly evaluate her veracity. Excellent journalism, once again. Professionals like Kurtz, being naive little tots who couldn’t possibly have used some discretion and refrained from airing their “puzzlement” at her “behavior” until they had the facts, just don’t know what to think.

Here’s what Kurtz said on Friday:

I must say, though, that I found her first interview yesterday rather odd. Carroll seemed bent on giving her captors a positive review, going on about how well they treated her, how they gave her food and let her go to the bathroom. And they never threatened to hit her. Of course, as we all saw in those chilling videos, they did threaten to kill her. And they shot her Iraqi translator to death.

Why make a terrorist group who put her family and friends through a terrible three-month ordeal sound like they were running a low-budget motel chain?

What a good question. Why indeed?

But, perhaps I’m being unfair, right? Maybe Kurtz didn’t know that she made the tape before she was safely out of the hands of her captors. Nope — from the same column:

Now perhaps this is unfair, for there is much we do not know. We don’t know why Carroll was kidnapped and why she was abruptly released. She says she doesn’t either, but surely she must have gotten some clues about her abductors’ outlook and tactics during her 82-day captivity. Maybe she was just shell-shocked right after being let go. Maybe she won’t feel comfortable speaking out until she’s back on American soil.

As my colleagues in Baghdad point out, when that interview was taped, Carroll was still in the custody of a Sunni political party with ties to the insurgency. It may have just made sense for her to be especially cautious.

Yah think?

But it would have been wrong for the media critic of the Washington Post to sit tight and wait to get the fact before speculating that she is a terrorist sympathizer. He was just awfully “puzzled” by the sight of a kidnap victim giving a propaganda statement.

And they tell me that Carroll did cry — off camera — when the subject of her murdered translator came up.

Thank god for that. Of course, you would have thought that the tape of her almost hysterical from a couple of months ago would have been a clue that she wasn’t a willing participant, but whatever. Unless she cries when howie and his pals think she should cry, she’s suspect. Lucky for her, someone was there to vouch for the fact that she behaved appropriately.

Still, people are buzzing because her taped remarks have been played over and over again on television. I hope she’ll be able to share a fuller account of her ordeal soon.

The main people who were “buzzing” were despicable asses in the right blogosphere and rightwing talk radio who are going to hell for what they said. And I would suggest that Howie is going right along with them; his column on Friday was unconscionable. The only decent assumption under the circumstances was that she had been coerced. That’s certainly what I thought when I saw the tape. It was always theoretically possible that she could have suffered from Stockholm Syndrome or had “gone over to the enemy” but to assume that based upon a tape that was produced by anyone other than a reputable news agency is either a sign of second rate journalism or an obvious political agenda. With Kurtz’s history it appears to be both.

.