This is wonderful news. It really brightened my day to hear this.

Jill Carroll: finally free
By Dan Murphy and Scott Peterson | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor

CAIRO AND BAGHDAD - Katie Carroll went from a deep sleep to instantly awake when she saw the Iraq country code on her caller ID.

She grabbed the phone. It was 5:45 a.m and the ringing heralded the news about her twin sister, Jill, who had been held hostage in Iraq for nearly three months. "Katie, it's me," said the voice on the other end of the line. "I'm free."

It was Jill herself, safe after 82 days.

"Then she burst into tears and I did, too,'' says Katie.

Journalist Jill Carroll was freed in Baghdad Thursday ending a period of captivity marked by an enormous global outpouring of support and calls for her release.

"I'm just really grateful. The overwhelming emotion is gratitude. I am glad this day has arrived and thank whatever forces, divine and otherwise, that helped bring about this day," says Jill.

On Jan. 7, Monitor freelancer Carroll traveled to interview Sunni Arab politician Adnan al-Dulaimi in Baghdad's western Adil neighborhood. He was not in his office, and, after waiting some 20 minutes, Carroll and her Iraqi driver and interpreter left.

After traveling about 300 yards, they were attacked by gunmen. Carroll was seized, and her interpreter, Allan Eniwya, was killed.

Thursday, Carroll's captors simply drove her to Amariyah, stopped the car, pointed her in the direction of the Iraqi Islamic Party (IPP) office at about 12:20 p.m. local time and then drove off.

Carroll, who was on assignment for the Monitor when she was kidnapped, gave a short interview to Baghdad TV, which is owned by the IIP, before being transported to the Green Zone by the US military. She was told the interview was for internal party uses only, and didn't realize it would be broadcast. In that interview Carrroll said that for most of her ordeal she was kept in a darkened room which she later described as a "cave."

"I really don't know where I was. The room had a window but the glass you know, you can't see," she said, making a motion with her hand as if the window was blocked, "and you couldn't hear any sound, and so I would sit in the room."

"If I had to take a shower I walked, you know, two feet, to the next door to take a shower or go to the bathroom and come back." From time to time, she says, she had contact with Iraqi women and children in the house which she found comforting.

She was only allowed to watch television and read a newspaper once and had little information about what was going on in the world at large.

"I was treated well, but I don't know why I was kidnapped," Carroll told the TV station about her kidnappers. In videotaped statements her captors had implied they would kill her if Iraqi prisoners held by coalition forces weren't released. But Carroll said, "They never hit me. They never even threatened to hit me."

Carroll says she asked an IIP official to call the Monitor's Baghdad hotel. He refused, and called the Washington Post's Baghdad office. Carroll is close personal friends with two of the Post's Iraqi staffers.

Her next call was to twin sister Katie. She then called her parents, Jim and Mary Beth.

The first thing she told me today was, 'I love you,'" says Mary Beth. "She said, 'Every single day I was in captivity, I cried over how worried you must be, and what a burden this must be for the family.' "

In fact, the day before release, Katie Carroll had appeared on the Arab TV station Al Arabiyah, where she had talked of the effect of the kidnapping on the family and pleaded for information that might lead to her sister's release.

"I was dreaming that this would be the way I'd find out - that she'd call me in the middle of the night like this,'' says Katie. "She sounded great. I just want to thank everyone who's prayed and given us support through this time, and we're obviously looking forward to some private time with Jill."

Monitor Editor Richard Bergenheim said Thursday: "This is an exciting day, we couldn't be happier. We are so pleased she'll be back with her family. The prayers of people all over the world have been answered."

President George Bush had said Carroll's release was a top priority for his administration, and her freedom was welcomed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a press conference in Berlin. Ms. Rice spoke of the "great delight and great relief of the United States, the people of the United States and, I'm sure, the people of the world at the release today of Jill Carroll."

Carroll's release followed half a dozen false leads in the effort to free her - people who contacted the Monitor or the Carroll family. Some demanded exorbitant ransoms, but never managed to produce a "proof of life." One scam artist, calling himself a repentant member of the kidnapper group and seeking a payoff, turned out to be a young Nigerian and was arrested in Germany. Other would-be players said they had contacts and could free her, but never delivered.

Her support among Iraqis appeared to be quite strong. Several Iraqi newspapers and television stations took up her cause. They reported her story, editorialized for her freedom, and donated public-service announcements designed by the Monitor's Baghdad correspondents that pleaded for Carroll's release.

Even the mother of a young Iraqi woman detained for months by the government without charges and finally released in late January was willing to speak publicly on Carroll's behalf. Politicians across the Iraqi political spectrum, especially leaders from the Sunni sect also spoke out emotionally on Carroll's behalf.

Across the Muslim world, voices not normally heard on behalf of an American, called for Jill's release: Hamas in the Palestinian territories, the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, and many others.

Hope rose with the release of the remaining three Christian Peacekeepers hostages last week. But it had been nearly two months since Carroll's last video was dated, and many experts were privately beginning to express discouragement about her status. It had been quiet too long, and without a single confirmed attempt to negotiate.

For the Monitor's "Team Jill" - an informal group of editors and writers who worked on her case, each assigned separate tasks - it was a difficult time.

Washington bureau chief David Cook every day passed a photo of Carroll taped to the door of the bureau's building. "You'd come in the door and see her picture and think, 'have I done everything I could today to help get her out?'" says Cook.

Monitor editor Bergenheim said no money had been exchanged for Carroll's release.

Following Carroll's arrival at the IIP office Thursday, the party's Secretary General Tariq al-Hashimi led a ceremony in which he handed the freed journalist gifts, and praised her release.

Mr. Hashimi is a rival for influence among Iraq's Sunni Arab minority of Adnan al-Dulaimi's, the politician Carroll had sought to interview on the morning of Jan. 7. Mr. Dulaimi has repeatedly denied involvement. Dulaimi has said that his political rivals - both Shiite and Sunni - were trying to hurt his political standing.

Leading IIP member Naser al-Ani said her appearance at their office, in a blue Islamic robe and wearing a light green headscarf identical to the one she wore in a Feb. 28 video issued by her captors, was completely unexpected. He said guards at the office "thought she was a party member - dressed Islamically like that, they thought she worked in [the Iraqi government's] Women's Affairs department."

Mr. Ani said she was dropped off near the office, in a Sunni stronghold in Western Baghdad. In a press conference, Hashimi said she bore a letter from her captors that she gave to the IIP guards.

A measure of the extent to which she was cut off from the outside world was that she didn't know if her driver had escaped on Jan. 7 during the abduction. News of his safety was a great relief to Carroll, her father Jim Carroll said.

"She knew about Alan, but did not know about [the driver],'' Mr. Carroll says. "She started to break down when we were talking about it, so I didn't pursue that too much."

Shortly before her release, her kidnappers also warned Carroll about talking to the US or going to the Green Zone, alleging to her that it was "infiltrated by the Mujahideen" and that she might be killed if she cooperated with the Americans, her family says.

When the US military arrived at the IIP offices to escort her to the Green Zone, she was at first reluctant to go. But in a brief phone call the Monitor's staff writer Scott Peterson in Baghdad, he persuaded her that was the best and safest course of action.

Kidnappers in Iraq have tried to scare former hostages like this in the past. When Italian journalist Guiliana Sgrena was released by her captors in February last year, they told her there was a CIA threat to kill her, and that she should rush to the airport rather than go to the Green Zone. As her car sped down the airport road, at the time one of the most dangerous stretches of Iraq, the US military opened fire on the car, killing Nicola Calipari, the Italian intelligence agent who helped secure her release.

Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper said the kidnappers had phoned the US military with an anonymous tip and the cars description, warning that it was a car-bomb.

At the time of writing, Ms. Carroll is receiving medical attention in the Green Zone.

Fully in character to all those who know her, Jill has repeatedly expressed concern for Allan and his family, and all the friends and family who've been worrying about her through her ordeal - particularly her parents and her sister.


http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0331/p01s01-woiq.htm

Who cares? She's not a blonde co-ed.

that looks DELICIOUS

Even without yupislyr's post, yours still makes sense.

Only now it's ten times funnier.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2006/04/ ... e-and.html

4/3/2006
Jill Carroll Is a Cowardly Whore and Other Things the Rude Pundit Learned From the Conservative Punditry:

You know what's fuckin' funny? Thinking about what, say, Jonah Goldbergwould have done with a gun in his face after being kidnapped from the streets of Baghdad after he just saw his translator shot dead. That pissant little bitch would have shit himself and begged to be filmed blowing the lead kidnapper, pausing only to shout into the camera, "I loves me some mujahideen cock; now please rape my Jew ass, Osama." For, indeed, it seems that for Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and other scumsucking reactionaries, Carroll would not be a traitor to America only if she had ripped off her veil and yelled, "Lick my clit, you stinky Allah-fuckers" before she was wasted. Then she'd've been a hero and we could make up wonderful, splendiferous lies about her.

Yeah, that bald piece of shit, Bernard McGuirk, who spends his life making sure Don Imus's colostomy bag is licked clean, called Carroll "Taliban Jill" for giving an interview to secure her freedom and for wearing a veil while in captivity, saying Carroll put on weight while in captivity because she's "carrying Habib's baby." 'Cause you know that if McGuirk had been kidnapped, sure, he might've tried to be the tough guy for just a second or two until he tasted the oil and metal of a locked and loaded Kalashnikov shoved into his yappin' mouth. Then, after yowling like gang-raped street cat, McGuirk would have been writin' his own script praisin' al-Zarqawi, the insurgents, Mullah Omar, who-the-fuck-ever, lookin' to "Habib" for the approval he only gets when the I-man rubs his scalp to tell him, "Good job on wipin' my ass."

Because many of us in the home of the brave are brave only from distances. Like Hugh Hewitt, who was interviewing Time magazine's Michael Ware, a reporter who has spent time behind enemy lines interviewing insurgents in Iraq. "Spent time" here means the better part of the last three years. Hewitt attempted to explain to Ware why the reporter may be aiding the enemy: "I'm really fascinated by the question of whether or not it's ever good journalism to consort with the enemy in search of interesting stories...I'm just wondering whether or not there's a line that you have in your mind reconciled yourself to crossing not once, but scores and scores of times, to report on the enemy, and whether or not that's a good thing."

Ware pointed out that Hewitt was in a comfy studio while he was shitting in sand pits in Iraq, but Hewitt interrupted Ware to correct the reporter: "I'm sitting in the Empire State Building. Michael, I'm sitting in the Empire State Building, which has been in the past, and could be again, a target. Because in downtown Manhattan, it's not comfortable, although it's a lot safer than where you are, people always are three miles away from where the jihadis last spoke in America. So that's...civilians have a stake in this. Although you are on the front line, this was the front line four and a half years ago."

At this point, Ware may have wanted to say, "You know what, you cunt? I wanna see you walkin' around armed Islamic militants wearin' nothin' but a diaper on your ass with a picture of Muhammed on it. I'll try to talk 'em into givin' you a five-minute head start to see if you can make it to good ol' loyal Pakistan before you're gunned down like so many captured quail."

But instead, later in the interview, Ware offered this polite bitch-slapping, "[I]n the course of this war, we've had a translator assassinated four blocks from our house. Our house has been hit by, or subject to car bombs twice. I've had two of my stringers who deal with the insurgency kidnapped, one of whom was rescued by the Marines when they overran Fallujah in November, 2004. The other one was tortured for five days as al Qaeda tried to get information on me before he was finally released, when they became convinced that he was innocent of any kind of crime. I had another translator of mine, who when al Qaeda targeted him to get information on me and our operation and he refused, they blew up his car. We had to fly him to Jordan, get last ditch surgery to save his arm, and he's now been granted refugee status in Australia. My staff have been in firefights. Their lives have been threatened. I'm not sure that that's been an easy ride."

Hewitt, of course, was undeterred from trying to paint Ware as somehow a willing accomplice of the insurgency. Much like others on the right attempted to do with Carroll. Because courage is a cheap commodity in these nasty times, and the arbiters of bravery and cowardice buy and sell it like tons of shifting sand and blowing wind.

(Note: the Hewitt story's been everywhere in Left Blogsylvania. The Rude Pundit first read about it at Kevin Drum's Political Animal.)