Jill Carroll was threatened: I told you so

Jill Carroll’s kidnappers told her they’d kill her, even in the Green Zone.

Jill Carroll’s kidnappers reportedly warned her before her release that she might be killed if she cooperated with the Americans or went to the Green Zone, saying it was infiltrated by insurgents.

The freelance writer for The Christian Science Monitor, who was freed by her captors Thursday and dropped off at a branch office of the Iraqi Islamic Party, was later escorted to the Green Zone by the U.S. military, the newspaper said Friday.

At first, she was reluctant to go, but a Monitor writer in Baghdad, Scott Peterson, convinced her it was safe, the newspaper said.

The Monitor quoted her family as saying that her kidnappers had warned her against talking to the Americans or going to the Green Zone. They told her it was “infiltrated by the mujahedeen,” the newspaper said.

And that propaganda video she made? Puh-leeze.

Bergenheim said Friday that Carroll’s parents, who spoke to her about the video, told him it was “conducted under duress.”

“What emerged was that they actually started filming this tape the night before and then there was a power outage. Jill had been told the questions, asked to translate them from Arabic into English,” he told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“When you’re making a video and having to recite certain things with three men with machine guns standing over you, you’re probably going to say exactly what you’re told to say,” Bergenheim added.

Nothing pisses me off more than the blogosphere’s rush to judgment. Cases like this one prove that if some big mouths would only wait a single day, they’d look a lot less stupid.

Anyone can spout an uninformed opinion. That’s why the blogosphere is so vast. But uninformed opinions do not a “citizen journalist” make.

Update: I told you so, part 2. More evidence she was coerced.