Posted on 03/30/2006 10:23:55 AM PST by SmithL
Amherst, Mass. -- All Jill Carroll ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent.
The 28-year-old freelance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor was released Thursday nearly four months after being kidnapped in Iraq.
"I was treated well, but I don't know why I was kidnapped," Carroll said in a brief interview on Baghdad television.
Her ordeal took place half a world away from where she began her career.
Carroll, who grew in Michigan, received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts in 1999.
After college, Carroll worked as a reporting assistant for The Wall Street Journal until 2002, when she was laid off. It was then that she moved to Jordan to pursue her dream of working overseas.
"All I ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent," Carroll wrote last year in the American Journalism Review. "It seemed the right time to try to make it happen."
Carroll has had work from Iraq published in the Monitor, AJR, U.S. News & World Report, an Italian news wire and other publications. She has been interviewed often on National Public Radio.
Unlike many Western reporters, Carroll speaks Arabic.
One of her former professors at UMass, Howard Ziff, said Thursday that Carroll's decision to learn Arabic was a sign of her devotion to journalism and to the topic she was covering.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Traitorette du jour.
I don't know how she squares "being treated well" with "watching her translator get murdered in cold blood by her kidnappers".
Well lots of people are ambitious. In America, it's more of a virtue than a sin.
What gives?
Ditto ! The poor translator has been forgotten.
But she sure has made a name for herself,hasn't she?
She said they didn't do her any harm but what about her parents? I can't imagine what they went through.
Hmmm -- I wonder what happened to the translator. I guess it isn't important or the great journalists at the AP would have mentioned it.
Maybe like the German woman hostage in the recent past she too was a convert and the kidnapping was fake.
Arggg...Time for an Expose' before she becomes annointed saint by the press. Whenever she turns on the happy face she needs to be asked about the slaughter of her fellow human interpretor.
Hello, she's just been released from being captive for four months, you know that can have a greta psychological impact on someone. I'm sure being a captive for four months would have no impact on you, but not every one is a superhero.
He was just an easily discarded appendage. Plenty more where he came from!
Her press conferences from captivity seemed to be scripted by Mel Brooks: "OH! Do What He Say! Do What He Say!"
Learn Italian...it's at least a little safer.Except,perhaps,in Sicily.
HUGE Leftist and hater of this country.
Tells me a lot.
I've heard of this man. What does he "teach" at UMass?
"University of Massachusetts in 1999"
Now it all makes sense!
He was of course murdered. But if she is fluent in Arabic, why the need for a translator to begin with?
"He was of course murdered. But if she is fluent in Arabic, why the need for a translator to begin with?"
I doubt she was actually fluent in Arabic. More likely, she had taken classes in Arabic, and could get along OK in the language. That would be much more likely.
I'm holding off on any comments about her until she is somewhere out of Iraq and able to speak for herself freely.
The speculations here are way out of line, given how little we actually know at this point.
You and your logical approach to everything! Taking all the fun out of this story!:)
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