< I believe Jill Carroll and if I had been in the same circumstances, I would likely have said anything to get away from my captors. I have heard callers to various talk radio shows claim they could never be compelled to speak out against America and the war effort and that they would rather die first. >
I kinda have a different take on it. I think, notice I said think, I would be willing to refuse to do as they say to a point, unless I was broken by continuous torture. However, I also think with the threat of beheading with a dull sword, I'd pretty much cave. Threaten to shoot me in the head...I might resolve to just be killed. Beheading is just a different matter.
You can't watch the Nick Berg video and not feel that way. I challenge everyone to watch it to put barbarism in the right perspective.
< I believe Jill Carroll and if I had been in the same circumstances, I would likely have said anything to get away from my captors. I have heard callers to various talk radio shows claim they could never be compelled to speak out against America and the war effort and that they would rather die first. >
I kinda have a different take on it. I think, notice I said think, I would be willing to refuse to do as they say to a point, unless I was broken by continuous torture. However, I also think with the threat of beheading with a dull sword, I'd pretty much cave. Threaten to shoot me in the head...I might resolve to just be killed. Beheading is just a different matter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You make some good points. I'm not certain if one's captors are prone to give their captives a choice between blowing their brains out with a bullet or carving their brains out with a knife, but in either instance, the captive would be dead--brave, perhaps, but still dead. Jill Carroll is a reporter, not a soldier who has had the benefit of survival training. It seems to me, at least, that there is a very good possiblity that Carroll may well have kept her wits about her and may have psyched her kidnappers out by convincing them they had been successful Muslim proselytizers and that they she would better serve their evil cause as an anti-American propagandist.
We'll know soon enough if Carroll's story that she was forced to sound like Jihad Jill as a condition of her release is true or not. For now, I am more inclined to take her word than to believe the story put out by her Islamic kidnappers, a group that call themselves "The Revenge Brigades."
"Threaten to shoot me in the head...I might resolve to just be killed. "
Talk is cheap...