Jill Carroll’s ordeal is pretty obvious:

Ms. Carroll had been their captive for three months and even the smallest details of her life - what she ate and when, what she wore, when she could speak - were at her captors’ whim. They had murdered her friend and colleague Allan Enwiya, “she had been taught to fear them,” he says. And before making one last video the day before her release, she was told that they had already killed another American hostage.

That video appeared Thursday on a jihadist website that carries videos of beheadings and attacks on American forces. In it, Carroll told her father she felt compelled to make statements strongly critical of President Bush and his policy in Iraq.

Her remarks are now making the rounds of the Internet, attracting heavy criticism from conservative bloggers and commentators.

In fact, Carroll did what many hostage experts and past captives would have urged her to do: Give the men who held the power of life and death over her what they wanted.

“You’ll pretty much say anything to stay alive because you expect people will understand these aren’t your words,” says Micah Garen, a journalist and author who was held captive by a Shiite militia in southern Iraq for 10 days in August 2004. “Words that are coerced are not worth dying over.”

Facing the prospect of imminent death, Jill chose to survive. And facing the prospect of a return to freedom, it seems everyone’s eager to put words in her mouth, especially her abductors and conservative bloggers.

Consider just these two examples.

Before she was abducted, I’d bet most conservative bloggers would not have recognized her name. Now they serve as self-appointed translators for her.

Here’s what I see. Her family, friends and co-workers know her best. Their interpretations are rooted in knowledge, not speculation and condemnation,

If you’ve read her past writing, you’d see she’s very articulate, balanced and clear. In her captivity video, her message is clumsy and repetitive. As it doesn’t resemble her pre-abduction performance, it looks pretty obvious she was signalling that the message was coerced.

Is it better for ‘the little woman’ to have the weight of her upbringing, education, ethical foundation and experience kidnapped by total strangers who would define her through a lens of speculation tinted by vitriol, than the experience of the kidnapping of her physical being?

Frankly, I think it a cruelty atop another cruelty, no matter if she’s left, right or middle.

Do I think Ms. Carroll hates or loves Bush?

Frankly, dear, I don’t give a damn. I’m just happy for her and her loved ones that she’s regained her freedom.