'Wash Post' Reporter Has Special Insight on New Carroll Video

By: Barbara Bedway Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner, recently returned from
her latest assignment in Iraq, makes a point in her new book, "Tell Them I Didn't Cry," that women reporters have one inherent advantage there. "It's the simple fact I can go out in disguise: I can put on a head scarf and an Iraqi robe," she told E&P this week. "Nobody pays attention to you, and that's an asset when people are looking for Westerners to kidnap, obviously."

But the kidnapping of her good friend Jill Carroll has only underscored the limits of the head scarf and abaya as protective gear.

"I watched that video of her, and I shouldn't have," Spinner said
grimly, referring to the brief tape of an anguished Carroll released a few days ago. "I was horrified by it."

Watching with her was a member of the Post's Iraqi staff, in the United States for a visit underwritten by the paper. To him, Jill Carroll's white head scarf conveyed specific meaning: "He could tell by watching the video that basically she was still with the Sunnis because Shiites would never have put a white scarf on her," Spinner related.

She noted as well that "Jill and I both wore headscarves, two-piece things that you don't really have to hook--it's difficult to get your scarf to look exactly how an Iraqi woman wears her scarf if you haven't done it since you were an adolescent. So you can cheat and use these two-piece things that you just flip over your head."

But her Iraqi colleague noted that the way the scarf was tied in the latest Carroll video was "a well-known way that women scarf themselves in the Adhamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad."

Soon after her arrival in Baghdad in 2004, Spinner was herself the
target of an attempted kidnapping while covering the release of
detainees from Abu Ghraib prison. As she struggled with her would-be captors, a crowd of Iraqis waiting for their relatives to be released gathered round her, but she found no sympathetic faces: "I was an Ameriican woman, no better than the American soldier in the photographs of the abused detainees who dragged one of their bloodied sons or husbands naked on a leash," she writes.

The title of her book (published by Scribner's), which includes commentary by her twin sister Jenny, comes from her admonition to her translator after she was rescued by Marines: "When we get back to the office, you tell them I didn't cry."

Spinner's book tour will include Philadelphia tomorrow, and New York City; and many other cities over the next five weeks. She recently appeared on the popular NPR program, "Fresh Air."