This article got me thinking: first of all in a cynical way, because these guys happened to be working for Fox News at the time, how willing they might be to twist their statements for the sake of an agenda… And about the nature of ‘integrity’ in general.

“I’m really fine, healthy in good shape and so happy to be free,” Mr. Centanni told Fox News. He said the two had been forced at gunpoint to say that they were converting to Islam and had taken Muslim names. “I have the highest respect for Islam,” he said. “But it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

OK: so all you have to do is make some statements that are untrue and pose for the camera reading from this book with a gun to your head and then you are free to go. I think many American’s would jump at this option, nevermind that it is deeply sacreligious - I think the general American and Fox News attitude would be ‘dooped those sand niggers, now on with my spending’. If the Islamic theology is truth, and I don’t think it is, you boys can expect a flaming sword straight up the bunghole as your introduction to the next realm.
And if you’re Christians, as far as your remaining time in this realm goes (and if that theology turns out to be true: in relation to the next realm), the confession clause can certainly be activated and you’ll most likely get a pass on the switch hitting.
But take it to another level, with other captors (and these guys certainly weren’t true Al Qaeda - this video would have been released and then some headless corpses found somewhere down the road), and it begs the ethical question: would you do anything to be released? Anything? Now this applies to other sick and deviant minds that enslave people for whatever psychotic reason. At a certain point there’s something to be said for the victims’ “death with integrity”.

Then I started thinking about why despots of the past may have employed certain tactics. For example in the inquisition: OK, so you’ve claimed Christ as the true messiah after these hours/days/weeks/months of torture - which is great for your soul, because we’ve decided to free it from the mortal coil anyway.
Or in the case of the Japanese rightwing manina that went on in the first half of the 20th century, which went straight back to the bushido code, when prisoners were treated as worse than dogshit, because they didn’t even accept the notion of ‘prisoner’ - it was understood a true warrior would end his own life before they allowed themselves to be captured.
Obviously, these same strict warrior ethics shouldn’t be applied to journalists. I’m just exploring what it is about this article that bugs me….