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| -Short Attention Span Theater- | |
| Put Away the Pliers Here’s Shiek Abdul and His Well Worn Quran | |
| 2003-11-30 | |
| A little late in the day, but I thought it would be of interest to many you Rantburgers. Saudi Arabia, known for harsh criminal penalties such as beheadings, is trying a gentler approach to get information from some al-Qaida captives. Saudi interrogators often bring clerics and a Quran to their prison interviews to establish a religious connection, a technique that has proved successful in eliciting information from terrorist suspects and reorienting them to less violent religious beliefs. The tactic, similar to the way cult deprogrammers work in the United States, has impressed American counterparts enough that Saudi intelligence was permitted to use some of the principles on their citizens being held at the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Saudi officials said. The technique is being credited in part for the extraordinary public renouncement of violence by two former militant Saudi clerics, Nasser al-Fahd and Ali al-Khudair. They went on state-owned television in the past few weeks to recant their religious edicts promoting violence. "We see this as an important development, one that is getting the attention it needs to get inside Saudi Arabia," U.S. embassy spokesman Carol Kalin said in a telephone interview from Riyadh, the Saudi capital. The religious reorientation is markedly different from some hard-core interrogation tactics that can use sleep deprivation, alternate rewards and punishment and other methods to elicit information. Pliers? Saudi officials, who would describe their interrogation methods only on condition of anonymity, said the tactic is reserved mostly for midlevel and low-level al-Qaida prisoners who were attracted to Osama bin Laden’s network through a perversion of Islam. Shortly after these al-Qaida prisoners are taken into custody, Saudi interrogators send in a cleric who appears to espouse militant Islamic views to help build a personal bond with the young men and open a dialogue based on Islam. "Once we connect with them, the interrogators slowly hand them over to a more moderate cleric, who sits with them and goes over what the Quran says and discusses what the traditions of the prophet are," one Saudi official explained. Over time, the clerics position the prisoners to repent and renounce their past allegiance to the network established by the Saudi-born fugitive bin Laden. Then traditional interrogators are brought in to question the prisoners and learn tactical information, officials said. "We have learned that what drove them into this cult, and what causes them to cooperate, is religion," said one senior Saudi official involved in intelligence work.
So which technique did they use? The one touted in this article or a method prescribed by the Pentagon? U.S. and Saudi officials note the technique would never work on hard-core terrorist leaders. Also, the type of al-Qaida recruit on whom it does work often has no information about bin Laden’s inner circle plans, they added. Nonetheless, Saudi officials have elicited valuable information. A Saudi official in Washington said one al-Qaida recruit who went through the reprogramming provided information that helped prompt a security warning to airlines over the summer. Significant information has been learned about how young Saudi men were lured into al-Qaida by bin Laden’s recruiters. That’s been a secret? Experts say the religious reprogramming tactic works well as a carrot in a society that also threatens a harsh stick — Islamic trials followed by swift, public beheadings of criminal. A threat of being shortened by a foot can cause one’s tongue to loosen. It has developed over decades as the Saudis have looked for ways to rehabilitate their citizens. Nathaniel Kern, who runs a Washington firm that advises oil companies on Middle East security and intelligence, recalled how a Saudi royal prince aided the families of a group of Saudi Air Force officers convicted of an attempted coup in 1969. One of these officers was the commander of Daharan Air Base (RSAF) and possibly a leader of the attempted coup. He was also brother to an officer that I worked with at HQ RSAF (1970-1971). The quiet rumor circulating around the HQ at the time was that all those involved in the coup had been taken aboard a RSAF C-130 and dumped in the Rub Al Kahli (Empty Quarter). No one really knew the fate of these officers. The prince made sure "their wives got their salary checks, that the kids were doing well in school, that the families were taken care of. The wives and kids hadn’t done anything wrong," Kern said. "By 1975, the officers | |
| Posted by:Gasse Katze |
| #1 Using the koran to fight terroism. To bad the koran is used to wage terrorism. The royals should do a Constatine and declare Islam a false doctrine, oops that would be a bombshell. Could you imagine though. Maybe john Lennon was on to something but couldn't quite completely spell it out. "Imagine no Islamism, I know it's hard to do. No clerics to lead us and no fatwas too. Imagine all the people..." If it comes to that. |
| Posted by: Lucky 2003-11-30 9:51:49 PM |