[ExI] LA Times: Rehabbing militants in Saudi Arabia

[Gary Miller]

I realize that most of the responses to this thread have been of a sarcastic
and satirical nature.

But lets think about this for a few minutes.

All the terrorists know about America is what they've been told growing up
in Islamic schools or on the street.

I would think that after the subject has gone through his initial denial and
anger phases of incarceration and some amount of sensory deprivation which
goes along with solitary confinement that they would be open to talking with
and establishing some sort of dialogue with his captors just to ease the
sensory deprivation.

The US has probably gone to good lengths to produce documentaries
chronicling the history of the terrorism, the United States and the middle
east.

Simply by honestly portraying our successes and failures at trying to
intervene and make things better.  The terrorist would gain an appreciation
over time that even though we may be motivated by our need for oil, that we
have always pumped much money into that part of the world to reduce human
suffering and have tried to unsuccessfully broker peace many times.

Such movies would be supplemented with success stories of how much freedom
and prosperity Muslims enjoy in the United States and in other Muslim
countries such as the Emirates which do not spend all of their oil wealth on
weapons and fighting the west. They may allow them visits by trusted Muslim
clerics who preach peaceful coexistence with the other religions of the
world.

And even though the terrorist may feel at first that this is all propaganda
and lies.  Eventually as his captors begin treating him better as his
attitude improves a certain amount of Stockholm Syndrome will set in and
eventually his captors may not seem like such bad guys.

Of course if this person was viewed as a key player and brutally
interrogated, it would take a lot of convincing and time to make up for
those acts of cruelty but if given time the captive may even come to
appreciate why the information he held or his captors thought he held was so
important that we would resort to barbarism to obtain it.

Terrorism is not pedophilia or homosexuality which are tied to deep seated
biological drives.  The terrorist may be a terrorist for money, for
religious ideals, or for hatred of Americans who he has been taught to blame
all of the evils of the world on.  Education I believe is our most effective
weapon against terrorism.  Unfortunately the time to start educating is when
they are children and haven't already killed many people with improvised
IEDs.  Or convinced women and children to become suicide bombers and blow
themselves and innocent civilians up along with them.

Many terrorists after they've passed the course and are released may revert
back to their old hatred.  But as long as we tell them the truth, they won't
find out we were lying to them. Once released I doubt many of them will be
trusted enough by their uncaptured brethren to reenter the terrorist
organization anyway.  And once they've been there for a few years any
information that they managed to withhold would be so stale as to be
worthless anyway.