I'm certainly all for preventing criminal acts that hurt and kill innocent people. But is this task best left to Western clinical psychology? An Ideas piece in today's Boston Globe examines how "specialists" are interested in how to get Middle Eastern defectives to give up their "thoughts and feelings that drove them to support violent strains of Islam."
Certainly, an ideology that promotes force, violence, and fear as the way to achieve goals and influence the behavior of others would seem on the face of it to be wrong. But the article does not propose that anyone look in the mirror and ask if policies described as "capture and kill" have any effect on the ideologies of their targets. In fact it dismisses with two words that these extremists we are worried about are "not aggrieved," but rather likely engaging in the "allure" of terrorism because "their friends are doing it."
One thing I find kind of amazing in the article is how the U.S. has been running these "deradicalization" programs in Iraq: "Major General Douglas Stone, commander of detention facilities in Iraq, says that since the US program was set up last September, only 12 of more than 6,000 released inmates have been rearrested."
What? Six thousand released? So, how many have they put in their dungeons? It's well known that the U.S. has rounded up tens of thousands of Iraqis for no other reason that they accidentally crossed paths with operations based on "bad intelligence." Lots has been written on this, but the Winter Soldier testimony was replete with stories about how there is no rhyme or reason to why Iraqis are detained. The article can't bring itself even to discuss the possibility that the Iraqi people are detained arbitrarily, admitting only that there can be "marginal members, imprisoned for supporting extremist groups or (in the Iraqi program) supporting the insurgency in relatively minor ways."
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Posted by The Owl on Apr 13 at 14:51. Filed under: War and peace