Maine Owl

Are violent terrorists just mental defectives unwilling to see the light of Western liberation? (Note: click "Read more" to see updates.]

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."

How to defuse a human bomb

What would it take to persuade a terrorist to give up the life? A growing number of specialists are trying to find out.
By Drake Bennett - Boston Globe - April 13, 2008

SAUDI ARABIA IS one of the last places on earth one would expect to find an art therapy course for convicted terrorists. The kingdom, after all, is known for an unforgiving approach to criminal justice: thieves risk having their hands amputated, "sexual deviance" is punishable by flogging, and drug dealers are beheaded.

And yet, over the past few years, jailed Saudi jihadis, led by therapists and motivated by the possibility of a shortened sentence, have been putting paint to paper to work their way through - and hopefully leave behind - the thoughts and feelings that drove them to support violent strains of Islam.

Extremist art therapy, it turns out, is only part of a new global movement to "deradicalize" terrorists. The Saudi program, a multipronged effort, is among the biggest and best-funded, but in recent years a growing number of Muslim countries and countries with large Muslim minorities have started similar ones: Indonesia, Malaysia, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Singapore, Great Britain, and the Netherlands among them. Last September, the US-led military coalition in Iraq created an ambitious program of its own to handle its more than 24,000 detainees. And psychologists and political scientists are starting to take an interest in the topic.

Since 9/11, the focus of the war on terrorism, especially as prosecuted by the United States, has been to capture or kill terrorists. Some analysts have grappled with the question of what leads people to terrorism. Only now, however, are thinkers turning to the equally vital question of what can lead people away from it. According to those running and studying the new deradicalization efforts, such programs are a new front in the battle against extremist organizations like Al Qaeda or Southeast Asia's Jemaah Islamiyah - but also an admission that military and police actions alone are no match for the problem. Done well, its proponents promise, deradicalization can undercut terrorist groups by peeling off supporters and even turning them against the groups they once fought for. What's more, a better understanding of deradicalization may lead to a deeper grasp of terrorism's allure.

"This is very exciting and very important. And it's very, very new," says John Horgan, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University and one of the few scholars to have studied several of the programs in detail.

Getting people to reject deeply held beliefs is a complex problem, and some behavioral scientists are skeptical that deradicalization can be successful on a large scale. They point to, among other things, persistently high global recidivism rates among criminals, and the tendency of cult members to return to groups that they've been "rescued" from. Even after ostensible deradicalization, critics caution, many people are likely to revert to their old mental habits, especially when they find themselves back in the environment that inspired them to resort to violence in the first place.

The piece goes on to discuss "cult deprogramming" being ineffective against the "stubbornness of human behavior" and that "getting people to stop doing bad things is depressingly difficult."

Agreed. And I'll apply that to my own government as well, as it has killed enough to fill coffins stacked a hundred times higher than ours on 9/11/2001 in the seven years since. We seem to reserve that right to kill, while others are seen as cult crazy when they seek that very same solution. As Noam Chomsky has said, one of the best ways to reduce terrorism would be to stop participating in it.

Update 4-18-2008: Today Democracy Now! had this story:

US to Release Iraqi Prisoners, Teach Them About Islam

The Wall Street Journal reports US commanders in Iraq have begun releasing hundreds of Iraqi prisoners after concluding the military’s detention policy might be harming US goals in Iraq. The US is currently holding about 23,000 Iraqis, many without charge. The US military has begun building a pair of large halfway houses in Taji and Ramadi, where detainees will undergo vocational training. The Wall Street Journal reports the US military also plans to teach religious courses to the former prisoners about how to be a moderate Muslim. Imams will be brought in by the military to teach courses that highlight the Islamic precepts that bar the killing of innocents and offer alternative interpretations of jihad. [emphasis added]

Somehow I get the feeling that Iraqi Muslims will not respond well to the "re-education" efforts of their occupiers.

Use of "defective"
Also, a reader has objected to my use of the term "defective," as in the White Man who has invaded Iraq views the Iraqis who resist, sometimes violently, as somehow mentally unbalanced. Yes, the reader is right, it's a Nazi term. But rest assured, my own thinking is exactly the opposite. At least I find it to be quite sane to resist the domination of ones country by an invading force. So mine is a sardonic remark, meant in an ironic sense.