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TruthBook Religious News Blog



Friday, September 21, 2007

Iraqi Prisoners Get Religion From U.S.

The Skinny:
Military Uses Moderate Muslim Clerics To Steer Detainees Away From Al Qaeda
NEW YORK, Sept. 19, 2007

"The battlefield of the mind."

That's where Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, commander of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, says he's waging his Iraq war these days, according to the Washington Post. And if the weapons in such a war are words, Stone's got quite the arsenal.

The story's ostensibly about the introduction of "religious enlightenment" and other education program for Iraqi detainees, some of whom are as young as 11. The religious courses are led by moderate Muslim clerics whose teaching "tears apart" the arguments of al Qaeda, such as "Let's kill innocents," Stone said.

The program has been growing, as the surge has swelled the population of Iraqis in U.S. detention from 10,000 last year to 25,000 this year. More than 800 are juveniles.

But what really emerges from the article - a summary of a conference call Stone held from Baghdad with a group of defense bloggers - is a portrait of Stone as a formidable character who's almost as fun to quote as Donald Rumsfeld was.

Stone, who reads Arabic and says he reads the Koran daily, said the new religious training helps U.S. forces pinpoint the hard-core extremists. "I want to know who they are," he said. "They're like rotten eggs, you know, hiding in the Easter basket."

He wants to identify "irreconcilables" and "put them away" in permanent detention facilities. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and interrogators help distinguish just who the extremists are, he said. And when that doesn't work, there's always the polygraph test, which he uses on detainees who promise they will change to "figure out if they're messing with us ... You're not talking about radicals going to choirboys."

The re-education has been working, in some ways better than the military even hoped. On Sept. 2, there was a religious uprising where some detainees turned on others. "We had a compound of moderates for the first time overtake ... extremists," he said. "Found them, identified them, threw them up against the fence and shaved their frickin' beards off of them ... I mean, that is historic."

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