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Keep Him

Quote of the week:

“We’ve had 14 or so youth not want to leave when they could have been let go,” Stone recalled. “We’ve had parents visit us and say ‘if he’s working on his education please don’t let him out.’ “

Quick, no peeking. What kind of facility does Stone run?    

If you guessed hated Crusader Koran-flushing, pigpile-staging, waterboarding humiliation and torture center, you guessed … wrong.  Those are maintained* primarily by organizations such as the New York Times, Human Rights Watch, etc. This is a detention center for insurgent and terrorist suspects in Iraq.  It has a dramatically lower recidivism rate than your average U.S. prison. Lowe at Weekly Standard:

IT MAY NOT BE the most dramatic operation going on to defeat the insurgency and weed out al Qaeda operatives in Iraq, and it may not grab the biggest headlines. But one Marine general is waging his counterinsurgency fight by attacking the battlefield of the mind, rather than kicking in doors and blowing up buildings.

In a corner of the sprawling Baghdad International Airport, just a harrowing armored bus ride from the Green Zone, Maj. Gen. Doug Stone is implementing a novel plan to undercut the insurgency by drying up its base of hardened fighters.

With a combination of vocational education, religious “enlightenment” courses, and more carrots than sticks, Stone is working to send detainees captured in U.S. raids back into society with a mission of building a unified Iraq, rather than tearing it down.

“Victory is to establish an alliance with and to empower the moderate Iraqis to effectively marginalize the violent extremists,” Stone said in an interview from his base at Camp Cropper, Iraq. “We’re trying to build this society inside that would reflect victory on the outside.”

… 

After assuming command of detainee operations in May, Stone put together a novel program that aims to separate the moderate Iraqis that have been detained during raids and other combat operations from the “dead-ender” extremists who he believes are unable to be swayed.

…

In the past, as many as 7 percent of detainees who were eventually released found their way back into the detainee camps. That included many who left the camps during government-sponsored mass releases. But since the beginning of 2007, less than 2 percent of the 4,000 detainees released have returned–and none of those are graduates of the new program.

“We’re trying to find out which of the ones are just unemployed and would not return to the fight,” Stone explained. “When they go back to society, A: we hope that they won’t return and B: we hope they engage in helping the rest of society know what we’re doing.”

The new strategy is also beginning to change minds inside the prison walls. In September, Stone said two groups of moderate detainees turned in a group of religious extremists hiding in their midst, pushing the so-called “takfiri” up against the fence and calling guards over to remove them from their compound.

… 

Stone said al Qaeda sometimes uses children in their operations, so his detainee population includes more than 150 he considers “youths.” These detainees undergo a similar education program to the adults–though the religion classes are “more a civics class” than the adult one–along with sports and art courses.

One vocational program puts the detainees to use making bricks to help rebuild Iraq’s war-torn infrastructure. Each brick made by the detainees is inscribed in Arabic “brick by brick we rebuild our nation.”

“We’ve had 14 or so youth not want to leave when they could have been let go,” Stone recalled. “We’ve had parents visit us and say ‘if he’s working on his education please don’t let him out.’ “  

* Maintain: verb, chiefly journalistic; to insist, as a quoted source in a news article, on a position subtly suggested or overtly indicated to be indefensible by the writer.

h/t Dave at Small Wars Journal.

Topics: Iraq, military

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:13 am on Tuesday, October 23, 2007

2 Responses to “Keep Him”

1. Vanguard of the Commentariat Says:
   October 23rd, 2007 at 11:09 am

   Heh. Can it get any worse for the Lefty war narrative? Sounds like a US Army officer has turned a detention center into a WPA-CCC like institution to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure and more importantly, rebuild self confidence and civic responsiblity.

   So does it make sense that the intellectual offspring of the New Dealers can’t find anything they like about it?

2. steve Says:
   October 23rd, 2007 at 1:25 pm

   And then from inside the “dogma dome” we have MSNBC with their woefully out of date, out of touch and even self-contradictory– “Hatred of U.S. drives al-Qaida recruiting”

   This could be from 2004. They are starting to recycle stories to agitate BDS sufferers and MoveOn’s true believers.

   You’ve to hand to hand to MSNBC for trying so hard to boost al Qaeda’s morale. “There’s still hope, don’t give up. We know you can do it!”

   It is the exact opposite of the WeeklyStandard piece on successful rehabilitations: “We’re trying to build this society inside that would reflect victory on the outside.”

   MSNBC version—‘We’re trying to destroy this society from the outside so that it would reflect defeat on the inside’.

   actual article– [ ] The Bush administration rejects the idea that the war in Iraq has driven young Arab men into the arms of al-Qaida. But if you believe the young men themselves, the administration is wrong…

   At a Baghdad jail for prisoners who have attacked U.S. forces, everyone — to a man — says it was the U.S. occupation of Iraq that drove them to violence. And they are not alone. Across the Middle East and South Asia, the same story can be heard in Internet cafes, mosques, safe houses and prisons.

   Interviews with Farhan and other radicals reveal that many young men were torn when it came time to choose sides. Even though they fight alongside al-Qaida, they insist that — contrary to what U.S. officials say — they do not support al-Qaida. Many, in fact, say they hate al-Qaida.

   At a government rehabilitation center in Saudi Arabia, many radicals say they now reject the al-Qaida philosophy. But at the same time, they admit that the U.S. occupation of Iraq drove many of them to join the movement and that it still drives their hatred of America. Some, in fact, were arrested for trafficking in Internet videos about Iraq designed specifically to motivate and recruit for al-Qaida. [ ]

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