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FAO LTC (Ret) Steve Franke's recent input for personnel deploying. |
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REWARDS FOR JUSTICE Program To FIGHT Terrorism
US Military Retirees Korea Retirees Annual Mtg 13Dec03/10AM Balboni Retired Activities Office, Korea (Excellent widow info) |
Please report
bad links found on these pages.
If you have comments, improvements,
or additional links to add, please email me! I look
forward to hearing from you! Many new links are constantly
added from readers sending them to me! We want this
site as interactive and user-friendly as possible.
================================================
ITEM 1
1. Language Survival Kits (LSK) - Products for non-linguist Soldiers (DLIFLC,
POM, CA)
o The Task Force OEF office at DLIFLC, Monterey, has developed and makes
available a very useful set of Language Survival Kits (LSK) products for
OEF and OIF.
o DLIFLC's TF OEF designed and produced these LSKs for use by
NON-linguist Soldiers. They are useful for essential "command and
control" functions and contain basic phrases for courtesy / cooperation
/ influence with nationals in the main ethnicities of Iraq (speakers of
Kurdish, Arabic and Farsi) and Afghanistan (Pashto, Dari, Urdu).
o Many LAK products are available as downloads (most are big files, but
they are worth the downloading and printing).
-- The LSKs for many languages (and main regional dialects) of OIF, OEF
and few other regions of USG interest are available at this URL:
http://oef.monterey.army.mil/downloadlsk.html
-- By sliding/clicking on the button along the row near the top of
that page, you can then link to:
http://oef.monterey.army.mil/onlinelsk.html
That URL offers online LSKs in Iraqi Arabic, Kurdish (Kurmanj) and
Kurdish (Sorany).
o Printed LSK media also available from DLIFLC include C&C cards, CDs,
and phrasebooks that fit BDU/DBU pockets (handy and useful, but you can
get eyestrain from reading their small type after a while)
2. The DLIFLC POC for LSK products is aware and has approved this
mention of these products and URLs.
3. The DLIFLC website
www.lingnet.org is also useful for some basic cultural orientation
information on the demographics, features, social institutions, and
cultural sensitivities of Arab/Moslem populations (separate from the
fact that the Middle East has also been home to several other
significant populations and distinctive cultures which are neither
Moslem or Arab, although they were historically encapsulated or
surrounded by Arab/Moslem majorities).
We have a couple of tidbits:
1.
English
<-> Arabic basic phrases for social, courtesy and cooperation
situations
2. Examples
(with translations) of typical Arabic-language public signage and
warning notices.
NOTE:
Readers will need to have a PC with either Windows 2000 or XP (XP is
much better) and install with Arabic support to enable proper opening
and display of the Arabic text.
That is easy; no sweat.
Arabic language support is included in the basic CD for Win 2K and XP;
no special extra software is needed.
To find and install Arabic support (first insert the Wins 2K or Win XP
CD, or have it handy):
START => control panel => regional settings => language => Arabic
(select "Arabic, Saudi" and forget the other Arabic variants listed) =>
install => finish => reboot.
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US
Military Retirees
Association Korea
Korea Retirees Annual Mtg
American Legion, China Post #1, Expat Post-Great for those frequent overseas travelers.
---------------------------
Retired Activities Office, Korea (Excellent widow info)
ITEM 2
Most of the time we will only put in the URL or address of the article. But this is a starting page, and until I get more links I will keep some articles but change them often.
Saudi Interrogators Try Gentler Approach
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-saudi-interrogations,0,7
463668.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
By JOHN SOLOMON
Associated Press Writer
November 30, 2003, 2:01 PM EST
WASHINGTON -- Saudi Arabia, known for harsh criminal penalties such as
beheadings, is trying a gentler approach to get information from some
al-Qaeda captives.
Saudi interrogators often bring clerics and a Quran to their prison
interviews to establish a religious connection, a technique that has
proved successful in eliciting information from terrorist suspects and
reorienting them to less-violent religious beliefs.
The tactic, similar to the way cult deprogrammers work in the United
States, has impressed American counterparts enough that Saudi
intelligence was permitted to use some of the principles on their
citizens being held at the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
Saudi officials said.
The technique is being credited in part for the extraordinary public
renouncement of violence by two former militant Saudi clerics, Nasser
al-Fahd and Ali al-Khudair. They went on state-owned television in the
past few weeks to recant their religious edicts promoting violence.
"We see this as an important development, one that is getting the
attention it needs to get inside Saudi Arabia," U.S. embassy spokesman
Carol Kalin said in a telephone interview from Riyadh, the Saudi
capital.
The religious reorientation is markedly different from some hard-core
interrogation tactics that can use sleep deprivation, alternate rewards
and punishment and other methods to elicit information.
Saudi officials, who would describe their interrogation methods only on
condition of anonymity, said the tactic is reserved mostly for midlevel
and low-level al-Qaeda prisoners who were attracted to Osama bin Laden's
network through a perversion of Islam.
Shortly after these al-Qaeda prisoners are taken into custody, Saudi
interrogators send in a cleric who appears to espouse militant Islamic
views to help build a personal bond with the young men and open a
dialogue based on Islam, the officials said.
"Once we connect with them, the interrogators slowly hand them over to a
more moderate cleric, who sits with them and goes over what the Quran
says and discusses what the traditions of the prophet are," one Saudi
official explained.
Over time, the clerics position the prisoners to repent and renounce
their past allegiance to the network established by the Saudi-born
fugitive bin Laden. Then traditional interrogators are brought in to
question the prisoners and learn tactical information, officials said.
"We have learned that what drove them into this cult, and what causes
them to cooperate, is religion," said one senior Saudi official involved
in intelligence work.
A senior U.S. diplomatic official, speaking only on condition of
anonymity, said American officials have observed firsthand the Saudi
interrogation tactic and regard it as "a set of skills that is very
important in this cultural and religiously oriented society."
Saudi officials said they were permitted in the last year to visit many
of their citizens being held as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay.
While Saudi questioners did not have enough time to do a full religious
reprogramming, they used some of the basic principles to help build a
relationship and elicit information, Saudi officials said. U.S.
officials confirmed the visit.
"Saudi Arabia has been one of the countries who has sent a delegation to
Guantanamo to talk to their enemy combatants who are detained here,"
Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention camp,
told Associated Press Television News in an interview last week.
Miller said the Saudis were permitted only to use interrogation
techniques approved by the Pentagon.
U.S. and Saudi officials note the technique would never work on
hard-core terrorist leaders. Also, the type of al-Qaeda recruit on whom
it does work often has no information about bin Laden's inner circle
plans, they added.
Nonetheless, Saudi officials have elicited valuable information. A Saudi
official in Washington said one al-Qaeda recruit who went through the
reprogramming provided information that helped prompt a security warning
to airlines over the summer.
Significant information has been learned about how young Saudi men were
lured into al-Qaeda by bin Laden's recruiters.
Experts say the religious reprogramming tactic works well as a carrot in
a society that also threatens a harsh stick -- Islamic trials followed
by swift, public beheadings of criminal.
It has developed over decades as the Saudis have looked for ways to
rehabilitate their citizens.
Nathaniel Kern, who runs a Washington firm that advises oil companies on
Middle East security and intelligence, recalled how a Saudi royal prince
aided the families of a group of Saudi Air Force officers convicted of
an attempted coup in 1969.
The prince made sure "their wives got their salary checks, that the kids
were doing well in school, that the families were taken care of. The
wives and kids hadn't done anything wrong," Kern said.
"By 1975, the officers had repented and were released, but their
loyalties were really won over by the care their families had been
given. It's a part of the world where you don't need to make enemies if
you can help it," he said.