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Comment by DominikR | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't categorize this as brainwashing. Or to be more specific: I wouldn't categorize the description in the blog post as brainwashing or torture.

To me, this looks more like some kind of group therapy since the POWs were not forced and the example statement they were asked to make ("The United States is not perfect.") is obviously a fact because nothing is perfect.

What I find interesting is to compare this to what is happening today in Guantanamo.

I mean they are trying to get information and cooperation, why always default to torture?

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Well i think that stems from a indoctrinated hatred towards the captives. If you think rationally (albeit coldly/mechanically) you'd figure out that torture isn't that effective. In fact torture just makes the captives hate you more. So that makes your job even harder.

But if you could shake their beliefs... Show them the error of their ways. And they actually might help you stop the other terrorists.

But all that needs that you actually see the captives as human beings.

What I find interesting is that most terrorists are a product of brainwashing too. And i mean DELIBERATE brainwashing, not the kind of stuff you learn from society as you grow up. So why not fight fire with fire and deprogram them? Heck the violence actually reinforces their brainwashing that the captors are Evil people.

Saudi Arabia has apparently had considerable success deprogramming militants by engaging them in religious discussions.

Oh? I thought that militants in that region of the planet were programmed by religious discussions in the first place.

Maybe we do not share the same definition of what a "militant" is, in Saudi Arabia?

Perhaps if you can program militants using religious discussion, then you can deprogram them using religious discussion. Militants aren't EPROMs, they don't need UV light.

Articles on the Saudi deprogramming effort:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/get-out-... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/magazine/09jihadis-t.html?...

And a more recent (PDF) review about why deprogramming mostly doesn't work:

http://sites.duke.edu/ihss/files/2011/12/Morris_Research_Bri...

Although Saudi Arabia's may be more effective. The reason is basically that terrorists aren't actually programmed using religious discussion, terrorists are programmed using monkeybrain ties to other terrorists. ObGwern:

http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror

A clever person might therefore attempt to use stronger monkeybrain ties to deprogram terrorists. Like the PLO did:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/all-you-...

Very different from Guantanamo. It's almost like after Vietnam we decided there was only one way to get information out of people.

Brainwashing it is, torture it isn't. By combining both words in your comment, you show that you see them as going together or being one and the same.

I don't understand how you could possibly come to this conclusion.

I used both words together because it depends on how brainwashing is achieved if it qualifies as torture or not. (that's why I wrote "brainwashing OR torture")

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