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Saudi interrogators succeed with a gentler approach

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 US, has impressed American counterparts enough that Saudi intelligence was permitted to use some of the principles on their citizens being held at the US 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.

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 US 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."
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