Recruiting the dead in the war against terror…

Posted by Jim Stroud

April 8, 2006

After 911, and even with the Internet, al Qaeda communications were poor, as was their intelligence work. Bottom line was, most al Qaeda members were never sure if a fellow terrorists had been killed in action, captured or defected. Because of this, even dead terrorists could be useful to counter-terrorist operators. You could keep a dead terrorist “alive” on the Internet for a while, or in the minds of other terrorists being interrogated at places like Guantanamo. And then there was the classic interrogation trick, threatening to frame a terrorist as an informer, and release him. If done well, this was a formidable weapon, for it threatened the terrorist with a fate worse than death, to be tagged as a traitor.

READ: Recruiting the Dead, Missing and Unwilling

TAG: terror,al qaeda,Terrorism, War on Terror, recruiting