Taliban prisoner at Gitmo key to peace talks? (Obama preparing American's unconditional surrender)

The Obama administration is considering transferring to Afghan custody a senior Taliban official suspected of major human rights abuses as part of a long-shot bid to improve the prospects of a peace deal in Afghanistan, Reuters has learned.

The potential hand-over of Mohammed Fazl, a "high-risk detainee" held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison since early 2002, has set off alarms on Capitol Hill and among some U.S. intelligence officials.

As a senior commander of the Taliban army, Fazl is alleged to be responsible for the killing of thousands of Afghanistan's minority Shiite Muslims between 1998 and 2001.

According to U.S. military documents made public by WikiLeaks, he was also on the scene of a November 2001 prison riot that killed CIA operative Johnny Michael Spann, the first American who died in combat in the Afghan war. There is no evidence, however, that Fazl played any direct role in Spann's death.

There is a policy I would seriously like the CIA to consider in future conflicts of this nature. While it sounds grotesque on the surface, in the final analysis it is benign.

Brainwashing has a horrible and deserved reputation, because it was used for the purposes of twisting minds to corrupt ends. But what if brainwashing was instead used to save the lives of innocent people?

It is very difficult for a terrorist to leave his home for another country, with the intent of slaughtering innocent civilians. Very few fanatics can do this. So when captured, why not use the lightest form of brainwashing so that they no longer want to go to this extreme?

This is not anything like A Clockwork Orange, where a man was no longer able to defend himself, and became deeply nauseous even in the presence of violence.

Instead a captured terrorist, when he went home, could still defend himself, and even defend his country if attacked. He would just no longer want to leave his country to attack innocent people in other countries.

There is no “human right” to conduct terrorist attacks in other countries. Otherwise, they would live normal lives, and their opinions and beliefs would not change. Just that they no longer wanted to be a terrorist in a foreign country.

In practice, the CIA could even set up a “mass production” line that could neutralize hundreds or thousands of captured terrorists in a short period of time. And unlike typical drug-induced hypnosis, the change would be so subtle that its “decay” could be stretched out for decades, until the ex-terrorist is too old to do such things.

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