Senior Fellow Dr. Mathieu Guidère on Toutes-les-France

France,12 February,2008--Senior Fellow of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies and professor at Université de Genève, Dr. Mathieu Guidère discusses his views about terrorism on the French talk show “Toutes les France”. Dr. Guidère stressed the fact that when talking about interrogation we should consider both sides, whether legitimate or not. He further elaborates that there could be individuals who create these problems like the Abu Graib scandal and that might not be a government policy.

When talking about the “Senja” file that was found in Iraq by the Americans, Dr. Guidère believes it wasn’t handled in a professional way. This document included 850 pages of Al-Qaeda operatives’ personal information along with detailed description of the time they spent in Iraq and by posting the findings on the internet the U.S has lost an advantage. In addition to that, he says that the secret services are incompetent on the cultural and linguistic level. Around one hundred thousand people work for secret services and almost eight hundred have Arab notions. The American embassy in Iraq has one thousand people working there and out of that only six have Arab notions.

Therefore, he concluded the only way to fight terrorism in the long run is by increasing the number of specialists and by providing people other ideological alternatives and not just plain opinions.

To see the full video of this discussion, click on this link.