Thank you Mr Nordam for you keen interest in our beloveth country, The
Gambia.
Now to answer your questions. The families of these AFRC "youth wings" do
not know beyond the obvious i.e that a young man is politically active and
probably supports party xyz.  Obviously what they do at night when they get
together is totally a different bizarre story.
Concerning their training, let me assure you that no intelligence/security
outfit in the Gambia is anywhere close to the CIA/FBI.  The closest that the
CIA/FBI ever came to practicing "active measures" was in the 1970s,
especially during the Watergate Scandal, that led to the resignation of
President Nixon.  This eventually led to the Church and Pike Committees that
investigated human rights abuses of the security establishment and
eventually led to the passing of the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance
Act of 1978, that ensures the protection of the civil liberties and rights
of US persons.  In the US, a security agency such as the FBI has to
establish a "probable cause" before a court of law, in order to be granted
any authority to investigate or arrest a suspect.  Obviously this paradigm
is very different from what is going on in the Gambia.
What you have in the Gambia is an NIA, a rudimentary outfit that has very
little intelligence proficiency.  Their information collection capability is
strictly restricted to human intelligence i. e. the interrogation of
"suspects" by torture to milk some information from them, gathering rumours,
an open source collection from newspapers, market women, political rallies,
and etc etc.  They have no technical intelligence capability such as
communications and signals collection platforms.  The NIA even lacks any
credible analytical outfit to collate all the information gathered from
their "informers" to generate any substantive information for the policy
makers.
Therefore what you have in the Gambia is some kind of a Russian "Cheka" (
the predecessor of the former KGB) or a political outfit whose sole purpose
is to protect the APRC political survival at any cost.  The NIA is
resposible for collecting rumuors (which they call intelligence), and the
APRC youth wings execute the covert actions of terror such as what just
happened with Radio 1 FM case, and the unwarranted assualt on the UDP
leadership at Basse.
I hope this answers your questions.

Greetings.

Ebou Jallow



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