Posted on 08/06/2005 3:01:29 PM PDT by FlashBack
Experts: Suicide Bombers Not Crazy Psychologists: Group Mentality, Goals of Iraq, London Killers Likely Can Drive Sane People to Suicide Attacks Aug. 6, 2005 - It's been said that the suicide bombers who cause the scenes of carnage and chaos relayed on American TV screens and front pages must be driven by a cocktail of religious fanaticism and outright insanity.
However, some experts -- including people who are advising the U.S. government on terrorism -- said not only are suicide bombers sane, but also that anyone of us, under the right circumstances, could become one.
"Absolutely, this is normal psychology, normal group dynamics," said Clark R. McCauley, a Bryn Mawr College psychology professor who is part of an outside team consulting for the Department of Homeland Security.
"Normal people, given the right circumstances or right set of friends, can become suicide bombers," said Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA officer.
"None of the suicide bombers would be put in a mental asylum on the order of the district psychiatrist," said Ariel Merari, one of the leading Israeli experts on suicide bombers, who has interviewed dozens of attackers captured before they could kill.
Lincolnesque? McCauley even finds insight into the terrorist mind from, of all sources, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. He points to a passage from Lincoln's speech on giving up one's life for a cause: "From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."
It is part of McCauley's argument that suicide bombers see themselves like the dead of Gettysburg -- sacrificing their lives for a greater good to ensure, in Lincoln's words, "that we, here, resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."
In short, the experts kept saying suicide bombers are not necessarily irrational, and noted that lots of people in lots of places have been honored by their societies for choosing to kill themselves in order to kill others. Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II did it. So have Tamil guerrilla fighters in Sri Lanka. And closer to Western civilization, there is the Biblical account of Samson, who pulled down a temple to kill his enemies, which meant killing himself.
"Part of the power of suicide bombing is the impact of martyrdom," McCauley said. "Once it's somebody that you know and somebody that you care about that has taken his or her life in this fashion, that has made the sacrifice, then there is a kind of a guilt associated with doing less than they were willing to do."
That is McCauley's point about Lincoln. Obviously, Lincoln was not calling for suicide attacks, but he was trying to mobilize the troops to fight harder to honor those who had died already.
Like Columbine? That dynamic, according to McCauley, is now in play in an Internet world where each new attack turns into a recruiting event for others: Bomb-making instructions are given out. Examples are set. And if you're a young man in a group of young men, you will get inspired.
"I think anybody could become a suicide bomber," said Sageman, the former CIA officer. "It's a process."
Sageman saw such a process in America in connection with the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. There, the two boys who killed others and themselves got their inspiration from a wider group.
"The guys in Columbine, although they were two, they were very much connected to a whole community on the Internet," he said.
End Justifies the Means? Many would call it madness to kill innocents, including children, on a bus or train and to call it good. But in Israel, where it has been practically a weekly experience at times, Merari is convinced the attackers can tell themselves it is good and still be sane.
"What they say is, 'All Israelis are potentially soldiers. Israeli children are going to grow up and become Israeli soldiers,' " he said. "And that justifies their killing."
Outside the Middle East, how does the rational suicide bomber call it good to kill Americans in an office building or British people on a train?
"The kind of justification that is commonly employed," McCauley said, "is something about desperation: 'We're weak and they're strong. This is the only way we can hit back at them.' "
But when did the West ever deliberately hurt children? Many in the Muslim world might point to Iraq in the 1990s.
"Through much of the Muslim world, and even some of Europe," McCauley said, "it's believed that the embargo on Saddam Hussein's Iraq caused the deaths of several hundred thousand people, most of them children, from bad water, untreated sewage, lack of proper medical care."
ABC News' John Donvan originally reported this story for "Nightline" on July 29, 2005.
Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures
If this is duplicated...My apologies...just seen it on their (ABC News) site today.
They truly are NOT crazy, what they are is truely devoted.
Psychiatry is the biggest form of theoretical hocus pocus in America.
While there is probably some truth in this report, it comes across as a justification for terrorism.
Cherrypicking bygone human imperfections that have nothing to do with anything and using them to rationalize the preaching of nihilistic mass murder to the young, impressionable and vulnerable gets me crazy.
They may not be crazy, but they are definitely evil.
"Through much of the Muslim world, and even some of Europe," McCauley said, "it's believed that the embargo on Saddam Hussein's Iraq caused the deaths of several hundred thousand people, most of them children, from bad water, untreated sewage, lack of proper medical care."
I guess evil just can't see evil. I don't know how else to explain this mindset.
I think that Muslims are taught this profound hatred since birth, and it just does not go away. It is part and parcel of these "human beings". Those of us in the Western World have never experienced anything like this.
I have a Saudi Arabian aquaitance, who seems to be kind and normal in every way, but when a Jew is mentioned, he just goes beserk. He is one human consumed with hatred for the Jewish people, and this has been taught to him. He has studied Islam every day of his life.
that's effin' insane......there is nothing sane about recruiting people to commit mass murder.....
The teaching of hatred/bigotry is just so sad...lifes too short to go around hating everyone of a particular race-color-creed...there are good people everywhere just as there are bad.
In the end Good must triumph over Evil.
FMCDH(BITS)
It doesn't matter whether they are crazy.
What they indisputably are is evil.
Were SS camp guards crazy? They were evil.
Could it be that they are "sane" in the organic sense, but "insane" in a cultural or intellectual way, if that is possible? The idea that a young person would rashly and foolishly throw away their lives committing a heinous crime of senseless murder, poisoning their own memories and the world's impression of their supposed "cause" as monstrously evil, is at the very least counterproductive, and is in reality, idiotic.
Perhaps these people are not "insane" as in psychotic or bipolar, but they are culturally poisoned and made basically incapable of what we call rational decision making... another way of saying that they are simply or foolishly and suicidally evil?
The outrage is in the way the 'journalist' twists the quotes to support his theme of moral equivalence between the terrorists and civilised human beings. First he lumps very different military actions into the same category. The Tamil rebels of Sri Lanka he refers to ARE terrorists, the only difference being that the Tamils hope to impose their dark vision on an island and the Islamists hope to impose their dark vision on the whole world. The Japanese kamikazees where something different entirely. They were soldiers in uniform, fighting in a declared war, delivering weapons against enemy troops. It was a ruthless tactic and contrary to our values, but they did not hide behind the cover of a civilian population to randomly kill other civilians. The soldiers of Gettysburg were so far removed from the terrorists that the comparison is offensive.
The conclusion the author wants us to draw is that the terrorists should be thought of as fighters for a cause, and admired for their devotion, while they are killing us. The conclusion that should be drawn is that some ideaologies are so vile that they should not be tolerated. It is not safe to allow radical Islamists to indoctrinate generations of young people anywhere in the world, precisely because 'normal' humans can be conditioned to do horrible things.
If suicide bombers are not crazy, then it means that nobody is ever crazy. Therefore, the profession of psycology is a scam. Thanks for clearing that up, I always suspected it.
The "Experts" are nuts.
Outright suicide attacks, as opposed to merely risking one's life, make sense only in protecting IMMEDIATE lives or for a reward in the afterlife. Doing so for any other "reason" is nuts by definition. And there is the rub - these nutty "experts" set up their phony definitions to try to make their fellow anti-Americans seem normal.
Then what is nuts is believing in a "god" who wants you to go around commiting indiscriminate murder. I'd turn my weapon on "god" first.
"Absolutely, this is normal psychology, normal group dynamics," said Clark R. McCauley, a Bryn Mawr College psychology professor who is part of an outside team consulting for the Department of Homeland Security.
"Normal people, given the right circumstances or right set of friends, can become suicide bombers," said Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA officer.
THIS IS BUNK....
First, remember it was the "psychiatrists" who decided that Adolf Eichman was "sane"...they ignored that sociopathy is a personality disorder.
Second, although under stress and group psychosis, you can "brainwash" ALMOST anyone, the suicide bombers are NOT isolated...they choose to ignore outside influences that go against killing the innocent, and the inner impulse to live. In psychiatry there is a syndrome called the delusion of two, where two people who live together get involved in a group delusion. This is closer to suicide bombers...but remember: They are not isolated, so have a choice.
Finally, although some people have personalities that are vulnerable to brainwashing, there is a small percentage that refuse it...the majority of people can refuse to follow it early in the game, but some continue to refuse to give up their independent thinking even under severe pressure...
Remember the JimJones cult "suicides" of 700 people? Many of them had been physically forced to drink the poison (including 300 children), and about a dozen escaped because they wanted to live...
As for those who say this is "normal" result of living in a deluded environment, I suggest that those doing the brainwashing -- i.e. the radical mullahs paid by Saudi "charities" and those radio/tv stations run by Iran, Egypt, and the Palestinian authority, show that the decision to make such hateful propaganda of the vulnerable is indeed "logical" and an act of war....
I'm sorry, I just could not become a suicide bomber under any circumstances, no matter what any "expert" says.
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