Why So Many Terrorists Get Their Start as Engineers

Sphere ^ | December 29, 2009 | Russell Berman

[1rudeboy]

(Dec. 29) -- Of all the biographical details that have emerged about the Nigerian man who allegedly tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas, perhaps the least surprising -- at least to those who study these things -- is what he studied in college.

The terrorist suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, earned a degree in mechanical engineering from University College London in 2008, just over a year before he tried to demonstrate his skills by detonating an explosive device aboard the Detroit-bound plane. Among violent Islamic extremists, that puts him in familiar company. Indeed, the propensity toward engineering studies is an aspect of the terrorist profile that has drawn increased scrutiny of late from scholars, who have been advancing theories about the high correlation between the two.

In a study published this year, European sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog researched more than 400 known violent jihadists since the 1970s, including the 25 men involved with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly half were known to have received some level of higher education, and of those, 44 percent were engineers -- including eight of the 9/11 plotters and hijackers. Engineering was by far the most popular field; the percentage of terrorists who had pursued it was more than twice as high as the second-place field, Islamic studies.

"The bottom line is that while the probability of a Muslim engineer becoming a violent Islamist is minuscule, it is still between three and four times that for other graduates," Gambetta wrote in an article in the New Scientist that summarized the pair's findings, which were published in August in the European Journal of Sociology.

[1rudeboy]

How's that for profiling?

[Red Badger]

[sauropod]

Reminds me of the old saw:

Mechanical Engineers build weapons.

Civil Engineers build targets.

[ansel12]

Before the females, wasn’t engineering the main degree for West Point Army officers?

[Hoodat]

KSM was an ME.

[rarestia]

As a white male in engineering school, I remember that the overwhelming majority of students in my elec and gen engineering classes were foreign: Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Iranian, unclassified Mid-Easterner. They were all swell people, but they def. kept to their own groups. We would talk in class and during study halls about the work, but there was never any personal interaction. Considering the fact that I was a 350 lbs. bald white guy with numerous visible facial piercings, I would imagine swilling beer and throwing darts was culturally taboo to them.

[1rudeboy]

[Thrownatbirth]

A morbid childhood fascination with explosives led to my engineering degree. :-)

[Chi-townChief]

Well, it’s like we say at work: he’s an engineer so he can’t be too smart.

[ctdonath2]

The fallacy of degenerate statistics. Take an extremely small sample from an extremely large population and you can find a correlation which utterly fails to prove causality.

Yes, it is unsurprising that terrorists who use relatively* sophisticated attacks involving complex* equipment are trained as engineers. THAT MEANS NOTHING ABOUT ENGINEERS. It only provides an obvious anecdote that those motivated to a goal tend to follow their training & experience to get there.

If the author is looking for correlations that mean something (vague as they may be), he should notice that ALL the terrorists are Islamic. Some may be technically trained, but every dammed one of them is motivated by the same religion. Even that correlation means little, as a billion Muslims harmed no one yesterday (a la a common RKBA canard).

* - in this context, “relatively” and “complex” refer to the fact that other terrorists are considerably less sophisticated. The “advanced” attacks used so far are petty to most trained engineers. Box cutters? a mix-and-ignite binary explosive (which BTW failed)? not difficult. Because of the gross simplicity, coupled with frequent failure, of even these “advanced” attacks, I worry little about the notion of terrorists with nukes.

[MrB]

Lots of ME (middle easterners) in the engineering programs when I was there as well. Didn’t trust ‘em then, either, and that was pre-1990.

[duffus]

And the punch line is.

If he had been worth a pile of camel dung as an engineer it would have gone BOOM rather then burn his little panties.

Is it too late to get a refund on his tuition? Somebody didn’t get their moneys worth.

[1rudeboy]

That was my impression when I worked at the University of Michigan Engineering - Transportation Library during the mid 1980’s.

[SlowBoat407]

The people who want to bring down the US without bombs become climate scientists.

[afraidfortherepublic]

I’ve noticed this too, since I have a number of engineers in my family. Perhaps this study should differentiate between American Engineers (a pretty stable group) and Middle Eastern Engineers.

My youngest son who has a PhD in Engineering was the only Caucasian American male in his class — in contrast to his older brother’s class (mostly American males with only one female) or his father’s class — 100% male American with a handful of foreign students. My youngest son, who worked his way through college as a lab assistent in several locations, found that much of his time was spent repairing equipment carelesslyl damaged by the Middle Eastern students who came from wealthy families and were used to having everything done for them by servants in their homelands. In fact, my kid was so nice to his colleagues that his advisor had to order him to STOP helping these other guys who were constantly messing up their experiments and destroying lab equipment.

Perhaps the key is in famly background — not country of origin.

[rbg81]

Easy one — Engineers have technical ability and they tend to be focused and (somewhat) single minded. You are probably also more detacted from people than, say, a marketing major. If you are able to get an engineering degree, you have a demonstrated ability to finish what you start.

[MuttTheHoople]

Engineering is a values-neutral field. I'm pretty sure there were German Engineers working for Siemens or Krupp during World War II who were pleased that they could engineer a superior gas chamber, and had no thought that what they were doing was horrid and despicable.

Being an engineer can be an empty lifestyle, if you derive all your meaning out of it. Therefore, it's easy for Jihadists to radicalize Engineers and get them to do their bidding.

[WayneS]

Okay.

But what about “home grown” engineers with the middle name Wayne?

[toast]

You would think an engineer would have been able to operate the bomb better than he did.

They’ll need to start training them as chem E’s instead of mechanical.

[1rudeboy]

If the author is looking for correlations that mean something (vague as they may be), he should notice that ALL the terrorists are Islamic.

"The bottom line is that while the probability of a Muslim engineer becoming a violent Islamist is minuscule, it is still between three and four times that for other graduates."

He takes that into account. And a 3x-4x correlation is worthy enough to mention, even though you might dispute the statistical significance.