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Dr. Grier blogs about Narcissism and other current topics.>
Tragedy at Fort Hood Part II.
November 14, 2009
Watching the confusion on television about whether the attack by Major Hasan was a terrorist attack or not, I believe it might be useful to give you some insight on the research that I did on suicide bombers. The many issues that are being discussed now are those that have been discussed amongst experts for a number of years. The experts still disagree, so it is not surprising that journalists here in the U.S. cannot get it right.
I am going to go through each major topic one at a time, and hopefully it will all come together at the end. Let’s start by answering the obvious questions.
1. Was the attack on Fort Hood a terrorist attack?
The short answer is “Yes.”
2. Why did the FBI not take action when presented with evidence of Dr. Hasan’s activities?
My sense is that the question was directed to a legal expert rather than a terrorism expert. Why do I suggest that could be what happened?
Some history.
In 2006, scores of young people on Myspace posted that their aspiration in life was to “die a martyr”. When researchers doing research on suicide bombings discovered the worrying postings, they contacted the FBI. The FBI told them that the postings were a “free speech” issue, and there was nothing to be done about it.
Fast forward to 2009.
A host of evidence is uncovered about Dr. Hasan. Any of it in isolation might also lead a lawyer to tell the Army that the evidence concerned “free speech” issues. But taken in the aggregate and with knowledge that the person involved was a field-grade officer in the U.S. Army with oversight of wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, a very different conclusion would be reached by an analyst with expertise in terrorism. An expert would have recognized that Dr. Hasan had adopted extremist views and concluded that the Army had a problem and needed to take action to resolve it.
My speculation is that once again a lawyer provided the answer, “It’s free speech.”
3. Is trauma “contagious”?
The answer is “yes”.
People close to those who have been wounded or killed in conflict can themselves become traumatized. This phenomenon is also common enough amongst clinicians that they have given it a name: transference. It happens when counselors take ownership of their patient’s problems. When trauma is involved, it is also called secondary or vicarious trauma. Some psychologists who counsel trauma victims may limit their caseloads because of this risk.
In Palestine, people who had relatives killed or injured during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were themselves subject to trauma. They often became targets of recruiters searching for suicide bombers.
Recruiters you ask? Yes, recruiters: a network of extremists whose purpose is to identify people who might “volunteer” to kill themselves for Islam.
So what kind of people “volunteer” to kill themselves while murdering others? Who are they?
It is a complicated question, because there are "categories" of recruits. Zealots like the 9/11 suicide attackers provide one source of recruits. They lead the way, inspiring others to commit atrocities while killing themselves. But their numbers are limited, and others must be found to continue the carnage. It is this second category that has been exploited by extremists for the job of carrying out suicide attacks, and of which Mr. Hasan is a part.
Let's look more closely at people who fall into this category.
Over thirty female would-be suicide bombers from Palestine were incarcerated in an Israeli prison in 2005. They had been captured because they “failed” in their mission or they turned themselves in to authorities once they got on the Israeli side of the border.
What was the psychological profile of these women?
• Some of them were coerced to make amends for a relative who was a “collaborator”.
• Some of them were coerced to escape honor killings.
• The rest were psychologically frail or depressed.
From this quick overview, we can conclude that many people involved in suicide attacks were victims of secondary trauma, coerced, psychologically “frail”, or depressed. In other words, they were not mentally healthy people. During the suicide attack at the Nord-Ost theater in Moscow, it was reported that “40 Chechen widows” [of men who died in the Chechen War with Russia] were participating in the attack.
(Another group vulnerable to recruiters trolling for suicide bombers is young people. For example, the average age of Palestinian suicide bombers was 22. Kamikaze pilots during WWII were typically university students in their late teens and early twenties.)
If Dr. Hasan was suffering from secondary trauma, had become a target of recruiters, and was indulging in visits to Islamist chat rooms and extremist websites where he would be subject to intense propaganda and the effects of pornographic violence, then he was a textbook candidate for becoming a suicide attacker.
(Pornographic violence includes videos of vehicles being destroyed by IEDs, videos of suicide bombers blowing up themselves and their surroundings, beheadings, and graphic pictures of American soldiers who have been mutilated, wounded, or killed. Hollywood violence is "synthetic". In contrast, pornographic violence involves the violent deaths of real people, and like sexual pornography can become addictive.)
4. Is Dr. Hasan a terrorist?
What do you think, now that you have a better appreciation for how Dr. Hasan may have been targeted and then lured by extremists into committing mass murder in the name of Islam?
My view?
Regardless of how he got there, by his actions Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan proved that he is a terrorist.
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