[iwar] [fc:Profile.of.suicide.bomber.changes.after.attack]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-21 18:43:56


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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Profile.of.suicide.bomber.changes.after.attack]
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                     Friday September 21, 2:23 PM
           Profile of suicide bomber changes after attack
                By Alan Elsner, National Correspondent



 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Intelligence services around the world are
tearing up their psychological profiles of potential suicide bombers
after last week's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The men who hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed three of
them into key symbols of U.S. prestige and power, were not poor and
uneducated youths, brainwashed into giving up their lives by promises
of sexual ecstasy in a martyr's paradise and a demonization of those
they call their oppressors.
"We need to change the profile of the would-be suicide bomber. All our
previous assumptions are no longer valid," said Yonah Alexander, of
the International Center for Terrorism Studies, a private institute in
northern Virginia.
"The traditional profile was of a young, fairly uneducated person. But
now, the entire world is the frontline of this battle and everybody is
a potential actor," he said.
Last week's hijackers, unlike many of the Palestinian suicide bombers
who have carried out a series of attacks in Israel in the past year,
were not transported to the location of the attack minutes before the
action. These were educated, sophisticated men who planned their
attack for years and who blended well into American society.
They bought first-class tickets using credit cards and giving frequent
flyer numbers. They drove sedans, lived in middle-class neighborhoods
and dressed like businessmen.
They had tasted some of the material riches of western life, yet were
able to maintain their determination to die for several years while
planning the operation.
"It means either that such people are being recruited from an expanded
reservoir of volunteers including middle class and perhaps also
secular people or that the planners are getting state help in tapping
volunteers," said James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, a
conservative Washington think tank.
CHILLING IMPLICATIONS
"The implications are chilling. It's going to be much more difficult
to find the needles of the haystack," he said.
Until the 1980s, intelligence agencies worldwide acted on the
assumption that armed militants, though ready to risk their lives to
attack their enemies, wished to live after their attacks so as to
enjoy and benefit from their accomplishments.
That assumption was shattered by the Oct. 23, 1983, suicide bombings
of barracks occupied by U.S. and French peacekeeping troops in Beirut,
killing 241 American and 58 French servicemen.
Subsequently, suicide attacks spread from the Middle East to the
Indian subcontinent, where they took the lives of Indian Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe
Premadasa in 1993.
Still, security services concluded that it was relatively difficult to
recruit potential suicides and that many other participants were
needed to plan and carry out a suicide attack, most of whom did not
want to die and could therefore be attacked, punished and deterred.
In Israel, most suicide recruits appear to have been picked out of
religious schools, separated from their families and instructed over a
period of months and years of the rewards that will await them in
paradise if they agree to sacrifice their lives.
They are told they will become national heroes and their families will
be given lifelong pensions after their deaths.
But for each person who volunteered to die, there had to be those who
planned the attacks, selected the targets, gathered the necessary
intelligence, did the recruiting, provided the "spiritual training",
prepared the explosives and transported the suicide bombers to the
target areas.
The World Trade Center bombers appear to have executed most of those
functions themselves.
Neil Livingstone, an expert in such attacks with Global Options LLC, a
Washington consultancy, said U.S. intelligence developed information
after the 1983 Beirut bombing that the bomber was strapped into his
truck only minutes before the attacks and given hashish.
"That's why we set up barriers and chicanes in front of key buildings.
Psychologists told us anything that broke the bomber's concentration
could make them have second thoughts about what they were about to
do," he said.
"Profiling was a very inexact science before this but now we have to
assume that even our broad generalizations were wrong, or at least
incomplete," he said.
Even in Israel, the profile of the suicide bomber was changing. On
Sept. 9, an Israeli Arab killed himself and three Israelis in the
northern town of Nahariya. The attacker was identified as Mohammed
Shakur Habeishi, a 48-year-old man with two wives and six children.
Alexander said security officials had a vastly more difficult task
defending against suicide attacks.
"The attacker could be a businessman, a woman, a child. You see a
pregnant woman boarding a plane -- it doesn't mean she's pregnant. She
could be carrying a belt of explosives around her waist," he said.

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