Suicidal Bombers

Foreign Policy Magazine's Adam Lankford recently wrote a piece on the mental states of the 9/11 hijackers, and it argues something, based on scholarly research and evidence from many of the hijackers' lives, that should have been obvious to all of us since day one: The 9/11 suicide bombers had mental health issues, including depression and suicidal tendencies. This conclusion is in direct conflict with the conventional assessment that the suicide bombers of 9/11, and suicide bombers in general, were painfully normal individuals who expectedly "subordinated their individuality to the group. And whatever their destructive, charismatic leader, Osama bin Laden, said was the right thing to do for the sake of the cause was what they would do," as former CIA analyst and behavioral psychologist Jerrold Post explained in 2006.

However, the evidence does not support Post's conclusion, as an investigation from Israel that studied 15 arrested individuals who attempted to carry out suicide bombings shows. This study showed that more than half were depressed, nearly half had suicidal tendencies, 20 percent had post-traumatic stress syndrome, and more than 10 percent had actually attempted suicide in the past. Based on this, Adam Lankford concludes that out of the 19 9/11 hijackers, 10 would be clinically depressed and 7 or 8 would have been suicidal. The Israeli study is compounded by testimonials of people who had known the hijackers and their email correspondences with friends and family, which undeniably show signs of an ill mental state.

I have always been bothered by the line of thinking that generally, suicide bombers were not mentally ill but rather just brainwashed. I had the sense that, though one may commit acts of violence under the influence of an authority (as we see in every military force in the world), I found it unlikely that merely a charismatic leader like Osama Bin Laden could drive one to suicide. I am always reminded of the mass Jonestown suicide where the victims were kept in the dark about the content of the Kool Aid and where the ones who did know about the cyanide proved to be defiant and had to be forced to drink it; Here we have a cult essentially based on devotion to one man and even he couldn't get his followers to knowingly accept his order to commit suicide.

So why were we lead to believe that those who kill themselves to kill others in the name of God were not mentally unstable? There are several different factors that we could speculate about, but two immediately stand out to me. The first one is that to talk about the psychological problems of the 9/11 hijackers would be to humanize the enemy and risk the potential for sympathy. The attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Flight 93 were undoubtedly incredibly heinous, and when something like this happens we all need someone to blame; its only natural. However, there were forces at work that had great interest in portraying a colorful, nuanced, and intricate world as black and white. Partly these were interests in self-preservation; to make sure we blame the right party, namely, Islamist terrorists and not US foreign policy. People who are able to think critically will undoubtedly come to the conclusion that Islamist terrorism, such as on that tragic September morning, is, in no small part, the effect of a long history of disruptive US intervention in the Middle East. This is not a controversial statement and I do believe most Americans know this today to an extent, whether they want to think about it or not. However, when the world turns black and white, when global relations turn to an "us vs. them" dynamic, cause and effect are suspended from public consciousness and an institution of power like the US government can escape blame, and thus no changes are needed to be made in policy as long as the same people still benefit.

Not only did policy not need to change direction, but it could expand. In addition to self-preservation, making the world monochrome was also an instrument used to exploit a crises to the gain of the few. Simply, without the tragedy of 9/11 there would be no War in Iraq, or at least no easy path towards it. Here, the Bush Administration and its allies overreached, as it wasn't so long after the Iraq War was under way that majority public opposition mounted against it. But, the exploitation of 9/11 did its basic function and cleared the path to war, and aside from the War in Iraq, it also gave opportunity to the Bush Administration to consolidate more power in the executive than was ever acceptable to pursue other avenues.

Making the world black and white was conscious decision made by those in power in order to escape blame and achieve otherwise unpopular goals. However, there was an unconscious current that continuously ran beneath that made it easy to not consider the obvious mental health-related questions raised by suicide bombing. This was a result of conditioning that has created deeply ingrained, distorted views of Muslims and other formerly colonized peoples by peoples of former colonizing nations. This undercurrent influence, extensively researched on by scholars such as Edward Said, has been dubbed Orientalism. In the Orientalist viewpoint, the Middle East is a region of unchanging, irrational, and primitive people; they are not civilized like their western counterparts and are prone to zealotry and violence. The majority religion of these people, Islam, is seen to be a root cause of this backwardness.

I say this is an unconscious current because I do believe most westerners do not consciously make a choice to be bigoted, for lack of a better term, but are ultimately informed about the "Muslim World" by, for example, "experts" like Judith Miller and other so-called authorities on the Muslims who's opinions are sought by the media as well as the intellectual mainstream. Just as significant are the portrayals of the Middle East, Muslims and Arabs in western literature and film that ultimately, in a not-so-subtle way, shape our understanding.

Orientalism provides a certain outlook on the world that can be easily boiled down to a good-guy-bad-guy story. It provides assumptions that are usually wholly false. One important assumption is that everything people in Middle East do has everything to do with Islam, completely discounting the fact that the "Muslim World" is composed of countless different people of several different ethnicities with a countless set of different experiences, and that first and foremost, they are people and not mindless drones. However, by asserting that Islam dictates the lives of every Muslim to the breath one is able to completely eliminate an issue like mental health from the picture. Thus, there can be no room to even question why a Muslim would run a plane into the World Trade Center and kill himself along with several other innocent people, because the answer becomes obvious: Because he is a Muslim.

Instead, should we not be asking why any person would run a plane into the World Trade Center killing himself and several other innocent people?

The hypocrisy in the media is, as usual, out of this world. Particularly the right wing media, where a right-wing Christian fundamentalist terrorist in Norway can kill something like a hundred youths or a right-wing terrorist can open fire on a crowd and shoot a Democratic congresswoman, as well as killing a child, and immediately he is thought to be mentally handicapped. And I'm not disagreeing with that. But what if we replaced both of those people with Muslims? What do you think Bill O'Reilly would be saying?

Or how about when a Christian terrorist does something heinous, he or she is not considered a real Christian, just a crazy. However, when there is a Muslim terrorist, there is the expectation for the Muslim community to take responsibility and speak out. Could it be that, likewise to Christians, Muslims don't consider such people as real Muslims either, and probably just crazy as well? Or are all Muslims implicated and considered accomplices?

Bottom line: This is very dangerous thinking. Muslims have been continuously wrongly perceived and thus persecuted and alienated continuously since 9/11, as recent polls on Americans' attitudes towards Muslims confirm. It's as if 60 or so of those who died on that traumatic day were not Muslims just as innocent as the others who lost their lives far too early. Unfortunately, its only when we come to terms with our mistakes as a nation that we will ever be truly safe.




You can read Adam Lankford's piece here (Foreign Policy Magazine)