No, you are wrong. They are not "lunatics"
"What manner of men are these, living in American society, for years in some cases, aiming to kill thousands while dying in the process? Surely, one would think, they must be crazed psychotics; no normal person could do such a thing. But in fact, the al Qaeda terrorists were psychologically “normal.” By no means were they psychologically disturbed. Indeed, terrorist groups expel emotionally disturbed individuals – they are a security risk." p17, Know Thy Enemy: Profiles of Adversary Leaders and Their Strategic Cultures" Barry R. Schneider Jerrold M. Post Editors
July 2003
(2nd Edition)
USAF Counterproliferation Center
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
USAF COUNTERPROLIFERATION CENTER
PRESENTS Air National Guard CONFLICT 21
C21 Center for Terrorism Studies
" Dr. Jerrold M. Post is Professor of Psychiatry, Political Psychology and International Affairs and Director of the Political Psychology Program at The George Washington University. At GW, Dr. Post teaches a graduate course on terrorism and political violence, as well as a course on leadership and decision making. He is Co-Founding Director of the George Washington University Institute of Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management.
Dr. Post has devoted his entire career to the field of political psychology. Dr. Post came to George Washington after a 21 year career with the Central Intelligence Agency where he founded and directed the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, an interdisciplinary behavioral science unit which provided assessments of foreign leadership and decision making for the President and other senior officials to prepare for Summit meetings and other high level negotiations and for use in crisis situations. He played the lead role in developing the "Camp David profiles" of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat for President Jimmy Carter and initiated the U.S. government program in understanding the psychology of terrorism. In recognition of his leadership of the Center, Dr. Post was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit in 1979, and received the Studies in Intelligence Award in 1980. He received the Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Political Psychology in 2002.
A founding member of the International Society of Political Psychology, Dr. Post was elected Vice-President in 1994, and has served on the editorial board of Political Psychology since 1987. A Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, he has been elected to the American College of Psychiatrists and is currently Chair, Task Force for National and International Terrorism and Violence for the APA.
Dr. Post has published widely on crisis decision-making, leadership, and on the psychology of political violence and terrorism, and recently has been addressing weapons of mass destruction terrorism: psychological incentives and constraints, as well as information systems terrorism. He is the co-author of a study of the politics of illness in high office, When Illness Strikes the Leader: The Dilemma of the Captive King, Yale University Press, 1993, and Political Paranoia: The Psycho-politics of Hatred, Yale, 1997. He is editor and author of The Psychological Evaluation of Political Leaders, With profiles of Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton, Univ. of Michigan Press, 2003 and (with Barry Schneider) of Know Thy Enemy: Profiles of Adversary Leaders and their Strategic Cultures, Air Force Counter Proliferation Center, 2003, and is author of Personality and Political Behavior , Cornell Univ. Press (in press).
Dr. Post received his B.A. magna cum laude and M.D. from Yale. He received his post-graduate training in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the National Institute of Mental Health. He has also received graduate training at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
After the invasion of Kuwait, Dr. Post developed a political psychology profile of Saddam Hussein. His analysis of Saddam has been featured prominently in the national and international media. He provided his analysis of Saddam's personality and political behavior in testimony at the hearings on the Gulf crisis before the House Armed Services Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He served as a psychiatric expert on terrorist psychology for the Department of Justice in the 1997 trial of an Abu Nidal terrorist, and in July, 2001 testified as an expert witness in the federal trial in New York of one of the Osama bin Laden terrorists responsible for the bombing of the US embassy in Tanzania. Since 9/11. he has testified before the House National Security subcommittee hearings on bio-terrorism, before the Senate Armed Services Committee on terrorist motivation, and before the UN International Atomic Energy Agency on the psychology of nuclear terrorism. He recently presented a keynote address to the Europe conference of international police on counter-terrorism in Copenhagen, and delivered an address to a terrorist expert meeting in Oslo, Norway in June 2003. He is a frequent commentator on national and international media on such topics as leadership, leader illness, treason, the psychology of terrorism, Slobodan Milosevic, Yasir Arafat, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il." -Jerrold M. Post. Professor of Psychiatry, Political Psychology and International Affairs
Director, Political Psychology Program
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