DRAFT : Do not quote 1 The Psychology of al Qaeda Terrorists By

Since the attack of 9/11/01, the U.S. military is heavily engaged in the war on terror. At present, SOCOM (Special Operations Command) is the lead on the Global War on Terrorism. In support of this mission, military psychologists may be called upon to interact with al Qaeda terrorists, many of whom are already incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay under military guard. Therefore, it is important to understand the psychology of these terrorists, who wish to harm the United States of America. The conventional wisdom about terrorists is that they are products of poverty, broken families, and ignorance who lack skills and opportunities; they are without occupational or family responsibilities, or have weak minds, vulnerable to brainwashing from madrassas or their families of origin. Alternative explanations of terrorism center on personality factors. Some claim that terrorists, especially those who commit suicide in the process of murdering innocent civilians, are mentally ill, have personality disorders, are criminals, religious fanatics, or simply evil. A third set of explanations for terrorism focuses on situational factors, namely the circumstances prevailing in the lives of the potential terrorists at the time they joined their respective terrorist organizations. The present study attempts to empirically test this conventional wisdom through accumulation and analysis of biographical data on the terrorists who wished to harm the U.S. (Sageman, 2004). Traditionally, the study of terrorism has been hampered by attempts to define terrorism. A common quip is that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. So, the first task was to identify whom to include in this sample. This study was interested only in the terrorists connected to the perpetrators of the attacks of 9/11. Therefore, it excluded other terrorists such as the Palestinians or Tamil Tigers, whom many people lump together, but who are not linked to the anti-American perpetrators. In order to delineate who belongs in the sample, it is necessary to define the threat to the U.S. The terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania on 9/11/01 were part of al Qaeda. The term al Qaeda is confusing, because it refers both to a specific organization and to a more diffuse and global social movement at war with the U.S. Al Qaeda the formal organization is the vanguard of this violent Islamist revivalist social movement. I chose to include in my sample people who belonged to this terrorist social movement, which I called the global Salafi jihad, because many of the terrorists are not formally in al Qaeda, in the sense of swearing an oath of loyalty to Osama bin Laden, its leader, but are nevertheless fellow travelers with them. In order to define who belongs to this social movement, it is important to understand its nature.