Creating Brainwashed Terrorists

In March 2004, The Times of London revealed that al-Qaeda used drugs to brainwash young men in Iraq to create suicide bombers. The process involves the use of pain and drugs in combination with hypnosis.

According to Colonel Karim Sultan, police chief of Karbala, Iraq, “It’s a long process to brainwash them. They seduce them with money, then start to use drugs on them until they are half-conscious.”

Karbala endured attacks from nine suicide bombers in a three-week period in March 2004. The violence would have been worse, had Colonel Sultan’s officers not captured 12 men in outlying villages—a number of them reportedly drugged and “ready to act.”

Other psychological “brainwashing” methods employed by terrorist groups include a three-stage process involving “unfreezing,” “changing” and “refreezing.” “Unfreezing” physically removes the person from his routines, sources
of information, social relationships and support structures, and then humiliates the individual so that he perceives himself as unworthy, supposedly motivating him to change.

“Changing” directs the person towards learning new attitudes, quite often through coercion. “Refreezing” involves “... the integration of the changed attitudes into the rest of the personality.”

Also called “sensitivity training,” this process was “developed to study how people could be socially and psychologically manipulated to give up their souls.” The end result: the destruction of individualism, moral judgment and personal responsibility.

Psychiatrists and psychologists have long boasted that they are able to program individuals into assassins by use of these methods. Long before anyone heard of a “Manchurian Candidate”—a person unwittingly programmed to kill by means of drugs and hypnosis—George Estabrooks, a psychologist and former professor at Colgate University in New York, reported the creation of operational Manchurian Candidates on the Allied side during World War II. “The key to creating an effective spy or assassin,” he said, “rests in splitting a man’s personality, or creating multi-personality, with the aid of hypnotism. This is not science fiction. This has and is being done. I have done it.”

Numerous studies have verified that psychotropic drugs can “take over the human mind against the will of the individual.”
“Through the use of drugs,” wrote Walter Bowart in Operation Mind Control , “the skilled mind controller could first induce a hypnotic trance. Then, one of several behavior modification techniques could be employed with amplified success. In themselves, without directed suggestions, drugs affect the mind in random ways. But when drugs are combined with hypnosis, an individual can be molded and manipulated beyond his own recognition.”

It is well known that psychiatric drugs induce violent behavior. A 2000 Swedish study of juvenile delinquents found that 40% were acute abusers of a psychiatric tranquilizer known as the “fear reducer,” a drug that enabled them to commit extremely violent crimes without regret. Abusers showed no guilt about their violent offenses. “I didn’t feel any emotion when I stabbed him five times,” one teenager reported.

It is estimated that 250,000 children are forced to engage in armed combat at the behest of revolutionaries and terrorists around the world. According to a United Nations report, many of these children are drugged with amphetamines and tranquilizers to enable them to “go on murderous binges for days.”

Corinne Dufka from Human Rights Watch, stated, “It seemed to be a very organized strategy of getting the kids, drugging them up, breaking down their defense and memory, and turning them into fighting machines that didn’t have a sense of empathy and feeling for the civilian population.”

Colin Ross, M.D., author of Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists and an authority on coercive psychiatric methods, revealed that a variety of techniques could be exploited by a skilled psychiatric technician to program an individual to commit violent acts. Hypnosis exerts a more powerful influence when combined with drugs and pain. Ross suspects the number of suicide bombers who are programmed with drugs is “close to 100 percent.”

MANUFACTURING TERROR: Methods employed by those forming terrorist corps involve the use of drugs and psychological conditioning, together with ideological indoctrination; these methods enable terrorists to perpetrate such atrocities as the suicide bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut (1983), the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), and in Iraq’s holy city of Karbala, where suicide bombers killed 112 people on March 2, 2004.

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