IMPORTANT FACTS

1. In 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared psychologists and psychiatrists “capable of doing an immense amount of harm” and that they should be restricted from involvement with armed forces.

2. Some psychiatrists glorify and justify the vicious, criminal acts of terrorists on the basis of the terrorist’s mental, biological or cultural circumstances.

3. In 2002, Adel Sadeq, Chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists’ Association, called suicide bombers martyrs and their acts committed as self-sacrifice and honor.

4. Psychiatric personnel provided violence-inducing antidepressants to the military servicemen and women who staffed the Iraqi prison where prisoners were tortured and abused.

5. Military sources state that pilots are put on a regimen that includes psychiatric stimulants to fight fatigue. Side effects of these drugs include depression and feelings of aggression and paranoia.

CHAPTER TWO Psychiatrists Applaud Madmen

President George Bush described the kamikaze operations on the World Trade Center as “acts of madmen.” And most everyone agreed. However, the mental health “experts” who advise the world’s intelligence communities on the terrorist state of mind argue that the madmen were perfectly sane.

Adel Sadeq, Chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists’ Association, and head of the Department of Psychiatry at Cairo’s Ain Shams University, explains it this way: “When the martyr [counts down and] reaches ‘one,’ and then ‘boom,’ he explodes, and senses himself flying, because he knows for certain that he is not dead ... it is a transition to another, more beautiful, world. None in the [Western] world sacrifices his life for his homeland.”

He stated further: “…The psychological structure [of the perpetrator of a suicide attack] is that of an individual who loves life. This may seem strange to people [who] are incapable of understanding [the suicide attack] because their cultural structure has no concepts such as self-sacrifice and honor.”

In the 24 months following Sadeq’s statements, the death toll in the Middle East due to suicide bombings more than doubled over the previous 24 months, rising from 201 to 499.

Jerrold M. Post, a psychiatrist, a political psychology “expert” and former CIA analyst, who teaches at George Washington University, also says that terrorists are not psychopaths “but use psychological strategy for political change.” Post testified on behalf of Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, the terrorist responsible for the deaths of 10 innocent people and the injuring of 74 others in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Tanzania. Post met with Mohamed four times and found him to be a “remarkably unquestioning person.”

Regarding Aziz al-Abub, the psychiatrist who tortured and drugged hostages in Beirut, Lebanon in the 1980s, Post spuriously claims he may have possessed a “genetic predisposition to become both a terrorist and a medical torturer through what they describe as an abnormal amount of genes favoring spite .”49 [Emphasis added]

According to Post, Saddam Hussein is not “irrational,” “impulsive” or suffering from a psychotic disorder. Yet this is the man who waged a savage war on Iran between 1980 and 1988, imprisoned and then executed 8,000 members of the Kurdish resistance and used chemical weapons against Kurdish villages in his own country that killed 5,000 and left 45,000 injured. Post claims that Hussein merely has a “paranoid outlook” and that his troubles “can really be traced back to the womb.”

From glorifying the blatantly criminal acts of suicide bombers to reducing the hideous acts of a maniacal murderer to psychological or biological bad luck, psychiatrists on both sides of the terrorist conflict share the same twisted perspective on the criminal mind. This perspective protects and denies the dangerousness of the criminal at the expense of honest citizens.

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