Fighting the Terrorist Mind
October 2004
Kaffir! Kaffir!”
The detainee was shouting loudly and vigorously as Lieutenant Colonel Frantz and I walked by the razor fence line one afternoon.
“Did that bastard call me an infidel?” I asked Lieutenant Colonel Frantz, with mock indignation.
“That fucker sure did, sir,” he replied. “Just breaks my heart to know those fuckers don’t love us.”
Lieutenant Colonel Frantz’s dislike for the Iraqis was worn on his sleeve at all times. If you didn’t notice it, he would be proud to explain it to you. The screamed insult prompted him to wax poetic about the Iraqis.
“Colonel, I just don’t understand why we gotta be so nice to these bastards,” he said. His face got really red as he kept talking. “Sir, I don’t like their customs, and their language hurts my ears,” he said, starting in on his list. “It’s an ugly language. Man, it sounds like two guys are gagging when they talk.”
It was clear that not only were the religion, language, food, battle tactics, and culture of these extremists different, but so was their thought process. Is it a normal thought process? I would ask myself over and over. And if the terrorists’ mind-set is abnormal, what makes it abnormal? Is it a mental illness?
After making a detour to his office, Lieutenant Colonel Frantz and I headed to the chow hall for lunch. As we passed by the same part of the prison again, the same detainee saw us coming and yelled out “Kaaaaaaffirrrrrrr!!!!!” He was even louder this time and seemed to really be pissed. I stopped for a moment to hear what he said in broken English.
“I fuck you ass, I fuck you ass, you donkey, dog, dog, fuck you ass,” he screamed, while he grabbed between his legs and shook his crotch at me. Then, as he pointed directly at me, he yelled out, “PRAISE ALLAH!” Then he took his right hand and slowly made a cutting motion across his neck as though he was cutting my throat. “You die, you die, infidel, fucking dog, praise Allah,” were the last words he yelled. Then he spit on the ground toward me and walked away.
Stunned at the hate, the evil I saw in his eyes, I became even more convinced that this guy’s mind-set was similar to a Klansman at a segregation rally. He reminded me of the hate I saw in the eyes of many Klansmen as a young boy in Louisiana. Also, like the Klansman of old, no reason, no logic or amount of information could change this detainee’s mind nor clear his heart of the hate and evil he spewed. His rage was foul and almost inhuman.
After many encounters like that, it became clear to me that the new battlefield was not the sands of Iraq or Afghanistan, but the mind of terrorists. Why? I asked myself. Why is the battlefield in these people’s minds now, in a way it never was before? I concluded that this is an enemy like we have never faced before. We have waged wars in sand before, including World War II. The environment in Iraq is the same as the environment in North Africa or plenty of other places we fought in back then—it sucks. Mechanically, for example, the problems are the same. Sand in a tank engine in World War II destroyed it equally as well as it destroys a Humvee engine today. But the mind, language, culture, intent, and will of this enemy is totally different. Destroying the entire Western world is the goal some of them would die for. In wars of the past our enemies wanted to destroy our army, not American women and children walking down the street. They wanted to overtake our military, government, and society, and make us bow to their wills, but they didn’t have a fanatical insistence that each and every one of us be killed. This new enemy cannot be swayed to our way of thinking by showing them the finer points of American life. Too many Americans do not understand that this enemy in the global war on terror cannot be won over by tourism and Levi’s jeans, by “understanding them” and “respecting their culture.” Death to all Americans will be their only victory.
America has never fought an enemy like this, one that has been on this single-minded quest to eliminate all infidels for hundreds of years. Nor do we understand the level of hate and the almost delusional mind-set it takes to maintain a war for centuries. The jihad wars of the Middle East have been fueled by a religious fundamentalism that makes American fundamentalist right-wing anti-abortion hard-liners look like pussycats. As crazy as they might be sometimes, the nuts in the United States have not used suicide bombings as a strategy. No American has walked into a college student union, Madison Square Garden in New York City, or Union Station in Washington, D.C., and blown themselves up for a political cause, killing a hundred innocent other people at the same time. Our terrorist enemies have and will continue to do so on a regular basis in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and other parts of the world. I just pray they never employ the same strategy in the United States, that the tragedies of 9/11 will never be repeated in our shopping malls, parks, and schools. Our global war on terrorism is intended to stop exactly that nightmare from unfolding.
I asked myself many times, Are these guys normal? Is this part of a mental illness or is it a normal part of their culture? Well, clearly we know that 99.99 percent of all Muslims around the world are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. But that still leaves plenty of others who aren’t. After 9/11, when I was attending a conference in Chicago, I caught a ride in a taxi with a driver named Joe. Joe was a Ralph Kramden kind of a guy, with a big, loud, but likable persona. As I approached the cab, I could see Joe’s plaid shirt, baseball cap, and a bumper sticker that read, “I love this country.” Joe asked me, “Partner, what brings you to Chicago?”
“Man, I’m in town for a conference with some other psychologists,” I told him.
Clearly, Joe was one of those taxi drivers who liked to explore the world through impromptu chats with their fares. “Hmmm . . . Doc, I got a question for you,” he said. “Why did it take a whole team of you guys to decide if Jeffrey Dahmer was crazy or not?”
“What are you talking about, man?” I asked. “Jeffrey Dahmer, that serial killer who ate his victims?”
“Yeah, that one,” he said with a big grin. “Doc, that guy was drugging young guys, tying them up, raping ’em, then the crazy nut would cut up their bodies, stew ’em in a pot, and eat the bodies. Doc, you mean to tell me you really need to have a committee of shrinks to decide if that fucker was crazy? Man, it ain’t shit a normal dude would do.”
I was stunned to get this question out of the blue, and I just laughed it off without giving Joe a good answer. But it got me to thinking about the same question with some of the Muslim extremists who employ terrorism. Do we need a new mental illness diagnosis for the terrorists? Are they mentally ill?
I had many debates and conversations with other psychologists, often using the American terrorist Timothy McVeigh as an example. He’s the former Army soldier who blew up the government center in Oklahoma City in 1995, and was executed in 2001. A colleague of mine by the name of Dr. Harry Jackson told me, “Larry, the guy was perfectly normal.”
I responded by saying I didn’t see how he could be. “Harry, let me see if I understand your logic,” I said. “McVeigh was pissed at the government, so he went out and blew up a building and killed or injured a couple hundred people, correct? Harry, how in the hell is that a normal, rational thought process?”
Dr. Jackson believed that because McVeigh was not hearing voices, seeing little green men, and he knew that his actions were wrong, he was “normal.” Of course, I disagreed and told Dr. Jackson that our field needs to rethink what we classify as normal and a mental illness.
Even before I went to Abu Ghraib, I had many conversations with psychologists around the country about the mental state of terrorists. Of course, many loudmouthed, know-it-all PhD “experts” from around the country would say that these terrorists are perfectly normal. Now, mind you, most of these clowns had never sat in a room and looked in the whites of a terrorist’s eyes. I have, on many occasions. Major Leso and I, while he was still in Cuba with me, had many long discussions about this. John was of the belief that the desire to kill all “nonbelievers” was cultural and not unique to Muslim extremists. He cited the example of Japanese suicide bombers in World War II and asked if I thought they were mentally ill.
“John, I don’t have the answer,” I told him. “But it is clear that the mind of the modern-day terrorist is unlike anything we have ever seen before.”
Even aside from the question of the terrorist mentality as a new mental illness, I was dealing with plenty of the standard, old-fashioned, unquestionable mental illness among our detainees at Abu Ghraib. No one in the White House ever expected that the rates of true mental illness would be such a problem with this new enemy. We had a significant number of depressed patients and schizophrenic patients, but we did not have the hospitals in place to manage and take care of them. We also had a large proportion of the enemy whose belief structure was so illogical, rigid, and factually incorrect that it appeared to be delusional—the ones who thought the earth was flat or that Iraq was the most advanced nation on earth. Add to this the 10 or 20 percent of their population who were simply dumb as a box of rocks, and we had a real challenge in how to handle these people. Collectively, such an enemy yielded a new battlefield.
Our rates of mental illness such as depression, psychosis, and anxiety at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib actually matched the rates of mental illness in U.S. prisons. So it wasn’t that the Iraqi or Afghani population produced more mental illness. It probably produced about the same rate as the United States, but even that was problematic because the prison system back home had some resources, limited as they may be, to deal with those mental illnesses. We had virtually nothing of the sort in Iraq when I arrived. We had to build an inpatient psych unit in Abu Ghraib, just as I had done in Gitmo, and by September we were seeing how much impact those resources could have on these patients. We now know that in future wars we must plan to manage and treat at least 3 to 15 percent of all the prisoners we capture for a psychiatric condition while they are in our custody. Likewise, as this war goes on we will have to plan on fighting an enemy who has many soldiers who are ignorant and cannot read and write and/or may very well be mentally ill.
As a doctor and a soldier, I saw this challenge as a unique opportunity to merge my skills and my professional goals. We have to be ready to treat mental illness in the prisoners we pull off the battlefield, but we also must assess whether we are facing an entirely new mental illness diagnosis in the form of the terrorist whose devotion to jihad is so extreme, so one-dimensional that it may cross a line into a disorder that can be defined and studied. Treating this enemy like any enemy of old would be a mistake.
This new enemy does not want to just go to war with U.S. soldiers, sailors and marines. This new enemy wants to go to war with every American man, woman, and child, to kill them all. As Joe the taxi driver would say, that’s not normal.