The latest weird science promoted by Scientology in their crusade against psychiatry: Psychiatry causes terrorism.

On Two scientology chat shows prominent members of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (a Scientology front group whose overwrought website dedicated to exposing psychiatry as an “Industry of Death” can be seen here) calmly explain that bin Laden was brainwashed into committing acts of terrorism by his “psychiatrist”, Al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Chairman of CCHR Florida Dave Figueroa claims that terrorism is inextricably linked to psychiatry. As he puts it: “behind those individual acts of mayhem you find psychiatrists, you find psychologists and their drugs”. In bin Laden’s case it was Zawahiri: “that ideology of terror was coming from bin Laden who was influenced by a psychiatrist and that really is the bottom line.”

Listening to Figueroa you would think that bin Laden had been working for the Salvation Army until he was corrupted by Zawahiri in 1988. Shaking his head at the memory of the sweet Osama we used to know, he laments:

“His whole thought patterns [sic] and his entire viewpoint were changed by Zawahiri and whatever types of drugs that Zawahiri used to make that change in bin Laden we don’t know. But we do know that there was a real change in this guy’s attitude and in his willingness to wreak havoc.”

Apparently this “willingness to wreak havoc” was not suitably demonstrated by bin Laden’s involvement in brutal jihad against the Red Army in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s.

In the second clip President of CCHR International (and surely a star in some sort of Scientology panto, ‘The Psychiatrist Terrorist: He’s Behind You’?) Dennis Clarke confidently describes Zawahiri as “[bin Laden’s] psychiatrist, that’s his doctor, that’s his therapist, that’s … [dramatic pause] the guy who runs him.”

Neither Figueroa nor Clarke seems overly worried about the fact that Zawahiri is in fact an eye-surgeon and not a psychiatrist, that there is absolutely no evidence for what they’re saying, nor that religious violence predates psychiatry by, oh, several thousand years.