re: #140 Killgore Trout

Suspect’s mom: Son ‘stupid kid,’ not a terrorist

The NYT has a long piece on them and their past. They remind me of the Columbine killers.

From Wayward Teenagers to Terror Suspects

One was a spoiled child so prone to fits of rage — fights, screamed insults, threats — that his parents began taking him to psychiatrists at age 6 and medicating him in a vain struggle to control his moods. By their count, his short fuse and incendiary tongue forced him to change schools no fewer than 10 times.

The other was arrested three times in less than four months for petty crimes, and seemed like an aimless youth — until he developed a passion for a strict version of Islam that shocked and alienated his Dominican family. Within a few years, he was posting extremist views on the Internet and assailing the United States while predicting its downfall.

Basically, nasty little rageballs, one of whom (as in the Columbine case) is quite possibly a sociopath.

The Atlantic has a great piece as well which is more general:
The Case for Calling Them Nitwits

They blow each other up by mistake. They bungle even simple schemes. They get intimate with cows and donkeys. Our terrorist enemies trade on the perception that they’re well trained and religiously devout, but in fact, many are fools and perverts who are far less organized and sophisticated than we imagine. Can being more realistic about who our foes actually are help us stop the truly dangerous ones?

I think what we’ve been seeing is what someone in the Wilson Quarterly wrote about last year— the collapse of global jihad and the shift to fighting local jihad, which means assorted losers, loners, and freaks. Which is both good news and bad news: the collapse of global jihad is good, but local jihad requires different strategy and tactics on our part, and success may be difficult to quantify:

In combating terrorism, therefore, quantity matters as much as quality. But some numbers matter more than others. How many additional American and European troops are sent to Afghanistan matters less than the number of terrorist plots that don’t happen. Success will be found subtly in statistics, in data curves that slope down or level off, not in one particular action, one capitulation, or even one leader’s death. It will be marked not by military campaigns and other events but by decisions not taken and attacks not launched. Because participation in the holy war in both its local and global forms is an individual decision, these choices have to be the unit of analysis, and influencing them must be the goal of policy and strategy. As in crime prevention, measuring success—how many potential terrorists did not join an armed group or commit a terrorist act—is nearly impossible. Success against Islamic militancy may wear a veil.