Psychologists and psychiatrists often deal with faulty thinking. Without realizing it, some women will hurt their husbands because of unresolved father issues. Kids will run screaming from a friendly dog because of a long-ago dog bite. Mental health professionals help people find their faulty internal "programming". Sometimes they ask patients to review horrible events, working out where the error lies. Then the doctor will help the patient change thought patterns to end the pain.
Death cults like Hamas and al Qaeda "reprogram" people to commit suicide attacks. In a perversion of the mental health healing process, they change their human weapon's thinking to override her natural drive of self-preservation, replacing it with motivation to kill herself in the name of some greater cause.
Ultimately defeating these death cults requires understanding this reprogramming process well enough to counteract it. By the time someone is programmed to blow herself up in a crowded market, it's too late. Eventually you must give people the mental tools and motivations to resist death cult recruitment and reprogramming. But understanding the reprogramming and recruitment process is very difficult, because the results of that programming is destroyed along with the life of the suicide bomber. There is no "crash dump" left over to examine.
Fox News reports on a female homicide bomber that was caught before completing her mission:
At this moment, Rania is precious. The size and gruesome effectiveness of the Al Qaeda female homicide bomber program in Iraq has surprised and appalled everyone here. There is a report that there are another four "on the loose" somewhere in Diyala province. For both Iraqi and American forces desperately working to crack the homicide network and find the ringleaders, any first-hand "lead" — and future witness — like Rania is extremely useful.
Yes, she is useful on a tactical basis. But she is also useful on a more strategic basis--to understand and counteract the threat posed by the twisted ideologies of the death cults.
Interviewing Rania is like examining a computer program crash dump. The interviewer can probe how she thinks, looking for ways to undo the programming and build up resistances to that programming in other potential human weapons.
I hope she gets the professional help she needs to undo the perversions visited upon her, and that eventually she can help other women resist the evil suicide bomber weaponization process.
