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Sir, While the alleged Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, may be the “first MBA terrorist” that some Pakistani intelligence officials have ever come across, Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior minister, should not have been surprised “at the profile of this man [as] an unlikely terrorist” (May 8).
According to forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer in Pakistan, Marc Sageman, whose study of 172 al-Qaeda terrorists was published in 2004, the majority of his sample were middle to upper-class, well-educated, married with children, and occupied professional or semi-professional positions, often as engineers, architects, scientists and physicians.
So, once again we have, among those in whose hands our fate lies, a disconnect between perception and reality that surely must be undermining global efforts to understand and respond to the implications of core identities, vicariously shared humiliation, needs for justice and transcendent meaning, and other factors that can turn a healer or a financial analyst into a murderer.
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