09/21/11 – Robert A. Pape and Adam Lankford – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And our next guests are Adam Lankford and Robert A.
Pape.
Robert A.
Pape, many of you are familiar with.
He's been on the show numerous times in the past.
He's the author of the books Dying to Win, the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism and Cutting the Fuse, the Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.
And you'll often hear him cited by Ron Paul in his presidential campaign when he talks about how we got into this mess with the war on terrorism.
And Dr. Adam Lankford is a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama.
From 2003 to 2008, he helped coordinate senior executive anti-terrorism forums for high ranking foreign military and security personnel in conjunction with the U.S.
State Department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program.
And he has a recent piece at the Huffington Post called Ron Paul is wrong about 9-11 studies show.
Welcome both of you to the program.
How are you doing?
Yeah, good.
Good to be here.
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate you both joining us very much on the show here.
So I guess real quick, Adam, we'll start with you.
If you could please explain your studies.
And was it something specific or many different points that Paul made that he was wrong about?
Make your case from your article and then we'll go from there.
Sure.
Well, I guess I would say overall, you know, believe it or not, I don't have a strong political agenda here.
I keep my nose in the books and I'm so busy studying behavior that that kind of politics takes a backseat for me.
What I'm talking about with what Representative Ron Paul got wrong is this idea that foreign occupation directly causes suicide terrorism and that foreign occupation caused 9-11.
I don't disagree that, you know, foreign occupation and that wars overseas can be bad and that bad policies are obviously bad.
But just because they're bad, that doesn't mean they cause suicide terrorism or they caused 9-11.
And you also specifically mentioned Dr.
Pape's books in your article and actually criticized the method of his research as well.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Sure.
You know, well, Dr.
Pape's been working on studying suicide terrorism for a long time, and I certainly appreciate his efforts.
But the bottom line is, you know, I think he's coming to the wrong conclusions, particularly when it comes to foreign occupation.
But, you know, it's hard for me to imagine kind of a more explicitly biased opinion than this kind of simplistic idea that, you know, the U.S. is to blame for bringing kind of 9-11 on itself and that U.S. policy is to blame for suicide terrorism.
The reality is that that suicide terrorists don't operate because of political motives or because of other ideological motives or because of religion.
It's really more about the personal problems in their lives, which then lead them to decide that they want to kill and be killed.
And there are certainly a lot of specific problems I have with the conclusions Dr.
Pape makes.
But I'm not sure we want to get into that level of depth.
Well, we have some time.
Bob, let's go to you now.
It's certainly from my point of view, social science is social science.
It's not really science, science.
And even with science, science, if you ask the wrong question, a lot of times you can get a misleading answer.
And I wonder what you think of the criticism that maybe you're asking the wrong question here.
And that's what's leading you to see occupation as the root rather than.
Right.
Yeah, I'm definitely glad to get into the details here, Scott.
So I think, Adam, we should definitely come back.
Let's get into the details, because that's what Adam wants to do.
And I'm definitely glad to do that.
I've been doing this for 10 years, 24-7, so I have no problem doing that.
But so far, Adam's basic charge is I came to this with a preconceived notion.
I hate America and I think it's occupation that must be driving this.
And there's just this is just poppycock.
In the 1990s, I taught for the U.S.
Air Force.
If you go back and look at my history, you'll see that.
I spend a lot of time over the last 30 years not criticizing America because I hate it, but trying to help us pursue better policies that get things right.
That's what's been happening in my career pretty much since it began in the 1980s.
And I think that's why a lot of folks in Washington have not just generally paid attention.
So this isn't just about Ron Paul.
But much of my research has been funded by the Department of Defense, been funded by the Department of Defense many times, supported by the intelligence community and not just by, say, the Obama, not just Johnny Come Lately, but in fact, starting in 2004, Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department was one of the biggest funders of the work that we're now discussing.
And they're not doing it because they think that this is let's just blame America and for some political advantage.
They really are doing it because there are people, believe it or not, in Washington and around the country who sincerely just want to get things right.
And now, where did I come from this argument?
Well, in the 1990s, as you just heard, I was studying air power.
I wasn't studying terrorism.
I did start to study terrorism after 9-11.
And actually, like a lot of people, I initially thought it was Islamic fundamentalism.
And so what I thought I was going to do was start to collect the detailed biographies of individuals to find the point where these religious extremists would transform and then become violent terrorists, so violent they would want to kill themselves, pretty much the spectrum of radicalization that in some ways Adam supports and many have supported for many, many years.
That's where I started from.
But as I got into the details and as I got deep into the details of not just individual attackers, which I did many, many times, but collecting then the universe, what became the first complete universe of all suicide attacks around the world, then something completely different jumped out at me.
And that was foreign occupation, especially by democracies.
This came from the data itself.
This was also not something that as soon as I saw it, I immediately went and rushed to the press.
It actually I spent two years with the research team in 2002 and 2003, verifying the data in detail, even before the first versions were published.
And then once I got funding from the Defense Department and other sources, I was able to get an even larger research team to collect not just information in English, but in all the key native languages associated with the phenomenon, Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil, Russian.
We sent people to Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, basically to collect information on black markets such as martyr videos.
We probably have the largest martyr video collection in the world at this point.
And much of these detailed documents, by the way, are available on our web post, our website at C-Post.
All right, I'm going to have to hold you there because there's so much to go over already.
Yeah, I'm sorry about sorry, Scott.
There's just a whole lot underneath this idea that somehow I came at this with some preconceived and I hate America.
This is just totally poppycock.
OK, you know, is it possible that someone like Michael Shoyer or someone like Ron Paul or someone like Robert A.
Pape or even myself could have different reasons for concluding that our foreign policy tends to provoke terrorist acts against us and still be America loving patriots with all the best intentions at the very same time or not?
Are we blaming the rape victim here, as you put it in your article?
Really?
Well, what I would say is, yeah, I mean, it's certainly fair to make a distinction between Dr.
Pape.
And I'm glad to hear, you know, that he has no agenda and that, you know, people who cite his research could certainly have a big agenda.
And frankly, you know, their agenda could be to save lives and do the best thing for this country.
So, you know, again, I'm not really against this idea that that we should stop bad policies or stop bad wars.
You know, I'm certainly in favor of that.
I guess a couple of things when we get into the details.
You know, Dr. Pape says a lot of things which sound impressive, you know, about being funded by the government.
And of course, the government wants answers, just like we all do, you know, about how he has the universe of attackers.
But really, it's not how many attackers or how many attacks you can put into a database.
It's how well you understand them in depth that matters.
In one of his previous books, Dying to Win, that came out in 2005, I believe, he claimed to have performed the most, I believe the quote was, comprehensive and reliable study at the time of something like 462 it was at that point, 462 suicide attackers.
And his conclusion based on his research team, which, well, I might not be fair to say, but it seems to me it sounds like it's some graduate students collecting data.
His conclusion was that based on looking at the lives of those 462, that not a single one was depressed, not a single one had been dealing with adultery, not a single one was homosexual, not a single one was struggling with any sort of significant shame.
That's just not credible.
That's not credible.
That's not what people who study and understand other human beings say.
You can't go into a room on the face of the earth and find 462 people and not find one who's depressed, except Dr.
Tate, based on his methods, somehow managed to do that with suicide terrorists.
Dr. Tate?
Yeah, Scott, I think it's just not reading chapters 9 and 10 of Dying to Win closely enough.
I never claimed not a single one was depressed.
That's just not the case.
In fact, I even take into account a lot of the missing data.
The bottom line is that the argument that Adam seems to want to support is that mental illness is what's driving suicide terrorism, that suicide terrorists kill themselves because they're suicidal, not because they're angry at occupation policies.
And that is an argument that has been around for 20 some years.
It was first put forward by Ariel Mirari, an Israeli scholar, and has been widely discredited.
And I do report similar reasons why others have discredited the argument.
But the bottom lines are this, which is folks such as me who have looked in detail with the biographies of the suicide attackers that we can look at typically find that about 3 to 5 percent seem to have serious signs of what you would call depression, serious signs that would show up by clinical psychiatrists as counting for depression for ordinary suicide.
And I say that not simply because I've counted these up, but in 2004, I was part of meetings with the Department of Homeland Security with Mirari himself, where the FBI's clinical psychiatrist and forensic psychiatrist, which the FBI actually has, real professionals, basically grilled Mirari and destroyed his arguments right in front of everybody, including people from Israel, that is Israel's Department of Homeland Security, essentially pointing out that the indicators he's using of mood swings, broken homes, distance from family, that are simply soft indicators that would fit about 50 percent of all American adolescents or people in their 20s at some point in their lives, and not the kind of harder indicators that clinical psychologists would point to, such as persistent, recurring suicidal thoughts, independent of circumstance, that is not simply as a function of, say, living under an occupation, that is weeks alone in self-isolation, or multiple bouts of crying spontaneously where the crying goes on for hours on end.
I'm not seeing any of those show up in Adam's work.
Now, maybe they do.
They seem to show up, again, about 3 or 4 percent of the cases, as I report in Dying to Win, and as others, like Mark Sageman, have reported as well, but the softer indicators are just simply too present, and they're present in virtually every group of adolescents all around the world, and so if they really were driving at these soft indicators, we would just see fantastic numbers of suicide attackers pretty much everywhere, from pretty much every type of society.
And so, anyway, for those long sets of reasons, I and many others have simply long discounted mental illness of depression that would lead to ordinary suicide, leading to suicide terrorism.
Well, on the other hand, you have a lot of occupied people and very few who actually participate in suicide attacks, so what does make those individuals special?
Yeah, that's an excellent point, Scott.
There are far more people who are living in occupied lands than living in occupied lands and are suicidal and are exploited by terrorist organizations.
It's about being precise and narrowing the net.
Explanations like foreign occupation, that just doesn't hold.
Again, Adam, you need to go and read Chapter 6 of Dying to Win.
So I spent about 100 pages in Dying to Win, the first book, so Dying to Win is not just an op-ed piece, it's kind of extended here.
There's a 100-page analysis to answer the question, why some occupations and not others?
And actually, Scott's allowed me to talk about this at some length in some of his previous shows because it is very, very important.
But basically what I did is I looked at, again, I'm showing that about 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to occupations by democracies.
And you're saying, well, there are many, many of these.
Well, that's true.
And in fact, some political scientists have done some counting work for me.
There's a polity data set that actually counts approximately 50, between about 59, actually, occupations by democracies in the 1980s and 1990s.
So what I did is I did analysis of those to try to figure out what was it about the nine that led to the suicide terrorism.
And there are two specific factors which jump out.
Number one is prior rebellion.
Suicide terrorism is a strategy that's adopted by groups in rebellion to a occupation.
But typically, only after a prior rebellion has not only broken out, that is a prior ordinary rebellion with no suicide attack, but it's not only broken out, but also failed to end the occupation.
So issue number one is prior rebellion.
And we would not be too surprised once we understand that suicide terrorism is a strategy of last resort.
And that's what the data shows.
Issue number two is when there is an occupation that also has a religious difference, that is where there's a different religion predominantly in the occupier society and predominantly in the occupied society.
And when that religious difference occurs, it's not that some religions are more prone to do this than others.
It's that when there's a religious difference, the terrorist leader is able to paint the occupier as the religious aggressor, essentially scaring the bejesus out of the local community.
Anyway, let me stop you there.
Let me stop you there.
You've used as an example in the past Sri Lanka, where neither side is Muslim and Sudan, where there's massive violence and everybody's Muslim and there's no suicide terrorism in Sudan and plenty in Sri Lanka to illustrate that point in the past.
But I need to turn the mic over to Adam Langford here and let him get some words in, although he's on the offensive and you're defending.
I understand you need to try to draw out your points.
But Adam, I want to ask you, it seems to me like, you know, to say that politics, it's just not about politics or something kind of runs up against just the facts of, for example, Hezbollah and their long term suicide campaign that ended as soon as the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended.
Right.
And now Osama Bin Laden never blew himself up, but the guys that he recruited to blow themselves up, he recruited with a bunch of shtick about how America occupies the Holy Peninsula, et cetera, et cetera, supports Israel.
Right.
Well, there's no doubt that terrorist propaganda uses religion and it uses foreign occupation and it uses, you know, political arguments.
You know, terrorist propaganda has a whole bunch of stuff in it.
What I would say is, you know, if you if you simply believe what the terrorists say, you know, it's going to lead you astray.
You're falling for that.
I think the question is, what do the volunteer suicide bombers believe?
Not not whether we believe Osama bin Laden is an honest guy.
He's obviously a lying, murdering manipulator.
But what he's telling his recruits is that this is about politics.
And he cites Israel and the Arabian Peninsula and the blockade against Iraq of the 1990s, et cetera, like that.
In fact, in in the looming tower, Lawrence Wright says that Muhammad Attah filled out his last will and testament when Israel reinvaded southern Lebanon and did Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, which also takes up, you know, four or five paragraphs, I think, in bin Laden's original fatwa of 96.
Well, what I would say is you're absolutely right about terrorist leaders and you're absolutely right about the terrorists, but you're not right about the suicide terrorists.
Suicide terrorists, you know, far and away are individuals who were not politically very active and then something goes wrong in their life, unwanted pregnancy, divorce, other sort of family problems.
They get sick.
They have a disability.
They have someone in their family dies.
All of a sudden they have a crisis and that's what actually leads them to want to die and kill.
Now, certainly, you know, overall, do they would they prefer that, you know, Islamic fundamentalist forces win?
Sure, they would.
But it's not their primary goal.
It's really, you know, just like Dr.
Pape himself would admit that religion is not the primary goal.
Scott, I would just simply ask your listeners to reflect on the type of family crises that Adam has just laid out and to ask, don't they already know people in their lives who fit that description?
And don't they?
And isn't it the case that this is simply true of many hundreds of millions of people of the six and a half billion people on our planet?
Yeah, I think we've heard that argument before.
If this really is true, then we should basically see suicide terrorism as a pretty constant factor, not ebbing and flowing with respect to foreign occupation, as you just pointed out with Lebanon and as our work shows in many other cases, but basically as a constant factor around the planet.
And that's just not what we see.
Suicide terrorism.
Let me let me respond to that.
You know, it's just it's just so clear that when you're talking, you don't understand what suicidal people are like when you act like, you know, they're just kind of going to walk around in a daze and crying.
You know, there are millions of families who didn't see any of those kind of signs.
And then their their family member killed themselves.
Now, when it comes to the problems I mentioned, you know, what about cases of murder, suicide?
That's one of the things I've done, I've paralleled the lives of people who commit suicide terrorism with lots of people can commit murder, suicide in places just like the US.
Now, some people commit murder, suicide in the US because they get fired from their jobs.
It's a fact.
It's not it's not debatable.
It's a fact.
They get fired.
The next day they go into work and they start shooting.
Now, what you could say with your kind of logic here is, oh, well, you know, if that was true, everyone who gets fired from a job would then go in and commit an act of murder, suicide.
It's just not true.
Some people do and some people don't.
Certainly there are individual differences.
But that's the perfect example, Adam, which is that, let's say as many as three percent of the people who get fired from their job go out and commit murder, suicide.
That's an absurdly high number, by the way.
OK, right.
That's my point.
That's my point.
My point is not that I'm denying that that happened.
What you're claiming is that that's the dominant feature of suicide terrorists, which means it must character characterize the vast majority.
And what I'm telling you is that, in fact, it just simply it just simply doesn't hold up.
And if it did, we would see it pretty much at a steady state.
Now, what we could argue about the level of that state, but pretty much as a steady state in pretty much every country in the world.
And we just simply don't see that.
And and I would also just point out that, OK, let's let's just sort of kind of get into the details.
I'm not claiming that every ordinary suicide went through these bouts of crying or went through.
But in fact, about 50 percent, if you go and look at the literature, the clinical literature on ordinary suicide, you'll discover that about half of all those people who commit suicide, ordinary suicide have been hospitalized for clinical depression, where these are the hard indicators that led to their hospitalization.
Then they were released and then they went after multiple attempts at committing suicide, actually succeeding.
Now, of course, there are some that don't fit that profile.
But what I'm trying to tell you is you're you're taking essentially two or three percent of the sample and trying to extend this over all of the group.
And it's just simply not correct.
It seems to me now I read a book called Perfect Soldiers by a L.A.
Times reporter named Terry McDermott.
It was primarily concerned with the Hamburg cell, you know, the muscle hijackers that were brought in toward the end.
Nobody knows as much about them, but this guy wrote the biography basically of the Hamburg cell.
And those guys didn't seem like they were all suicidal to me.
They actually they all had, you know, pretty good lives going on.
And there's one I believe is Marwan.
All she is portrayed as always going back and forth.
He's got a wife and a family going on that he's dedicated to.
And yet, on the other hand, he's a soldier dedicated to this mission.
It's not that he wanted to end his life.
He, in fact, I think, risked the mission by traveling back to Europe to see his wife one last time and things like this.
And the whole group of them, none of them are portrayed as, you know, wanting to die.
And now they just want to go out in a blaze of glory at all.
They all seem to they wanted to go fight against the Russians or they wanted to go fight against, you know, some imperialist force encroaching on Muslim land one way or the other.
And they got recruited into this game, you know?
Yeah, well, I see what you're saying, but frankly, that's not my reading of of the evidence even portrayed in that book, Perfect Soldiers.
You know, if you look at Mohammed Ata, I mean, even other Islamic fundamentalists in Germany thought Mohammed Ata stood out as abnormal and they were right.
You know, he was so lonely and bitter.
I mean, there are a remarkable number of things in his life which help explain why he would have become suicidal.
Now, again, you know, suicide's not a simple thing.
And certainly there are a lot of factors in there.
Well, in organizing the takeover of four planes and crashing them into high profile targets on the East Coast is no simple thing either.
Right.
But the point is, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of suicide.
Suicidal people can be completely rational.
They can plan things out.
I mean, look at the the Columbine attacks.
The kids who carried out the Columbine attacks, Eric Harrison and Dylan Klebold, they put a tremendous amount of planning.
They're planning that attack for more than a year.
You know, they planted bombs.
They planted extra bombs.
You know, they wrote long notes.
So and then they shot themselves in the head.
So just because you're suicidal and you're set on murder, suicide doesn't mean you can't act rationally and carry out what seems to be a very strategic plan.
Again, I think that I just encourage the those listening to accept that Adam's right, probably about three or four percent of the time, and that if he was right, even more than 50 percent of the time, we just simply wouldn't see suicide terrorism rise when we have foreign occupations and decline when we don't.
The other thing I'd like to add, though, is that occupation itself can be a cause of mental illness.
There's a great book written called The Wretched of the Earth by Fanon.
This is a book that was written about the French occupation of Algeria during the Cold War.
So it's an old book.
But I'd ask your listeners to go and check this book out because they often don't see the whole second half of the book, which is called Mental Illness, where there's profile after profile, detailed profile after detailed profile of how the occupation itself in various specifically different micro ways produces mental what we've come to think is mental illness.
But the root is the occupation itself, which is why we do see in some occupations, we do see some mental illness.
It does tend to come.
And this has been something we've known now for really 40 some years.
Well, I just look at all the PTSD among the soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan and think what it's like for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, the civilians in these war zones.
Exactly.
Well, that's actually somewhere where we agree, Scott.
You know, in fact, I sent a note to Dr.
Baker about, you know, eight or nine months ago, basically saying that thing, that his foreign occupation thesis makes the most sense when you look at foreign occupation as a cause of things like mental illness and suicidal behavior.
You know, but again, it's the difference between saying the political ideology, you know, people don't get mad, walked up to a terrorist recruiter and say, I want to murder myself.
They do get mad and walk up to a terrorist recruiter and say, I want to fight.
But if, you know, if somebody drops a bomb on your family members, that may cause you to become suicidal.
So that is something we agree on.
All right.
Well, and we're way over time already, at least what was asked for.
Is it OK to keep y'all going or?
You know what?
We're I'm actually got a whole group of students out here.
I have a seminar, you know, like, you know, and I'm sure Adam can appreciate that.
Sure.
We have a seminar that's already I'm already five minutes late for.
OK, well, we'll leave it there at a good point where everybody agreed that being occupied might drive a man mad and and leave it right there.
Thanks very much to both of you.
Thank you, John.
Glad to do it.
OK, bye everybody.
That is Adam Lankford from the University of Alabama and Robert A.
Pape from the University of Chicago.