The
many faces of a homegrown
terrorist By Dinesh Sharma
While American media were apoplectic over
"Weiner-Gate", a global terrorism trial came to an
end in Chicago. Americans shocked by congressman
Anthony Weiner's aberrant behavior, namely, the
leakage of his private self represented as tweets
in the public square, may not have fully paid
attention to the mind of a terrorist.
There is a common element between the
aberrant and the deranged - dissociation. In the
age of Twitter, where no private transgression can
remain hidden for very long, we can venture to
make the linkage between the private and the
public, the individual and the collective, and
perhaps better understand the psychology of
terrorism.
In the age of social media,
privacy as we knew it is a thing of the
past; almost everything that
we define as personal can now be accessed in the
public domain.
In the past week, those
concerned with homegrown terrorism were shocked to
learn about the tightly compartmentalized -
complex, multiple and divided - chambers inside
the mind of a Pakistani-American terrorist, David
Coleman Headley, who managed to penetrate and dupe
intelligence authorities across many cultural and
international borders.
When United States
Federal authorities finally nabbed him in October
2009, they released a complaint against him and
his alleged accomplice, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, for
plotting attacks against a Danish newspaper,
Jyllands-Posten, over the printing an inflammatory
caricature.
In December 2009, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation also accused Headley of
planning the massive 2008 Mumbai attacks in India
in which 164 people were killed; of providing
material support to a terrorist group,
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT), and aiding in the murder
of American citizens.
Headley, who pleaded
guilty to 12 counts, faces life in prison and a
hefty fine. He has in turn fingered his friend
Rana for a role in the Mumbai attacks. Headley cut
a plea deal to avoid extradition to India, Denmark
or Pakistan and not to face the death penalty. The
trial that concluded on June 9 found Rana guilty
on two counts of plotting against the Danish
newspaper and aiding the LeT, but did not find
complicity in the planning of the Mumbai attacks.
In addition to confirming the now
well-publicized role of Pakistan's Inter-Service
Intelligence (ISI) in the planning of the Mumbai
attacks, the trial of Headley brought to light the
"multiple personalities" or "dissociative
identities" of a home-grown terrorist, offering an
object lesson to psychologists and security
experts alike. His complicated story has already
generated a documentary; it might even be ideal
for a HBO docudrama.
A quick glance at
Headley's profile reveals the presence of deep
fissures, splits or dissociations in his
personality profile at different phases of his
life. Not surprisingly, Headley was indeed
diagnosed with a multiple personality disorder
(MPD) in 1992, so I learned while trying to
confirm my clinical hypothesis. However, the
circumstances surrounding his illness and
diagnosis remain murky.
He was known as
Daood Sayed Gilani in the Pakistani-American
community of New York, Chicago and Philadelphia as
well as in his ancestral homeland of Pakistan.
Before turning into a terrorist, in the 1980s and
1990s Headley was a small-business owner running
mostly bars and video rental stores. In 2001, to
absolve himself of multiple drug charges for
smuggling heroin from Pakistan, he became an
informant for the Drug Enforcement Authority
(DEA).
While conducting undercover
surveillance for the DEA, Headley started to make
contacts deep within LeT during 2002 and 2003. "He
just turns around immediately and betrays
everybody when it's convenient for him," says one
terrorism analyst.
After repeat visits
with the LeT, one of the more effective
step-children of the ISI, he began to assume
responsibility for the execution of the 2008
Mumbai attacks and other terrorist activities. "A
dream come true for LeT," according to another
security analyst. In Headley, the LeT found "the
perfect terrorist", an American guy with money, a
US passport and the ability go in and out of the
country without any suspicions or interrogations.
In 2006, Headley dropped his Islamic name,
adopted an American identity and his mother's
surname to hide his Pakistani-Muslim contacts and
make travel to India easier. At the time, even his
close friends and associates could not have
imagined what he was planning. "David Headley is
insane ... no person with a brain could do these
things," said Rana's wife.
The clinical
diagnosis of MPD is not easily obtained or simply
doled out; it constitutes a rare
psychopathological condition in the general
population. But in the case of this
Pakistani-American jihadi, who was born in 1960 in
Washington DC, not too far from the steps of the
Capitol, it seems to fit.
In 1992 and
during other stressful life-transitions, Headley
may have displayed the full-blown markers of MPD
as outlined in the diagnostic and statistical
manual of the American Psychiatric Association
(APA):
Disruption of identity characterized by two or
more distinct personality states, one rooted in
Pakistan and the other in America.
Dissociation of important personal information
from everyday events as a result of living two or
more separate lives
Significant distress and impairment in social,
occupational or other important areas of
functioning.
Headley's different personalities were not
seen as a "normal" part of a broadly accepted
cultural framework.
Developmentally, the
divided lives of Headley may have begun at the
beginning. He is the son of a Pakistani diplomat,
Sayed Salim Gilani, and an American mother, Serill
Headley, both of whom were employed at the
Pakistani Embassy in Washington at the time of his
birth.
Headley spent part of his childhood
at an elite preparatory school for the military,
Cadet College Hasan Abdal in Punjab province,
after his father divorced and moved the family
back to Pakistan. Raised as a devout Muslim, at
this school he may have received a strong dose of
radicalization. He met his childhood friend and
later apparent accomplice, Rana, at the military
academy and the two became life-long friends and
business associates.
The Islamic world of
his father would crash head-on with the secular
lifestyle his mother offered him in the US. In
1977, at the age of 17 due to the changing
political climate in Pakistan, Headley's American
mother moved him to Philadelphia where she ran a
bar called the Khyber Pass.
During
turbulent teenage years, while experimenting with
American values Headley began to show signs of
fanaticism by rebelling against his mother's open
or "libertine" choices and professed to dislike
all non-Muslims.
Headley himself could not
have imagined that his hatred was so deep-seated
that it would propel him so far along the path of
jihad. He managed to infiltrate the ISI, the LeT,
the DEA and dodge the Indian security forces by
assuming different disguises, just as he courted
and divorced a string of women in the US and
Pakistan.
"Most people have contradictions
in their lives, but they learn to reconcile them,"
William Headley, Headley's uncle told a reporter,
"But Daood could never do that. The left side does
not speak to the right side."
Headley's
fanaticism, rooted in a sickness, seems hidden and
tucked away in the compartments of his deranged
mind. Its low-grade variant may be found at much
reduced frequency and wavelength among those who
live with divided loyalties across different
cultural and national boundaries.
This
type of homegrown anti-Americanism may be more
virulent than we think, much more dangerous than
the salacious tweets sent from a US congressman's
personal blackberry.
Dinesh
Sharma is author of Barack Obama in Hawaii
and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President
(ABC-CLIO/Praeger, 2011).
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