Engineers Make Good Terrorists?

An anonymous reader writes "Engineers' focus and attention to details, along with their perceived lack of social skills, make them ideal targets to be recruited as terrorists, according to EETimes. Planning skills make engineers good 'field operatives' was written up by Raphael Perl, who heads the Action against Terrorism Unit of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He offers that 'Engineers ideally make excellent strategic planners, and they make excellent field operatives. They think differently from how other people think.' That may sound like a stereotype, but Perl claims that 'because of those traits, terrorist groups actively recruit engineers.' He says that Al-Qaeda has widely acknowledged that a significant number of the group's top leadership had engineering backgrounds." This is the second time in just a few months that engineers have been likened to terrorists.

Comments

Re:They have the skills, but the desire, maybe not

[chuckymonkey]

Have you ever been in on an interrogation for one of these higher up? Ever met on in person or talked to one? Or are you just pulling that out of your ass? I have personally been there and done all of the above. Iraq 2003-2004 2005-2006 (sneaky bastard). Most of them are pushing a very religous agenda, even the ones high on the food chain aren't doing it because they're opressed, they do it because they want to be the opressor in their region. They want all the mosque's in their area to preach what they want preached and to keep the masses ignorant to garner more power for themselves. Ever seen a body wadi? That's what we called it because that's where we would find all the bodies of a particular tribe that another tribe hated. I was present when we captured a particularly sick imam that made a habit out of raping and beheading people with opposing religous views. Most of the guys planting the bombs don't even necessarily care one way or the other about the position of the person who wants him to do it, usually it's just some poor farmer that had someone offer him money to put a box in a certain place at a certain time. What I think you fail to understand is how the culture in the mid-east works, there is a lot more to it than U.S. vs. Sunni. vs Shiite. There are huge familial bonds, ancient blood feuds, clan feuds, tribal feuds, honor killing, among many other things. All of them want to be the dominant power where they are and after they get it, they want more power and more, it's just the way of things. Not to say that all muslim regions are like this, just the bad ones are like this. I even had a fight with my mother about lumping a whole group of people together, she said some nasty slur about muslims and I lost my cool. Muslims aren't the problem, power hungry religous zealots are the problem. I worked with so many muslims that were great (Gigi, Aziz I'm looking at you) people, fun to be around, and all they wanted is for people to stop fighting and get along. They saw us (U.S. Forces) as the best way of doing that and often they would die for that when another zealot would find out they worked with us. Here's a little story for you, we took a break in the city we were in at a place where the proprietor was friendly towards the U.S. We bought some roasted chicken and were sitting down BSing with him when he received a phone call and immediately ushered us into the back. The reason was that there were some of the above stated assholes coming and he didn't want to have a firefight that could hurt other people, so he hid us in the back. Call it what you will, but the man was just trying to help and get on with his life, the vast majority of muslims want this. The others just want to control these good people.