Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Ignore Social Science but...

The Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress released a report on September 1999, titled "The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?". One of its findings says
Al-Qaida's expected retaliation for the U.S. cruise missile attack against al-Qaida's training facilities in Afghanistan on August 20, 1998, could take several forms of terrorist attack in the nation's capital. Al-Qaida could detonate a Chechen-type building-buster bomb at a federal building. Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House. Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters.

And you already know what happened on September 11, 2001---two years after the report came out. It only shows how Social Science can provide a valuable tool in preventing large-scale mayhem, if only it is given due attention.

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