Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why: The 1999 Government Report on Profiling Terrorists

I found this book to be incredibly insightful. This book not only explores al-queda, but several other terrorist organizations around the world. This book is based on numerous studies, spanned over 3-4 decades, and gives psychological, sociological, economical, and educational profiles of people who choose this lifestyle. The Appendix of the book lists many major terrorist groups, their leaders, and what each particular groups ideals and goals are. I do not suggest buying this book if you find reports or statistics boring, as this book has plenty of them. (This was a report published by the U.S. government in 1999) However, if you are very interested in psycholog and what it entails, it is still worth a read as the percentages and stats are relevant to the information in the book.This book also includes an excellent study on female terrorists, which I found to be particularly startling. I was quite unaware of the number of female terrorists formerly or currently involved with these groups, as the most known terrorists in the Western world are male.Some of the statistics in this book were quite surprising to me, such as the education level of these people. This book shows the growing trends in terrorism, and shows how terrorism has evolved over many decades. This book was very helpful in understanding why people commit acts of terrorism and how it may be possible in the future to deal with such people.

Anyone who wants to get a glimpse of just how much is "knowable" should read this book.Though many will find the academic style of this book somewhat daunting, it provides an incredible vantage on just how much our government discovered about international terrorism BEFORE September 11th. If you read this book bearing in mind that its contents are not classified, you can begin to imagine how much specific intelligence the FBI, CIA, and NSA must have -- and now we're creating an Office of Homeland Security?This book will convince you wholly and completely that tragedies like 9/11 are avoidable -- it's not the information that's the problem, it's wether or not that information informs policy. I sure hope this is required reading for our Congress.