Richard Reid and Jose Padilla - the enemy within

While all eyes were fixed on men of Middle Eastern origin, the two closest threats to a follow-up terrorist attack by Al Qaida since September 11th came instead from from British and American citizens. Most certainly they will not be last to launch suicide and terrorist attacks against Western countries in the name of Bin Laden. This begs the question of what motivates and lies behind the psychology of these two individuals and the capacity for Al Qaida to recruit directly from natives within the countries it wishes to attack. Reid’s attempt to blow an airliner and Padilla’s plans to detonate a nuclear dirty bomb will be repeated by other of their ilk.

Indeed, as was the case within the Al Qaida training camps and terrorist activities, such elements will have to prove themselves more worthy and daring than their Arab and Middle Eastern comrades, in order to earn their trust and respect. In many ways such elements can be even more fanatical than other with these cults of terror. The psychological profiles of these two individuals reveal some interesting similarities of the types likely to become involved in groups like Al Qaida.

Unlike John Walker Lindh, whose case has been commented on in more detail in another article Reid and Padilla do not come from comfortable upper-middle class backgrounds. Lindh’s type is also potentially dangerous and comments also on the disturbed state of a section of disillusioned middle class youth in the US and the West generally. As far as background is concerned, Lindh is a perverse inverted doppelganger of the hippy intellectuals and revolutionaries of the ’60’s, which rejected conservative values and morals of the earlier generation and turned to drugs, free love, women’s liberation and left wing causes.

Conversely, Lindh sought to spurn the hyper-liberalism of northern California and modern American society. He sought out discipline, rules, limits, values, extreme reactionary morals, visions and perspectives, which he found were not offered by the family or society in the USA. In certain ways, we will see the same to be true of Reid and Padilla. Although because their backgrounds and histories are quite different to Lindh, they would appear to contradict one another, but in fact Reid/Padilla and Lindh are two sides of the same coin.

While Lindh may be reminiscent of the hippy revolt in reverse, types like Reid and Padilla are more similar to the lower class, unemployed and ghettoized youths of Belfast who became the terrorist foot soldiers of the IRA and Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the paramilitary death squads in Serbia, terrorist groups Latin America, the Basque and Corsican nationalist in Spain and France and the urban guerrilla movements in Argentina. They come from the more underprivileged, urban poor, the socially excluded and hopeless layers who see no future in a society where they have few prospects and where they grow up in a climate of crime and violence.

Both Reid and Padilla were young and vicious criminals. Reid was a mugger and thief, a violent criminal who was involved in many fights while in prison. Padilla’s record was more impressive a street gang member with many convictions for violent crime, armed robbery and shootings. Both came from deprived areas and dysfunctional families. Interesting both had fatherless or dysfunctional fathers. Padilla’s father died when he was three years old and Reid’s father was in prison when he was born. Both appeared to feel themselves socially excluded and to not fit in with society. They seemed both to have identity crises. Reid was born of a white British mother and a mixed Jamaican father, leaving partly within and outside of both communities. Padilla appears to originate from Puerto Rican origins, but chose to classify himself as Afro-American. The two of them began their conversion to Islam while in goal and on release changed to Islamic names and became involved in Islamic mosques and gravitated toward extremist gatherings.