The Art of Knowing the Enemy
At home, law-enforcement officials refer to Mohamed Atta, suspected as the ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, as a criminal mastermind rather than as a military lieutenant dutifully following orders. The men he led are called suicide attackers, as if they were puppets afflicted with some sort of self-destructive psychosis rather than troops employing what is an extreme but by no means unusual military tactic: sacrificing their own handful of lives to achieve an overall objective deemed vital to their cause.

This basic error in profiling — treating terrorists as criminals rather than as soldiers — is the source from which other errors have sprung and continue to flow. What sane man, our officials have reasoned, abandons a loving family to engage in a suicidal crime? So the attackers must be insane. Yet would those same American officials and analysts make similar pronouncements about our own special forces troops who have died in high-risk operations? The willingness to sacrifice one's own life is not, in the context of military psychology, a foolproof gauge of mental imbalance. It can just as often — perhaps far more often — be evidence of a deep commitment.

Our lack of understanding of these men has even colored our interpretation of the bin Laden videotape. Even among anti-bin Laden Muslim commentators, there has been little if any suggestion that his occasional chuckling on the tape is intended as mockery of the Qaeda members who died in the attacks, as American officials characterized it. Rather, he is seen as expressing awe at the extent of their discipline and the damage they inflicted — just as Americans might quietly and admiringly chuckle at the amazing bravery and effectiveness of their own dead soldiers.

The mistaken ideas that Mr. bin Laden is scoffing at his followers and that the average Islamic terrorist is an unbalanced, suicidal misfit are more than just useless: this sort of profiling actively hampers the kind of genuine understanding that will help American citizens engage in constructive discrimination between those few Muslims who may be dangerous and the far greater number who have been placed under the pall of suspicion simply by virtue of their names, their nationalities and their religion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/21/opinion/21CARR.html