X-URL: http://www.ohio.com/home/docs_news/006109.htm Published Wednesday, October 24, 2001, in the Akron Beacon Journal.

Experts explain terrorist training
Cult leaders can destroy person's ability to think, creating human bombs BY THRITY UMRIGAR
Beacon Journal staff writer When Stow businessman Ron Taggart read about a recruiting technique used by al-Qaeda, he felt a jolt of recognition.

The terrorist organization reportedly had asked a potential recruit to stay in a room until someone came for him. The youth waited alone for three days. Finally, a man showed up and told him he had failed his test because he had looked out of a window a few times while he waited.

"Osama bin Laden is taking thought reform to levels I haven't seen," Taggart said. "They are sifting for someone who is extremely obedient."

As someone who belonged to a radical Christian cult for six years in the 1970s, Taggart knows about mind control, thought reform and blind allegiance.

"If you can convince someone they are sacrificing for God and country, they will sacrifice a lot," he said. "That's the key.

It's getting them to believe a world view."

Today, Taggart is the vice president of Cult Information Services of Northeast Ohio, a group that works to monitor cults. He helped organize a conference titled "Cults and Terrorism: Abuse of the Vulnerable," being held Friday through Sunday at the Hilton Cleveland South Hotel in Independence.

Sponsored by the Connecticut-based Leo J. Ryan Education Foundation, the conference is designed to bring together national experts in the cult awareness field. It will examine such topics as "Understanding the Making of the Terrorist" and "Extreme Belief: How and When does Religion Become Violent?"

Understanding the mind of a terrorist is vitally important for government officials, according to Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, co-authors of the book Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change. The two, who were honored at last year's foundation conference, have been studying cults since the 1970s and have long warned about the possibility of terrorism in America.

"The government must educate our intelligence forces on this mind-set," Siegelman said. "They have almost manically denied that this has been going on for a quarter of the century."

For instance, transfixed by the recent anthrax scare, most Americans do not know that the first bioterrorist attack in America was in 1984, when followers of the Rajneesh cult spread salmonella germs in a town in Oregon.

But how do cult leaders get young men to turn themselves into human bombs?

Conway said thought-stopping techniques, such as extended repetition of prayers and chants, literally destroy a person's ability to think.

Siegelman pointed out that letters by Mohamed Atta, who is suspected of being the chief hijacker on one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center, show how he worked himself into a trance before stepping onto the plane.

"Saying a prayer a thousand times -- that's just a way of jamming anything human from coming into his brain," he said.

One characteristic of Messianic religions, or cults, is to divide the world into good and evil and to identify the struggle as a cosmic one, said Stephen Kent, a professor of the psychology of religion at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

These religions often have a charismatic leader, said Kent, who is speaking at the conference.

"The common refrain of former cult members is that they would've died for their leader," Kent said. "Suicide for a holy cause is not as mysterious as it first seems."

Whether accidentally or on purpose, he said, bin Laden has capitalized on the Saudi tradition "of a spiritual leader going into hiding only to return at the end of time to lead the utopian community."

Kent said the teachings of any religion can be distorted for political gain. Terrorists "dip into the mainstream aspects of this tradition, extract an array of ideas on the value of martyrdom and use this to justify violent action."

Conway and Siegelman said the U.S. government must distinguish between terrorist leaders and their rank-and-file followers.

It is also imperative for the United States to resolve basic issues of justice and oppression in the Middle East, they added. And moderate Muslim clergy must be used to counteract militant messages being preached to poor and illiterate children in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But in the meantime, Conway said, people must understand that terrorists are made and not born.

"The hardest thing to understand," she said, "is that the mind itself can be captured and made into a machine."

Thrity Umrigar can be reached at 330-996-3174 or at tumrigar@thebeaconjournal.com

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