This from NPR this morning:
There's a pattern to recent terror attacks in the United States: Americans — either citizens or residents — have been behind them. In the past two years, dozens of American citizens and residents have been arrested on terrorism charges.
In some cases, the suspects were young Muslims traveling overseas to train for violent jihad. In others, they're accused of actually trying to launch attacks. Attorney General Eric Holder said homegrown terrorism is one of those things that keeps U.S. officials awake at night.
The findings that [Quintan Wiktorowicz] came up with based upon his work really shattered some of the stereotypes we have about Muslims and radicalization.
- Christine Fair, expert on terrorism and radicalization
Now there is someone new at the National Security Council who won't be getting much sleep: He's a former Rhodes College professor named Quintan Wiktorowicz, and he's an expert on, among other things, how some people decide to become terrorists.
Do homegrown American terrorists have something in common? Here's my take on it, previously published int he Homeland Security Review:
America’s Homegrown Terrorists of the 21st Century:
The Disgruntled, the Obsessed, and the Mad… Three Types, One Challenge?
By
James Ottavio Castagnera
Abstract
While the “War on Terror” typically is taken to designate the actions, foreign and domestic, directed at Al Qaeda and its allies (e.g., the Taliban), and although the attacks of September 11, 2001, were (and remain) unprecedented, America’s homegrown terrorists pose a far more serious threat to public safety and the commonweal. These native sons and daughters fall into three principal categories:
(1) Disgruntled individuals with an ax to grind. They are exemplified in this article by the government scientist who the FBI now believes perpetrated the Anthrax attacks, which followed close on the heals of Nine/Eleven, in 2001;
(2) The obsessed, represented here by the radical animal-rights activists.
(3) The mentally disturbed, characterized in this study by those who have committed individual acts of murder and mayhem on college campuses, most notably the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007.
The author argues that, long after radical Islam has been eradicated or otherwise pacified, the threat posed by these homegrown terrorists will continue to plague our democracy, challenging our ability to remain a free and open society. Therefore, we must better understand these three varieties of domestic terrorists. In so doing, we may conclude they comprise but three breeds within a single species. If so, then preventative measures, found to be effective in one arena, may be applicable in all. These may include advanced profiling procedures.
Biographical Statement
James Ottavio Castagnera, J.D., Ph.D., has spent more than 25 years practicing, writing about, and teaching law. He is an expert in employment law and policy, and is well acquainted with many aspects of higher education law and policy, as well. In 2007, as an Academic Fellow on Terrorism of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, he joined 44 other academic fellows in studying counter-terrorism in Israel. His 17 published books include Al Qaeda Goes to College: Impact of the War on Terror on American Higher Education (Praeger, 2009) and Ned MacAdoo and Molly Maguires, a self-published novel about domestic terrorism in the 19th and 21st centuries. He also has published numerous magazine and newspaper articles on domestic terrorism. As Associate Provost and Associate Counsel for Academic Affairs at Rider University, he is intimately involved in that institution’s emergency planning and response initiatives.
INTRODUCTION
While the “War on Terror” typically is taken to designate the actions, foreign and domestic, directed at Al Qaeda and its allies (e.g., the Taliban), and although the attacks of September 11, 2001, were (and remain) unprecedented, America’s homegrown terrorists pose a far more serious threat to public safety and the commonweal. These native sons and daughters fall into three principal categories:
(1) Disgruntled individuals with an ax to grind. They are exemplified in this article by the government scientist who the FBI now believes perpetrated the Anthrax attacks, which followed close on the heals of Nine/Eleven, in 2001;
(2) The mentally disturbed, characterized in this study by those who have committed individual acts of murder and mayhem on college campuses, most notably the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007; and,
(3) The obsessed, represented here by the radical animal-rights activists.
It is this author’s view that long after radical Islam has been eradicated or otherwise pacified, the threat posed by these homegrown terrorists will continue to plague our democracy, challenging our ability to remain a free and open society. If that is true, then understanding what, if anything, these three categories of terrorists have in common may be crucial to meeting this threat in an effective and efficient manner. Predicting terrorist potential may be critical to preventing it. And advanced profiling may be key to such predictive capabilities.
PART I
The Disgruntled: The 2001 Anthrax Attacks
In the weeks, months, and, inevitably, years following the Nine-Eleven attacks, Rider University was impacted by the resulting “War on Terror” in a wide variety of ways, as was all of American Higher Education. The first such impact was felt as early as September 18, 2001, when letters postmarked from Trenton-area post offices and containing anthrax spores arrived in the offices of two U.S. senators and several news media organizations, ultimately killing five people and making another 17 or so ill.
The FBI visited the biology labs on every college campus along the Route One corridor between New York and Philadelphia. Rider’s single science building was no exception. Nothing suspicious was found there. Nothing suspicious was found in any other university lab in the region. However, the nearby Hamilton post office, which had handled some of the letters, was closed, not to reopen until three-and-a-half years later.
On the silly side of the 2001-02 anthrax attacks, this author received a call early one morning from Rider’s manager of environmental health and safety, Darryl Blusnavage. She advised me that a member of the Admissions staff had reported the presence of an unidentified white powder on the table where the mail was usually opened. She recommended we contact the Trenton-area first-responders. This, she said, might entail the evacuation of the building and perhaps even hospitalization of its occupants. I asked her to hold her fire.
Finding his four-digit extension in the campus directory, I rang up Dr. John Sheats, chair of the Chemistry Department. Dr. Sheats obligingly collected a sample of the mysterious powder and ran it through the department’s spectrometer. A half hour later he called me back.
“It’s sugah,” he reported in his Southern drawl. Only after the analysis was conveyed by the Dean of Students to her staff did several of them recall the birthday cake that had been cut on that table the day before.
Meanwhile, the bureau also intensely investigated Uncle Sam’s own bio-weapons facilities, including Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. The investigation proved to be one involving needles and haystacks.
Eventually, FBI suspicions focused on a bio-weapons researcher named Steven Hatfill. Indeed, after years of investigating, the agency’s only “person of interest” was this Fort Detrick alumnus. Although never indicted, Hatfill’s POI status was enough to make him a leper to his profession, essentially unemployable. At last, the government admitted it was trailing the wrong guy. In June 2008, Hatfill received a $5.85 million settlement.
With Hatfill off the (exceedingly short) FBI hit list, old leads were reviewed, witnesses revisited, and a new suspect emerged. On Tuesday, July 29, 2008, amidst rumors that this time indictments would be forthcoming, another Fort Detrick denizen, Bruce E. Ivins, killed himself. Attorneys representing Ivins, age 62, in the government investigation, put their client’s death down to a fragile personality that succumbed to pressure.
“The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways on different people,” Bethesda criminal-defense attorney Paul Kemp commented of the client he had represented for more than a year. “In Dr. Ivins’ case, it led to his untimely death.”
The publicly available evidence against Ivans was circumstantial but somewhat compelling. Of some 33 years as an Army scientist, Ivins’ last 18 were spent at Fort Detrick and apparently were devoted in large part to anthrax. Between December 2001 and April 2002, Ivins secretly swabbed and bleached some 20 work areas that he claimed had been contaminated with anthrax by a sloppy lab technician and then kept his cleanup under wraps. When those illegal activities came to light, he claimed he couldn’t recall whether or not he had gone back to re-swab the contaminated spots to insure that no spores remained. A former co-worked commented in the media, “That’s bull. If there’s contamination, you always re-swab. And you would remember doing it.”
The newspaper reports indicated that the second round of FBI investigations benefited from better genetic technology that made a match between the spores sent through the Postal Service and those with which Ivins had worked.
If Ivins was guilty, one irony in the case is that he earlier had helped the FBI analyze the anthrax sent to the senators’ offices. However, unless the Department of Justice has some direct evidence yet to be made public, we apparently can’t be certain that Ivins’ death closes the case. What, for instance, may have been his motive? Reports read by this author to date don’t seem to say. Au contraire, the Washington Post reported on August 1st that in 2003, “Ivins and two of his colleagues at the… U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick… received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine.” This doesn’t sound like the same guy whom five years later the DOJ was ready to indict. Yet, added the Post, prosecutors were considering including a request for the death penalty.
Closure of this case, which is older even than the war in Iraq, would add a note of finality to at least one ugly incident in the eight-year-old War on Terror. We probably are there yet. But if Ivins is guilty as charged, two motives may explain his mad acts, at least as to the extent that they were directed at Senators Leahy and Daschle:
(1) He believed they were bad Catholics because of their pro-abortion stance, and
(2) He blamed them for blocking funding for work on an anthrax vaccine.
PART II
The Obsessed: The Radical Animal-Rights Activists
The Roots of the Animal Rights Movement
In his novel of 17th century England, Quicksilver, author Neal Stephenson has members of the Royal Society “starving a toad in a jar to see if new toads would grow out of it,” draining “all the blood out of a large dog and putting it into a smaller dog minutes later,” and removing “the rib cage from a living mongrel.” Since Stephenson’s representations appear to be historically accurate, little wonder that the “first significant animal rights movement began in nineteenth-century England, where the impetus was opposition to the use of unanaesthetized animals in scientific research.” The only wonder is that it took so long for social mores to rise to the level of repugnance for this practice that the “movement inspired protests, legislative reforms in the United Kingdom, and the birth of numerous animal protection organizations….”
The rise of such sentiments paralleled the changing views of England’s leading philosophers (including so-called “natural philosophers”) toward animals. While Rene Descartes considered animals to be “organic machines,” David Hume wrote in the 18th century, “Next to the ridicule of denying an evident truth, is that of taking much pains to defend it; and no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow'd with thought and reason as well as men. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant.” Jeremy Bentham, the early-19th century father of Utilitarianism added, “Other animals, which, on account of their interests having been neglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded into the class of things. ... The day has been, I grieve it to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated ... upon the same footing as ... animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse?...the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?... The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes... ."
Although the anti-vivisection movement was birthed in the early 19th century alongside the significant scientific activity which characterized that period, and despite its long history of opposition to animal research, the movement cannot be credited with stopping a single scientific experiment until 1977, when the movement’s outcries ended NIH funding of certain grizzly and notorious cat experiments that the federal agency had funded for some 17 years at New York’s Museum of Natural History.
In fact, not until the 1960s did a robust animal-rights movement emerge in the United States, part and parcel of the socio-cultural revolution which swept through American society in such varied forms as the Hippy Movement, the anti-war protests, the sexual revolution and the drug culture. An early victory was the 1966 Laboratory Animal Welfare Act. In 1971 NIH issued its policy on the “Care and Treatment of Laboratory Animals.” This was replaced by Public Health Service Regulations in1973.
In 1981 Johns Hopkins University established its Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, which describes itself as follows:
The Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) has worked with scientists since 1981 to find new methods to replace the use of laboratory animals in experiments, reduce the number of animals tested, and refine necessary tests to eliminate pain and distress.
We are an academic, science-based center affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. We believe the best science is humane science. Our programs seek to provide a better, safer, more humane future for people and animals.
We provide a variety of resources, including grants for scientists developing non-animal methods workshops on alternative methods, books, newsletters, and other publications.
We also manage Altweb, an international online clearinghouse of alternatives news and resources.
Despite these pioneering efforts and all the subsequent advances in the regulation and humane treatment of laboratory animals, animal rights activists’ targeting of scientific, including university, laboratories has increased in recent years. To understand why, it’s worth noting the several levels of animal activists in terms of philosophical orientation.
Animal Activist Philosophy and Tactics
David DeGrazia identifies three gradations of standards subscribed by activists:
• Sliding-scale model: “Animals may be used in research only where their use is consistent with giving their interests appropriate moral weight in view of the animals’ cognitive, emotional, and social complexity.”
• Utilitarianism: “Animals may be used in research only where their use is likely to maximize the overall balance of benefits --- factoring in likelihood of success --- over harms, where all parties’ (including animals’) interests are impartially considered.”
• Strong animal-rights view: “Animals may be used in research only where (1) their involvement does not harm them or (2) their involvement is in their overall best interests (therapeutic research). This view might also permit animals to be used in research where (3) their involvement poses only minimal risk to them.”
Clearly, the third level is the most demanding. Indeed, the definition proffered by DeGrazia masks the extreme nature of this last position. The devil, as they say, is in the details. For example, whether what a scientist does to his animals harms them or not depends entirely on the definition of the word “harm.” If one includes under harm the mere caging of an animal, then it is virtually impossible for a research scientist to work with animals in his lab. Similarly, if one deems the anxiety caused to an animal by the mere handling of that animal to be “harm,” then, once again, the definition would make it well-nigh impossible for a researcher to work with any such animals.
If these interpretations seem far-fetched, then consider the following:
PETA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Animal Exploitation
Every year, more than 3 million dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, and other animals are euthanized because they were born into a world that does not have enough homes for them. For every one companion animal who lives indoors with a human family and receives the attention, health care, and emotional support that he or she needs, there are thousands just barely surviving. Millions of domestic animals never know a kind human touch and live hard lives on the street before dying equally hard deaths.
Others suffer at the hands of an unfit guardian who deprives them of veterinary care and other basic necessities: Social birds are left alone in tiny, barren cages for years as decorations; rabbits, guinea pigs, and hamsters are kept in filthy cages and only paraded out as a source of entertainment now and then; cats are left outside and often become victims of cruel people; dogs are left chained outside or kept in waste-strewn pens with only a metal barrel to protect them from the elements.
Every animal deserves a chance to thrive in a responsible and permanent home. Sadly, breeders, pet stores, and people who fail to sterilize their companion animals have created a tremendous overpopulation problem that forces animal shelters to put millions of dogs and cats to death every year.
Those who subscribe to such anthropomorphic sentiments, as those reflected in this statement, also tend to deny that --- to borrow from George Orwell’s Animal Farm --- some animals are more equal than others. Thus, for example, a recent essay by two biologists rejects all of the following arguments for distinguishing among phyla and species in according animals rights:
• The evolutionary argument
• Variations in awareness of self
• Variations in memory and planning skills
• Animal intentionality
These writers conclude that, “given our present state of knowledge of the needs and capabilities of classes of animals, let alone individual species, we feel, as biologists, that we first and foremost ought to guard against, or at least be very cautious about, the temptations of creating a scale of lesser or greater value of one species over another.”
From such philosophical/ethical tenets the distance to radical tactics is short. Consider the cartoon below, taken from the Animal Liberation Front website.
In close proximity with this cartoon on the site is the “ALF Credo”:
The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) carries out direct action against animal abuse in the form of rescuing animals and causing financial loss to animal exploiters, usually through the damage and destruction of property.
The ALF's short-term aim is to save as many animals as possible and directly disrupt the practice of animal abuse. Their long-term aim is to end all animal suffering by forcing animal abuse companies out of business.
It is a nonviolent campaign, activists taking all precautions not to harm any animal (human or otherwise).
Because ALF actions may be against the law, activists work anonymously, either in small groups or individually, and do not have any centralized organization or coordination.
The Animal Liberation Front consists of small autonomous groups of people all over the world who carry out direct action according to the ALF guidelines. Any group of people who are vegetarians or vegans and who carry out actions according to ALF guidelines have the right to regard themselves as part of the ALF.
The last paragraph of this credo springs from the broader radical tradition of “leaderless resistance.” “Leaderless resistance (or phantom cell structure) is a political resistance strategy in which small, independent groups (covert cells) challenge an established adversary such as a government. Leaderless resistance can encompass anything from non-violent disruption and civil disobedience to bombings, assassinations and other violent agitation. Leaderless cells lack bidirectional, vertical command links and operate without hierarchal command.”
The term "Leaderless Resistance" was popularized by the white supremacist Louis Beam, who published an essay on Leaderless Resistance in 1983 and again in 1992. Beam advocated Leaderless Resistance as a technique for fighting an incumbent government using self-organizing clandestine cells; he attributed the strategy to Col. Ulius Louis Amoss, allegedly a U.S. intelligence officer who was fearful that Communists were about to seize control of the U.S. in the early 1960s.
In his essay, Beam argued that traditional liberation armies employing pyramid-style organization are "extremely dangerous for the participants when it is utilized in a resistance movement against state tyranny":
"Especially is this so in technologically advanced societies where electronic surveillance can often penetrate the structure revealing its chain of command. Experience has revealed over and over again that anti-state, political organizations utilizing this method of command and control are easy prey for government infiltration, entrapment, and destruction of the personnel involved. This has been seen repeatedly in the United States where pro-government infiltrators or agent provocateurs weasel their way into patriotic groups and destroy them from within."
A more workable approach, argued Beam, is to convince like-minded individuals to form independent cells that will commit acts of sabotage or terrorism without coordination from above, and while minimizing communication with other cells:
"The so-called "phantom cell" mode of organization, developed by Col. Amoss, or Leaderless Resistance, is based upon the cell organization but does not have any central control or direction. In the Leaderless Resistance concept, cells operate independently of each other, but they do not report to a central headquarters or top chief, as do the communist cells ...
[P]articipants in a program of Leaderless Resistance through phantom cell organization must know exactly what they are doing and how to do it. This is by no means as impractical as it appears, because it is certainly true that in any movement, all persons involved have the same general outlook, are acquainted with the same philosophy, and generally react to given situations in similar ways. As the entire purpose of Leaderless Resistance is to defeat the enemy by whatever means possible, all members of phantom cells will tend to react to objective events in the same way, usually through tactics of resistance and sabotage."
Despite exhorting the adoption of a resistance without a leader, it is likely that Beam was advocating Leaderless Resistance in an attempt to cement his position as a leader and thinker in the white separatist movement. Indeed, Leaderless Resistance is taken by some to be a technique of splitting an organization into an above-ground wing that primarily deals in propaganda, and an underground wing that actually carries out terrorist attacks.
Examples of the Leaderless Resistance credo among animal-rights and eco-terrorist organizations include:
• Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), a Worcestershire, England, organization targeted in particular Huntingdon Life Sciences, among the world’s largest animal-testing laboratories. Founded in 1999, SHAC’s main website states under “Who we are”:
SHAC is a worldwide campaign, and the first of its kind, with SHAC groups in the UK, USA, Holland, Germany, Italy and many other countries all uniting to target HLS and the companies that support them globally.
SHAC is an innovative campaign, and has received worldwide media coverage for the success of its methods, the intelligence of its tactics and the determination of its supporters.
Please note that SHAC does not encourage or incite illegal activity.
• Earth Liberation Front (ELF) modeled itself after the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) (see above). Its adherents claim credit for numerous acts of vandalism against such targets as logging companies, luxury real estate developments and SUV dealerships, as well as the freeing of animals. With regard to the latter, ELF affiliates joined with Alf affiliates in November 1997 in Burns, Oregon, to cause a half-million dollars in damage to the office, barns and other facilities of a horse and burro breeding company.
• Also available on the web are such “leaderless resistance” tools as “ARSON-AROUND with Auntie ALF: ALF’s Arson Guide,” which two Long Island teens, who pleaded guilty in February 2001 of burning down housing currently under construction, had accessed.
Harassing scientists at home: a case on point in animal-rights leaderless resistance
On Sunday, February 24, 2008, a U.C.-Santa Cruz breast-cancer scientist and her family were enjoying a birthday party, when a loud knock came from their home’s front door. The researcher’s husband responded and was greeted by six masked visitors, one of whom smacked him on the hand before they got back into their car and drove off. This was not the first such incident at Santa Cruz, where the cancer researchers use mice in their labs. Earlier intrusions included graffiti, such as “murderer” and “torturer,” and strewn garbage in front of other scientists’ homes. Similar assaults were reported in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.
UCLA’s Dr. Edythe D. London, who uses primates to study addiction, has been a particular target of ALF adherents. Her house has been both firebombed and flooded.
UCLA’s Center for Neurovisceral Sciences and Women’s Health describes Dr. London’s work as follows:
Dr. London's research has advanced the study of substance abuse and the development of new approaches and probes for studies of brain function. She has edited several books and authored over 200 original research articles and over 60 reviews. Her most recognized accomplishments involve PET scanning of human subjects who suffer from addictions. Dr. London's group was the first to show a relationship between drug craving and activity of brain regions that link memory with emotion. She also showed that drug abusers have structural abnormalities in prefrontal cortex and deficits in decision-making tasks that depend on prefrontal cortex function. Her work influenced other researchers to look toward the frontal lobe for an understanding of the compulsive self-administration of drugs despite detrimental effects, which characterizes drug addiction. Most recently, she and her colleagues have developed new probes for external imaging of those receptors in the brain where nicotine binds to produce its behavioral actions.
By contrast, on March 13, 2008, the ALF website posted the following anonymous notice :
At the start of last week, in Irvine, CA, a van owned by UCLA went up in flames. For all of those affected you have the UCLA primate vivisection program to blame.
It is unacceptable for us to see, hear, and know what is going on in our animal labs without taking action. Every time we pass someone like Arthur in the hallways and have to witness his stomach churning grin or watch Joaquin double checking the door locks on his little red Mercedes we have to choke back a crippling amount of disgust and hatred. It is becoming almost impossible to hold back. Then we hear the monkeys wailing and screaming and we find the strength to stay put.
We are driven to show the world the compassionless support that UCLA gives to these monkey killers and to do anything we can to end the needless suffering that the primates are forced to face.
The end of UCLA vivisection is coming. We urge you to start switching over to non-animal protocol without haste.
-LA ALF
PART III
The Mad: The April 2007 Virginia Tech Massacre
The panel investigating the VTU massacre met for the first time on Thursday, May 10, 2007. Present was no less a political light than Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who commented that “we owe it to the victims” to learn all there is to know about the tragedy. He charged the eight-member commission, chaired by retired State Police Superintendent W. Gerald Massengill, to learn all it can about, among other things, the killer’s mental state and mental-health treatment.
In 1966, U.T. Austin’s resident psychiatrist conducted a session with the tower sniper some four months before the troubled ex-marine climbed to the 28th floor observation deck and shot 45 passers-by. The doctor’s notes eerily reported the 25-year-old Whitman’s fantasy of shooting at people from the tower.
A decade later, in Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, the California Supreme Court enunciated a duty-to-warn rule, which has been adopted over the past 30 years by much of the American common law. The decision established an obligation among mental-health professionals to warn the known, intended victim of a patient, the doctor-patient privilege notwithstanding.
In Tarasoff the plaintiffs/parents sought to recover damages against the defendants for the wrongful death of their daughter, Tatiana Tarasoff, who was killed by Prosenjit Poddar, a University of California student. The complaint alleged that defendant Regents of the University of California was engaged in the business of the care, treatment, and supervision of patients suffering from mental disorders, and was engaged in providing the service of protecting the public from bodily harm, this by means of its campus police; that on August 20, 1969, Poddar was a voluntary outpatient undergoing psychotherapy at the hospital operated and maintained by the Regents; that on that day defendant Lawrence Moore, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who was providing psychotherapy to Poddar, personally notified defendants Everett D. Atkinson and Johnny C. Teel, officers of the campus police, that Poddar was capable of doing bodily harm to himself or some one else; that Dr. Moore told those officers that at a psychotherapy session on August 18 Poddar had informed Moore that he was going to kill ‘an unnamed girl, readily identifiable as Tatiana Tarasoff, when she returned home to Berkeley from Brazil’; that on August 20, Dr. Moore notified Atkinson and Teel that he would give the campus police a letter of diagnosis on Poddar so that the campus police could pick up Poddar and take him to Herrick Hospital in Berkeley where ‘Dr. Moore would assign a 72-hour Emergency Psychiatric Detention’ on Poddar; that same day Moore, by letter, notified defendant William Beall, chief of the campus police, that Poddar had a “paranoid schizophrenic reaction, acute and severe” and was “at this point a danger to the welfare of other people and himself”; that in this letter Moore stated that “at times he appears to be quite rational, at other times he appears quite psychotic”; that defendant Stuart Gold, M.D., who initially examined Poddar at Cowell Memorial Hospital, and defendant James Yandell, M.D., assistant to the director of said department of psychiatry, concurred in the opinion that Poddar should be committed for observation in a mental hospital; that the campus police responded to the letter and took Poddar into custody; that defendants Gary L. Brownrigg, Joseph P. Halleran, and Atkinson, officers of the campus police, were satisfied that Poddar was quite rational and had changed his attitude altogether; that the campus police released Poddar when he stated he would try to stay away from Tatiana Tarasoff; that defendant D. Harvey Powelson, M.D., director of the department of psychiatry at Cowell Memorial Hospital, upon learning that his staff had made arrangements for Poddar to be placed in a 72-hour treatment and evaluation facility, requested Chief Beall of the campus police to return Moore's letter, ordered all copies destroyed, ordered Moore's therapist's notes on Poddar to be destroyed, and ordered no action to place Poddar in a 72-hour treatment and evaluation facility; and that on October 27, as a direct and proximate result of the negligence of these various defendants, Poddar, who was deranged and at large, shot and stabbed Tatiana Tarasoff to death.
On these facts, California’s high court held, “When a psychotherapist determines, or pursuant to the standards of his profession should determine, that his patient presents a serious danger of violence to another he incurs an obligation to use reasonable care to protect the intended victim against such danger, that discharge of such duty may require the therapist to take one or more of various steps, depending on the nature of the case, that complaint could be amended to state cause of action against the therapists, to whom patient confided his intentions to kill plaintiffs' daughter, on theory of failure to warn, that therapists were entitled to statutory immunity from liability for failure to bring about patient's confinement but that plaintiffs pled no special relationship between the patient and the police defendants which would impose on them any duty to warn the daughter or other appropriate individuals and that the police were also entitled to statutory immunity for failure to confine the patient.”
In 1995 the Virginia Supreme Court had occasion to consider the Tarasoff rule. In Nasser v. Parker, the Commonwealth’s high court stated that “we disagree with the holding of Tarasoff that a doctor-patient relationship or a hospital-patient relationship alone is sufficient, as a matter of law, to establish a ‘special relation’” with the patient sufficient to fix liability upon the doctor who declines to warn. Under this Virginia precedent, the mental-health caregiver must “take charge” of the mentally ill individual in order to implicate duty-to-warn liability.
In Nasser, the deceased, Angela Nasser Lemon, had been involved in a relationship with George Edwards, but she rejected him and attempted to terminate their relationship. Edwards had a history of committing violent acts against women who rejected him. On December 5, 1990, Edwards held a gun to Lemon's head and threatened to kill her. She obtained a warrant for his arrest, and, fearing for her safety, left her Virginia Beach home in an effort to conceal her whereabouts from Edwards.
Shortly after the December 5th incident, Edwards consulted Charles E. Parker, M.D., a licensed psychiatrist who had been treating Edwards for mental problems over a period of seventeen years. Dr. Parker was aware of Edwards' history of violence toward women who rejected him and also was aware that Edwards recently had threatened Lemon. The doctor concluded that Edwards' mental condition was deteriorating and that Edwards needed prolonged intensive therapy in a mental hospital.
On or about December 10, 1990, Edwards was admitted “on a voluntary basis” to Peninsula Psychiatric Hospital in Hampton. Dr. Parker visited Edwards in the hospital and observed that the patient had not been placed in a secure section.
Learning that Dr. Parker knew about Edwards' actions and his condition and that the doctor had arranged for Edwards to be hospitalized for a prolonged period, Lemon returned to her home. The day after his admission, Edwards left the hospital. Neither Dr. Parker nor the hospital notified Lemon of Edwards' departure.
Edwards visited Dr. Parker on December 13 or 14, 1990. The doctor prescribed medication for Edwards' mental illness. On December 17, Edwards shot and killed Lemon in her home and then killed himself.
Lemon was survived by an infant son. Lemon's father, Michael J. Nasser, Sr., in his capacity as administrator of Lemon's estate, brought the action seeking damages for Lemon's death against three defendants, namely, Dr. Parker and the two corporations that operated the hospital, the Hospital Corporation of America and Virginia Psychiatric Company, Inc.
On these facts, the Virginia Supreme Court concluded, “the boyfriend's psychiatrist and hospital did not have special relationship with boyfriend to be under duty to control his conduct to prevent harm to another.” However, in thus affirming the dismissal of the lawsuit, the high tribunal established that “To establish the ‘special relation’ required for the duty to control conduct of a third person to prevent him from causing physical harm to another, the plaintiff must allege facts which, if proven, would show that the defendant had taken charge of third person.”
In the VTU killer’s case, reports indicated that police first investigated the future mass-murderer in November 2005, following up on another student’s harassment complaint. Cho was directed to the university’s Office of Judicial Affairs. The complainant declined to press charges, saying that Cho’s unwelcome attentions were merely annoying, not truly harassing.
A month later another female student filed a complaint against Cho with the VTU PD. This time, after the campus police interviewed Cho, another student called to claim that Cho appeared to be suicidal. This call resulted in issuance of a detention order. The troubled young man was subsequently evaluated at Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health, an independent mental-health facility. Following this counseling intervention, say police, they received no more student complaints about Cho.
Also in the fall of 2005, a VTU poetry professor had Cho removed from her class. Nikki Giovanni told media she found the young man’s poetry so intimidating and his presence so menacing that, when two students who shared her anxiety stopped attending class, she moved to remove Cho. Describing Cho as “mean,” she told CNN, “I knew when it happened that that’s probably who it was.”
These facts beg the questions: In the fall of ’05 should Cho have been removed from more than just Giovanni’s poetry class? Should he have been kept in custody --- institutionalized --- when he was taken to the mental-health facility?
A May 8, 2007, editorial in the Roanoke Times complained of “No Teeth in Mental Health Laws in Virginia.” The piece went on to contend that Cho’s fall ’05 release from custody was inappropriate because he was diagnosed as “depressed and imminently dangerous.” In eerie emulation of the UT psychiatrist’s suggestion that tower-sniper Whitman make an appointment for the following week, Cho was ordered to pursue outpatient treatment and then released. As with Whitman, Cho’s next appearance on the radar screen was gun in hand.
One ultimate question was whether on these facts VTU assumed any legal liability vis a vis Cho’s victims and their families in terms of a wrongful-death action. Though the young man’s meanness and intimidating behavior in Professor Giovanni’s poetry class fit a profile of a potential menace to the campus community, profiling alone cannot form the basis of legal liability for the university (just as it probably cannot alone form the basis for removal of the student).
But, even under the Virginia Supreme Court’s variant of the Tarasoff rule, VTU may well be found to have “taken charge” of Cho in 2005. Although he named no specific victims, whom Judicial Affairs and campus police could have warned, the Commonwealth’s courts might well have proven to be sympathetic to injured survivors or the parents of the deceased victims, who choose to sue. The Commonwealth’s highest court ultimately might have been called upon to determine whether such anticipated wrongful-death actions are capable of prevailing under Virginia common law. However, VTU and the state wasted little time in settling the case. The settlement was for a modest $11 million, because under Virginia law $100,000 is the maximum that a single litigant can recover against the state in a case of simple negligence. And the most VTU officials could be accused of was simple negligence in this exceptionally difficult case.
In April 2008, Governor Kaine signed a number of bills aimed at reforming the mental health, law enforcement and court systems to better cope with the dangerously ill before they morph into terrorists. He also signed several pieces of legislation aimed directly at the state’s higher education system:
House Bill 1005 requires the board of visitors or other governing board of any public institution of higher education to establish policies and procedures requiring the notification of a parent of a dependent student when the student receives mental health treatment at the institution's student health or counseling center. The notification applies when there exists a substantial likelihood that the student will, in the near future, cause serious physical harm to himself or others as evidenced by recent behavior or any other relevant information or suffer serious harm due to his lack of capacity to protect himself or to provide for his basic human needs.
House Bill 1058 requires the board of visitors or other governing board of any public institution of higher education to establish policies and procedures requiring the release of a student's educational record if the parent requesting the record claims the student as a dependent.
Senate Bill 538 mandates that by January 1, 2009, each public institution of higher education establish a comprehensive, prompt, and reliable first warning and emergency notification system for students, staff, and faculty.
Senate Bill 539 requires that the board of visitors or other governing body of every public institution of higher education establish a threat assessment team. The bill also requires the team to adopt a campus-wide committee charged with education and prevention of violence on campus.
Senate Bill 636 allows each public and private institution of higher education to request from its students complete student records, including any mental health records held by the originating school. These records shall be kept confidential as required by state and federal law.
House Bill 1449 requires the board of visitors or other governing body of each public institution of higher education to develop and keep current a written crisis and emergency management plan.
What is readily apparent is that the bulk of this new legislation is aimed at identifying students who pose potential threats, before they commit horrific acts of violence.
CONCLUSION
Can we, in fact, identify those individuals who are primed to become the next Ivins, freelance ALF sympathizer, or Cho?
Our justice system takes a dim view of profiling, but profiling is precisely what this is all about. When the police use profiling, it’s condemned as racist. When the customs service does it, it’s similarly assailed as discriminatory and unconstitutional. Still, it’s being done. Travel & Leisure Magazine reported in January2007, “The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently began rolling out a new security program, Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT), at dozens of airports around the country.” Time Magazine explained, “TSA employees will be trained to identify suspicious individuals who raise red flags by exhibiting unusual or anxious behavior, which can be as simple as changes in mannerisms, excessive sweating on a cool day, or changes in the pitch of a person's voice.” Although such techniques invariably arouse the ACLU, should colleges and universities consider adopting them?
Before you answer “no,” consider the case of Dawson College. On September 13, 2006, Kimveer Gill parked his car in downtown Montreal, removed a cache of weapons from the trunk, forced a passerby to carry his extra ammunition, and walked the short distance to the college’s campus. At the main building’s back entrance he opened fire on students standing on the steps. His hostage ran off with the extra ammunition as Gill entered the building and walked to the cafeteria, where he immediately shot two students. Ordering the others in the room to lie on the floor, he continued firing randomly until police arrived. Taking two more hostages, he attempted to escape until, shot in the arm, he took his own life. The toll: one student dead, 19 more wounded.
Police later found Kimveer Gill’s profile posted on a website called VampireFreaks.com . In the accompanying photo he wore a black leather trench coat and sported a Beretta Cx4 Storm semi-automatic carbine, one of four guns he took to Dawson College. Visit VampireFreaks.com today and you can purchase “cyber-gothic clothing” on a related link called clothing@F---TheMainstream, and read featured interviews with “Velvet Acid Christ,” “Zombie Girl,” and “Grendel.” Gill’s own VampireFreaks screen name was “fatality 666.” His last login was at 10:35 AM on the day of the shootings.
In the aftermath of the Dawson College shootings, the so-called “Goth” subculture came under sharp attack in the media. Hardly a high school or a college on the North American continent is without its clique of Goth enthusiasts in their leather, chains, piercings, tattoos, and bizarre hairstyles. Operators of Goth shops and websites found themselves defending the lifestyle and adamantly disavowing violence. Some expressed shock at the 55 graphically violent pictures posted on Gill’s VampireFreaks web page.
Gill also turned out to be a big fan of the video game “Super Columbine Massacre RPG.” Go to the game’s web site today and you’ll find this statement about the Virginia Tech massacre: “This week, the press is awash with stories about the shooting at Virginia Tech – the deadliest in recent history. Will we remember this tragedy in a week? In a month? In the years to follow? I certainly hope so. I hope we can learn from such sobering events as Virginia Tech, as Dawson College, Ehrfurt, Columbine and all the other horrific shootings modern society has endured. So often the potential for another shooting is just around the corner should we forget the lessons history has to offer us. This process of reevaluation, introspection, and a search for understanding is the value I believe my video game offers to those who play it.” The author, site owner Danny Ledonne, is said to have vomited when he learned that Gill was a fan. Presumably Gill wasn’t participating for “reevaluation, introspection, and a search for understanding.”
VampireFreaks and Super Columbine Massacre persist on the web, despite their appeal to the Kimveer Gills out there. No one has definitively proven a clear cause-effect-relationship (albeit the Alabama Supreme Court in 2006 reinstated a $600 million lawsuit against the makers of a video game called “Grand Theft Auto,” which the plaintiffs blame for the shooting deaths of two police officers and a dispatcher in 2003 ).
As Goth enthusiasts and video gamers alike point out, tens of thousands of adherents never commit a violent crime. In the absence of a clear causal connection between violence-glorifying cults and games on one hand and campus shooters on the other, the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment argue against profiling Goths and gamers, or any other classifications of people, as potential threats. And yet… as horrific incidents multiply down the decades, we all might be forgiven for considering closer scrutiny of employees, students, and others who fall into these categories. Indeed, while little publicized, standing committees, convened regularly and comprised of representatives of all major segments of the university, have quietly come into existence, post-VTU, at numerous schools to conduct ad hoc discussions and evaluations of perceived “problem” students. In essence, this amounts “informal” “low-profile” profiling. In effect, these committees are de facto doing what the Virginia legislature has mandated de jure.
Furthermore, some experts have emerged, who claim to be capable of raising profiling to a new level of sophistication and reliability. For example, Consultant Dan Korem’s book, Rage of the Random Actor: Disarming Catastrophic Acts and Restoring Lives makes the following claims on its dust jacket:
In the early 1990s, Dan Korem, a critically acclaimed investigative journalist and author, identified the Random Actor profile. He used it to solve the riddle of why there were mass shootings as the Post Office, but not at UPS. And why mass company shooters work in accounting or on an assembly line, but not in the art department.
In the mid-1990s, he used the same profile to predict student-led terrorist incidents in American schools. He even identified Denver suburbs as a candidate for a bombing massacre two months before the attack. After Columbine, he warned that adult-teen Random Actor killer cells would appear; in 2002 the Muhammad-Malvo “sniper” duo opened fire in DC and Maryland suburbs, He also believed that suicide bombers had the Random Actor profile, and he was right.
This article is not intended to evaluate, much less endorse, Mr. Korem. It is beyond this piece’s scope to prescribe precise practices and procedures. And it is also impossible in an essay of this length to provide more than a passing nod to the profound civil liberties issues that profiling inevitably raised.
Rather, the goal of this brief study has been to present three short case studies, drawn from three seemingly very diverse arenas of violent terrorist-type activities, and in so doing, suggest that the actors may have much more in common than is commonly recognized. And, assuming this to be so, the second purpose of the piece is to suggest that steps already taken by the Commonwealth of Virginia in the wake of the Cho massacre, and taken less legalistically on college campuses all across the country, to facilitate the early identification of potential “freelance” domestic terrorists are steps in the right direction… a path down which we must proceed (ever mindful of individual’s civil rights), if we are to effectively deal with the threat of domestic terrorism… a threat which this author contends surpasses that of international, politically motivated terrorism.
No comments:
Post a Comment