> Question for anybody out there more informed than I on Palestinian and
> other non-Chechen use of suicide bombing (probably a lot of people).
> What strikes me as distinctive about the Chechen case is that the
> bombers seem inevitably to be women, and the bombs detonated by remote
> control by someone safely out of fragmentation range.
Really? That's certainly not the case with Palestinians. Much of the drama when they are discovered is about trying to keep them from connecting the wires. And I'm almost positive it wasn't the case with the Tamil Tigers, who I think originated the practice in modern times.
Fwiw, there is an excellent 50 minute HBO documentary called "Terror In Moscow" on the October 2002 theatre seizure, and at at least in that case, all the suicide bombers were women, all of them controlled their own bombs with connecting wires, and none of them were drugged.
Brainwashing is a charge that is always lodged against suicide bombers, and depending on how broadly you define the term, there may be some truth to it sometimes. In the moscow theatre situation, though, where their Russian seatmates had good long talks with them, despair over losing the men closest to them seemed to be motive. They seemed mainly to want to commit suicide. As did many of the Russian women when they lost children or husbands.
If the suicide bomber has to put on the bomb and then go somwhere to deliver it, I'm not sure I see that it makes any difference to the degree of voluntariness whether it's set off by remote control or by hand. It seems it would take the same amount of consent by them in both cases. And in both cases, the people organizing and sending them are out of bomb range. But then, that's true of conventional officer staff who send people into battle too.
Michael