"The guys who did 9/11 were not lunatics from another planet, but were actually fairly normal", says terrorism expert Marc Sageman.
Sageman, a counterterrorism adviser to the US government and author of "Understanding Terror Networks", spent two years poring over available data on individuals with direct or indirect links to al-Qaeda.
Where terrorists are usually seen as being poor, single, ignorant and immature, al-Qaeda members are well-off and Westernised, found Sageman.
In his sample of 382 suspected terrorists:
-- 17.6 per cent were upper class, 54.9 per cent middle class, and 27.5 per cent lower class;
-- 16.7 per cent were educated to a level less than high school; 12.1 per cent had at least a high school education; 28.8 per cent had some college education; 33.3 per cent had a college degree; and nine per cent had a postgraduate degree;
-- only 9.4 per cent had a religious education - 90.6 per cent had a secular education;
-- 42.5 per cent were professionally employed (doctor, lawyer, teacher, etc), 32.8 had a semi-skilled job, and 24.6 per cent were unskilled;
-- 70 per cent "joined the jihad" in a foreign country - and many of these joined while travelling as privileged individuals in the West.
"It is comforting to think of the terrorist as 'the Other'", says Sageman, "but that isn't quite the case. Mostly these guys are the elite of their countries; they are very much like some of us in the West...."
Read the full interview with Sageman on spiked-online:
<http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA5E4.htm>