Terrorist Profiling as a Counter-Insurgency Strategy: Applying the Concept to Law Enforcement

Abstract

The nature of terrorism is fundamentally psychological. Similarly, psychological profiling is widely accepted in detecting crimes in both law enforcement operations and the study of criminology. However, there is a need to transfer its appearance from old traditional criminal environment to the context of counter-terrorism. This research argues that most prevalent method of interrogating suspects to achieve distinction between guilty and innocent is to establish a set of psychological attributes and factors. This paper proposes that terrorist's profiling is value-added intelligence that may add a new dimension in counter-terrorism to identify the individual behind a terrorist act. It is important to constructs a terrorist profile before designing a paradigm that should determine the probability of terroristic trends within the individual as well as certain perceptible qualities with which an observed suspect can be likened to. This article proposes a personality-guided model of interrogation with different categories to steer clear of oversimplified thinking about individual terrorist or groups. The objective is to adapt the style and content of questioning to obtain a clear overall picture of the suspect's knowledge with appropriate interviewing and interrogation methods. This profiling will provide thorough understanding of the ideology that drives terrorism and more awareness of the likely means and likely targets used by terrorists. This paper is a shift in direction – focusing rather on the development of evidence-based methods that could lead to an effective counterinsurgency strategy and the extraction of innocent's involvement in the terrorism.

Keywords: psychological profiling, interrogation, terrorism, interviewing, law enforcement