If the Internet postings by "Farouk1986" can be definitively linked to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year old alleged would-be bomber of a Christmas Day Northwest Air Lines flight into Detroit, the picture that emerges is of an young man who perceives himself as a societal misfit, which conforms perfectly to the well-researched profile of candidates for terrorist operations.

As NPR's Dina Temple-Raston said of the writings on All Things Considered Tuesday:

And frankly they start out just sounding like the writings of a lonely teenager at boarding school. They talk about not having any friends, being depressed, not knowing what to do. And as time goes on they talk about the difficulties in being a good Muslim. Things like averting eyes when a woman approaches, or whether it is permissible to go to a prom. The postings were made to an Islamic bulletin board called Gawaher — which means Jewels in Arabic. CBS News first reported the postings yesterday.

The Washington Post adds this:

The 23-year-old Nigerian man accused of the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an American airliner apparently turned to the Internet for counseling and companionship, writing in an online forum that he was "lonely" and had "never found a true Muslim friend."

"I have no one to speak too [sic]," read a posting from January 2005, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was attending boarding school. "No one to consult, no one to support me and I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do. And then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems."

 

The Washington Post reviewed 300 online postings under the name "farouk1986" (a combination of Abdulmutallab's middle name and birth year). The postings mused openly about love and marriage, his college ambitions and angst over standardized testing, as well as his inner struggle as a devout Muslim between liberalism and extremism. In often-intimate writings, posted between 2005 and 2007, he sought friends online, through Facebook and in Islamic chat rooms: "My name is Umar but you can call me Farouk." He often invited readers to "have your say" and once wrote, "May Allah reward you for reading and reward you more for helping."

Terrorism experts say a sense of alienation is the fundamental ingredient to a person becoming disposed towards doing terrorist violence.

In a 2008 piece that ran in The Australian, David Wright-Neville at the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University was quoted as saying:

"Alienation is critically important," Wright-Neville says. "Most terrorist research shows that unless the person is alienated, coupled with feelings of humiliation and disempowerment and so on, it's very unlikely that a person will become a terrorist."

Much earlier, in 1985, Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp wrote:

Despite many other disagreements among experts on terrorism, it is at least agreed that individuals who become terrorists feel alienated from society. This alienation may be the product of distinct social, economic, political or psychological factors or a combination of them. The person who drifts into terrorism, then, feels himself to be an outsider. His self-perception as an outsider may be based on his ethnic or religious affiliation, his inability to find personally satisfying or financially rewarding employment or his estrangement from the political mainstream of his country, or her may regard himself as one of the few true idealists in an unjust world.

My colleague, Konrad Kellen, has argued that "The road to terrorism generally beguings with some form of alienation, sometimes mixed with boredom." The terrorist's age (youth) often plays a key role in this journey..."

The Rand paper goes on to outline the difference between terrorists, who see themselves serving a "good cause" and having fraternal bonds with the like-minded and ordinary criminals who are more egocentric and lack such social bonds.

It makes for interesting reading, especially given how much more experience the U.S. now has with terrorism than it did in 1985.