The idea that they can reliably forecast the behavior of isolated terrorists is ridiculous.
"This attack is an evolution in the behavior of the terrorists, this time they attacked a symbol of the state and in the heart of the capital," Prime Minister Habib Essid told reporters after an emergency security meeting.
On that basis, jurors can infer that people are terrorists because their behavior parallels that of terrorists, for example, or because religious cassettes they own might be construed to endorse violence.
More disturbing, the Goldstone report has set a new standard for equating the behavior of democratic nations and terrorists.
Another author in the new collection, Philip E. Tetlock, a psychologist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that intelligence agencies employ scientists to try to predict the behavior of foreign leaders and terrorists — and that their track record has been mixed.
Meloy pointed to one of his recent studies that analyzed the behavior of 111 lone-actor terrorists from the United States and Europe.
The F.B.I. took into custody the suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, on account of his suspicious behavior at flight school, but was unable to integrate his case into a larger picture of terrorist behavior.
That, Zenko said, obscured an analysis of the 2013 frequency of "signature strikes", the most notorious of US counterterrorism efforts: operations that kill not specific, known terrorists but individuals, often "military aged males", believed to fit a pattern of terrorist behavior.
aIt is worth noting that there is a deep literature on psychological traits that make an individual more likely to become a terrorist and on the psychological group dynamics that affect a group's cohesion, but we do not consider this literature extensively here because its focus relates to individual behaviors rather than the amount of violence states suffer at the hands of terrorists.
But if we want to make a generalization based on the observed behavior of the majority, a randomly picked terrorist is unlikely to be insane.
