JERROLD M.
POST, M.D.
Dr. Jerrold Post is
Professor of Psychiatry, Political Psychology and International Affairs and
Director of the Political Psychology Program at The George Washington
University. At GW, Dr. Post teaches a
graduate course on terrorism and political violence, as well as a course on
leadership and decision making. He is Co-Founding Director of the George
Washington University Institute of Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management.
Dr. Post has devoted
his entire career to the field of political psychology. Dr. Post came to George
Washington after a 21 year career with the Central Intelligence Agency where he
founded and directed the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political
Behavior, an interdisciplinary behavioral science unit which provided
assessments of foreign leadership and decision making for the President and
other senior officials to prepare for Summit meetings and other high level
negotiations and for use in crisis situations. He played the lead role in
developing the "Camp David profiles" of Menachem Begin and Anwar
Sadat for President Jimmy Carter and initiated the U.S. government program in
understanding the psychology of terrorism in the late 1970s. In recognition of his leadership of the
Center, Dr. Post was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit in 1979, and
received the Studies in Intelligence Award in 1980. He received the Nevitt
Sanford Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Political
Psychology in 2002, and the Jean Knutson Award for Distinguished Service to the
International Society of Political Psychology in 2004.
A founding member of
the International Society of Political Psychology, Dr. Post was elected
Vice-President in 1994, and has served on the editorial board of Political
Psychology since 1987. He has been nominated as a candidate for President,
ISPP, 2005. A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric
Association, he is a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and
Neurology (1967). Dr. Post has been elected to Fellowship in the American
College of Psychiatrists. He is a member of the American Association of
Psychiatry and the Law. After serving as Chair, Taskforce for National and
International Terrorism of the APA, (1994-2000), he was appointed (2004) Chair, Workgroup for Terrorism and Political Violence.
Dr. Post has published
widely on crisis decision-making, leadership, on the psychology of political
violence and terrorism, with special reference to terrorist group dynamics. He
has authored eight book chapters on terrorist psychology and of the entry on terrorism
and counter-terrorism in the Oxford Companion to Military History. .In his
writings, he recently has been addressing weapons of mass destruction
terrorism: psychological incentives and constraints, suicide terrorism, and information
systems terrorism (cyber terrorism.). He
is the co-author of a study of the politics of illness in high office, When
Illness Strikes the Leader: The Dilemma of the Captive King, Yale University Press, 1993, and Political Paranoia: The Psycho-politics of
Hatred, Yale, 1997. He is editor and
author of The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders, With Profiles
of Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton, Univ. of Michigan Press, 2003 and (with
Barry Schneider) of Know Thy Enemy: Profiles of Adversary Leaders and their
Strategic Cultures, Air Force Counter Proliferation Center, 2003, is author of Leaders and Their Followers in
a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior, Cornell Univ.
Press, 2004, and is editor of The Al-Qaeda terrorism Manual Air Force Counter
Proliferation Center, 2005. He is currently developing a book on The Mind of
the Terrorist, under contract with St. Martin’s Press.
Dr. Post received his
B.A. magna cum laude and M.D. from Yale. He received his post-graduate
training in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the National Institute of
Mental Health. He has also received graduate training at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies.
After the invasion of
Kuwait, Dr. Post developed a political psychology profile of Saddam Hussein.
His analysis of Saddam has been featured prominently in the national and
international media. He provided his analysis of Saddam's personality and
political behavior in testimony at the hearings on the Gulf crisis before the
House Armed Services Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He
served as a psychiatric expert on terrorist psychology for the Department of
Justice in the 1997 trial of an Abu Nidal terrorist, and in July 2001 testified
as an expert witness in the federal trial in New York of one of the Osama bin
Laden terrorists responsible for the bombing of the US embassy in
Tanzania.
In the spring of 2000, Dr. Post was invited on
two occasions to brief the Defense Science Board on the psychology of
terrorism, with implications for CBW terrorism.
In 1999-2000 he served as consultant to the USG Y2K Commission. He has
received foundation support for research on terrorist psychology from the Harry
Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, and for a study of the psychology of weapons of mass
destruction terrorism involving interviews with incarcerated Middle East terrorists
from the Smith-Richardson Foundation.
Since 9/11, he has
testified before the House National Security subcommittee hearings on
bio-terrorism, before the Senate Armed Services Committee on terrorist psychology
and motivation, and before the UN International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna,
Austria at a specially convened session on nuclear terrorism on the psychology
of nuclear terrorism. In 2002 he
presented a keynote address to the Europe conference of international police on
counter-terrorism in Copenhagen, presented to the terrorism experts’ conference
in Haifa, Israel in January 2003, and was asked to brief the Israel military
leadership on current concepts of counter-terrorism. He was a member of the
Terrorism Expert panel that met in Oslo in June 2003 to prepare a white paper
for the UN General Assembly, and served as a member of a terrorism expert panel
convened by the Sandia National Laboratory. He served as chair of the committee
on the Psychological Roots of Terrorism for the March, 2005 Madrid
International Summit on Terrorism and Democracy. He is a frequent commentator on national and
international media on such topics as leadership, leader illness, treason, the
psychology of terrorism, suicide terrorism, Slobodan Milosevic, Yasir Arafat,
Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il.
Jerrold M. Post, M.D.
1957 E Street, NW
Suite 502 E
The Elliott School of International Affairs
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052