Tyranny on Trial: Personality and Courtroom Conduct of Defendants Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein

In this essay in the Symposium on Milosevic & Hussein on Trial, the author explores the impacts of personality & courtroom conduct in trial outcome to argue that the likenesses between the two defendants will result in Saddam\u27s projection of grand defiance. Biographical narratives of the two leaders trace the psychological development of each personality through childhood to their political careers characterized by defiant resistance & compensatory grandiosity that may be the source of the similarities of behaviors in the courtroom. Asserting that Saddam is following the Milosevic model of courtroom behavior by derailment of the proceeding, exploitation of the victimization theme, & distortion of history to present his political platform, the author concludes that, defiant & unrepentant, both defendants have returned to the international stage to restate their heroic legacies. J. Harwel

Parametrization and Stress-Energy-Momentum Tensors in Metric Field Theories

We give an exposition of the parametrization method of Kuchar [1973] in the context of the multisymplectic approach to field theory, as presented in Gotay and Marsden [2008a]. The purpose of the formalism developed herein is to make any classical field theory, containing a metric as a sole background field, generally covariant (that is, "parametrized," with the spacetime diffeomorphism group as a symmetry group) as well as fully dynamic. This is accomplished by introducing certain "covariance fields" as genuine dynamic fields. As we shall see, the multimomenta conjugate to these new fields form the Piola-Kirchhoff version of the stress-energy-momentum tensor field, and their Euler-Lagrange equations are vacuously satisfied. Thus, these fields have no additional physical content; they serve only to provide an efficient means of parametrizing the theory. Our results are illustrated with two examples, namely an electromagnetic field and a Klein-Gordon vector field, both on a background spacetime.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur

The Psychology of the Terrorist: An Interview with Jerrold M. Post

The psychological factors that motivate terrorist acts-par-ticularly ones such as the suicide bombings that characterized the September 11th attacks-can be especially difficult to fathom. Understanding the psychology of terrorism, however, can be invaluable in helping victims of terrorism work toward making sense of what they have been subjected to and why. Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist who specializes in political psychology and who has considerable experience in the study and profiling of terrorists, is interviewed. He explains what constitutes terrorism, its purpose, how profiling “at-a-distance” is conducted, the various categories in a typology of terrorism, and the psychological and socio-political forces that support terrorism in general and suicide bombings in particular