We do live in an accelerated time. Not only were we getting real-time dispatches from the scene as 13 were slaughtered at the Fort Hood Army Base in Texas, but there was a lot of speculation about the suspect within minutes.
With this overflow of information, we're probably even more confused about what happened. And the stench of conspiracy, rivaling 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination, is finding its way into the headlines.
Especially when Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an army psychiatrist, was taken into custody and named as a suspect. That's when the rumors really started to grow legs.
According to the blogosphere scuttlebutt, the 39-year-old Hasan knew some of the 9/11 suicide bombers and worshipped in the same mosque ... that he was part of the Homeland Security panel during Barack Obama's transition into the White House ... that he shouted "Allah akbar!" in praise to Allah during the shooting ... that Texas Gov. Rich Perry said there were three shooters at the massacre ...
Take each of these and weigh them individually. Some of these are valid; others you can, well, you know. Blame on flat-out hysteria, or just on everything happening so fast the mind can't process everything accurately.
Congressman and retired military colonel Allen West (R-Fla) told The Hill that he believes the Fort Hood shooting is evidence that the "enemy is infiltrating" our military. You can say he's being hysterical, except I believe he's right.
The biggest question here is whether Hasan merely bucked under stress of his job or was acting out his own one-man jihad. Other questions came out as soon as his Middle Eastern surname was disclosed -- did he act alone? Was this part of a larger plot? Was this a terrorist attack, or was it just another guy going postal?
Senator Joe Lieberman, who called for a committee hearing on the massacre, is playing it as a terrorist attack, according to CNN:
... Saying it was too early to know Hasan's exact motive, Lieberman declared that if reports of the alleged gunman's possible Islamic extremism are true, then "the murder of these 13 people was a terrorist act."
"There are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act." He also called Hasan "a self-radicalized, home-grown terrorist" who had turned to Islamic extremism.
If it's true as it seems, this makes it the deadliest terrorist attack on United States soil since 9/11.
The politically correct failure
According to the
London Telegraph, the FBI knew about Hasan for a while:
... the US Army major who killed 13 people in a shooting spree at America’s biggest military base had come to the attention of the FBI six months earlier over possible links to extremist comments posted on the internet ... Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a devout Muslim who was trying to buy his way out of the Army, was suspected of being the author of postings which compared suicide bombers to heroic soldiers who throw themselves onto grenades to save others ...As the story develops, more into Hasan's politics and religious life come about. It turns out he had attempted to contact al-Quaeda, and the FBI had known about this. In fact, U.S. intelligence knew what this guy was all about even before he was assigned to Ft. Hood in July.
Now, here's the deal. We're in a war.
Although Afghanistan is the main theater right now, the war itself is against terrorism in general. Against the kind of terror that flattened the World Trade Center, tore a chunk out of the Pentagon, killed 3,000 people, and brought mass hysteria (see: USA PATRIOT Act) to our land. That kind of terror.
OK. That said, will anyone please explain to me what an obvious jihadist is doing in the United States Army?
And how, pray tell, did he become a major? Shoot, that's a commissioned office, ranking above captain and below lieutenant colonel. Most majors give orders, not take them.
You can blame our asleep-at-the-switch intelligence community for letting this guy in through the gates -- and it's a popular argument given the intelligence failures that made 9/11 possible.
But the failure ran much deeper than that. You can bet Hasan achieved that rank because it just wasn't politically correct to do anything else. That's all. Don't want to look like the bad guy because you're giving the Muslim close scrutiny. Never mind stirring the waters with all this bad talk of his jihadist leanings, about how he's really an enemy combatant in a U.S. uniform. What the hey, let's promote him to major and let the guys salute him.
Sorry, folks. Guys like that don't belong in our armed forces. And they don't belong at Ft. Hood. Guantanamo, or wherever it is they stash enemy combatants these days, would be a better venue for the likes of Dr. Hasan.
Planned, not postal
Dr. Paul Ragan, a psychiatrist from Nashville,
told CNN he ruled out post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), saying Hasan spent much of his military hitch going to medical school on the Army's dime, and hadn't spent any real time in combat areas.
"I think religion did play a role," he told CNN interviewer Betty Nguyen. "Evidently he was counseled about proselytizing patients which was clearly a boundary violation. We have a report that he gave in his class at the fellowship, he was talking about endorsing suicide bombings. He was clearly engaging in some type of tunnel vision where this kind of radical view, which is not, as again the soldier said before, is not a part of mainstream Muslim religion. And so, he was -- there was something going on there, very much so."Another psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Breggin, pulled no punches in the Huffington Post:
... Major Nidal Malik Hasan was driven by religious ideology. For years he openly claimed that the War on Terror is a war on Muslims. He announced on the Internet and to his fellow soldiers in a course on public health that a Muslim suicide bomber should be praised for killing a hundred soldiers. It's reported that fellow soldiers warned his superiors that he was a ticking time bomb ...Like Ragan, Breggin says the evidence tilts more toward Hasan being a terrorist than insane.
... first, Major Hasan is a domestic terrorist and a traitor. Second, he's a madman--and that doesn't contradict his identity as a terrorist and a traitor. Third, there's nothing incompatible about being a psychiatrist and being a violent person ...
Hasan's behavior in the days before the assault, while certainly not normal, doesn't suggest someone who is mentally going where the buses don't run. He sold off his stuff and closed out his apartment, which is something you'd expect from someone who is planning to die. He knew what he was doing.
Although talk of a conspiracy is premature right now, the evidence points to the Ft. Hood massacre being an ideologically-driven terrorist attack.
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