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Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« on: 2009-11-13 02:00:37 »
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #1 on: 2009-11-13 02:21:19 »
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #2 on: 2009-11-13 02:22:50 »
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #3 on: 2009-11-13 02:24:44 »
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I think that Mo is completely missing Hasan's motivation and is not applying sufficient scepticism to what he is hearing about al Q'aeda from people who are no friends of theirs.  These are not good positions from which to develop comprehension of anyone, friend or enemy, but particularly somebody you do not understand, and thus have a perfectly natural but usually unjustified tendency to consider unreasonable. unethical, insane or at least opaque and probably some combination. Let me introduce you - or remind you - of three adages:
  • A fool may be known by six things: anger, without cause; speech, without profit; change, without progress; inquiry, without object; putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends.
  • When you heard that a mountain was moved, believe it; but when you hear that someone changed his character do not believe it
And perhaps most relevant here:
  • Hold your friends close - hold your enemies closer
All three are Arabic and ancient. I think that all three speak to fundamental human characteristics, that all three likely apply to Hasan and that all three should be applied to any investigation into motive.

Was "al Q'aeda" or any other group involved? I rate this as extremely unlikely. I doubt that Hasan would have seen that as ethical - and I think that the reason he committed murder is in part because I make the assumption that he is ethical to an almost extreme degree of nicety. As with judges, surgeons and priests, it tends to go with the territory. As I read it, Maj Hasan's action at Fort Hood was an instance of exactly the class of individually motivated and instantiated blowback we have expected for years and against which the system is effectively impotent. So far as I can see, he neither associated with terrorists nor involved himself in any indictable activity prior to committing multiple murders - which he almost indubitably saw as legal, ethical, justified and even necessary killings - and an unbiased court - which I doubt he will find in the USA, let alone in the military system, would acknowledge that, with an appropriate finding of manslaughter or at the least as a mitigating circumstance.

Let me try not to run the risk of over projection. Instead let me look at a little of what we know so far as possible, as if through Hasan's eyes. We know that he was of Palestinian stock though an American, and so would naturally identify with Palestinians, with other Semitic peoples and with Americans, most likely in that order. We know that all religions serve to bind people into large manipulable groups who can transcend the boundaries of family and tribe and enable self-identification with much larger groups, indeed I think that that was religions' principle utility up to the recent invention of the Nation State; the fact that these largely replaced religious grounds for war and as such perhaps have done more to weaken state support of religion than any other human activity tends to support this perspective.  We know that he was a Muslim and from the papers he has delivered, and the questions he has asked others, we know that he took it seriously and was extremely interested in the intersection of his professional life and Islam. We know that he has studied the interpretations applied to his scriptures by a fairly wide range of Imams including ones on both sides of the violence spectrum, on both sides of the Sunni/Shiite divide, as well as in the US and in the Middle East. We can conclude that he identified with other Muslims, and if he was like other men, perhaps rather more so than he did with Americans.  We know that Hasan is a psychologist and regarded as a good one. That is not a position somebody inarticulate, uncaring, unethical or stupid is going to work towards or achieve. So we know he was articulate, intelligent, ethical and caring and from the fact that people's essential nature does not change, can safely conclude that he still cares for people and did so even as he murdered a number of them and tried to murder more. We know he has helped, according to all reports effectively,  soldiers, irrespective of creed, returning directly from war zones where they have been fighting and killing Muslims, and we know that some of the stories are horrific. We know that these stories were from American soldiers who we know were caught up in the illegal and indefensible Bush wars, did and were exposed to horrific things and who unloaded on him because that is the very centre of what a psychologist has to do.

Moving to the speculative, where we don't know for sure, but can project from human nature and his actions, particularly from his requests to be excused from being sent to Afghanistan, there is a very high degree of likelihood that despite being raised in the USA, his perfectly natural to all humans, empathy for those he saw as being more like himself, in other words to the semitic people who are being murdered by Americans in the Middle East (Aside from the requirement to balance the likelihood of civilian casualties with military objectives, largely ignored by current US tactical doctrine, if a war is illegal, then the people being killed during that war are being murdered no matter how you might prefer to think of America's victims) had lead him to a position where his natural empathy was towards the people of the Middle East rather than the soldiers with whom he was serving. Given that that that is programmed into us genetically and largely supported by society, it seems perfectly reasonable to reach the conclusion that it applied to Hasan.

Can we now try to come up with a scenario which allows us to reach the point where a caring, ethical, intelligent man murders the very people whom he has been helping to heal, presumably after concluding that this is the only possible ethical thing to do, despite the very high level of programming against murder that all people, but especially medical personnel receive.

I think we can, and I think it is not terribly difficult.

Hasan perceived his forthcoming posting to Afghanistan not as an extension of the work he had been doing, but as something new that changed the situation or he would not have asked to be excused.

It seems evident to us that he could have taken several approaches when this was declined. For example, even presuming that his pride and ethics prevented him from engaging in subterfuge, which for a psychologist would be extraordinarily easy to get away with, he might have:
  • refused orders
  • sued to be relieved
  • have reported for duty and avoided doing things he regarded as unethical.
  • Reported for duty in Afghanistan and responded appropriately as the situation developed.
He did none of the above. Instead he resorted to murder and did so prior to being posted abroad or doing anything new that he could have felt would justify murder. Which tells us that the ethical pressure on him was very great, and that the new situation must have established sufficient guilt in his mind to change the good that he had been doing into something so massively wrong that he preferred to die killing as many of those he had previously helped as possible. What could it have been?

If we look at his job description, and combine that with what we know about US casualties, we know that he would have been employed treating PTSD and other psychological issues that beset military personel in unclear high stress environments (As many German soldiers from the Third Reich could tell you, there is a vast difference between defending your home (The Battle of the Bulge) and fighting to enable oil supplies (Stalingrad).). This is not substantially different from what he had already been doing in a support environment. So the difference must have been in the effect he would have. In the USA he was helping soldiers who had been broken by war return home. In Afghanistan he would be maintaining the combat readiness of American troops - enabling them to deal with murder and go out and murder again, and in so doing he would become a murderer himself.

I think that this might be a sufficiently substantive shift in effect to motivate an intelligent ethical person to decide that he couldn't participate in such activities against those with whom he identified. From here it is only a short step to him deciding that he was already guilty of having done this, and deciding that he needed somehow to attone for what he had done. To an intelligent, caring person versed in human nature, an act of atonement that does not at least attempt to undo the harm done is not worth very much. The conclusion I suspect he reached was that he had to render those he had helped, or at least some number of such people incapable of murdering more Muslims. Given who they were and what they do, the only possible way for him to accomplish that goal would be to kill them. That would have the Islamic virtue of allowing him to die while trying to save the innocent (as defined in the Q'uran, women, children and the aged) and thus be guaranteed of his entrance to "Paradise" despite his earlier "straying from the paths of righteousness" (bear in mind that Islam is a religion defined by action rather than belief and so what you do is much more important than why you do it).

If I am substantially correct, and I rather think i am, rectifying this situation is easy. Bring the soldiers home and stop interfering in the Middle East (which includes enabling Israel murder Muslims) and the vast majority of Muslims, American and foreign, will lose any motivation to kill Americans, indeed, the intelligent caring ones, who tend to make the most effective enemies, will probably revert to trying to be helpful. After all, that is a  major part of what being human is all about. If it were not, then Major Hasan probably never would have killed anyone even though, given that an accomplice is as guilty as the perpetrator, he would still have been a murderer. Looked at this way, his only crime in the eyes of Americans, was that he chose to murder Americans, rather than facilitate the murder of others by Americans.

Bad choices? Probably. Possible? Maybe even likely. Explicative? Indubitably. Inevitable? Possibly. Treachery? Hardly.

Q.E.D.
« Last Edit: 2009-11-13 04:40:50 by Hermit » Report to moderator   Logged

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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #4 on: 2009-11-14 00:33:13 »
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #5 on: 2009-11-14 02:53:25 »
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[Hermit] As you haven't replied to my "motivational analysis" above, I won't address Hasan here.

[Hermit] Ignoring the screeds of troll poop, shock, horror, terrorism, extremism, jihad, al Q'aeda, oh my, etc, dumped onto this thread by our reliably delusional troll, I did notice one little thing in your repost that I'd meant to address and which slipped past me before.

[MoEnzyme] Fine they are all bloody bastards. Muslims just happen to be more efficient at civilian terrorism lately - leveraging a dozen or so of their deaths into thousands of civilian casualties.

[Hermit] People usually use what they have to achieve what they can. I doubt that their religion has much influence on this behaviour. I'm sure that if the people wanting to send America a message on 9/11 had had access to missile systems or high performance stealth bombers with which to inflict statistically similar pain on Americans as they perceived American actions as enabling in the Middle East, they would have done so. The reality is that they don't, couldn't and didn't, so they improvised. The improvisation wasn't unexpected. We know today that the intelligence community was fully aware of our unpopularity due to our history of unfortunate interventions, and the vast range of responses open to people wanting to respond to it, many of them non-state actors. Indeed exactly the 9/11 scenario had been extensively discussed prior to 9/11 and the Cheney-Bush maladministration merely elected to ignore the threat; and once it had been realized, responded by using 9/11 as an excuse to attempt long held goals  having nothing to do with terrorism, nothing to do with police action and establishing many new enemies and an economy destroying war without end - despite having been warned of the probability of these consequences.

[Hermit] In these wars and other operations, the USA has used and is using mass produced, reliable, tidy missiles and much more cost-effective bombs, with a very high POK, delivered by nice young men in clean smart uniforms, to send messages to those they dislike and governments everywhere. In other words, America's attacks, often on civilians, are intended to create terror and force a change of behaviour in people and governments and so are no-less acts of terrorism than the deployment of a suicide bomber or an aircraft full of terrified people used as a kinetic weapon.

[Hermit] An important issue to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of these attacks comes in that even though the American approach involves vastly greater financial costs, it is far more predictable, offers far greater POK radius than any improvised weapons ever will, and is of course vastly safer for the attackers. It is this last factor which is most damaging to your assertion, which appears to be based on lives not dollars.

[Hermit] Given that kill ratios depend largely on energy delivered to target and energy its production and application is completely atheistic, I don't think that the religion of terrorists matters a great deal. Taking the religion merely as a tag for the identity of the "terrorists" fails even more dismally as there are so many reasons and identities involved in perpetrating terrorism. Even if we translate your assertion to mean "those who perpetrated 9/11" it is easy to see that the USA has created victims by the million for a cost in American lives in the low thousands, for a ratio between 1:100 and 1:1000, while 9/11, the largest informal terrorism death ratio achieved to date was at 1:100, but is more usually in the 1:10  to 1:1 range. So taking the US military as representing the population and so being mainly Christian, the Christians are actually far more efficient terrorists (in terms of lives) than the Muslims they are killing. Which leaves your assertion that "Muslims just happen to be more efficient at civilian terrorism lately" in tatters.
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #6 on: 2009-11-14 09:02:23 »
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #7 on: 2009-11-15 14:57:00 »
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #8 on: 2009-11-15 16:11:03 »
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[MoEnzyme] In general I do not disagree about the various moral and ethical conflicts Hasan faced.

[Hermit] We concur that on the present data, terrorism does not appear to describe Hasan's motivations.

[MoEnzyme] I don't think of him as a purely evil person, merely a traitor

[Hermit] I have argued that if my theory as to his motivation is correct, and you appear to have offered support to that theory, then by acting as he did when he did, he did not betray his clade. As loyalty to the clade is a biological imperative, it surely takes precedence over other less compelling allegiances?

[Hermit] As such, when do you think he become a traitor, how did he display this treachery, and to what was it demonstrated?

[MoEnzyme] I'm even assuming that he wasn't actively involved in conspiracy with members of Al Qeda

[Hermit] Consider that the case against al Q'aeda wrt 9/11 isn't even formulated, let alone proven, that most insurgent/guerilla/terrorist groups don't have membership cards, and that US intelligence services are of the opinion that al Q'aeda has fewer than 100 active members remaining before addressing who the supposed al Q'aeda member is and the purported relevance of this.

[MoEnzyme] I can't really find anything explicit about whether he was Sunni or Shia

[Hermit] Most Palestinians are Sunni, with a small but significant number (mainly Hamas) being Shiite; but the clans tend to be much more significant to the Palestinians than the sects, possibly because of the fragmentary state the Israelis have imposed on the Palestinians. But I have seen references to letters of his to both Sunni and Shiite Imams. Which is why I said that he had indubitably corresponded with both.

[MoEnzyme] as I understand it, Al Qeda is more of a Sunni terrorist brand (vs. Hezbolla).

[Hermit] al Q'aeda is unmistakably Sunni.

[Hermit] I am completely unconvinced of the merit of referring to Hizbollah as a terrorist organization. It appears that only Israel and countries with Israeli dominated governments that have adopted this terminology. Hizbollah developed as a resistance movement to Israeli aggression and occupation, filled the role that ought to have been played by government when Israel and the West were intervening on a massive scale to prevent effective government in the Lebanon, and later transformed itself into a social-political-defensive organization. To my knowledge Hizbollah has never projected or advocated terror, and while it did attack American military targets while the USA was occupying and bombarding the Lebanon these were, in my considered opinion, legitimate acts of resistance (as was the attack on the Cole, while McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City, the al Q'aeda bombings of US embassies and most of the ANC attacks were acts of terrorism). Today Hizbollah's membership and other arabs and arab states and bodies regard Hizbollah as a legitimate component of the socio-political-defense structure of Lebanon.
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #9 on: 2009-11-15 21:52:42 »
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #10 on: 2009-11-16 00:02:34 »
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[MoEnzyme] I suspect he probably counted this as "fair warning" in his limited ethical perspective, however this was more than two years before the culmination of his treason. I think he could have probably done more to explicitly warn his chain of command in the meantime. Sometimes you really have to grab someone by the collar and shake them around a bit before they see things they'd rather ignore.

[Hermit] But if my theory is correct, and it has the virtue of being sympathetic* as well as fully predictive and explicative, Hasan was seeing "defenceless people like him" being "murdered" by US military personnel that he had assisted in preparing to commit "murder", thus any action he took that only removed him from action would have been a fresh betrayal of his clade (betrayal is a better word to describe guilt through inaction in the face of a common threat) and would not have addressed his probable perception of pre-existing betrayal of his clade through enabling their enemy. My contention is that it was this higher priority imperative that overrode any other programming Hasan may, and almost certainly did, possess, and thus his actions were not "treachery" in his eyes but rather restitution for "treachery".

[Hermit] As I see it, for you to assert that he acted as he did because he is a "treacherous traitor" is merely an instance of both circulus in demonstrando and affirming the consequent, expressed from your, rather than his perspective. And unless you can show how your perspective controlled Hasan's behaviour, that is an instance of a non sequitur and if you think that your perspective ought to have been shared by Hasan, then probably of Hume's is-to-ought fallacy as well.

[Hermit] To my mind you are not acknowledging, let alone addressing these deficiencies in your responses. Please correct this oversight.


*"Sympathetic" here implies ascribing the best possible constructions and interpretations to the actions of another, friend or opponent, from their perspective. Failing to adopt a sympathetic stance makes it very unlikely that you will ever interpret the motivations of others correctly except by happenstance; because people almost always do things to "make things better" from their perspective, in one way or another, even where this means, e.g. bombing the existing system in order to destroy it so that something perceived as better by the bomber may arise from the wreckage of the disestablished controlling situation. Naturally a sympathetic stance doesn't happen in vacua, a sympathetic stance still requires you to evaluate all the evidence and ensure that none is contradicted and all is justified by your theories. My invitation stands for you to explain where my theories contradict or fail to explain something in Hasan's known behaviour.
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #11 on: 2009-11-18 08:18:53 »
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #12 on: 2009-11-18 10:49:01 »
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I see your argument with recourse to the dictionary about the meaning of treason in law as being fatally flawed. In US law, treason is defined by the USC as:
    Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason
I don't think that you can successfully argue that Hasan "levied war" or "adhered to their enemies" in law or in fact, and thus the charge of treason as a matter of law is spurious and so was not addressed.

Outside of narrow legal definition, treason is, I would argue, the rejection of one's primary obligations without duress. What is one's primary obligation? To family, to tribe, to clade, arguably to conceptual groupings as well, or perhaps even ahead of biological imperatives, we are after all, intellectual creatures and I have long argued, I think successfully, that religion thrived as a means to create groupings larger than the tribe. In defining treason as you attempted, these "natural obligations" have been assimilated into only a single concept, treason to the state, perhaps due to the Westphalian system not recognizing that states are no longer monocultural. but the roots of the word were not so exclusive, and neither is common usage. However they are defined, I think that "treason" and "traitor" always have massively negative connotations and do not allow of nuance. For that reason I tend to eschew them, because, like "terrorism" the application of the epithet is invariably made by those disagreeing with the action of those so labelled - who might, like Sophie and Hans Scholl, Nelson Mandela or von Stauffenberg (carefully selected types of "traitor" to some, patriots to others, in that they go from passive resistance to planning violent insurrection to attempted murder of the chief of state), regard themselves as greater patriots than those they opposed - and may well, as in all three examples here, end up being generally recognized as such, despite having previously been labelled as traitors.

That said, you demonstrated sympathy to von Stauffenberg (as would I, although I also have sympathy for e.g. Mandela and thus for other "traitors"), and I think you did so in the same way as von Stauffenberg himself claimed that he was following "Natural Law" (Naturrecht). I generalized this by referring to one's obligation to one's clade and demonstrated that Hasan could be shown to have multiple alternate allegiances, that these might be more binding than his allegience to the US, and as we cannot point to his "primary allegiance" (to clade, religion, ideology or state) in the absence of conclusive evidence, we cannot speak to his "treason" in the non-legal sense without making pre-emptive prejudicial assumptions. Which I wouldn't see as rational, empathetic or visionary.
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #13 on: 2009-11-18 11:19:37 »
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Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #14 on: 2009-11-18 13:23:09 »
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If Hasan emulated von Stauffenberg and thought "I am committing treason" then, like Stauffberg and every other person who acts knowing that what they are doing is going to be seen by others as "wrong", there was undoubtedly a "but" that established a greater priority and thus mitigated the "treason" in his own mind. As I see it, the "but" is what we would have to establish, in order to speak to his motivation. Claiming he was insane or perverse or evil or even treacherous (however faulty I suspect that label to be) doesn't speak to his motivation either, and may well get in the way of an investigation. We need to get inside his head, and assigning labels tends to get in the way of doing that.

I'm not trying to ascribe intentions to Hasan. We know what he did, he killed and injured others. From the number left injured, we can conclude that if he had had his druthers, he would have liked to have killed many more. If he was not insane, he intended to cause these deaths, as rational people don't shoot others unless they intend to kill them. I won't assume that he was insane without strong evidence of that, as insanity, like "god thingies" close the door on rational inspection, analysis and conclusion, let alone determining action to prevent recurrence or mitigate similar events in future if it can be achieved on a cost-effective basis.

At this point I consider Hasan's decision to act violently to have been a "poor decision" irrespective of whether or not it was also wrong. Let me attempt to explain. My current perception is that violence is justifiable only when it cannot be avoided and where it serves some useful purpose which cannot be achieved through other means. This is very seldom true. So I have not and will not examine the ethical implications of his actions, not only because we posses insufficient information, but also because I regard his recourse to violence as stupid and futile - which I see as probably worse than simply being wrong.

That said and done, my opinion doesn't and didn't matter to Hasan any more than yours does. Only his did. If we are to derive anything useful from his actions, we need to understand what motivated him, not what we think of it. If we are to do so we have to be able to understand his actions from his perspective. If you are attempting to achieve other aims, please share them. We will be much more effective that way.

In the meantime I have articulated and supported a theory of motivation (in my post beginning, "I think that Mo is completely missing Hasan's motivation and is not applying sufficient scepticism to what he is hearing about al Q'aeda from people who are no friends of theirs") and invited you to criticise it or propose alternates. I look forward to your response.
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