In order to better organize this topic which sprouted on http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=69;action=display;threadid=42746;start=75;boardseen=1 I am starting this thread here with a couple of paste-ins to capture the progress of this topic, specifically the treachery of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, as opposed to the "dismal falures of Obama". Aside from the fact that while not perfect I don't view Obama as a dismal failure, this current event seemed worthy of a separate topic line. You can go read it there if you wish but please respond here so that Hermit can continue to talk about Obama's "dismal failures" without getting sidetracked by current events.
Okay next post will be a stream of cut'n'pastes, so you've been warned.
I've been finding myself in some rare company (for me that is) on this Ft. Hood fratricide. While I'm not a fan of the Iraq war, and the Afghan war causes me consternation (even though I'm less surprised that we are there) I simply can't imagine a way that this incident is anything other than the memetic result of political Islamic jihad. Apparently Rush Limbaugh and Joe Liberman agree with me wholeheartedly, and other neo-con talking heads while agreeing seem much more culturally cautious than me even as they agree as well. And of course Obama is the most cautious of them all. I actually forgive him on this one since he's the chief governmental mouthpiece and there is an investigation that needs to proceed in a semi-level headed way.
But really now . . . how many members of Al Qeda does Major Hasan have to regularly talk to before our team figures out that he's really playing for the other guys? Its getting embarrassing. Without taking sides for a moment, just think about it . . . not in moral terms, but just in terms of stupidity and willful blindness. You don't have to be a US patriot to understand how much incompetence from so many people went into this collective lapse of judgement.
I know its not really Obama's lapse in judgement directly but if he really thinks that the Afghan war is worth it, he needs to jump to it sooner rather than later, and he's the only one who can really impose change on the culture of those responsible for this. Maybe it isn't worth it. Maybe we need to revise our goals there, but in any case the evidence shows that we are careening down this road rather blindly at the moment. I'm still not in the "failing dismally" camp, especially considering the mess of the previous few decades that were dropped in his lap, but then he obviously had to know what he was getting into.
Advocating carrying fighting to others also means bringing the fight to yourself. You can't have one without the other.
Given the vast number of casualties that the administration is prepared to accept in the field (about 500,000 so far), a few victims more or less in a support base is nothing to become emotionally distressed about. Particularly as attacks against soldiers, be they ever so internecine, cannot be characterised as terrorism without redefining the word such as to lose all meaning and thus utility. Attacks like this are a logical consequence of such wars against groups and targeting people with whom many Americans identify, such as those in which we are engaged in the Middle East, which is why US and other intelligence services predicted that the number of casualties, military and civilian, of ineptly named, "home-grown terrorism" would soar, even in the early years of the Cheney-Bush maladministration. Continuation of the policy of escalating martial exercises in what is now overwhelmingly perceived by its victims as a bipartisan American war against Islam and dusky hued people, even though we know that it is occurring in the face of public opinion that is now overwhelmingly negative, is only going to result in more of the same. For which, it seems we can now thank Obama, as much as we previously thanked Cheney-Bush. While some people think this is not a dismal failure, they should attempt to accept the predictable results of the policies they and their preferred leadership advocate and adopt with greater equanimity.
Those claiming or suggesting "another win for al Q'aeda" in Fort Hood have missed the point that religion follows society, it does not lead it, so it is silly to attempt to blame religion for reflecting human nature. While all religions promote delusional thinking and make their adherents more susceptible to mob behaviour, brutally aggressive religions are a response to brutally aggressive environments, not a cause of them. For example, similar religions could and did enable and motivate the hospitals of the Franciscans and the anti-slavery efforts of the British Quakers just as effectively as they motivated the merciless slaughters of the Crusaders, the obliteration of the American Indians and were used to justify slavery by the good old Christians of the USA.
In my opinion, Fort Hood, like other fraggings in the current war, is, as Arlo Guthrie might have put it, simply the result of militarizing, polarizing and marginalizing some members of society who identify with our victims rather more than they do with their peers. Just as were many of the fraggings in Vietnam. Only there the identification was primarily ideological rather than religio-racial. Which is why the current war is vastly more polarizing, even if, like the Vietnam war, this one is utterly unwinnable, vastly expensive, and enjoys bipartisan support.
Or to put it more succinctly, don't blame the people who "missed" the signs of this coming, blame the environment which makes it inevitable, and to the extent that you are responsible for enabling that environment, blame yourself.
Yeah sure, we had it coming as usual . . . in case I didn't make it clear originally - I accept it as a cost of war. And even though its a bit surprising coming in the form of fratricide in our own territory, I agree it isn't equivalent to killing thousands of presumably innocent civilians in tall buildings. Its not terrorism, but clearly something that we should have seen coming and assuming that we felt the war was worth the costs, something we could have and should have prevented. Somehow we seem to believe that we can be oh so culturally sensitive to Islam at the same time we declare war on their jihad . . . we really can't have it both ways, I just wish we would make up our minds already. While its an interesting detail that Major Hasan was a psychiatrist dealing with PTSD issues in his military patients, this fratricide was all about his Islamically inspired insanity rather than any other kind of mental disorder. Otherwise, your points are well taken.
-Mo
ps. after consulting wikipedia, I take a bit of exception to characterizing this as a "fragging" - Quote:
"Fragging most often involved the murder of a commanding officer (C.O.) or a senior noncommissioned officer perceived as unpopular, harsh, inept, or overzealous. Many soldiers were not overly keen to go into harm's way, and preferred leaders with a similar sense of self-preservation."
As best I can tell, Major Hasan was killing fellow soldiers rather than specifically his command structure. While he may not be a "terrorist" to say that this was a mere "fragging" would be a bit too complimentary of his motives.
continued Quote:
If a C.O. was incompetent, fragging the officer was considered a means to the end of self preservation for the men serving under him. Fragging might also occur if a commander freely took on dangerous or suicidal missions, especially if he was deemed to be seeking glory for himself. The very idea of fragging served to warn junior officers to avoid the ire of their enlisted men through recklessness, cowardice, or lack of leadership. Junior officers in turn could arrange the murder of senior officers when finding them incompetent or wasting their men's lives needlessly. Underground GI newspapers sometimes listed bounties offered by units for the fragging of unpopular commanding officers[2].
Looking at it in monetary terms – more numbers – may seem cold, but again, it puts the taxpayers’ burden into shocking perspective. Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz have identified two scenarios in their book, The Three Trillion Dollar War (2008). One scenario estimates a long-term cost of $422 billion to the federal government for veterans’ health care and disability compensation (given 1.8 million men and women deployed and troop levels falling below 55,000 by 2012). In the other scenario, the U.S. stays in Iraq and Afghanistan another eight years and 2.1 million men and women are deployed, with a price tag of $717 billion
Sullivan estimates that there are about 450,000 disability claims already filed with the VA on behalf of Iraq and Afghanistan vets, based on the official 405,000 figure announced back in February. He said there are approximately 80,000 new claims a month from veterans of all wars. As of Sept. 26, there were more than 951,217 pending claims by all veterans, including 200,679 claims pending appeal (the Veterans Benefits Administration recently reduced that number to 176,000, raising eyebrows at Sullivan’s group).
Rarely do we hear these figures over the din calling for even greater numbers of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. The generals want 40,000 or more, which would exceed the "surge" of 20,000 men and women into Iraq almost three years ago. Soldiers are finally withdrawing from that front only to be shifted to the other one for seemingly more hazardous duty.
If you want to look at numbers of those impacted by us, you should be attempting to evaluate regional surplus deaths, which is how the effects of other disasters are measured, rather than 'just' casualties, as surplus deaths provide a much more accurate reflection of the devastating impact we are having in the Middle East. The number in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where we are directly responsible is probably northwards of 3 to 3.5 million*. But nobody seems to be counting. After all, these are dusky people being killed as enthusiastically by Democrats as they were by Republicans. A tradition as American as apple pie.
Re fragging: I agree that the term as used by Americans is not as inclusive as one might like it to be, but I'm not sure that there is a better word for such "own goals" as the "military fratricide" (another term I have seen used, but take exception to as fratricide means the killing of siblings and the same term is used to describe both expected but accidental "friendly fire" casualties in combat as well as a technique for clustering hardened nuclear missile silos to minimize the POK of incoming attacks ) at Fort Hood, and the word has undoubtedly been used in other conflicts in the sense that I have used it here even though it originally described attacks using fragmentation grenades and later expanded to mean attacks with any weapons. The lack of an accepted term makes it difficult to search for such incidents, and perhaps that is deliberate, a choice to assist these "incidents" down the "memory hole". The other term I used, "internecine executions," might be better, as it describes deliberately caused deaths within a group by members of the same group; but I don't think I have seen this used to describe situations such as occurred at Fort Hood. That said, I have seen "fragging" used as I have here by others. For example, here is how a rabbi, Arthur Wasowskli, described what happened at Fort Hood in the Washington Post.
In Fort Hood, if the reports and claims from the police and military are correct (we already know that a number of falsehoods were reported as facts), an officer, a physician, trained to heal traumatized people from the maiming of their souls, was refused an exit from the soul-destroying prison he begged to leave.
If the reports are accurate, it seems that he broke, choosing murder rather than the nonviolent forms of resistance he might have chosen. In that sense he replicated the violence of the war he abhorred and the violence that kept him in the Army against his will -- replicated the violence instead of resisting it in a deeper way.
One of the reasons that "fragging" came near the end of theVietnam War is that the epidemic of fragging signaled to the higher officer corps that they had better end the war. Coming on top of more and more evidence that the U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan is itself multiplying the violent resistance it claims to suppress, the Fort Hood murders should signal the American public and its military and civilian leadership to take off tne hoods we have put over our own eyes, see the truth, and take our soldiers out from Afghanistan.
At this point, I find it very hard to disagree with him.
Ah yes, your "dusky" . . . my "darky" at least that's the bigot term I hear bandied about in my home culture when we are talking about heavily pigmented people who aren't culturally related through a history of slavery or some other such cultural/biological bond. We don't seem to use the "N" words anymore, and its just as well since those apply to people like "us" regardless of pigment.
To be fair to Islam, as well as to ourselves this really isn't a racial issue, as Islam is at least as colorblind as Amerika if not more so. I give them that much at least, but our problems are definitely cultural and specifically cultural issues with Islam itself. As I sometimes joke with my Christian friends - I don't really know if Jesus actually existed as a real historical person. I suspect not, but rather that he existed more as a historical myth like King Arthur. He was likely just a culturally romantic notion of the times who happened to share names with quite a number of people born in that era. As the punch line goes, if Jesus really wanted us to remember him as a real historical person, he should have killed a lot of people in his lifetime. That seems to be pre-to-proto-historic ticket to immortality, and certainly Mohammed qualified in that regard.
Thankfully with the later widespread literacy and other intellectual technology that's no longer necessary. And certainly Christianity has hell to pay for the crusades and many other violent sins, but as the basic cultural DNA, the actual mythology of Jesus . . . whether or not he existed, he didn't kill anybody - otherwise we would probably have better evidence of his existence. And while it steams my ethics to hear fundamentally violent partisan Christian hypocrites point it out, I have a hard time concluding that Islam is not fundamentally a religion violence as its founder eagerly engaged in it even as he preached "peace".
That seems like a mindful of thoughts for now . . . but since you want to talk about casualties, costs, and numbers, I think that's fair too. I haven't really looked it up myself, but I heard a fairly credible source mention that the number of suicides in military personnel since 9/11 actually exceeds the number of our combat casualties. While a significant number of those probably have more to do with personal issues, as a raw statistic, it ought to give us pause. While that wasn't your point, I put it in the "point taken" column for you along with your other cost/benefit analysis. Its all a messy equation of death with few to no winners, no doubt, but since I'm not Muslim, and not in the military, I suppose I can only personally deal with these other cultural issues.
ps. I didn't read your last post before posting this one. crosstalking again. I'll be sure to digest it however.
Nobody who has read it can deny that the "Old Testament" is replete with exhortations to genocide. Which provides an irrefutable basis of murderous nastiness for all three of the Abrahamic religions.
Following Robert Eiseman's towering work of scholarship, "James the Brother of Jesus," in so far as there was a prototypical Jesus, he was a "zealot for the law" and the law was the brutal Mosaic law. To the Hassemite kings and the Romans, the zealots were dangerous revolutionaries, the terrorists of their day, advocating violent insurrection and the non-payment of taxes which ultimately lead to two dangerous revolutions. Which adequately explains why the belligerent "community of the poor," whether you regard them as Jews or as proto-Christians, was, in contrast to their usual religious tolerance, extirpated by the Romans.
The murder of Hypatia by the rabid monks of Alexandria, and the ongoing extermination of fellow Christians holding "heretical views," shows that 400 years did not improve them in the slightest. Their willingness to murder, rape and pillage in the name of their gods may not have distinguished the Christians from any other group in the following 1000 years or so, but there is certainly sufficient evidence to disregard any claims that they were any better than any other groups.
Meanwhile the tolerance of people of other faith in their communities was and to an extent remains a hallmark of the Islamic communities who provided shelter to the Jews and others fleeing from pograms and discrimination by the Christians throughout Europe. It should not be forgotten that even today, the remaining Persian Jewish community living in Iran vastly exceeds the Iranians living in Jerusalem.
All of which show that the "cultural narrative" which you are asserting is dubious at best, and more likely pure Tonypandy.
Those claiming or suggesting "another win for al Q'aeda" in Fort Hood...
[Blunderov] I'm not aware of who might be making such claims. But if they happen to simultaneously be supporters of the various wars being waged at the moment, they will need to explain why the supposed objective - "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here" - has apparently not been achieved. To the contrary in fact. I suppose the chickenhawks are now likely to claim that it would have been worse without these wars.
@ Hermit. 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. Perhaps if Timothy McVeigh had another bite at the apple or few extra helping hands he would have registered a bigger score. Or perhaps he should have tried playing for a different team? whatever.
As to "fragging", I still think its an inappropriate term for Maj. Hasan. If you are looking for a better term, perhaps plain old "treachery" would suffice. "Fratricide" would better apply if he had gone through actual combat with the people he murdered, so perhaps that kind of implicit trust was lacking here. I'll take "treachery". I think he outranked most of the people he killed and injured so there really isn't any sense in which he was doing it on behalf of his fellow grunts - indeed they were mostly unarmed, and he didn't seem to save his fire for superiors. The simplest and most obvious explanation was that he was scoring for the other team whether they were aware of it or not.
Why when somebody reacts to being forced into doing something they really, really don't want to do, against which they have protested and been overridden, and which evidentially goes against what turns out to be their primary loyalties do you think that a word like "treachery" applies? After all, treachery is defined as a breach of faith, and I think that the evidence is in that whatever else drove the events at Fort Hood, the perception of "keeping the faith" is going to turn out to have more than a little to do with motivation. As, by the way, it did for McVeigh and his accomplices who were definitely driven by their fundamentalist Christian beliefs, even if the establishment did its best to downplay that side of the story and his execution precluded further investigations.
I suggest that if you are looking for descriptions of Hasan's actions based on describing his motivations as they have appeared so far, "dealing with the consequences of bad decisions" seems to me to be the most appropriate description of all. Bad decisions on the part of Hasan, his superiors, the US military and the US government, paid for by those who got in the way of projectiles from his weapon. I don't think that concern about the rank of those around him, who it seems in his view were setting out to kill his fellow believers in an illegal war and occupation, affected his aim in the slightest.
Given that nowhere in the US constitution or military code is there a clause permitting citizens to be forced into killing people for racial, religious or any aggressive purpose, and indeed, all countries and people are specifically precluded from participating in illegal acts of aggression by international and US law, so it could be argued that Hasan was engaging in the same cause as that espoused by Bush & Co. Pre-emptive self defence (which perhaps highlights why pre-emptive acts are usually invalid). What does seem unarguable is that if Hasan had been assigned differently or discharged, nobody would have died. As he apparently repeatedly requested this, his subsequent actions and the actions of others who have killed themselves or others in similar circumstances do not scream to me of "treachery", but of a broken system imposing unbearable strains on people who are all too human. If the system concludes that people following their consciences, even to illogical conclusions, are traitors, when the same system demands that people follow their consciences and reject illegal orders or potentially be guilty of committing crimes for which capital punishment applies, then perhaps it is irreparably broken.
While we don't yet, and may never know if Hasam committed murder, his victims were other people who were prepared and willing to kill, arguably illegally. Which is what distinguishes his actions from those of a terrorist.
Why when somebody reacts to being forced into doing something they really, really don't want to do, against which they have protested and been overridden, and which evidentially goes against what turns out to be their primary loyalties do you think that a word like "treachery" applies? After all, treachery is defined as a breach of faith, and I think that the evidence is in that whatever else drove the events at Fort Hood, the perception of "keeping the faith" is going to turn out to have more than a little to do with motivation. As, by the way, it did for McVeigh and his accomplices who were definitely driven by their fundamentalist Christian beliefs, even if the establishment did its best to downplay that side of the story and his execution precluded further investigations.
I suggest that if you are looking for descriptions of Hasan's actions based on describing his motivations as they have appeared so far, "dealing with the consequences of bad decisions" seems to me to be the most appropriate description of all. Bad decisions on the part of Hasan, his superiors, the US military and the US government, paid for by those who got in the way of projectiles from his weapon.
[Mo] Hermit, This is precious wording here. I've had more than one client's spouse's face which got in the way of my client's fist. "Dealing with the consequences of bad decisions" was fun too. I don't think he was dealing with them so much as he was perpetuating them.
Quote:
I don't think that concern about the rank of those around him, who it seems in his view were setting out to kill his fellow believers in an illegal war and occupation, affected his aim in the slightest. Given that nowhere in the US constitution or military code is there a clause permitting citizens to be forced ino killing Muslims, and indeed, nowhere is there a clause allowing the commanders of the US to draft citizens into fighting illegal wars of occupation, perhaps it could be argued that Hasan was engaging in the same cause as that espoused by Bush & Co. Pre-emptive self defence. What does seem unarguable is that if Hasan had been assigned differently or discharged, nobody would have died.
[Mo] I doubt that shooting about 50 unarmed military personnel was the only possible way out for Maj. Hasan. At a minimum he could have used better math. Probably just one victim would have gotten him out of having to shoot at his Muslim brothers later on. It probably would get him imprisoned, but that was going to happen anyways. The 40 some extra victims were bonus points for the other team. -Mo
Quote:
Which doesn't scream to me of "treachery" but of a broken system. If it concludes that people following their consciences, even to illogical conclusions, are traitors, when the same system demands that people follow their consciences and reject illegal orders or potentially be guilty of committing crimes for which capital punishment applies, perhaps irreparably so.
I don't visualize the al Qaeda connection on first plush, at all, when this story broke. I figured a "Shrink" lost it (no surprise for me there). So I was even more surprised to see the discussion you guys embark on (as always great stuff).
Will we really get the truth or will this be spun at any time to fulfill what ever need the administration has visa vi Afghanistan and Iraq by the "Infants and Cake eaters" and both sides of this mass killing aka WAR.
Sigh
Fritz
The Hasan Case: Overt Clues and Tactical Challenges
Source: STRATFOR Author: Scott Stewart and Fred Burton Date: 2009.11.11
In last week’s global security and intelligence report, we discussed the recent call by the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasir al-Wahayshi, for jihadists to conduct simple attacks against a variety of targets in the Muslim world and the West. We also noted how it is relatively simple to conduct such attacks against soft targets using improvised explosive devices, guns or even knives and clubs.
The next day, a lone gunman, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, opened fire on a group of soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas. The victims were in the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, a facility on the base where troops are prepared for deployment and where they take care of certain processing tasks such as completing insurance paperwork and receiving medical examinations and vaccinations.
Even though the targets of Hasan’s attack were soldiers, they represented a very soft target in this environment. Most soldiers on bases inside the United States are normally not armed and are only provided weapons for training. The only personnel who regularly carry weapons are the military police and the base civilian police officers. In addition to being unarmed, the soldiers at the center were closely packed together in the facility as they waited to proceed from station to station. The unarmed, densely packed mass of people allowed Hasan to kill 13 (12 soldiers and one civilian employee of the center) and wound 42 others when he opened fire.
Hasan is a U.S.-born Muslim who, according to STRATFOR sources and media accounts, has had past contact with jihadists, including the radical Imam Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki is a U.S.-born imam who espouses a jihadist ideology and who was discussed at some length in the 9/11 commission report for his links to 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Al-Awlaki, who is currently living in Yemen and reportedly has contacts with al Qaeda, posted a message on his Web site Nov. 9 praising Hasan’s actions. Despite Hasan’s connections to al-Awlaki and other jihadists, it is unknown at this point if he was even aware of al-Wahayshi’s recent message calling for simple attacks, and therefore it is impossible to tell if his attack was in response to it.
However, one thing that is certain is that investigators examining Hasan’s computer hard drive, e-mail traffic and Internet history will be looking into that possibility, along with other indications that Hasan was linked to radicals.
We noted last week that by their very nature, individual actors and small cells are very difficult for the government to detect. They must somehow identify themselves by contacting a government informant or another person who reports them to the authorities, attend a militant training camp or conduct correspondence with a person or organization under government scrutiny. In the Hasan case, it now appears that Hasan did self-identify by making radical statements to people he worked with, who reported him to the authorities. It also appears that he had correspondence with people such as al-Awlaki, whom the government was monitoring. Because of this behavior, Hasan brought himself to the attention of the Department of Defense, the FBI and the CIA.
The fact that Hasan was able to commit this attack after bringing government attention to himself could be due to a number of factors. Chief among them is the fact that it is tactically impossible for a government to identify every aspiring militant actor and to pre-empt every act of violence. The degree of difficulty is increased greatly if an actor does indeed act alone and does not give any overt clues through his actions or his communications of his intent to attack. Because of this, the Hasan case provides an excellent opportunity to examine national security investigations and their utility and limitations.
The Nature of Intelligence Investigations
The FBI will typically open up an intelligence investigation (usually referred to as a national security investigation) in any case where there is an indication or allegation that a person is involved in terrorist activity but there is no evidence that a specific law has been broken. Many times these investigations are opened up due to a lead passed by the CIA, National Security Agency or a foreign liaison intelligence service. Other times an FBI investigation can come as a spin-off from another FBI counterterrorism investigation already under way or be prompted by a piece of information collected by an FBI informant or even by a tip from a concerned citizen — like the flight instructors who alerted the FBI to the suspicious behavior of some foreign flight students prior to the 9/11 attacks. In such a case, the FBI case agent in charge of the investigation will open a preliminary inquiry, which gives the agent a limited window of time to look into the matter. If no indication of criminal activity is found, the preliminary inquiry must be closed unless the agent receives authorization from the special agent in charge of his division and FBI headquarters to extend it.
If, during the preliminary inquiry, the investigating agents find probable cause that a crime has been committed, the FBI will open a full-fledged criminal investigation into the case, similar to what we saw in the case of Luqman Ameen Abdullah and his followers in Detroit.
One of the large problems in national security investigations is separating the wheat from the chaff. Many leads are based on erroneous information or a misidentification of the suspect — there is a huge issue associated with the confusion caused by the transliteration of Arabic names and the fact that there are many people bearing the same names. Jihadists also have the tendency to use multiple names and identities. And there are many cases in which people will falsely report a person to the FBI out of malice. Because of these factors, national security investigations proceed slowly and usually do not involve much (if any) contact with the suspect and his close associates. If the suspect is a real militant planning a terrorist attack, investigators do not want to tip him off, and if he is innocent, they do not want to sully his reputation by showing up and overtly interviewing everyone he knows. Due to its controversial history of domestic intelligence activities, the FBI has become acutely aware of its responsibility to protect privacy rights and civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and other laws.
And the rights guaranteed under the Constitution do complicate these national security investigations. It is not illegal for someone to say that Muslims should attack U.S. troops due to their operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that more Muslims should conduct attacks like the June 1 shooting at a recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark. — things that Hasan is reported to have said. Radical statements and convictions are not illegal — although they certainly would appear to be conduct unbecoming a U.S. Army officer. (We will leave to others the discussion of the difficulties in dealing with problem officers who are minorities and doctors and who owe several years of service in return for their education.)
There are also many officers and enlisted soldiers in the U.S. Army who own personal weapons and who use them for self-defense, target shooting or hunting. There is nothing extraordinary or illegal about a U.S. Army major owning personal weapons. With no articulable violation of U.S. law, the FBI would have very little to act upon in a case like Hasan’s. Instead, even if they found cause to extend their preliminary inquiry, they would be pretty much limited to monitoring his activities (and perhaps his communications, with a court order) and waiting for a law to be violated. In the Hasan case, it would appear that the FBI did not find probable cause that a law had been violated before he opened fire at Fort Hood. Although perhaps if the FBI had been watching his activities closely and with an eye toward “the how” of terrorist attacks, they might have noticed him conducting preoperational surveillance of the readiness center and even a dry run of the attack.
Of course, in addition to just looking for violations of the law, the other main thrust of a national security investigation is to determine whom the suspect is connected to and whom he is talking to or planning with. In past cases, such investigations have uncovered networks of jihadist actors working together in the United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere. However, if all Hasan did in his correspondence with people such as al-Awlaki was exercise his First Amendment right to hold radical convictions, and if he did not engage in any type of conspiracy to conduct an attack, he did not break the law.
Another issue that complicates national security cases is that they are almost always classified at the secret level or above. This is understandable, considering they are often opened based upon intelligence produced by sensitive intelligence programs. However, this classification means that only those people with the proper clearance and an established need to know can be briefed on the case. It is not at all unusual for the FBI to visit a high-ranking official at another agency to brief the official on the fact that the FBI is conducting a classified national security investigation involving a person working for the official’s agency. The rub is that they will frequently tell the official that he or she is not at liberty to share details of the investigation with other individuals in the agency because they do not have a clear need to know. The FBI agent will also usually ask the person briefed not to take any action against the target of the investigation, so that the investigation is not compromised. While some people will disagree with the FBI’s determination of who really needs to know about the investigation and go on to brief a wider audience, many officials are cowed by the FBI and sit on the information.
Of course, the size of an organization is also a factor in the dissemination of information. The Department of Defense and the U.S. Army are large organizations, and it is possible that officials at the Pentagon or the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (still known by its old acronym CID) headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Va., were briefed on the case and that local officials at Fort Hood were not. The Associated Press is now reporting that the FBI had alerted a Defense Criminal Investigative Service agent assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Washington about Hasan’s contacts with al-Awlaki, and ABC reports that the Defense Department is denying the FBI notified them. It would appear that the finger-pointing and bureaucratic blame-shifting normally associated with such cases has begun.
Even more severe problems would have plagued the dissemination of information from the CIA to local commanders and CID officers at Fort Hood. Despite the intelligence reforms put in place after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government still faces large obstacles when it comes to sharing intelligence information with law enforcement personnel.
Criminal Acts vs. Terrorism
So far, the Hasan shooting investigation is being run by the Army CID, and the FBI has been noticeably — and uncharacteristically — absent from the scene. As the premier law enforcement agency in the United States, the FBI will often assume authority over investigations where there is even a hint of terrorism. Since 9/11, the number of FBI/JTTF offices across the country has been dramatically increased, and the JTTFs are specifically charged with investigating cases that may involve terrorism. Therefore, we find the FBI’s absence in this case to be quite out of the ordinary.
However, with Hasan being a member of the armed forces, the victims being soldiers or army civilian employees and the incident occurring at Fort Hood, the case would seem to fall squarely under the mantle of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). From a prosecutorial perspective, a homicide trial under the UCMJ should be very tidy and could be quickly concluded. It will not involve all the potential loose ends that could pop up in a federal terrorism trial, especially when those loose ends involve what the FBI and CIA knew about Hasan, when they learned it and who they told. Also, politically, there are some who would like to see the Hasan case remain a criminal matter rather than a case of terrorism. Following the shooting death of Luqman Ameen Abdullah and considering the delicate relationship between Muslim advocacy groups and the U.S. government, some people would rather see Hasan portrayed as a mentally disturbed criminal than as an ideologically driven lone wolf.
Despite the CID taking the lead in prosecuting the case, the classified national security investigation by the CIA and FBI into Hasan and his possible connections to jihadist elements is undoubtedly continuing. Senior members of the government will certainly demand to know if Hasan had any confederates, if he was part of a bigger plot and if there are more attacks to come. Several congressmen and senators are also calling for hearings into the case, and if such hearings occur, they will certainly produce an abundance of interesting information pertaining to Hasan and the national security investigation of his activities.
Thanks for the read. Yes, there is some talk about whether this was a "terrorist attack". In the plain sense of those words, I would say no; up to that point Hermit and I agree due to the military nature of the targets. There are however jurisdictional issues and for such purposes "terrorist attack" can mean something different. Perhaps if its discovered that Maj. Hasan was actively coordinating his activities with members of Al Qeda that could trigger jurisdictional issues, and I think that is what Joe Lieberman is trying to get at when he called for his investigation into whether this was a terrorist attack.
Even if that's the case, while a bit more disturbing, I still wouldn't consider this a terrorist attack in any moral/ethical sense of the word. As has been noted above, we will probably never get inside Hasan's head on this one, however given some indications that have seeped out in the media it seems likely that his actions were in sympathy with Al Qeda, perhaps even particular individuals in that loose organization. On those assumptions, Hasan was scoring for the other team and so I'm sticking with treachery on this one.
I still like "fratricide"; not literally of course - these people weren't actually related - but because of the implicit trust soldiers share with their psychiatrist "fratricide" captures some of the ethical flavor of this incident. I heard an interesting story on NPR just now about one soldier who sought psychiatric care at Ft. Hood and his interactions with Hasan. While Hasan was not directly working with him, from what I gathered from the interview it seems likely that Hasan probably knew some things about his experiences in Iraq which led to him seek psychiatric help.
Capt. Shannon Meehan is one of the soldiers from Iraq who took his wartime stories to the psychiatrists at Fort Hood. But since the mass shooting there, allegedly by psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan, Shannon is now worried that other military personnel won't want to share their stories with mental health professionals.
Shannon was a platoon leader in Iraq. He was considered one of the best in the brigade. But in the heat of the battle for Baqubah, he called in mortars on a suspected Al Qaeda house. He soon discovered that a family with six children had died in those blasts. Shannon joins Dick Gordon to talk about how the psychiatrists at Fort Hood began to help him deal with the wounds of war.
That's not a permanent link above, but if you go there now you can see the program note and listen to the program. It's about a 30 minute interview at the beginning of an hour show. About halfway through the mp3 file the show switches to a different unrelated interview.
Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #3 on: 2009-11-13 02:24:44 »
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.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
"Going postal" is a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon of violent rage in which a worker--archetypically a postal worker--"snaps" and guns down his colleagues.
As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub--disconcertingly--"Going Muslim." This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American--a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood--discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.
The difference between "going postal," in the conventional sense, and "going Muslim," in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological "snapping" point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage--the camouflage of integration--in an act of revelatory catharsis. In spite of suggestions by some who know him that he had a history of "harassment" as a Muslim in the army, Maj. Hasan did not "snap" in the "postal" manner. He gave away his possessions on the morning of his day of murder. He even gave away--to a neighbor--a packet of frozen broccoli that he did not wish to see go to waste, even as he mapped in his mind the laying waste of lives at Fort Hood. His was a meticulous, even punctilious "departure."
We are a civilized society. One of our cardinal rules of coexistence is that we (try always to) judge people only by their actions and not by their identity, whether racial, religious or sexual. This is our great strength as a society, and also, in the present circumstances, our great weakness: How to address the threat posed by the fact that, of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in our midst, there are a few (perhaps many more than a few) who are so radicalized that they would kill their fellow Americans? Must we continue to be neutral in handling all people from different groups even though we know that there are differential risks posed by people of one group? The problem here is a heightened version of the airport security problem, where we check all people--including Chinese grandmothers--regardless of risk profiles. But can we afford that on a grand, national scale? (And I mean that question not merely in a financial sense, but also in terms of the price we'd pay in failing to detect a threat in time.)
This being America, we will insist on going a long way to preserve the appearance of equality, and that is no bad thing in terms of moral principle. But like all values, the appearance of equality is not infinite in its appeal--especially if it flies in the face of common sense and self-preservation. A short time after the shootings at Fort Hood, President Obama asked us not to jump to conclusions. To many Americans, this was a grating request, of a piece with the political correctness that was responsible--it has emerged--for the hands-off treatment by the Army of Maj. Hasan. How else could he have been left in the position of treating U.S. troops, given the stories we've now heard about his incendiary statements and apparent incompetence?
This is the same mindset that led the FBI to deny the possibility that the Fort Hood massacre was linked to terrorism even before they could have had any idea that was the case. We don't have to be paranoid about Arab males; we just have to avoid the opposite: Being fearful of coming across as Islamophobic, and thereby failing to look straight at a situation.
This is part of a larger--and too-hot-to-touch--American problem, which is the privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse. Muslims may be more extreme because their religion is founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes. President Obama was as craven as a community college diversity vice-president when he said that no one should jump to conclusions. Everyone did, and he lost credibility with people who cannot stand civic piety in the face of the murderous kind.
Muslims are the most difficult "incomers" in the ongoing integration challenge, which America has always handled with pride--and a kind of swagger. We're the salad bowl/melting pot. Drive through Queens to see how we do this.
America differentiates itself on integration from Western European countries, which are far more cringing and guilt-driven in their approach. But can the American swagger persist if many Americans come genuinely to view Muslims as Fifth Columnists? The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant's desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. Once that trust doesn't exist, America faces a problem in need of urgent resolution.
Have we reached that point of breakdown in trust? Not yet, I think, and not by some distance; but a few more murderous incidents of the Maj. Hasan variety--a few more shouts of "Allahu Akbar" as Americans are shot dead--will push many Americans on to a dangerous cusp.
I will end on a practical note. The PC--political correctness--problem is an obvious and thorny issue that the U.S. Army, at least, has to tackle. The Army had a self-identified Islamic fundamentalist in its midst, blogging about suicide bombings and telling everyone he hated the Army's mission; and yet, they did, or could do, nothing about it. In effect, the "don't-jump-to-conclusions" mentality was underway long before this man killed his colleagues.
So, first, it should be part of the mandatory duty of every member of the armed forces to report any remarks or behavior of fellow service members that could be construed as indicating unfitness for duty for any reason.
Second, there should be a duty to report such data up the chain of command, regardless of the assessment of the local commander.
Third, there should be a single high-level Pentagon or army department that follows all such cases in real time, whether the potential ground for alarm is sympathy with white supremacism, radical Islamism, endorsement of suicide bombing or simple mental unfitness.
Let the first lesson of the Hasan atrocity be this: The U.S. Army has to be a PC-free zone. Our democracy and our way of life depend on it.
Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at NYU's Stern Business School and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, is executive editor for opinions at Forbes.
It can by now come as no surprise that the Fort Hood massacre yielded an instant flow of exculpatory media meditations on the stresses that must have weighed on the killer who mowed down 13 Americans and wounded 29 others. Still, the intense drive to wrap this clear case in a fog of mystery is eminently worthy of notice.
The tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace. Commentators, reporters, psychologists and, indeed, army spokesmen continue to warn portentously, "We don't yet know the motive for the shootings."
What a puzzle this piece of vacuity must be to audiences hearing it, some, no doubt, with outrage. To those not terrorized by fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's motive was instantly clear: It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.
What is hard to ignore, now, is the growing derangement on all matters involving terrorism and Muslim sensitivities. Its chief symptoms: a palpitating fear of discomfiting facts and a willingness to discard those facts and embrace the richest possible variety of ludicrous theories as to the motives behind an act of Islamic terrorism. All this we have seen before but never in such naked form. The days following the Fort Hood rampage have told us more than we want to know, perhaps, about the depth and reach of this epidemic.
One of the first outbreaks of these fevers, the night of the shootings, featured television's star psychologist, Dr. Phil, who was outraged when fellow panelist and former JAG officer Tom Kenniff observed that he had been listening to a lot of psychobabble and evasions about Maj. Hasan's motives.
A shocked Dr. Phil, appalled that the guest had publicly mentioned Maj. Hasan's Islamic identity, went on to present what was, in essence, the case for Maj. Hasan as victim. Victim of deployment, of the Army, of the stresses of a new kind of terrible war unlike any other we have known. Unlike, can he have meant, the kind endured by those lucky Americans who fought and died at Iwo Jima, say, or the Ardennes?
It was the same case to be presented, in varying forms, by guest psychologists, the media, and a representative or two from the military, for days on end.
The quality and thrust of this argument was best captured by the impassioned Dr. Phil, who asked us to consider, "how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act." And how far out of touch with reality is such a question, one asks in return—not only of Dr. Phil, but of the legions of commentators like him immersed in the labyrinths of motive hunting even as the details of Maj. Hasan's proclivities became ever clearer and more ominous.
To kill your fellow Americans—as many as possible, unarmed and in the most helpless of circumstances, while shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), requires, of course, only murderous hatred—the sort of mindset that regularly eludes the Dr. Phils of our world as the motive for mass murder of this kind.
As the meditations on Maj. Hasan's motives rolled on, "fear of deployment" has served as a major theme—one announced as fact in the headline for the New York Times's front-page story: "Told of War Horror, Gunman Feared Deployment." The authority for this intelligence? The perpetrator's cousin. No story could have better suited that newspaper's ongoing preoccupation with the theme of madness in our fighting men, and the deadly horrors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, than this story of a victim of war pressures gone berserk. The one fly in the ointment—Maj. Hasan had of course seen no war, and no combat.
Still, with a bit of stretching, adherents of Maj. Hasan-as-war-victim theme found a substitute of sorts—namely the fears allegedly provoked in him by his exposure, as an army psychiatrist, to the stories of men who had been deployed. The thesis then: Maj. Hasan's mental stress, provoked by the suffering of Americans who had been in combat, caused him to go out and butcher as many of these soldiers as he could. Let's try putting that one before a jury.
By Sunday morning, Gen. George Casey Jr., Army chief of staff, confronted questions put to him by ABC's George Stephanopolous—among them the matter of the complaints about Maj. Hasan's anti-American tirades that were made by fellow students in military classes, as well as other danger signs ignored by officials when they were reported, apparently for fear of offense to a Muslim member of the military.
These were speculations, Gen. Casey repeatedly cautioned. We need to be very careful, he explained, "We are a very diverse army." Mr. Stephanopolous then helpfully summarized matters: This case then was either a case of premeditated terror—or the man just snapped.
The general was not about to address such questions. He was there to recite the required pieties, and describe the military priorities . . . which are, it appears, a concern above all for the sensitivities of a diverse army, a concern so great as to render even the mention of salient facts out of order, as "speculation.'" "This terrible event," Gen. Casey noted, "would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty."
To hear this, and numerous other such pronouncements of recent days, was to be reminded of all those witnesses to the suspicious behavior of the 9/11 hijackers who held their tongues for fear of being charged with discrimination. It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.
There are two irreconcilable views of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan's murder of 13 people last Thursday at Fort Hood, Texas. One is that Major Hasan should be seen as not much different than many other disturbed individuals, whose demons pitch them into homicidal frenzies. The other is that the Hasan murders raise hard questions about the ability of Muslims to serve at all in the American military.
Neither view is acceptable. It will be the job of public and military officials in weeks ahead to shape a policy response that recognizes the hard political and ethnic realities of the Fort Hood massacre.
The central reality is that 13 people are dead on American soil, all but one in service to the country as a member of the U.S. Army. Sergeant Amy Kreuger of Kiel, Wisconsin, enlisted explicitly in response to 9/11, she said, to oppose the forces that caused that day. These appear to be the same violent forces that turned Major Hasan into an instrument of terror.
So no, Major Hasan is not just another nut. He volunteered himself into a larger Islamic jihad, whose political weapon of choice is the murder of innocents across the globe.
The Fort Hood massacre makes clear, again, that Islamic terror is unavoidably a domestic U.S. problem as well. There is a strain in American thinking that deludes itself in believing that somehow this force will occupy itself mainly with blowing up marketplaces in faraway Pakistan or Afghanistan. On Thursday, their problem was our problem.
In the aftermath of these shootings, the best venue for exploring the domestic threat from radical Islam and what to do about it is Senator Joe Lieberman's proposed hearings into the Hasan murders. News reports piecing together Major Hasan's history suggest an association years ago with a pro-al Qaeda imam at a mosque in northern Virginia. That imam left for Yemen in 2002, and his lectures there in support of al Qaeda have appeared on the computers of terrorists suspects in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.
Investigators are collecting information from Major Hasan's PC and his email traffic, with officials already noting that he spent time surfing radical Islamic Web sites. This sounds similar in some respects to the aborted car bombings in the U.K. in 2007, committed by Muslim doctors there who also spent evenings absorbing violent exhortations on Web sites. A Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty study that year documented the reach and sophistication of radical jihadi media on the Web—accessible to anyone with an Internet hook-up in Kabul, Islamabad, London or Fort Hood.
Before the Democrats came to power in the 2008 elections, one issue they pushed hardest through the policy debate was their opposition to domestic electronic surveillance in pursuit of Islamic terror activities. If the Hasan investigation concludes that he arrived at his pre-spree cry of "God is great!" after immersion in the world of violent Islamic Web sites and prior time spent at radical domestic U.S. mosques, then we would hope that the response of our lawmakers would be more than a shrug that these 13 dead are simply the price we have to pay for living in "our system."
Likewise, Mr. Lieberman's hearings could explore if the Army needs ways to muster out personnel such as Hasan or recruits ambivalent about fighting fellow Muslims.
Just as Americans can't blink away the dangerous world of radical Islam, however, we also cannot pretend that we can field a military that doesn't include Muslims. The unreality of attempting to fight this enemy without Muslim soldiers or operatives should be obvious. In Iraq, devout Muslims worked loyally as translators and guides for U.S. forces, sometimes dying to rid their country of the world's common enemy, which is homicidal Islamic fanatics.
In recent years U.S. soldiers have fought a common enemy on behalf of and often alongside Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Somalia, and elsewhere. The U.S. is fighting a sworn enemy today, just as in World War II American Germans, Italians and Japanese fought sworn U.S. enemies of the same race and religion. Many American Muslims will do the same if we stay focused on the real enemy, and show we have the will to do what's necessary to find them and stop them.
For a person with old-fashioned values, and an old-fashioned sense of English word meanings, the reports of the Fort Hood massacre were almost as provoking as what happened there. In the larger view of things, they may be more consequential.
Let me make that latter point plain. I am saying the words and attitudes conveyed in the reporting of a massacre can be, and in this case are, more consequential than the massacre itself.
Having said that, I must not leave the impression I think little of the loss of a dozen human beings, the perhaps permanent maiming of many more, and all the consequences of this horror in the lives of their families and friends. But we must not shed crocodile tears. My heart goes out to the victims, but from a great distance: I know none of them personally, I know no one who knows them.
This is my first objection to the "funeral of Diana" rhetoric we keep getting today, promptly from all affected politicians, whenever something bad happens and people get killed. The knowledge that their "touching remarks" are drafted by hard-bitten speechwriting staff, skilled in the professional emulation of human feeling, is something the public should bear constantly in mind.
But let us not only blame bureaucrats for the people who commission their work. President Barack Obama's display on Thursday made my point more clearly than it usually can be made, for he turned on a dime. He assumed the "presidential grieving tone" over the Fort Hood massacre, the moment after he'd just done an equally scripted segment of light joking banter for the benefit of the Tribal Nations Conference he was addressing. Millions in the television audience must have watched this incredibly cynical "quick flip." I wonder how many noticed it?
We should not allow ourselves to be moved by the cold hearts of professional tear-jerkers because when we reward that kind of thing we help perpetuate an emotional order that is dangerously false. We should instead be annoyed by attempts to manipulate us.
Falsehood has more consequences than the revelation of personal insincerity. What happened at Fort Hood was no kind of "tragedy." It was a criminal act, of the terrorist sort, performed by a man acting upon known Islamist motives. To present the perpetrator himself as a kind of "victim" -- a man emotionally distressed by his impending assignment to Afghanistan or Iraq -- is to misrepresent the reality.
This man was a professional psychiatrist, assigned to help soldiers cope with traumas. Is this the profile of a man with no control over his own emotions? It appears he had hired a lawyer to get him out of the military before his deployment overseas. Is this consistent with spontaneity?
He reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before opening fire on American soldiers. Would that perhaps offer a little hint of the actual motive? He shot about 40 people, over 10 minutes, with two pistols, neither of them military issue. Might that perhaps suggest premeditation?
There were reports from within the base (Fox News as usual seized on what other networks didn't), that accused Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had not merely been making anti-war remarks about Iraq and Afghanistan, but adding things like, "Muslims should stand up against the aggressor." Do we still have a category for treason? He has been quoted from Internet postings comparing Islamist suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade. Another clue?
And all this is quite apart from less checkable information that was quickly available through the Internet, painting a much grimmer figure of a man with openly Islamist views, able to rise through the U.S. military, because of the syndrome of political correctness. Time is certainly required to sort through such reports, and separate wheat from chaff, but the initial information alone was inconsistent with the media's clichéd presentation of the "tragedy of a man in despair."
This deadly enemy of the West -- the Islamist ideology which holds all Jews, Christians, other non-Muslims, and a considerable number of Muslims, too, to be human filth in need of extermination -- is well infiltrated. Events like that at Fort Hood prove this, and from what I can see, the problem can only grow with the passage of time.
Getting at Islamist cells, to say nothing of lone, self-appointed jihadis within our society, means getting over the false sentimentality that turns a terrorist incident into an "incomprehensible tragedy" when it is not incomprehensible, and not a theatrical event.
It also means ripping through the politically-correct drivel that is put in the way of investigators. They should surely be allowed to assume that every loyal Muslim will be eager to give information to help them identify any potential killers in their midst.
We'd be better off confronting that Islamist enemy, than spraying perfume after each fatal strike.
There's been plenty of debate about President Barack Obama's omission of the word "terrorism" when he spoke Tuesday at Fort Hood to honor the 13 Americans shot to death and dozens wounded last week by a Muslim army psychiatrist, Nidal Hasan. More broadly troubling to my mind is a word that Obama did use: "incomprehensible."
It came high in the speech. Having at least conceded that "This is a time of war" (instead of "overseas contingency operations"), Obama went on to note:
"These Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great state and the heart of this great American community. This is the fact that makes the tragedy even more painful, even more incomprehensible."
That might be language appropriate for a private conversation with the bereaved, whose interests may well center on the unfathomable ways of death and loss. But Obama was not holding a private conversation. Onstage at Fort Hood, he was speaking not only to the immediate survivors, but to the nation.
In that context, the death dealt out on a routine day, in deepest America, by the hand of someone yelling "Allahu Akbar," is not only comprehensible, but a predictable feature of this war against the United States. We may not know exactly where or on which day the next attack will occur, or with what weapons. But this is a war of many dimensions, in which ideas preached in one part of the globe can translate swiftly into murder--more aptly known as terrorism--in another.
The modern world is not neatly partitioned into far-off fields of battle and secure, unreachable America. To some extent it never was, though the enemies of yore were more prone to at least declare themselves by wearing enemy uniforms. Thus did the British burn the White House in 1814, and the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in 1941. But any remaining doubts about the global reach of modern battle should have been entirely removed on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as ash blanketed lower Manhattan and the Pentagon burned.
If that truth seems too obvious to bear repeating, then why, at a freighted emotional moment, in a speech watched by the world, does it elude the president of the United States?
The main lesson centers not on Hasan, but on the ease with which Hasan--born here in America--came into contact with the jihadi milieu. It is now emerging that from the comfort of his home turf, Hasan was in touch by e-mail with a terrorist-recruiting imam in Yemen, Anwar al Awlaki, who in turn has been part of a terrorist web extending from plots to attack Fort Dix, in New Jersey, to the Canadian parliament and prime minister. The same imam turns up in the 9/11 Commission report, his name transliterated there as Anwar Aulaqi, based eight years ago at the Dar al Hijra mosque in Falls Church, Va., where two of the Sept. 11 hijackers dropped by in spring 2001.
This is just a small sample of the reach and mobility of murderous jihadi networks in today's hi-tech world. And the hell of it is, they learn from each other. It's a good bet that while Americans are delving into how the military might have stopped Hasan in time, America's enemies are studying this bloody episode to understand how they can inspire more. Whatever Hasan's actual motivations--whether chemically unbalanced delusions, or cold calculation--the results are clear. It's another good bet that clips and articles on Hasan's kill rate at Fort Hood will play worldwide among the jihadi set as recruiting materials.
President Bush understood this, and during his first term pushed the frontlines of this war back from New York, Washington and skies over Pennsylvania to the home turf of America's enemies. He toppled two of America's most aggressive and brutal foes--Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the al-Qaida-hosting Taliban in Afghanistan. He cowed and harassed their despotic brethren with his push to promote their worst nightmare: freedom for their own people. Conclude what you like about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, or lack of; the record shows that for the duration of Bush's gunslinger presidency, America itself did not suffer the further massive terrorist onslaughts so widely feared in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.
But what now? During his campaign, Obama advertised himself as a citizen of the world, underscoring that claim with a speech before Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, as well as a visit to Afghanistan. But once in office, he has remained fastidiously distant in various ways from the world's real hot spots. In his rhetoric and deeds, he has distanced himself from the mass protests in Iran. As president, he has yet to go to Afghanistan--where Americans under his command are dying for their country. Having turned the site of the Berlin Wall into a campaign backdrop, he decided to skip a return trip to Berlin this Monday to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the actual fall of the wall. (See "Twenty Years Without The Wall.")
Now comes Obama's formulation that the deaths at Fort Hood make no sense because they did not come on "a foreign field of battle." This sounds oddly quaint in an age when the battles more than ever before are global and involve a war of ideas, which enemies of America have already projected into the heart of a slew of American communities. To be sure, near the end of his speech Obama--as he is wont to do--then said the opposite of his opening remark, mentioning "a world of threats that know no borders." That does not erase the garble with which he began.
In the media, the question of the hour is how the military could have missed the warning signs of Hasan's impending attack. Such details are important, and it would be a great idea to have better mechanisms (or any mechanisms at all?) within the military to catch the warning signs and act in time. But vigilance of that kind starts at the top. Right now the biggest warning sign of all is a president who looks at a pattern of jihadi communications, recruiting and attacks on America, and tells the public that the bloodshed at Fort Hood is "incomprehensible." Not for the first time, the system is blinking red.
Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.
WASHINGTON -- What a surprise -- that someone who shouts "Allahu Akbar" (the "God is great" jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan's religious beliefs.
"I cringe that he's a Muslim. ... I think he's probably just a nut case," said Newsweek's Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time's Joe Klein decried "odious attempts by Jewish extremists ... to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs." While none could match Klein's peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
They suffered. He listened. He snapped.
Really? What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?
And what about civilian psychiatrists -- not the Upper West Side therapist treating Woody Allen neurotics, but the thousands of doctors working with hospitalized psychotics -- who every day hear not just tales but cries of the most excruciating anguish, of the most unimaginable torment? How many of those doctors commit mass murder?
It's been decades since I practiced psychiatry. Perhaps I missed the epidemic.
But, of course, if the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, whom National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.
And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won't find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as "compassion fatigue." The poor man -- pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity.
Have we totally lost our moral bearings? Nidal Hasan (allegedly) cold-bloodedly killed 13 innocent people. In such cases, political correctness is not just an abomination. It's a danger, clear and present.
Consider the Army's treatment of Hasan's previous behavior. NPR's Daniel Zwerdling interviewed a Hasan colleague at Walter Reed about a hair-raising Grand Rounds that Hasan had apparently given. Grand Rounds are the most serious academic event at a teaching hospital -- attending physicians, residents and students gather for a lecture on an instructive case history or therapeutic finding.
I've been to dozens of these. In fact, I gave one myself on post-traumatic retrograde amnesia -- as you can see, these lectures are fairly technical. Not Hasan's. His was an hour-long disquisition on what he called the Koranic view of military service, jihad and war. It included an allegedly authoritative elaboration of the punishments visited upon nonbelievers -- consignment to hell, decapitation, having hot oil poured down your throat. This "really freaked a lot of doctors out," reported NPR.
Nor was this the only incident. "The psychiatrist," reported Zwerdling, "said that he was the kind of guy who the staff actually stood around in the hallway saying: Do you think he's a terrorist, or is he just weird?"
Was anything done about this potential danger? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague's religion?
One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, The New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence.
What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn't cry "Allahu Akbar" as they squeezed the trigger.
The delicacy about the religion in question -- condescending, politically correct and deadly -- is nothing new. A week after the first (1993) World Trade Center attack, the same New York Times ran the following front-page headline about the arrest of one Mohammed Salameh: "Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center."
Ah yes, those Jersey men -- so resentful of New York, so prone to violence.
Some commentators place Major Nidal Hassan's outrage at Fort Hood in the continuum of nonreligious psychotic mass killings like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech. Others liken it to Islamist terror outrages such as suicide and car bombings. Those on the left seem to favor the former view, while those on the right prefer the latter.
The New York Times has agonized serially over the pressure on psychiatrists and Muslims in the Army. Conversely, Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal has argued that Major Hasan's motives needed no elaborate explication of that kind--he was a murderous jihadi. Furthermore, she and others noted that rampant political correctness prevented superiors from identifying Hasan as a threat even after they knew of his pleas to Al Qaeda contacts.
In most Muslim countries, the military would not dither over the issue. In Turkey, for example, the armed forces impose a strictly secular ethos on their personnel. Over the years, scores of stealthy Islamists have been identified and unceremoniously booted out for trying to proselytize fellow soldiers and generally undermine the army's values. In less-forgiving countries like Syria, such offenders tend to disappear without a trace or get funneled clandestinely into terror cells for missions abroad.
In places like Algeria, Egypt and Libya, Muslim officers watch over their Muslim conscripts with relentless scrutiny lest any unscripted forms of freelance worship sneak into the picture. Their prisons are full of Muslim Brotherhood conspirators undergoing torture--if they haven't already disappeared into secret graves. In Saddam's military, turbulent believers often went straight to the frontlines during the Iran-Iraq war. Others found that their views rebounded onto the limbs and lives of family members in the most palpable of ways.
Many Muslims desperately flee these countries for the West in order to pursue their more extreme brand of Islam. We give them the freedom to do so--in effect the freedom to hate us. Whether Major Hasan's enormity derived from jihadist motives or because he snapped under emotional strain, he clearly acted out of religious feelings on that day, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" as he shot his fellow soldiers. The New York Times cannot claim that Muslims suffer unbearable prejudice in the Army and then claim that Major Hasan's conduct had no link to his being a Muslim. There's the rub: Does the Army have any propaganda courses at officer level? Was anyone tasked with the job of telling Major Hasan what life might be like for him in a Muslim military? He would not have stayed around, or alive, long enough to explore his hurt feelings as a Muslim.
At Fort Hood and beyond, a great many soldiers are angry that superiors knew of the Major's Islamist rumblings yet refrained from intervening. That kind of probing intervention was, ironically, the job of a psychiatrist. In the Army, as in civilian life, we take infinite care to be inclusive, to allay the disaffections of minorities. We do not ask them why their families are here of all places.This is especially true of the U.S. military, an institution as color-blind, meritocratic and humane as no other genuinely fighting force in the world.
Perhaps Major Hasan felt that the Muslim world would not be so divided if it weren't for the interference of the West and Israel. In that case, the Army should have offered courses in the history of Islam to clarify the matter. Muslims fought against one another, martyring the Prophet's kin, in civil wars over control of the Caliphate soon after the religion was established. That's how the Shiite-Sunni split first arose, and it hasn't stopped since. This is not to say that all Muslims of all nationalities have an equal and natural predisposition to violence. But to the degree that they derive identity from the unreconstructed, unreformed Islamic narrative of self, they tend to have an Us-versus-Them worldview–in which other Muslims frequently become the "other."
If the Army is too sensitive to take the argument to Muslims in its ranks, we cannot lay blame there. The U.S. as a whole and the West in general do not ask Muslims or any other minorities to cast doubt on the virtues of their own culture. For many that would be tantamount to "hate speech." But as the conflicts of the world have migrated into the U.S. and its armed forces, the conflicts of ideas have become a part of our daily lives. Our strength--our appeal for the disaffected--lies in our tradition of open debate. For those minorities less accustomed to such openness, criticism can seem like a species of bigotry or a kind of culture war. To them we must say, repeatedly, that they are lucky to hear the sounds of such debate. Where they come from, too often, it would be settled in exactly the manner in which Major Hasan chose, only he would not have lived long enough to carry it out.
Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s deadly terrorist attack last week at Fort Hood is generating plenty of finger pointing at the military for the debacle. While the indignation is understandable, and while the army brass bears a share of the responsibility for Hasan’s terrorism, having the military bear a disproportionate share of the criticism is both unfair and misguided. Doing so plays right into the hands of liberals, who would rather have America’s warriors take the heat.
A good deal of conservative ire has been leveled at the military for adopting political correctness codes. But is the military really to blame for this development, or are the culprits the politicians to whom the military brass reports?
The Constitution makes the military subordinate to civilian command. That’s more than just form, thank goodness. The military obeys the president and follows the laws established by Congress. The Founders wanted the military subordinate to civilian command, for obvious reasons.
Liberals have had great success over the years insinuating political correctness into the very fabric of the national government. They’ve accomplished this not only by using the law and directives or manipulating budgets, but with substantial acts of intimidation.Those who oppose quotas of any sort, for instance, or who make reasonable arguments against special laws and penalties for so-called hate crimes, are vilified as bigots.
The same goes for the military, with the glaring proviso that the president and Congress hold the military’s purse strings entirely. They also have the power to promote or demote, to advance or ruin careers. They run the show.
Given Washington’s de jure and de facto control over the military, it’s no small wonder that Hasan was able to remain in the army and move up the ladder despite giving every indication that his first loyalty lay with the aims of radical Islam.
Again, that’s not to let the army brass off the hook. Regardless of Washington’s legal and practical power, there are moral and ethical imperatives. If officers need to shout it from the rooftops that a fellow officer is hostile to his own nation and, in fact, is a militant for the nation’s enemy, then that must happen, whatever the fallout is to funding or careers. When there are reasonable suspicions that innocent human beings are imperiled — and that was most likely the case given Hasan’s public utterances — then action is unavoidable.
Most of us work in situations that require varying degrees of conformity. We all, to one extent or another, bend to the norms of our work cultures. That’s natural and expected. Organizations simply cannot function if its members are free-wheeling.
That is especially true for each branch of the military. The nation’s armed forces contain highly integrated units with strong hierarchies. Success in war depends on units acting internally, and with other units, as one.
The great ongoing tension in the military, or in any culture, for that matter, is between conformity and the duty to one’s conscience. Conscience should always prevail, but anyone who has faced having to make a choice between conformity and conscience knows it can be wrenching. And a choice isn’t always going to be as evident as in the case of Major Hasan.
In the aftermath of the Hasan attack, the military’s top brass needs to reiterate to soldiers that doing the right thing — following the dictates of conscience — is a soldier’s overriding duty. It’s in the spirit of a soldier’s code of conduct — specifically, Article VI. It needs to be made obvious, given the current climate and until the infection of political correctness is removed from the armed forces.
And if that raises the president’s hackles or those of congressional members or cabinet secretaries, so be it. Call it the armed forces’ first act of reclaiming the moral high ground. And as Lincoln said about the possible fallout in his stand on principle: “Let the grass grow where it may.”
If the nation doesn’t want a repeat of Fort Hood or other terrorists shooting up malls or neighborhood schools, then a sustained, unapologetic, no-holds-barred campaign needs to be mounted against the authors and defenders of political correctness. It needs to begin with the national government. Certainly, liberals will resort to every nasty epithet and smear they can think of to push back the forces of common sense. They’ll arm-twist and threaten, connive and cajole, but whatever their gambits, they need to be defeated. The nation’s security depends on it.
Liberals would like nothing better than for criticism of the military in the Hasan affair to grow. For liberals, the military is a smart diversion from their own culpability in making the nation less safe through the odious doctrines of political correctness.
Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #5 on: 2009-11-14 02:53:25 »
[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.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
I'll get back to motivational issues, I've just been busy with some things. On terrorism - one of my favorite performance artists, Laurie Anderson, well before 9/11 and in retrospect rather presciently remarked that at the end of civilization terrorists will be the last artists because they always know how to surprise us. More later.
In general I do not disagree about the various moral and ethical conflicts Hasan faced. I don't think of him as a purely evil person, merely a traitor. And frankly I'm sure that there are plenty traitors capable of good ethical decision making, indeed if they were completely incapable of such a thing they probably would not be very effective and thus not well remembered as traitors. Like a con man, traitors unlike terrorists need to gain the confidence of their marks (or their groups) and over time and that would entail at least some understanding of ethical behavior and the capacity to hold an empathic (if not completely sympathetic) point of view. I'm sure he was kind to his friends and associates. I'm sure he was humane to his patients - at least up to the point that he committed treason.
I'm even assuming that he wasn't actively involved in conspiracy with members of Al Qeda, even though he apparently interacted extensively with at least one of them, and socialized in religious circles which included at least several more of them. I can't really find anything explicit about whether he was Sunni or Shia, but as I understand while they view each other as Muslim within general society, they tend to roughly segregate themselves in places of worship. While I'm sure they welcome crossover guests, like Catholics and Protestants they tend to gravitate to their favorite flavor of mosques and imams/mullahs. And as I understand it, Al Qeda is more of a Sunni terrorist brand (vs. Hezbolla).
So given his relatively small degrees of separation from Al Qeda members, I'm tending to assume that Hasan was Sunni. I assume he probably wasn't actively coordinating with Al Qeda and I would assume the he would never identify as one of them with their tactics - I am after all agreeing that he's not a terrorist, but rather a traitor. However I think he had strong enough cultural and social connection with them to sympathize with them and to undermine his loyalty to the US Army, thus his treason. Beyond basic inspiration and his treasonous motives, I think Hasan acted alone, which is probably why he was more difficult to predict and successful in his interprise.
I think I have more to say on this topic, but I think these are enough assumptions for one round before I step deeper into this. I'll pause for feedback and will add more sometime in the next few days.
Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #8 on: 2009-11-15 16:11:03 »
[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.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
[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?
Hermit, I think the memetic seeds of his treachery were planted in his mind sometime prior to his June 2007 dissertation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hasan_presentation.png. I think this was a rather ethical (non-treacherous) attempt on his part to deal with his conflict of loyalty. While it probably did not seem to relate to the psychiatric issues his fellow students and instructors would normally expect, I think it was more relevant than they seemed to assume at the time. I don't think this dissertation was an act of treachery, and deserved to be more appropriately addressed at the time. Indeed it may have even been a helpfully instructive thesis to "our team" if taken it more seriously at the time. Certainly overlooking it stands as a lapse of judgment in the military command.
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.
Indeed and literally such a physical demonstration might have helped in the meantime - yeah its a misdemeanor assault but considering his mental trajectory its relatively nothing compared to his eventual murderous treason. Most truly perplexing ethical problems require more than a memo or dissertation to resolve. I think your "options" you provided him are relatively unimaginative. He could have resorted to fist-a-cuffs or many other dramatic theatrics in the meantime if he really didn't want to commit the murderous treason he finally resorted to.
While I agree that he seemed to have some sense of ethics which would have precluded him from real acts of terrorism, really "dealing with bad decisions" ethically would normally inspire one to discover many more options in his situation, out of concerned curiosity if not actual creativity.
[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.
Okay, I'll lay off the Hezbolla comparison. I was just trying to think of some movement more familiarly associated with Shia factions. Whether Hezbolla is a terrorist organization or not is another conversation mostly irrelevant to Hasan. -Mo
Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #10 on: 2009-11-16 00:02:34 »
[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.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
In law, treason is the crime that covers some of the more serious acts of disloyalty to one's sovereign or nation. Historically, treason also covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife (treason against the king was known as high treason and treason against a lesser superior was petit treason). A person who commits treason is known in law as a traitor.
That's the first paragraph in the entry. Maj. Hasan certainly acted disloyally to the United States, so in the plain sense of the word he's a traitor. Perhaps you want to bend the meaning of "traitor" and "treason" in reaction to the negative connotations they convey. Perhaps Hasan sees himself as a good traitor like Claus von Stauffenberg, but that doesn't change his status as traitor or his intention to commit treason. Are you simply trying to argue that Hasan is a good traitor instead of a bad traitor? -Mo
ps - looking back on my other postings on this, I see that I've painted treason with "ethical" highlights rather than simply as description of behavior, perhaps implying to some that treason is always an ethically bad choice. Certainly in the case of Claus von Stauffenberg I can consider his treason as possibly an ethically good thing - indeed as little as I know of it that seems correct to me. Regardless, the fact that his action involved treason, in addition to loss of human life and bodily injuries, certainly has large ethical implications - either it demonstrated extremely unethical or extremely ethical (if otherwise unsuccessful) behavior with little room in the middle.
Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #12 on: 2009-11-18 10:49:01 »
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.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
A quick reply quote as I predict I'll have more thoughts of my own on in a few days, but I wanted to make sure I captured this since we've seemed to agree on this, so here is a translation of Claus von Stauffenberg as he openly told young conspirator Axel von dem Bussche in late 1943 "I am committing high treason with all my might and means...." Is that the kind of good intentions you would apply to Maj. Hasan? Aside from the sophistry you accuse me of, does this seem remotely similar to the intentions you imagine (as nobody can be sure at this point) of Hasan in a similar situation. I'm not so sure about Madela except that he finally seemed to be on the winning side; seeing as its frankly not my own cultural/national concern I'm inclined to agree with you on that.
I'm sorry if my predilection for dictionaries/encyclopedias seems disingenuous to you. For what its worth, it was a sentiment I was holding on to for while before I finally started searching and quoting it that way. Perhaps I should doubt my linguistic instincts sooner, but I know I can be sloppy that way.
Re:Major Nidal Malik Hasan
« Reply #14 on: 2009-11-18 13:23:09 »
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.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999