Christopher Weber at Politics Daily:
Up to eight Army officers could be disciplined for failing to properly handle the behavorial and professional problems of the accused Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, in the years leading up to the November rampage.
A Defense Department review concluded that if Hasan had been dealt with correctly his career might have ended before the shooting spree at the Army base that left 13 people dead, according to a military official who spoke to the Los Angeles Times.
Hasan’s superiors allowed his psychiatry career to advance despite the fact that he repeatedly failed to meet basic officer standards for work ethic, appearance and physical fitness, according to the report.
The officers whose actions may be called into question hold ranks of colonel and below, and could be given letters of reprimand, the official, who spoke anonymously, told the Times.
The report also found the Pentagon’s policies toward internal threats are outdated and don’t focus enough on hunting down extremists, the official said.
The report — or at least, AP’s take on the report — downplay’s Hasan’s radical Islamist ties, instead focusing on the fact that he was often late for work, a loner, and disheveled. You see, the problem here was that he was a bad employee who was promoted, not that he supported jihad.
The dumbest part of the report?Hasan showed no signs of being violent or a threat. Really? He attended a mosque where Anwar al Awlaki worked. The same mosque attended by two 9/11 hijackers and Ahmed Omar Abu Ali. He used an acronym for Soldier of Allah on his business cards. He made many anti-military and anti-American statements. He even publicly defended terrorists!
No. Signs. Of. Violence.
Also showing no signs of prior violence?
How can the American military come to grips with home-grown Islamic terrorism when it won’t even acknowledge that political correctness enabled the Fort Hood massacre just as surely as an alcoholics’ wife enables his obsession by her co-dependency?
At a hearing televised on C-SPAN today, former Chief of Naval Operations, Vern Clark, and former Head of the Army, Togo West, fielded some questions from reporters about the Fort Hood terrorist incident. The two retired military officers are the Co-Leaders of what is euphemistically being called the “Fort Hood Shootings Review.”
The retired senior military officials intoned their recommendation that, for the American military, “situational awareness is the order of the day.” But when a reporter asked “Was political correctness a factor in overlooking the self-radicalization that went on here?” the best the officers could offer was “That question is out of bounds.”
Out of bounds? No, I’ll tell you what’s out of bounds: any military policy, procedure or official who for the sake of “diversity” risks the life of a single American soldier. That’s what’s out of bounds. And the sooner the military bigwigs get that, the safer our soldiers will be.
Bill Bennett at National Review:
You can read that “low self-esteem, depression, and anger are tied to many different types of violence” in the report. You can read about “workplace violence” and “disgruntled employees” in the report. You can read about “Motivations for domestic terrorism” such as “animal rights, “white supremacy,” and “religious intolerance” thrown in on equal par among other factors that simply were not in play here in the report. And you can read the grand conclusion that “Religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor; most fundamentalist groups are not violent, and religious-based violence is not confined to members of fundamentalist groups.”
But you would be reading a complete and total whitewash. You’d be reading a lie of a report. But that is what the Pentagon has produced.
Here was a situation where an Islamist reached out to Islamist imams like Anwar Awlaki who has worked with other terrorists, including 9/11 hijackers. Where he had a business card that read “Soldier of Allah,” Where he yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire on fellow soldiers and Americans. Where he delivered a lecture and said “non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire.” Where he told his neighbor the morning he set off on his rampage that “I’m going to do good work for God.” Where he said his allegiance was “to sharia law” not “American law” when asked by his colleagues. Where his classmates said “no one would . . . have trusted him with anything.”
And yet he was made a major. And yet he was educated by the U.S. military. And yet he was kept in the U.S. military. And he then went to war with the United States.
Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner
Paul Mirengoff at Powerline:
On Friday, the Department of Defense released its report on the Fort Hood Massacre –”Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood.” It is a disgraceful document. Indeed, Ralph Peters does not exaggerate when he says:
Rarely in the course of human events has a report issued by any government agency been so cowardly and delusional. It’s so inept, it doesn’t even rise to cover-up level.
The report attributes the fact that the military did not identify the threat posed by the Nidal Hasan — it calls him “the alleged perpetrator” — to bureaucratic shortcomings in the acquisition and sharing of information. As to accumulating information, the report finds that “current definition for prohibited activities [by members of the armed forces] is incomplete and does not provide adequate guidance for commanders and supervisors to act on potential threats to security.” In addition, “there is no well-integrated means to gather, evaluate, and disseminate the side range of behaviorial indicators which could hlep our comomanders better anticipate and internal threat.”
Second, the report finds a “gap” in the sharing of information. According to the authors, “the mechanisms for sharing potential indicators of internal threats with appropriate command channels are limited.” The report calls for an end to allowing “bureaucratic concerns by specific entities over protecting ‘their’ information” to “prevent relevant threat information and indicators from reaching those who need it — the commanders.”
It is embarrassing for me to even type these words. As Peters notes, the signs that Hasan was a radical Islamist who might well be a danger were abundantly clear, nor were they not missed by his associates. And the fact that his associates did not share this information was not due to poor bureaucratic “architecture” or turf protection. The information was not shared because, given Hasan’s status as “the Army’s sole Palestinian-American psychiatrist,” his “superiors feared — correctly — that any attempt to call attention to his radicalism or to prevent his promotion would backfire on them, destroying their careers, not his.”
Most obviously, the DoD will have to figure out how to get commanders, who have been socialized over the last two decades or more to avoid drawing attention to racial, ethnic, religious differences to have the courage to report suspicious behavior up the ranks — and to do so without creating a command climate that feels hostile to devout Muslims who are loyal soldiers.
Thomas Joscelyn at TWS
