Maj. Nidal M. Hasan
Well, frumps, it would appear that the “court of public opinion” is moving inexorably toward a “guilty of domestic terrorism” verdict on the comatose Maj. Nidal Hasan, believed to be the shooter in the mass murder that occurred last week at Ft. Hood. Hasan’s heretofore unremarkable life has been quickly dissected and reassembled, by some, to make him fit the profile of a crazed “lone wolf” jihadist who has carefully spent most of his adult life infiltrating the US military in order to massacre US soldiers.
While all of that is raging around us, I’m going way out on a limb to suggest that it is equally possible that Hasan fits the psychological profile of a “garden-variety” mass murderer much better than he fits the domestic terrorist profile. As a matter of fact, Hasan exhibits many of the documented characteristics of a particular type of mass murderer.
A casual Google investigation yields up plenty of information for the layperson on the psyche of the mass murderer – these are some of the recurrent themes:
“Mass murderers tend to strike in their local community, use automatic or semi-automatic weapons, plan their attacks and often finally kill themselves or hope the police will kill them.”
“There is, survivors report, a cold joylessness to the proceedings” (fits eyewitness reports of Hasan’s behavior during the shooting)
“The political tastes of psychopaths usually turn to the far right or far left.”
McGee and DeBernardo’s 1999 study of fourteen cases of mass murder, profiled the mass murderer as a “loner or outcast” with no violent history and a middle-class suburban or rural family.
I, of course, know as little about Maj. Hasan as everyone else who is speculating on his motives and searching for answers. And I freely admit that it could turn out that I am flat out wrong in my assessment. On the other hand, as long as thousands of vocal armchair forensic experts are not hesitating to pass judgment, I figure that I might as well add my voice to those cautioning against jumping to conclusions.
So far, eyewitness accounts indicate that Maj. Hasan was involved in the shootings at Ft. Hood. What remains unknown is why?
Your Taxpayer Dollars At Work
Political types are scurrying around anxious to help and, unfortunately a few are probably hoping for findings that support their political agenda. Actually, I’m shocked by the restraint that the Cheney’s are displaying.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, who happens to chair the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (unless he decides to filibuster Senate health care reform with the GOP), has torn himself away from protecting us all from the “Public Option” to launch a full-out investigation addressing the motives of the alleged shooter Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan and whether signs of “Islamic extremism” were apparent, but missed or ignored.
On Fox News Sunday, Lieberman stated that:
“It’s premature to reach conclusions about what motivated Hasan.”
But, in the next breath he added:
“But it’s clear that he was, one, under personal stress and, two, if the reports that we’re receiving of various statements he made, acts he took, are valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism.”
What exactly does it mean to say “if the reports are valid . . . he had turned to Islamist extremism?” What constitutes “Islamist extremism” in Joe Lieberman’s mind? I expect that Lieberman is referring to some of the anecdotal reports that have bubbled up over the last few days. Things like these:
Hasan shouted Allahu Akbar, an Arabic phrase which means “God is Great as he shot at his victims. This phrase is recited by Muslims in numerous different situations. For example, when they are happy or wish to express approval, when they want to praise a speaker, during battles, and even times of extreme stress or euphoria.
All that reveals to me is that Hasan is a practicing Muslim, which we already knew. Uttering those words is automatic and something that devout Muslims do many times a day. It is about as significant as a Christian saying “Oh My God.”
Hasan’s immediate family were not observant Muslims, however, when his parents died he developed a renewed interest in his family religion. I have about fifteen close friends that fall into that category.
Hasan attended a mosque that some suspected terrorists might have attended at one time . . . he and hundreds of other well-intentioned US Muslims living in the area of that mosque. It’s not as if there is a mosque on every corner in the US. Like any other religious institution the doors are thrown open to the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s been confirmed by imams at the mosque that Hasan was never been involved in the inner workings or leadership of that mosque, he simply said his prayers there.
Hasan allegedly posted comments of a philosophical nature on the pros and cons of suicide bombings. I could just as easily do that myself. Would that make me a jihadist? Do we really believe that a dangerous terrorist, supposedly in “deep cover” in the US military, would use his own name on an internet chat board discussion on terrorism?
Hasan allegedly asked for religious guidance on the correct way to counsel Muslim soldiers disturbed by the notion of killing other Muslims. That one is as old as the ancient art of warfare and, to me, signifies nothing. I recall many similar discussions around friends’ departures for the Vietnam War; I remember Quaker counselors, conscientious objectors and friends who faded into Canada.
There are rumors that Hasan has indicated that he feels that the Quran trumps the US Constitution. Swap the Bible for the Quran and, certainly Pat Robertson, Mike Huckabee and Justice Scalia, to name a few, can resonate to that notion.
I have to assume that those rumors about Hasan are the things that have put Joe Lieberman on red alert, which is, of course, his job as chair of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. One would hope that a “full investigation” will rely on facts and set aside rumors no matter how “damning” those rumors might be.
Rep. Sue Myrick,of course, seized the moment, to jump right back up to the podium, clutching her signed copy of WorldNet Daily’s Muslim Mafia, to say “toldyouso.”
President Obama, ever the proponent of boring old sanity, cautioned against jumping to conclusions; as did Missouri Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee. Skelton appeared Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation and said that launching a congressional investigation now into Thursday’s shooting at Fort Hood would be premature.
Skelton told CBS News Bob Schieffer:
“The Army has its investigators, the FBI is investigating, and, Bob, the truth will come out. Let’s give them a few days to find out just where the ball was dropped if that’s the case.”
Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, echoed his fellow Democrat’s caution.
“We do have to look closely at what the Army has done, what the whole armed services has done,” Reed said. “But Chairman Skeleton has put it in the right context. We have to wait for their careful deliberations. There’s a criminal investigation going on.”
Gen. George Casey appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and spoke of his worries that speculation about the Ft. Hood shootings will fan the fires of bigotry in the military. Here’s a clip of that conversation:
Myths are Made to Be Broken
Last Friday, Ashley Merryman of Newsweek’s NurtureShock blog, interviewed Dave Cullen to get his opinion on the Ft. Hood tragedy. Dave Cullen was a reporter at Columbine High School immediately after the mass murder there, who went on to write a New York Times bestseller on the subject entitled Columbine.
Here are a few germane snippets from that interview:
“If we have learned anything from these tragedies, it’s that we won’t get a firm handle on why for weeks, months or even years. At this (same) distance from Oklahoma City, we were convinced it was the work of Arabs or Muslims, and what was the difference between those two anyway?”
“The Ft. Hood perpetrator appears pretty transparent. The “obvious” factors include:
• His religion
• His ethnicity
• The ridicule he endured for each
• His profession as a soldier
• His profession as a psychiatrist
• His exposure to guns
• Relentless exposure to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in his patients
• Opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Imminent deployment there
“We have heard a lot of facts related to each of those factors already. I expect that most will turn out to be true. Historically, we get the what right pretty fast. But we have a terrible record on why. An odds-maker could reasonably predict that some of those items will prove relevant and others true but unrelated to the crime. The problem is predicting which is which.”
“If we guess now, the myths will be with us forever. Ten years after Columbine, most of the public still believes it was about jocks, Goths and the Trench Coat Mafia. No, no and no. It wasn‘t even intended primarily as a school shooting: the failed bombs were supposed to be the main event. With Columbine, speculation turned into accepted fact remarkably quickly. Most of the major myths solidified within the first 24 hours.”
What’s the Point?
As with all events of this type we are driven, by our survival instinct, to make sense of it, to assimilate it so that we can successfully avoid repeat events. There’s nothing wrong with that – unless we get it very wrong. And when we do get it wrong, and we put our efforts into defending against imagined threats we leave ourselves wide open to real threats that we might not see coming. We also run the risk of cutting ourselves off from those members of society who might be best able to help us understand real threats.
I’m convinced that it is very possible that Maj. Hasan has been a disturbed and disappointed man for most of his life. He has tried very hard to assimilate but has evidently been the target of anti-Muslim taunts for most of his life.
According to several reports his work load was oppressive and he was seriously disturbed by accounts of the war that came to him through his patients. When he realized it was more than he could handle, Hasan tried to resign from the military, even offering to pay back his tuitions, but to no avail. On top of all of that he was scheduled to deploy in the immediate future.
We have amassed a good deal of convincing evidence, over the past eight years, that we have some very serious problems afflicting our military services. Record numbers of suicides, homicidal veterans, repeat deployments, warehoused wounded and so on.
I came across this disturbing factoid last week on a blog called Outside the Beltway and haven’t been able to forget it, yet:
“The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.”
“Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.”
“About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.”
With the thousands of young people still being sent to these pointless wars, it doesn’t bode well for the stability of our society in the near term . . . God help us (and no, I’m not a dangerous Christian extremist).
Technorati Tags: Maj. Nidal Hasan, Ft. Hood, US Army, Islamist extremism, mass murder, jihad, Sen. Joe Lieberman, President Obama, Rep. Sue Myrick, Muslim Mafia, WorldNet Daily
