The Senate Homeland Security Committee report on the Fort Hood shootings, released yesterday, isn’t exactly shocking. We pretty much knew all this already. A better word would be horrifying. It is horrifying to see the sheer volume of unmistakable evidence that Nidal Hasan was (as the committee put it) a ticking time bomb, all of which was ignored because of political correctness.
The signs that were ignored included (starting on page 27):
In the last month of his residency, he chose to fulfill an academic requirement to make a scholarly presentation on psychiatric issues by giving an off-topic lecture on violent Islamlist extremism. . . Hasan’s draft presentation consisted almost entirely of references to the Koran, without a single mention of a medical or psychiatric term. Hasan’s draft also presented extremist interpretations of the Koran as supporting grave physical harm and killing of non-Muslims. He even suggested that revenge might be a defense for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
and:
The most chilling feature of both the draft and final presentation was that Hasan stated that one of the risks of having Muslim-Americans in the military was the possibility of fratricidal murder of fellow servicemembers.
and:
Hasan advanced to a two-year fellowship at USUHS. . . Hasan confided to a colleague that he applied for the fellowship to avoid a combat deployment in a Muslim country; one of Hasan’s supervisors realized that he had the wrong motivation for applying and warned against accepting him.
and:
Hasan’s radicalization became unmistakable almost immediately into the fellowship, and it became clear that Hasan embraced violent Islamist extremist ideology to such an extent that he had lost a sense of the conduct expected of a military officer. Classmates . . . described him as having “fixed radical beliefs about fundamentalist Islam” that he shared “at every possible opportunity” or as having irrational beliefs.
and:
Less than a month into the fellowship, in August 2007, Hasan gave another off-topic presentation on a violent Islamist extremist subject instead of on a health care subject. This time, Hasan’ s presentation was so controversial that the instructor had to stop it after just two minutes when the class erupted in protest to Hasan’s views. The presentation was entitled, Is the War on Terror a War on Islam: An Islamic Perspective? Hasan’s proposal for this presentation promoted this troubling thesis: that U.S. military operations are a war against lslam rather than based on non-religious security considerations. Hasan’s presentation accorded with the narrative of violent Islamist extremism that the West is at war with Islam. Hasan’s paper was full of empathetic and supportive recitation of other violent Islamist extremist views, including defense of Osama bin Laden, slanted historical accounts blaming the United States for problems in the Middle East, and arguments that anger at the United States is justifiable.
and:
Several colleagues who witnessed the presentation described Hasan as justifying suicide bombers. These colleagues were so alarmed and offended by what they described as his “dysfunctional ideology” and “extremist views” that they interrupted the presentation to the point where the instructor chose to stop it. The instructor who stopped the presentation said that Hasan was sweating, quite nervous, and agitated after being confronted by the class.
and:
One classmate said that Hasan supported suicide bombings in another class. He told several classmates that his religion took precedence over the U.S. Constitution he swore to support and defend as a U.S. military officer. . . His statement was not part of an abstract discussion on the relationship between duty to religion and duty to country. . . Rather, Hasan’s statements about the primacy of religious law occurred as he was supporting a violent extremist interpretation of Islam and suggesting that this radical ideology justified opposition to U.S. policy and could lead to fratricide in the ranks. Perhaps for this reason, Hasan’s comments on his loyalty to religious law, which he made more than once, were so disturbing to his colleagues that they reported Hasan to superiors.
and:
Later in the fellowship, Hasan pursued another academic project in the ambit of violent Islamist extremism. . . It was the third project in the span of a year that Hasan dedicated to violent Islamist extremist views.
and:
Hasan proposed to give Muslim soldiers a survey which implicitly questioned their loyalty and was slanted to favor the violent Islamist extremist views he had previously expressed. In one question, Hasan wanted to ask whether the religion of Islam creates an expectation that Muslim soldiers would help enemies of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. And again, Hasan raised the ominous possibility of fratricide by Muslim-American servicemembers against fellow servicemembers as a central reason for his survey.
(Bold emphasis mine.)
Hasan’s radicalism was not even balanced by professional competence:
Hasan was a chronic poor performer during his residency and fellowship. The program directors overseeing him at Walter Reed and USUHS both ranked him in the bottom percent. He was placed on probation and remediation and often failed to meet basic job expectations such as showing up for work and being available when he was the physician on call.
Hasan wasn’t eligible for the fellowship he received (p. 29) and he didn’t even show up for work! Despite all of this, Hasan received positive evaluations:
Yet Hasan received evaluations that flatly misstated his actual performance. Hasan was described in the evaluations as a star officer, recommended for promotion to major, whose research on violent Islamist extremism would ass ist U.S. counterterrorism efforts. . . These evaluations bore no resemblance to the real Hasan, a barely competent psychiatrist whose radicalization toward violent Islamist extremism alarmed his colleagues and his superiors. The lone negative mark in the evaluations was the result of Hasan failing to take a physical training test. Other than that, there is not a single criticism or negative comment of Hasan in those evaluations.
In summary:
Thus, despite his overt displays of radicalization to violent Islamist extremism and his poor performance, Hasan was repeatedly advanced instead of being discharged from the military. . . The officers who kept Hasan in the military and moved him steadily along knew full well of his problematic behavior. As the officer who assigned Hasan to Fort Hood (and later decided to deploy Hasan to Afghanistan) admitted to an officer at Fort Hood, “you’re getting our worst.” On November 5, 2009, 12 servicemembers and one civilian employee of DoD lost their lives because Hasan was still in the U.S. military.
In addition to all this, Hasan made contacts with terrorists under investigation by the FBI (beginning on p. 35), but like the Army, the FBI took no action.
Glenn Reynolds remarks “yeah, everybody already figured this out, but thanks.” If only that were true. The report notes (p. 9) that the Army still hasn’t figured this out:
However, DoD — including Secretary Gates’s memoranda — still has not specifically named the threat represented by the Fort Hood attack as what it is: violent Islamist extremism. Instead, DoD’s approach subsumes this threat within workplace violence or undefined “violent extremism” more generally. DoD’s failure to identify the threat of violent Islamist extremism explicitly and directly conflicts with DoD’s history of directly confronting white supremacism and other threatening activity among servicemembers.
Despite 13 murders, political correctness is still in charge.
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