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Fort Hood suspect charged as second guessing begins
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The president has ordered government agencies to disclose what they knew about Hasan, including who he was talking to, how thoroughly suspicious behavior was monitored and why his behavior at Walter Reed wasn't taken more seriously.
The decision to try Hasan in a military court reflects the belief that Hasan acted alone and was not involved with a larger terrorist organization.
While military trials tend to sentence fewer people to death, they're considered more thorough than civilian cases.
Military law experts speculate that the case could take up to two years to go to trial due to the amount of pre-trial publicity.
Meanwhile, finger-pointing over Fort Hood officially began in Washington.
The Pentagon claimed that two anti-terrorism task forces failed to inform the military about e-mails Maj Nidal Hasan sent to a radical Islamic cleric. For its part, the FBI insists that the information wasn't shared because officials had decided the communiqués were 'benign" and didn't warrant further investigation. In fact, members of the military were part of the task forces and apparently agreed with the assessment that the information shouldn't have been shared.
The "possible communication lapse" is "striking" because the task forces "were created in large part to make sure information is more easily and routinely shared."
Some of the best background work is being done by NPR, which early on dug up Hasan's troubling years at Walter Reed.
In addition to being seen as a lazy student and substandard worker, doctors and staff who oversaw Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's medical training were also worried about his overzealous religious views and argumentative nature. Officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center went as far as to consider whether Hasan was psychotic. Hasan was even ordered to attend a university lecture series on Islam due to his outspokenness about the issues.
While there were no discussions about whether to remove him from the service, it was concerns about his substandard performance that led officials to send him to Fort Hood because supervisors figured he would just fade into the woodwork as other doctors in the huge facility could pick up the slack if he continued to perform poorly.
So, why was he made a major? The Washingon Post explains that there is such a severe shortfall of majors that "virtually all Army captains are being promoted." Despite claims by his aunt to the contrary, officials say Hasan never made a formal request to leave the military.
It's only natural to try and sort out why what happened at Fort Hood happened but there's another likely and, I think, more plausible explanation: It may not be possible to avoid events like the kind that occurred at Fort Hood, TX.
Perhaps that's too bleak and too barren a notion for us to contemplate, let alone accept.
The incident is relatively familiar. It doesn't happen often but it happens often enough for us to know the telltale signs. An angry person. A person with no recourse. Targets. Guns, Victims. These days, instead of suicide notes, telephone threats or scribblings in a diary, the internet provides a digital trail that tempts us into thinking we could have prevented such a tragedy had we only known.
Every time a horrific event like this occurs, we always ask, "How did this happen?" And that's always followed by our own second-guessing over what we could have done to prevent it and what can we do to make sure it doesn't happen again.
I'm not sure we can always take preventive measures because sometimes --maybe a lot of times-- things have to happen first before we realize that such a thing could happen --because we can't imagine a world in which they would. Since we don't imagine that they would, we don't bother to prepare for them as if they will.
There are countless examples of this. The storm won't be that bad. I'll never have an accident. Floods rarely happen, who needs insurance? The value of housing will keep rising.
How many times in our health care debate has it been said that prevention would significantly reduce the cost of health care? But many of us forego routine exams despite warning signs, and thus we never learn that our blood pressure is too high, or that we might have polyps or a blood disorder.
And what's our response when a tragedy occurs? "How could this happen?"
Take the shooting at Virginia Tech. What did we hear? The student sought advice. He saw psychologists and teachers. Everyone said he seemed odd and distant and nobody said anything to anyone about his odd behavior. He bought guns. No one connected any dots.
The man in Pittsburgh who shot up a health club last August left plenty of clues, even writing on his blog in very plain English that he had gotten his guns ready, that he was prepared to commit mayhem, even marking the specific day he would do it. But no one paid any attention. If you ran across his blog you'd think: "Just another kook on the web." It's only afterwards when we're left slack jawed by a horrific act that we wonder predictably whether we could have prevented such a tragedy.
So here comes a psychiatrist who, long before any contact with any radical Islamic elements, had been regularly written up by his supervisors, who'd been known to have an extreme view of Islam and who'd also expressed his concerns over the possible religious conflict of Muslims killing Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. Colleagues at Walter Reed had remarked off and on that this seemed like the kind of guy who could suddenly snap and shoot up an office. Did anyone do anything about it?
Makes you wonder if you work with someone like that at your office? No one working at an Orlando high rise would've considered that until the day after Fort Hood when a former employee burst in, guns blazing in despair and frustration.
When someone commits a heinous act such as happened at Fort Hood or in any mass shooting we've seen over the years, we're only able to look back at it through the prism of the shootings --after the fact. By then, anything and everything that has a bearing on such behavior looms large.
But if there were no shootings and you looked at these very same behaviors, they might appear as benign.
It's like that loner kid in 10th grade everyone makes fun of, jokingly predicting, "He's gonna wind up a serial killer." Ten years later he's a serial killer. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold didn't even wait that long. Who could've known? Should you have said something? How? We generally expect good out of people --or at least normal-- and when something goes bad, you can't look back and say "shoulda, woulda, coulda."
But we can't live in a society where everyone's a suspect, either. You can't have freedom if you are going to make presumptions about people's sanity and demand we detain anyone who seems odd, eccentric, tightly wound or slightly malevolent.
The startling and difficult conclusion from events like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Pittsburgh, Fort Hood or Orlando, may well be that murder is one of the prices we pay for living in a free society. Freedom allows criminals to commit crimes, even murder, and there is no perfect system of which I am aware that can prevent it. Do you know of any?
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