Frankly I have to disagree on the last one. While it is necessary to remove any soldiers that move to radicalism (of all flavors), that won't do a thing to reassure anyone or prevent an unjust backlash. Humans, soldiers or civilian, are not calm, rational actors. They are motivated by emotion and preconceived notions.

In response to #4:

I haven't had the time to follow this story as closely as I should have. However, from what I have heard, this guy was a poor performer and got transferred after receiving a poor evaluation (although I can't remember for certain where I remember reading/hearing this).

If this is true, then it seems as if he Army, as is typical, simply gave him a "rehabilitative transfer". In many cases, it can separate a soldier from a command with which he has a personality conflict. It's also a lot easier to send a Soldier to another unit than it is to kick him or her out of the military or go forward with UCMJ action, which is why it's highly desirable.

In any event, regardless of the circumstances of his transfer to Fort Hood, it is important to note that all written counselings--if they were done at all--are to be destroyed upon a change of station, and do not follow him from base to base. Any progress that was made on amassing written documentation regarding any indiscipline is lost, and a new command has to start from ground zero discovering, unearthing, and amassing written evidence to support disciplinary action or chapter paperwork.

Often an unreliable narrator but......
1) This doctor went so far as to hire an attorney and offer to pay back the Army for his education if he could be relieved of his military obligation. This handed the Army the perfect opportunity of removing as you say "a low performer" without seeming prejudiced. Obviously he disired to leave so why would he put up a fight, how hard could it have been to discharge him?

(2 The few of his patients who have been interviewed claimed he was a good at his job. One said he was the best Army therapist he had seen.

3) It would be even better if the Army re-assured soldiers by uncovering and dismissing any soldiers Muslim, Christian, what ever, who veer into extremism.

The first question I'd ask in a case like this is whether the shooter knew any of his victims. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported over the weekend that this Hasan person was slated to deploy with a Wisconsin Guard unit specializing in helping soldiers with combat stress, and soldiers from this unit were among the casualties. So it is at least possible.

The second question involves the most obvious warning sign, preparation for the crime. It takes a degree of skill to hit so many people in a short period of time with two handguns, even if one of them is a semi-automatic and even if one's targets are close together. How does an Army psychiatrist who had never before been deployed in a combat zone come to be able to acquire that skill? This isn't a rhetorical question; there must be records somewhere of Hasan's firearms training, where and how long ago he received it, and so forth. This might provide some insight as to how long this crime had been in preparation.

The third question relates more to Army policy on a sadly familiar topic. The Army's capacity for assisting soldiers traumatized by combat has been badly overtaxed in the last eight years. Is it likely that Hasan's retention in the counseling system, his promotion, and his selection for deployment were related to this situation? In other words, was a "low performer" kept in the system because the alternative was a "no performer"? If Hasan's prior assignment involved counseling individual soldiers, did the Army have reason to believe he was a "low performer," and how hard did it look for this information? The Army is pretty clear about what makes an effective rifleman or a good platoon leader; would it know whether a counseling psychiatrist was good at his job? Given the pressure to find credentialed mental health professionals to counsel large numbers of soldiers, would the Army be highly motivated to find out?

Warning signs about this individual may seem obvious in retrospect, but to my knowledge there is no precedent for an Army doctor during any war doing what Hasan is alleged to have done. This fact may point toward careful attention to those aspects of this case that would be relevant to any homicide investigation, and away from generalizations about "indirect PTSD" or Muslims in uniform.

All the stuff being said about the Ft Hood murderer has to be mentally filed as 'interesting, if true.' Without reference to the Ft Hood shooter, a psychiatrist (neurologist) with experience differentiating and treating TBI/PTSD is in great demand, over in the war zone.

The Army medical service was swamped since 2004 by a perfect storm of TBI/concussion casualties, which is confused and coincident with PTSD. The symptoms (memory/sleep loss, poor judgement, panics) overlap, and often occur in the same casualties.

Up thru 2007, the rule was '3 hots and a cot' for blast and closed head injury that resulted in brief loss of consciousness. Diagnosis of mild and moderate post-concussion damage was delayed until after much of the secondary 'inflammation response' had killed neurons and their supporting cells. Often a soldier returned to duty was exposed to a second injury, while his system was at much higher risk from a fresh concussion. Prozac and sleeping pills only mask TBI symptoms

Imagine a top gunner with reduced executive function, reacting after a convoy is hit again. It happened. 'Return them to the firing line' ethic has drawbacks in a COIN mission.

As with all casualties, the greatest good in combat medicine is to move diagnosis and treatment as far forward as the current state of the art and TOO allows. Starting last year, troops were supposed to undergo pre-deployment testing (a laptop memory and reaction 'game') to establish a baseline record, much like what college and HS football programs have employed to protect athletes and the school for many years now.

But you still need practitioners to bless the data, if post-injury testing indicates that Spc Chavez is no longer fit to be trolling for mines and crashing patrol vehicles.

The key point in all this is the U.S. Army paid a million dollars or so for him to attend medical school, which is followed by a lengthy active duty commitment. He wanted out, and if allowed, other doctors will want to leave early as well. What to do?

This is the same problem with troops who don't want to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, or even sailors that don't want to leave their wife for six months to deploy on ship.

One point not discussed is that an Army doctor/Major is in a position to inflict thousands of deaths at a military base if he makes the effort. Think bio/chem warfare. I would think he would shoot up a big headquarters and kill a few Generals and Colonels along the way. We're lucky he didn't check out an M-16 for the rifle range and use that.

Also, nothing prevented him from just driving away and going AWOL. If caught, the Army would just give him an dishonorable discharge anyway.

All this shows this was not a terror attack, just an insane form of suicide, and he failed at that too.

Mr. Ricks,

You are trying to be careful but, to my mind, you are not careful enough. The obvious may not give us the answers as to why Major Hasan snapped.

You say he was a low performer. More to the point: when was he a low performer? At every stage of his psychiatry career or after a certain point? Without his academic record as well as his clinical record in hand I'm not sure you could write off Major Hasan's career as an example of the Army dumbing down its standards.

We need to look at his patient records, yes. Maybe it will show that he preferred diatribes to treatments. It may also show that some wounded and traumatized veterans had very specific opinions about being treated by an Arab-American Muslim psychiatrist. Healthy doctor-patient interaction under this scenario must have been difficult for everybody.

Also, we also know that during the previous administration there was a preference for faith-based solutions to everything. The care of veterans at Walter Reed was no exception. See Tara McKelvey's new essay in the Boston Review: "God, the Army, and PTSD
Is religion an obstacle to treatment?"

http://bostonreview.net/BR34.6/mckelvey.php

So, in Major Hasan we have a military American-Arab Muslim psychiatrist who was ordered to treat veterans wounded by wars in Muslim countries being supervised by officials who preferred faith-based (i.e. Christian formulated) solutions to PTSD. Given the other issues surrounding the administration of Walter Reed I would be wary of taking the assessments of Major Hasan's supervisors at face value. A thorough investigation is warranted, not just a review of Major Hasan's record.

Lastly, you consider how the Army is trying to avoid a backlash against Muslims in the military. You recommend that the best way to do this is by "uncovering and dismissing Muslim soldiers who veer into extremism." That's a nice idea but could you please explain how this will be done without creating another Captain Yee? The track record of the military investigating Muslims in the ranks thus far is not inspiring on any count.

Leave aside the military connection and you could almost substitute Seung-hui Cho for Major Hasan. The similarities are striking. Socially inept, depressed, descent into extremist thinking of one sort or another, real or perceived grievances against authority, a perception that “they” wouldn’t listen to him or were out to get him, a belief that he was better than/knew more than others. His writings became more infused with violent rhetoric as time went on. People around him started noticing that “something wasn’t right.”

The other thing that is consistent, and has been consistent in every one of these horrific acts, is the tendency to scapegoat and to search for simple (and usually wrong) answers. With the Columbine killers, it was because they were goths and liked violent video games — someone should have seen it coming. Someone should have done something about it. Cho was just so manifestly weird that somebody should have done something. Now we have Hasan who was spouting extremist rhetoric — someone should have noticed and done something. Have you ever noticed how many people spout extremist rhetoric without going off the tracks? In my state (Virginia) alone, there are at least several million of them who occasionally say something or write something that could be construed as “extremist.” Maybe it was because he was a Muslim, as if we haven’t already learned that this, by itself, isn’t an indicator of anything.

This is understandable. People like simple answers, even when there aren’t any. The problem with trying to isolate people who have the potential to do something like this is the extremely high number of “false positives” you’re going to get. Think of the “no fly” list that saved us from terrorists like Sen. Ted Kennedy, David Nelson (of the ‘60s show “Ozzie and Harriet”) and many, many others. When something like Ft. Hood happens, we ignore the fact that we are a country of laws, our authorities are bound to act within the law, and that law covers everyone, not just outliers. The law limits the information that can be obtained, the means that can be used to obtain it and what can be done with it (and who it can be disseminated to) once it is obtained. The military is made up of 2,000,000 people, all of whom see, hear and read things, assess them, draw conclusions, and take actions every day that are based on insufficient evidence. Often those decisions are wrong. Most of the time those decisions don’t matter; in the overall scheme of things, what does it matter that you made a left turn at the light instead of a right turn?

Here’s what we appear to know about this guy. He’s 39 years old, single, lived a frugal lifestyle, was a Muslim, went to church regularly, gave to charity, was a psychiatrist whose patients (or at least the ones we’ve heard from) seemed to think he did good work, acted a bit weird, wanted out of the Army, was the subject of a poor efficiency report for unknown reasons, and wrote some inflammatory things on the internet. Oh, and eight years ago, he attended the same church at the same time as did three of the 9/11 terrorists, as did at least several hundred other people. Can anyone really believe that this set of facts would justify anyone other than Jack Bauer taking any kind of action against this guy?

We need to get real and recognize that no matter how we cut it, this profile could apply to many, many people, most of whom are unlikely to ever present any kind of a threat to anyone. This kind of thing is the human equivalent of a lightning strike. There’s no reasonable way we can prevent it. We’re a nation of 300,000,000 people. A very few of them are going to turn out to be people who do this kind of thing and there’s very little we can do about it. Someone, possibly a few someones, in the Army are going to bear the brunt of Hasan’s actions. Were they really responsible? Probably not, but that won’t stop us from blaming the whole thing on them.

The guy sounds much, much more like a typical workplace shooter than a terrorist. And everyone, not just the Army, is bad at spotting workplace shooters---because, as Paul G said above, "[their] profile could apply to many, many people, most of whom are unlikely to ever present any kind of a threat to anyone." Looking for patterns in a sample size of one will only result in a witch hunt, which is the last thing we need right now.

We need a witch hunt even less because of the number of people who want it. Check out the comments on these two fairly widely-read blog posts for a taste of the latent Islamophobia in a certain generation of military members:

http://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2009/11/prayers-going-out-for-soldiers-at-ft.html
http://blog.usni.org/?p=4926

"I am an American Soldier.

I am a Warrior and a member of a team.

I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army Values.

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.

I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.

I am an expert and I am a professional.

I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy, the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.

I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.

I am an American Soldier."

Any troops with any problems with the Creed should perhaps split.

1. Why obvious? Are we supposed to just go along with this unsupported assertion or is the entire opening sentence just a joke? Anyway, what a lame idea! Getting rid of the bottom 5% would leave another bottom 5% would leave another bottom 5% and so on. It's not a slippery slope argument. It's basic mathematics. And every group needs their 'low performers'. If there is spectacular collection of high performers, the group will forcibly transform a few of them into your famous unusually round figure: the bottom 5%. Accusing this guy of being an idiot is tantamount to ignoring his reasons for doing it. Which means the author is expecting us to believe in magic rather than cause and effect. Fail.
2. I offer no argument there but support your voice wholeheartedly. Western culture has a seriously dangerous case of pc. Like a ticking time bomb.
3. Good luck.
4. What exactly are the other cases, if this is just another 'classic case'? Your writing here becomes painfully transparent. The real catastrophe is the geopolitical timing of this. Hasan may well have been kicked off. After all, he was a soldier and he could well have been simply following orders, albeit rather covert and diabolical ones. The question is from whom and for what reason. There is no doubt in our minds that the military is expert at calculating affordable losses. Anyway, it wouldn't take much to bully someone so suggestible and vulnerable as he was. But as a psychiatrist, would he have not seen it being done to him? Nice counter-argument, but too nice for comfort. And as mentioned - bottom 0.05.
5. Agreed. Except, why just Muslims? Owch! The author here exhibits the unreasonable political correctness (it's a double-edged sword) that General Casey warned about. Military psychiatrists should dismiss any soldier who veers into extremism and, if I am not mistaken, there are already supposed to be some safeguards in place. Soldiers don't really have the same rights as civilians anyway. But on the whole, fundamentalism should be against federal and military law, as it directly and historically challenges the safety and freedom of the citizenry. It certainly has no place in the armed forces, lest we actually do want another goddamned holy war.

Tom,

Good questions and I see a couple good responses above. I would simply add that medical personnel in the Army are managed differently than non-medical personnel. Be careful about drawing broad conclusions from this incident about the personnel system as a whole. I'm not suggesting that you are - just throwing it out there for good measure.

My mechanic is an Iranian Shiite fundamentalist, bordering on extremism. He's got Christian, Jewish, Sunni and Bahai customers. The way he sees it, the better he is at his work, the better chance he has of creating converts.

Major Hasan is a nut case.

The lowering of standards for promotion and retention in the ranks are to blame. Let's not forget that, for the majority of his time as an officer, Hasan was probably a Captain but had little or no chance of ever seeing command. As a specialized officer in the medical corps, could he have been a company commander? What kind would he have been? I don't see any citation where he did a year in command of a medical company and his promotion to major was likely for "time served" and not about "potential."

The officers who signed off on his promotion to Major should be relieved, and everyone they have ever evaluated needs a second look.

Too many substandard officers are making Major and LTC right now, and that is creating a hollowed-out time bomb of an Army. Think of the implications of a conflict ten years from now, when the lowering of standards have left us with hundreds, if not thousands of substandard, marginal, weak, and ineffective officers at the rank of Colonel, LTC, or Major.

We MUST raise the standards, put the ash annd trash out of the service, and hope and pray that the NCO corps is not suffering a similar "watering down" of capability.

And Hasan WAS a terrorist. He used an act of violence to make a political statement because he felt he had no other recourse. That he wasn't organized into a larger terrorist organization is irrelevant--he was a sympathetic actor and one who committed a premediated act of terrorism against an organization that had fed and clothed him for years.

I estimated his salary to be nearly $90,000 a year over the weekend. Monthly BAH for an O-4 with no dependents at Ft. Hood is $1,212 and he was living in a fleabag apartment for $325 a month--he was living like an E-3 on O-4 pay. He was a weirdo, certainly, but where did his money go?

He couldn't resign his commission? When did that start?

I think the best way to prevent such an overreaction would be to re-assure soldiers that the Army is uncovering and dismissing Muslim soldiers who veer into extremism.

Frankly, this sentence would be significantly more compelling as an argument if you replaced "Muslim" with "religious."

They come in all stripes, Tom, and without ignoring the facts of the case that lead one to viewing Ft. Hood as an act of Islamic extremism, extremism from any religious source should be scrutinized similarly, to hold your argument to greater standard.

Norman Rogers wrote:
"The officers who signed off on his promotion to Major should be relieved, and everyone they have ever evaluated needs a second look."

Riiiiight. And your the first guy to jump on a loose hand grenade in battle too. Right?

The System is set up so that if you complain for any reason (valid or otherwise) 2 things will happen: (1) Your carreer will be tainted if not altogether stalled; (2) Nothing will happen to the party that you complain about.

Rather than sanctioning those who worked within this system of Political Correctness how about firing those who set up this System in the first place?

BTW, in the last couple of weeks I've heard Blacks and Mexicans slammed at my job by people who are "Protected Classes." As a white guy should I complain or ignore it? That's one of the things Liberals love about Political Correctness: It allows Protected Classes to have the same sort of "anything goes racist speech" as White Guys used to have before the 1960's. It's a way of evening the playing field. This nutjob/terrorist is a case in point.

I am by no means an expert on Army Medical Department policy and personnel matters. If you're genuinely interested in answering question question 1, I recommend you contact Human Resources Command in Alexandria, VA.

This guy was ROTC (4 years) and USUHS (7 years), giving him an Active Duty Service Obligation of 11 years - with the clock starting when he finished residency. I don't have all the details, but it looks like since he wrapped up his residency in 2007, he was only 2 years into a 11 year commitment.

Regarding promotion to MAJ. The Medical Corps's promotion to MAJ is pretty much like the Regular Army's promotion to 1LT. Are you flagged? No? Are you board certified? Yes? Congratulations!

As far as I know, as a policy the army does not allow medical officers to buy out their contract - though it seems in this case, an exception to the rule may have been a good idea. But rather than shoot up a Soldier Readiness Center, where else would he have found easy targets?

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