The Fort Hood shooter: Like I was saying

Posted By Thomas E. Ricks Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - 4:22 PM Share

Like I was saying, I think someone in authority might want to pay attention when a disaffected Muslim doctor uses a formal medical lecture at Walter Reed to deliver a talk to his colleagues on the Koran, and concludes, "We love death more then [sic] you love life!"

Did I mention that he also was in e-mail contact with a radical anti-American Islamic cleric?

Will Palmer/Flickr

EXPLORE:NORTH AMERICA, MILITARY, TERRORISM
 

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4:37 PM ET

November 11, 2009

Religion definitely played a part...

but not the part that some would have us believe.

Hasan's biography suggests that this was an avoidable and isolated tragedy.

He was an overtly devout Muslim with tendencies towards fundeMENTALism, and at the same time he was an Arabic-speaking psychiatrist in an Army that is apparently desperately short-staffed in that skill set, both here and certainly in the theatre.

As badly as he didn't want to be in the Army (and DEFINITELY not on the front lines) is how badly the Army needed him.

It seems to me like a tragedy of errors and nothing more.

He should have been smart enough to get a lawyer to counsel him and liase with the Army about a discharge or even court marshall. And the Army should develop concrete ways to detect sour discontent from within its ranks and deal with them appropriately.

My suspicion is that if the Army had posited the possibility of a dishonorable discharge or a court marshall, he would likely have accepted on the grounds of his religious principles and this all could have been avoided. Instead he boxed himself in with faulty presumptions about his prospects, and the Army never knew about the degree of his depression.

As to Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged 'radical anti-American Muslim cleric,' I think the connection is flimsy at best.

Awlaki is a self-avowed Salafist (Wahabbist) preacher and is definitely NOT an apologist for Islam, which raises red flags with the FBI and gives fuel to the fire of Islamophobic organizations like WND.

However he, to my knowledge, has never openly called for violence against the US or any western country. He's among the vast majority of Muslim Americans who condemn terrorism, but almost always qualify their condemnation with disclaimers about how the root cause of it is Western oppression. The qualifiers annoy the hell out of a certain segment of American society, and they seem to be the ones trying to make Awlaki a fall guy. When in fact all the evidence so far indicates that the Imam responded to Hasan's request for counsel on how to square the different realities in his life.

How to deal with American salafists is definitely an ongoing issue for the government. We could go the 'Abu Hamza' route and just deport them, but an increasing number of them are natural born American citizens - like Hasan and Awlaki.

 

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Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post from 2000 through 2008.

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