Tainted Saints

What happened to all the initial reports that accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan snapped because he was distraught over the Army’s refusal to grant him either a discharge or an exemption from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, wars which the Muslim psychiatrist abhorred — and how it was this callous Army refusal to accommodate Maj. Hasan that led to his downward spiral into despondency, rage and mass murder?

We heard quite a bit about this in the first couple of days, and then — poof! That part of the Fort Hood story disappeared so neatly that I almost started to wonder if I’d imagined it — such is the power of media bombardment versus a mere soap bubble like the human memory. I might have forgotten too and gone along with the reality-scrub, the way all of Official America has gone, but thanks to all the news archives, it was possible to check the record as it was first reported on November 5, and trace how a key part of the Nidal Hasan story was airbrushed away from reality.

The Army’s pig-headed failure to accommodate Maj. Hasan was, for a time, the most important — and most damaging — detail forunderstanding his shooting rampage. Because if Maj. Hasan tried to get out of his deployment, and if he telegraphed every warning signal possible (emailing terrorists, cruising 7-11s in his Al Qaeda costume) to bolster his case to reverse his deployment orders, and all the while the Army bureaucracy ignored him despite his 20 years’ service — then that means the massacre can’t be blamed just on one crazy Islamofascist’s inner evil. [more...]

From Haaretz, today:

Alleged Jewish terrorist: I know God is pleased

The Jerusalem District Prosecutor’s Office on Thursday charged alleged Jewish terrorist Yaakov (Jack) Teitel with two murders, three attempted murders and other acts of violence.

“It was a pleasure and an honor to serve my God,” said Teitel at the Jerusalem courthouse. “I have no regret and no doubt that God is pleased.”

Teitel also denied recent reports that he had operated as an undercover Shin Bet agent. .. . The indictment also lists Teitel’s efforts for more than a decade to harm Arabs, gays and lesbians, leftists, police officers and messianic Jews.

From Terror in the mind of God:  The Global Rise of Religious Violence:

The conventional narrative of the Fort Hood shootings, one week later, has been distinguished by the reporting of unconfirmed — and sometimes incorrect — details and the drawing of dubious conclusions. The only thing that suggests the current story will withstand the test of time better than the initial Pat Tillman myth (that he died in combat, rather than by friendly fire), or the overheated tale of heroism by Jessica Lynch in 2003 (which Lynch herself protested), is that two basic facts seem clear: The shootings certainly happened, and given the number of eyewitnesses, it’s almost certain that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan did it.

The fact that it was first incorrectly reported that Hasan died in the shootings, and that he was in cahoots with other perpetrators, may well be fairly chalked up to confusion during that first chaotic day. Other details, however, continue to unravel a week later. The media debate provoked by the Hasan incident is equally off-topic and unreliable. As someone who’s been asked to talk about the shootings because of my work covering the poor psychological care given to returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, I’ve had a front-row seat on the way preconceived biases are distorting the debate. [more...]

ABC’s Brian Ross has a history of bizarre “scoops” (like this one, when he announced that Hillary Clinton had indeed been in the White House the day Monica went down on her knees). And yet, ABC News is still proud to have him as their chief investigative correspondent, for some odd reason.

Now he overreaches on yet another story, this one claiming Nidal Malik Hasan attempted to contact al Qaeda. You heard it all over the news, right? Via Gawker:

Ross’ report yesterday that Hasan had attempted to “make contact with people associated with al Qaeda” took over the internet yesterday and sparked a furious round of speculation that Hasan’s attack was part of an Islamic terrorist plot. The headline, “Officials: U.S. Army Told of Hasan’s Contacts with al Qaeda,” said it all. The far more mundane truth emerged today in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post: Hasan had communicated via e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American cleric living in Yemen who formerly served as the imam of a mosque Hasan had attended in Virginia. What did they talk about? From the Washington Post:

The FBI determined that the e-mails did not warrant an investigation, according to the law enforcement official. Investigators said Hasan’s e-mails were consistent with the topic of his academic research and involved some social chatter and religious discourse.

ABC News’ Brian Ross has a breathtaking record of recklessly inaccurate, overhyped stories that don’t live up to the headline. His scoop yesterday about Nidal Malik Hasan’s “attempt to reach out to al Qaeda” was one of them. [more...]

[Because the Army is so well-known for being honest and forthcoming about errors in judgement... -Ed.]

The Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people last week at Fort Hood, Tex., did not formally seek to leave the military as a conscientious objector or for any other reason, an Army official said.

The Army psychiatrist believed to have killed 13 people at Fort Hood warned a roomful of senior Army physicians a year and a half ago that to avoid “adverse events,” the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of fighting in wars against other Muslims.

As a senior-year psychiatric resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic of his choosing as a culminating exercise of the residency program.

Instead, in late June 2007, he stood before his supervisors and about 25 other mental health staff members and lectured on Islam, suicide bombers and threats the military could encounter from Muslims conflicted about fighting in the Muslim countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a copy of the presentation obtained by The Washington Post.

“It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims,” he said in the presentation. [more...]

….”The whole family is in a state of denial,” [Hasan's uncle] said Saturday. “We don’t believe he is capable of doing something like that. I was amazed and shocked, because it’s not him. He’s very quiet, gentle.

“Maybe it built up together — the harassment, too many patients, the workload, the tragedies his patients brought to him,” said the 65-year-old retired real estate broker. “Whatever it was, it must have been big pressure, something terrible he couldn’t handle.”

Hamad and another West Bank relative, Mohammed Munif Hasan, said they learned recently that Maj. Hasan had consulted a lawyer about securing a discharge from the Army. [more...]

He prayed every day at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, a devout Muslim who, despite asking to be discharged from the U.S. Army, was on the eve of his first deployment to war. Yesterday, authorities said Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, a 39-year-old Arlington-born psychiatrist, shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex.

In an interview, his aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church, said he had endured name-calling and harassment about his Muslim faith for years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and had sought for several years to be discharged from the military.

“I know what that is like,” she said. “Some people can take it, and some cannot. He had listened to all of that, and he wanted out of the military, and they would not let him leave even after he offered to repay” for his medical training.

An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. George Wright, said he could not confirm that Hasan (pronounced Hass-in) requested a discharge. [more...]

No sooner was the identity of the Fort Hood shooter released — a man with the Arab name Nadal Malik Hasan — than the wingnuts sprang into predictable action: Of course he was a jihadi embarking on a murderous terrorism spree!

Pam “Atlas Barks” Geller immediately proclaimed it “an obvious act terrorism” and ran big all all caps heads declaring: “IT’S THE JIHAD STUPID.” Elsewhere in the right blogosphere, people like the folks at HotAir jumped all over the “news” that Hasan was a convert to Islam.

Then Shepard Smith interviewed Hasan’s cousin, and we found out that this was all so much tripe:

– Hasan was American born and educated, but raised Muslim. He was not a convert.

– He had never previously been deployed to Iraq or anywhere overseas, for that matter. So much for the theories he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

– He was regularly abused by his colleagues in the military for being Muslim — called a “raghead” and other such terms — and had been seeking to get out of the military because the environment had become so hostile. [more...]