The Army psychiatrist is believed to have acted alone despite repeated communications -- intercepted by authorities -- with a radical imam overseas, U.S. officials said Monday. The FBI will conduct an internal review to see whether it mishandled early information about the man accused in the bloody rampage that killed 13 people and wounded 29.I remember taking a class on the French Revolution. The instructor philosophized that oppressed people of any sort never rebel: it's too dangerous. It's only when hope is raised for a change, and the change doesn't come, or is reversed, that people get violent. Things had been getting better for the lower classes in France in the mid-18th Century. The abrupt reversal of that improvement in the 1780's set the stage for violence.
President Barack Obama was joining grieving families and comrades of the victims Tuesday at a memorial service at the sprawling Texas Army base. Hasan, awake and talking to doctors, met his lawyer Monday in the San Antonio hospital where he is recovering, under guard, from gunshot wounds in the assault.
In Washington, an investigative official and a Republican lawmaker said Hasan had communicated 10 to 20 times with Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam released from a Yemeni jail last year who has used his personal Web site to encourage Muslims across the world to kill U.S. troops in Iraq. Despite that, no formal investigation was opened into Hasan, they said.
Investigative officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case. Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said it was his understanding Hasan and the imam exchanged e-mails that counterterrorism officials picked up.
Officials said Hasan will be tried in a military court, not a civilian one, a choice that suggests his alleged actions are not thought to have emanated from a terrorist organization.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Hasan warned his medical colleagues a year and a half ago that to "decrease adverse events" the U.S. military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of fighting in wars against other Muslims. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, made the recommendation in a culminating presentation to senior Army doctors at Walter Reed Medical Center, where he spent six years as an intern, resident and fellow before being transferred to Fort Hood.
"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," Hasan said in the presentation, a copy of which was obtained by the Post.
FBI Director Robert Mueller ordered the inquiry into the bureau's handling of the case, including its response to potentially worrisome information gathered about Hasan beginning in December 2008 and continuing into early this year.
Based on all the investigations since the attack, the investigators said they have no evidence that Hasan had help or outside orders in the shootings.
Even so, they revealed the major had once been under scrutiny from a joint terrorism task force because of the series of communications going back months. Al-Awlaki is a former imam at a Falls Church, Va., mosque where Hasan and his family occasionally worshipped.
In 2001, al-Awlaki, a native-born U.S. citizen, had contact with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and on Monday his Web site praised Hasan as a hero.
Military officials were made aware of communications between Hasan and al-Awlaki, but because the messages did not advocate or threaten violence, civilian law enforcement authorities could not take the matter further, the officials said. The terrorism task force concluded Hasan was not involved in terrorist planning.
Officials said the content of those messages was "consistent with the subject matter of his research," part of which involved post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from U.S. combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A law enforcement official said the communications consisted primarily of Hasan posing questions to the imam as a spiritual leader or adviser, and the imam did respond to at least some of those messages.
No formal investigation was ever opened based on the contacts, the officials said.
Hope has been raised by the election of Barack Obama that U.S. troops would soon leave Muslim lands. But the slow withdrawal from Iraq, coupled with troop increases in Afghanistan, dashed hope in general, and when coupled with Major Hasan's imminent deployment to Afghanistan, created a crisis for Major Hasan in particular. Hope was coming too late for Major Hasan, oppressed as he was by conflicting loyalties. He responded violently.
A lot of Muslims, and Americans too, have been trying to cast America's entry into Iraq and Afghanistan as a war between faiths, between Christianity and Islam. People of good sense have been trying to avoid that characterization, because if that's the way the battle is framed, we lose: there are just too many Muslims. But people keep swinging away (Michelle Malkin, Ahmed Ahmedinejad, and many, many others), and some people eventually adopt that point of view.
In addition, the military is critically dependent on Muslims for intelligence throughout the Middle East. They speak the languages, after all. A purge of Muslims would willfully blind us to the dangers there. The military would be hobbled.
We seem to be sensitive to foreigners directing violence towards the U.S., but less ready to deal with people in the U.S. betraying the U.S. of their own volition. After all, we haven't had to consider betrayal for a long time. Betrayal was a big issue in WWII because so many soldiers were the children of recent immigrants. The success of acculturation helped immensely with the German- and Italian-cultured soldiers: less so with the Japanese (but that was more our failing). Betrayal was hardly a factor in Vietnam, though. But as we depend more and more on Muslims for critical information and critical tasks, betrayal becomes a problem again.
Al Qaeda isn't just a military wing, but an extension of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Philosophy lies at its base. In addition, Al Qaeda operates on almost a franchise basis - you don't have to get direction from the top. Its viral cellular structure is more robust, and thus more dangerous, than communist cellular structure ever was, because no links to a central command are required.
The FBI says the connection between Maj. Hasan and the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki appeared fairly-innocuous, and it probably was. It didn't matter that Major Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki didn't speak about politics, per se. They could have spoken about the weather, for all that mattered. What mattered was militant Islam had become more appealing than continued service in the U.S. military. Even casual contact with the cleric steeled Hasan's resolve.
Today on NPR, a woman telephoned in from Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, and talked about the insecurity that she now felt on base. American military bases are their own special communities, where children are present and ordinary life goes on. She was prepared for American soldiers to be shot at overseas, but not at home; not on base in the U.S.; not by someone with a pass on base.
Unfortunately, the longer we have troops in Muslim lands, the more troops we have there, and the deeper they become ensconced, the greater our insecurity will become. If we were content to have just small bases there targeting just our worst enemies (the initial involvement in Afghanistan), that would be one thing. Even large interventions for a short time are somewhat tolerable. (Academic Juan Cole has written, with surprise, just how tolerant most Iraqis have been of U.S. troops there.) But extended, large interventions are just the worst. Mission creep in the Middle East appears almost impossible for politicians to resist, whether Dick Cheney or Barack Obama. And U.S. troops will inevitably pay a price, sometimes when they least expect to.
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