On November 5, 2009, 13 Americans—12 servicemembers and one civilian employee of DoD—were killed and 32 were wounded in an attack at the military base at Fort Hood, Texas. This tragedy was the deadliest terrorist attack within the United States since September 11, 2001. Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army officer and psychiatrist, was arrested and is standing trial for murder and other charges in military court-martial proceedings. – from A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government’s Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack
Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, chairman and ranking member respectively of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, published their report on the Fort Hood shooting yesterday.
It is a tragic story of systematic inaction in the face of considerable evidence that Nidal Hasan had become a radicalized Islamic extremist. Point by point, page after page, the report provides chilling detail of a system that almost worked, but was paralyzed.
Sometimes it didn’t work because of bad luck. Occasionally it didn’t work because of laziness. Mostly it didn’t work because of the scourge of political correctness.
A big part of the background here is the deliberate conflation of the words and views of someone who has correctly identified radical, violent Islamism as a severe and ongoing threat to national security. It’s practically a matter of course now to say that anyone stating this rather obvious reality is waging a “war on Islam.”
Liberals who are able to perceive incredible nuance in, say, the minutiae of climate data, are suddenly incapable of comprehending this basic distinction. Never mind this bloody, genuine religious war; let’s excoriate those Christian wackos at Chick-fil-A.
And the next Nidal Hasan grows bolder and stronger.
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My brother’s comment on this whole story when it first broke was that it wasn’t that he was a Muslim, nor anything [that had yet to be discovered] about his background. It was that there’s a critical shortage of shrinks in the Army, period, especially with every third Joe being treated for PTSD. No way were they going to get rid of this guy. There’d be no one to replace him with.
Thus, he basically had carte blanche to do what he wanted, knowing that short of shooting up a gym full of people he wouldn’t be canned. Oh wait….
You know what is our CURRENT (one of them, anyway) ticking time bomb??? Egypt. I cannot believe the current administration’s response (or lack thereof) to what is going on over there.
I have said before that every generation should have to live through a Jimmy Carter so that we would have the sense to find a Ronald Reagan. But Lord, I didn’t want there to an ACTUAL repeat of peanut-head’s presidency.