(Nov. 10th) As reporters and investigators comb over the history and background of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the prime suspect in the Ft. Hood attack that left thirteen people dead, some noteworthy new details have emerged.
For one, it turns out that contrary to his family’s assessment that he was an “observant” Muslim, Hasan apparently frequented a local strip club three times this month, sipping beer and buying lap-dances. (Yes, it’s Fox News, but it directly quotes staff at the club).
For another, authorities monitored and knew of Hasan’s communication with a radical American-born imam who now serves as an al-Qaeda cheerleader in Yemen, but didn’t think the contact warranted further investigation.
It’s always easy to pass judgment in hindsight. No family member can know with full certainty what a loved one does with all his time, and no government official can be expected to assume from one or two exchanges that a man is teetering on the edge of violence.
Yet there is a third, crucial piece of information about Hasan that should have absolutely set off alarm bells, and the fact that it never did indicates a serious, glaring problem in the Army.
In June 2007, Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic of his choice to an audience of other military personnel, including supervisors who served as senior Army doctors. Instead, he presented an utterly bizarre and disjointed 50-page PowerPoint that was nominally about Islam.
Hasan’s rambling slides, replete with basic grammatical and spelling errors, argued in part that the military should let Muslim soldiers opt for conscientious objector status in order to avoid “adverse events” arising from opposition to serving in Muslim countries. For obvious reasons, this is the focus of media’s attention.
But more importantly, a look beyond the first few slides makes it blatantly obvious that Hasan was merely projecting and telegraphing his own growing confusion, ambivalence and frustration with serving in the U.S. military as a Muslim. The cherry-picked verses, un-cited assertions, basic theological errors and huge assumptions about what constitutes offensive and defensive jihad clearly signify that he had begun to go off the rails.
For instance, in suggesting that Muslim soldiers would oppose the wars specifically because it meant that they would be fighting other Muslims (there are plenty of other reasons that millions of Americans have opposed either war), Hasan evidently forgot that the Islamic extremists themselves have overwhelmingly been killing other Muslims, that terrorism violates one of the most basic tenets of the faith and that one obligation incumbent upon Muslims is to stop fellow Muslims from committing injustice.
Stunningly, however, not one person among the 25 attendees picked up on the significance of the presentation. It went unreported to any authorities. It seems that Army staff and leadership were so uniformly ignorant about Islam that they took this warped, radical presentation as an accurate, if unsolicited, reflection of mainstream Muslim thinking. It cannot be argued that Hasan presented his slides as an effort to show how only extremists think: the whole point of the exercise was to convince those assembled that Muslims in their own ranks essentially couldn’t be trusted if they were true Muslims.
We’ve already seen many instances since September 11 — indeed, including September 11 — where absence of critical information about Islam or Muslims has led to disaster. Lawmakers’ ignorance about something as basic as the difference between Sunni and Shia, for instance, enabled blunders that contributed to the bloody panorama that was the Iraqi civil war.
That senior officers within the Army as late as June 2007 were utterly unable to distinguish a rational presentation of Islamic thought from the wild distortions of a man desperately trying to telegraph his own radicalizing views reflects poorly on the institution and is part of the problem Adm. Mike Mullen identified in a recent address:
“Good communication runs both ways. It’s not about telling our story. We must also be better listeners. The Muslim community is a subtle world we don’t fully — and don’t always attempt to understand. Only through a shared appreciation of the people’s culture, needs, and hopes for the future can we hope ourselves to supplant the extremist narrative.”
