Court proceedings for Maj. Nidal Hasan on the Fort Hood shooting and their signficance

The military seems to have done an impressive job keeping a lid on information about the accused Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan, and his attack last November. But now pretrial court hearings are finally under way, and new information is emerging.

There has been some public comment from American officials, however. As By Patrik Jonsson reports in the Christian Science Monitor article linked below:

Congressional reports on the Fort Hood shooting have highlighted the veteran soldier's contact with Anwar Al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric known to foment violence against the US over the Internet. Personal problems, inappropriate statements at work, and a looming deployment to Afghanistan all hint at a man driven to the brink, fueled by stories about war injustices he'd heard from US soldiers returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In September, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate panel that broader Al Qaeda strategy has diversified in terms of tactics and targets.

But while the Obama administration did not reference the Fort Hood shooting as an example, Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine, the Homeland Security Committee ranking member, said, "I am convinced that terrorists are beginning to focus their efforts on smaller-scale attacks, with small arms and explosives such as we saw at Fort Hood, Arkansas, and in India." [my emphasis]

Anwar Al-Awlaki is one American citizen that is a designated hit target in President Obama's controversial assassination program, in which he asserts sweeping Executive power that can rightly be called tyrannical - though it's unlikely that you'll hear any of our supposed Tea Party Republican lovers of freedom criticize him for that. It's the kind of authoritarian government power they tend to support; they just think it should always be in the hands of a Republican President.

Al-Awlaki's supposed connection to the Ft. Hood massacre has been used, as Susan Collins uses it in the quote above, to validate the hit on Al-Awlaki and the Presidential assassination authority more generally. So whatever we learn about Hasan's motives will be interesting for the extent to which it validates those assertions. (Glenn Greenwald, among others including Marcy Wheeler, has been following the assassination program, as in Obama argues his assassination program is a "state secret" Salon 09/25/2010.)

Apart from whatever current ideological uses may be made of it, it's important to understand domestic terrorist attacks. And the Ft. Hood massacre was a serious one. There are clear indications that Hasan's motives were extremist Islamist ones. The fact that bigots will try to demagogue it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand it. On the contrary, for people who actually care about the relevant issues, it's important to understand realistically the influences that acted upon him.

In commenting on this case, I'll try to refrain from constantly referring to what should be painfully obvious but clearly isn't to Republicans more interested in smearing Democrats than in understanding domestic terrorism: there's nothing "liberal" or "progressive" about Islamist jihadism. Nor do American liberals and Democrats - or European Greens, liberals and social-democrats - share their outlook. Religious fundamentalism, Islamic or otherwise, is rightwing in political terms. And is generally understood as that, outside the strange bubble of American Republican thinking right now.

But domestic Islamist terrorism also shouldn't be confused with other far-right brands of terrorism. Almost all of the ones in the United States are anti-Islamic along with their other hatreds. That's not necessarily always going to be the case. Extreme patriarchal, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic attitudes are common to many non-Islamic- and Islamic-extremists. But in the US, Christian Reconstructionism plays such a large role in much of today's far-right militia mentality, it would make actual cooperation with Islamic extremists particularly difficult.

Jeremy Schwartz reports in the 10/12/2010 article linked below that Hasan is "paralyzed from the chest down from bullet wounds received during the shooting [but] is able to move his arms."

The proceeding now under way is called an Article 32 hearing, which will determine whether Hasan will be court-martialed and whether the death penalty could apply. The presiding judge is is Col. James Pohl. This is a military equivalent of a grand jury, though unlike civilian grand juries Article 32 hearings are normally open to the public.

Hasan is being tried through the regular military legal system, not through some special military commission or other Kangaroo Court kind of proceeding.

Jeremy Schwartz of the Austin American-Statesman has been following the case closely. His recent articles include:

Witness: Man's face was 'blank' during Fort Hood shooting 10/18/2010

Fort Hood shooting hearing postponed as judge mulls continuance 10/12/2010

Hasan has hearing today in Fort Hood shooting case 10/11/2010

Hasan hearing to give rare look at military justice 10/11/2010

Hasan's lawyer says case is important test of justice system 10/09/2010

Seasoned legal talents will play key roles in Hasan case 10/09/2010

Hasan loses bid to close hearing to public, media 09/16/2010

He is also doing live-blogging updates at the paper's Austin Legal blog. The Austin American-Statesman also is tweeting the trial (presumably Schwartz at least part of the time) at FtHoodShootings.

Schwartz mentioned in an online chat last week that he didn't expect a lot of details about Hasan's potential motivations in the shooting to emerge in the course of the Article 32 hearings. His 10/12/2010 article does contain this interesting observation:

Tuesday's request for a continuance is the latest in a string of delay petitions from Hasan's attorneys, who have complained that they have not received stacks of discovery evidence, including classified portions of investigations ordered by the White House after the shooting.

He recorded this testimony in a 10/13/2010 blog entry:

A third witness just testified in the Article 32 hearing and described a bizarre interaction with Maj. Nidal Hasan a few seconds before witnesses say he opened fire inside the soldier readiness processing center.

Latoya Williams, a civilian data entry clerk at the center, said Hasan approached her desk just after lunch and told her that there had been an emergency and that her supervisor needed to see her.

"I said, 'Me?' He said yes. I got up and walked toward (her supervisor’s) office," she said. "I looked back to see if he was coming with me, but he was still in my area. I figured he didn’t need to go with me."

She said that walked away from Hasan and seconds later, she heard several pops that sounded like "firecrackers." Williams said she threw herself to the floor and eventually ran out of the building unharmed.

Williams did not say why she thought Hasan told her to leave the room and said she had never seen or met Hasan before. After the Nov. 5 incident, witnesses said that Hasan appeared to be targeting soldiers in uniform. [my emphasis]

This could be significant in indicating that Hasan had a conscious goal of specifically killing soldiers and not civilians. I don't imagine the defense counsel was glad to hear that one.

Further testimony showed that one civilian was killed, a physician's assistant who tried to stop Hasan by hitting him with a chair. Hasan shot and killed him first.

Schwartz' 10/15/2010 blog report includes the curious detail from the testimony of PFC Lance Aviles "testified under cross-examination that he made two videos of the shooting scene but deleted them later that day under directions from his superiors." Why would a superior want video evidence of such a crime destroyed?

In his 10/18/2010 blog post, Schwartz recounts this heart-rending incident:

Five witnesses testified, all via live feed from Afghanistan and Iraq. Spc. Jonathan Sims, with the 20th Engineer Battalion, testified that during the shooting he saw a female soldier laying in the fetal position, screaming "My baby! My baby!" A few minutes later he saw the same soldier flat on the floor, face down and unmoving. When nurses turned her over, her eyes were rolled into the back of her head, Sims testified.

Sims didn't give the soldier’s name, but it was most likely Pvt. Francheska Velez, who was pregnant and had just returned from Iraq at the time of the shooting. Velez was one of 13 killed during the shooting.

Amanda Kim Stairrett of the local Killeen Daily Herald his reporting on the Article 32 hearings at the paper and on Twitter at KDHmilitary.

Other recent coverage:

Patrik Jonsson, Will Fort Hood shooting trial find motive – or link to terrorism? Christian Science Monitor 10/19/2010

Sig Christenson, Chilling testimony at Fort Hood hearing San Antonio Express-News 10/14/2010

Charley Keyes, Witness: Police shouted 'put the gun down,' then more shooting CNN 10/18/2010.

Charley Keyes, Witness: Emotionless Fort Hood shooter 'wasn't happy, wasn't angry' CNN 10/18/2010

Taylor Barnes, Fort Hood shooting 'was a horror movie,' witness testifies at pretrial Christian Science Monitor 10/14/2010

Patrik Jonsson and Tracey Samuelson, Fort Hood suspect: Portrait of a terrorist? Christian Science Monitor 11/10/2009

Dan Murphy, Fort Hood shooting: Was Nidal Malik Hasan inspired by militant cleric? Christian Science Monitor 11/10/2009

Tags: domestic terrorism, fort hood massacre, hasan trial, terrorism

Imagining the Enemy Within

Do Republicans really wet their pants every time they hear bad news? Or do they just act that way when they are trying to drum up a hate campaign against some group or the other?

Human Events is one of the long-time favorite organs for rightwing Republicans. The lead story at their Web site as of this writing is Hasan's Personal Jihad by Clare Lopez 11/12/09:

A week after a Muslim jihadi gunned down more than 40 fellow citizens at Ft. Hood, Texas, America’s national security leadership still won’t admit that the attack had anything to do with Islam. By failing to acknowledge that connection, those with a constitutional duty to defend this nation “against all enemies foreign and domestic” consistently substitute a policy of political correctness at the expense of military readiness. The fact is that the 5 November 2009 attack that took the lives of thirteen American patriots was not just an act of terrorism: it was an act of war. When a gunman from the ranks of Islamic Jihad mounts an armed assault against a military target in complete consistency with the enemy doctrine of war, it is time to recognize that the U.S. actually is at war -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but with all those who follow the call of Jihad. These are the Jihad Wars and the stakes are clear: shall Americans live in security under the Constitution or shall the enemy within and without compel us to submit to Shari’a (Islamic law)?

There is no evidence at this point that the accused shooter, who has just been formally charged by the military with 13 counts of premeditated murder, is a "Muslim jihadi". We know he's Muslim. But what role if any his religion may have played in his actions isn't known, based on what's in the public record (although it's likely that it played some role).

I've yet to see that there's any evidence of the Army having promoted "political correctness at the expense of military readiness", although since rightwingers mean politically INcorrect when they say "politically correct" and they aren't always referring to politics, it's hard to know what the writer is actually trying to say. As I suggested in an earlier post, I can speculate that the desire to turn a blind eye to excessive Christian proselytizing in the military and the need to retain people fluent in Arabic could have played a role in ignoring danger signs.

But what were the supposed danger signs? Marcy Wheeler in Nidal Hasan’s Dots Emptywheel 11/10/09 gives a roundup of what we know that may be relevant to the actions of which Hasan is accused. Her discussion focuses on data sharing among federal agencies. But her reality-based list of focal points in analyzing Hasan's background is telling. Taken together, they give us a strong circumstantial reason to believe that some ideological motive (religious and/or political) was at work in his planning for the shooting. But the only one of the types of evidence she lists looks to me like an obvious red flag in itself: his purchase of a so-called "cop-killer" gun with several 20-round magazines of ammunition on August 1 of this year. But conservatives have committed themselves to such an expansive reading of the Second Amendment that they will presumably be hesitant to jump up and down over that as a sign of anything other than good citizenship by a citizen diligent to protect his Second Amendment rights. Although I would guess the gun purchase is going to be part of the prosecution's case for premeditation.

Is Hasan "from the ranks of" some group called "Islamic Jihad"? No evidence that I know of. Who are "all those who follow the call of Jihad"? Since "jihad" (struggle) is a concept with multiples meanings in Islam - Islamic tradition says that the Prophet Muhammad called the struggle to live in accord with God's laws was the "greater jihad" as distinct from the "lesser jihad" of war - American (non-Muslim) rightwingers typically apply such accusations to Muslims generally.

And it has to be clear to anyone whose brain is not pickling in ideological OxyContin that Christian theocracy is a greater threat to American freedoms that Muslim religious law (Sharia).

The Lopez article is useless as an analysis of the Fort Hood shooting. But it illustrates how conservatives use the image of an infinitely threatening, horrible Muslim enemy in pretty much exactly the same way they used the Communist menace during the Cold War. In fact, some of the polemics could be boilerplate, with words like "Muslims" and "Sharia" substituted for "Communist" and "Communism".

The Pentagon is largely echoing that aspect of this argument. This is a case that has the hard right accusing the Pentagon of being soft on Communism Islamic extremism. Which brings to mind that it was Joe McCarthy's reckless investigation of the Army that wrecked his credibility and brought him an official Senate censure.

The politics of this are already complicated. Liberals and progressives generally wouldn't want to enable a new round of paranoid fear-mongering about The Terrorists. Remember Attorney General John Ashcroft's warning after the 9/11 attacks that there could be thousands of Al Qa'ida sleeper agents in the US, a claim that had no basis in fact?

But there is a real problem also with the fact that the Army's tendency in these things is to keep as much secret from the public as possible. It's not only a deeply ingrained habit. But more than one senior Army officer at Fort Hood must fear for their careers right now after such a disaster occurred on their watch. We've already seen what looks like a very clumsy attempt to spin the capture of Hasan in a way that didn't align with the facts. (See Greg Mitchell Massive Media 'Fail' on Fort Hood Pressing Issues 11/12/09; James McKinley, Jr., Second Officer Gives an Account of the Shooting at Ft. Hood New York Times 11/12/09)

One of my big concerns here is that with the Republicans obviously trying hard to spin this as evidence of a Terrorist Conspiracy So Vast, the Army's reflexive secrecy and tendency to creative embellish their stories released to the public could wind up feeding paranoid conspiracy theories. When your framework is that the Army is being "politically correct" in covering up a known Terrorist Conspiracy in their ranks, any false information they release on the case will then become evidence of the dark conspiracy. The Army can't stop political paranoids from being what they are. But it doesn't have to facilitate their propaganda by sloppy public relations nonsense, either.

Tags: fort hood massacre, paranoid style

Parsing the available information on the Fort Hood massacre

"Updates to the investigation surrounding Thursday's shooting were scarce Monday," writes Amanda Kim Stairrett speaking of last week's horrific shootings at Fort Hood, in FBI, CID continuing investigation Killeen Daily Herald 11/10/09.

But that hasn't stopped people from speculating freely. Joe Lieberman, honorary Democrat for reasons that apparently only his colleagues in the Senate can fathom, was on FOX News Sunday talking about having an investigation of "the worst terrorist attack since 9/11." Holy Joe is chairman of the Senate Internal Security Committee and his fellow Democratic members apparently can't say no to him over anything. So he can probably have his hearing if he really wants.

But the publicly available facts about the case are still sparse. And what is being confidently reported is often contradictory and confusing. Did the shooter have one pistol or two? Was Officer Kimberley Munley shot three times or five? Did Munley take down the shooter herself or did her partner Mark Todd deliver the shot that brought him down?

The body count seems to be stable in the reporting at 13. The Army has publicly released the names of the dead after the required notice to their families (presumably). Amanda Kim Stairrett's report linked above says that 15 injured in the attack were still in the hospital Monday afternoon and 27 had been discharged. She doesn't mention how many injured may have been treated on the spot and not taken to the hospital, if any.

Since the Republicans and others clearly want to use this case to promote Islamophobia, the details of the attack could turn out to be important beyond the legal case against the shooter. If we assume that there was at least one bullet per injury, that means at least 55 rounds were fired. Depending on the time frame and the weapon(s) used, that's possible. There was some early speculation about the possibility of "friendly fire" injuries being involved, i.e., victims wounded by accident by people firing at the shooter. But if Munley was the only responder, or she and her partner the only ones, that seems less likely. Kate Harding writes about some of the reporting problems in Was Kimberly Munley the real Fort Hood hero? Salon 11/09/09, although she almost gets lost in speculating about what various narrative frames might imply about larger cultural issues.

Dana Priest, who's one of the Washington Post's best reporters, has a strange story on the suspect, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan: Fort Hood suspect warned of threats within the ranks 11/10/09. As Taylor Marsh's reaction shows, it's easy to read Priest's article as virtually a warning that he might take violent action. But what the article says is that Hasan gave a presentation in his role as an Army psychiatrist about factors that might cause US Muslim troops to turn against their own forces. As far as those present who heard it, it's not at all clear to me that they had reason to take it as other than face value. Shouldn't Army psychiatrists be talking about such possibilities? In an online chat, Priest confirms that she does think that his listeners should have seen that as a warning of trouble. but then later she concedes that they may have seen no reason to take it as such a warning sign. The slide show Hasan used in that presentation seems long on Qu'rānic verses for a medical presentation. But I don't see any obvious flags that he was somehow trying to validate fratricide (killing other soldiers in your own army) or acts of violence.

This is kind of sad to see, though, from the online chat:

Washington, D.C.: Did the Post ever point out that Timothy McVeigh was Christian? Should we be kicking out all the Christians from the military? All white males?

Dana Priest: I don't remember McVeigh's actions being motivated by his faith. He hated the government. As I recall.

[Sigh!] Actually, there is evidence that McVeigh was influenced by the white supremacist Christian Identity movement, which is very influential in the white supremacist gutter. See Elohim City Anti-Defamation League n/d (2001 or later). But Beltway Village pundits know not to look for religious motivations among non-Muslim domestic far-right terrorists; the default assumption is that they are the proverbial "lone nuts".

In a later story, Post reporter Ann Scott Tyson quotes an anonymous Army source claiming that Hasan did not formally seek to leave military, Army official says 11/11/09.

Here are some of the key factual questions in my mind:

• What actually happened at the shooting? Were the victims all hit by bullets from the perpetrator or was "friendly fire" involved?

• What was the shooter's motivation? To what extent was this a consciously political or religious act?

• Did he have actual accomplices of some sort? By actual accomplices, I mean people that actively enabled him to commit that specific crime. Having heard some radical Islamic preacher may be a clue to his motivations. But that's not the same as an accomplice to crime. Moral responsibility is another question, though it's pure speculation at this point.

• How did security at the base fail? If a bunch of people got killed because of preventable failures or shirking of responsibility on the part of base security, that's something that should be addressed. Kimberly Munley is being understandably praised for her heroism. But the current story is that she happened to be in the area having her car repaired and she and her partner heard shots and went to investigate. Munley and Todd may have performed well. But was base security working properly if the first responders were a couple of officers who just happened to be in the area picking up their car?

In connection with that last point, I hope the Army in this case holds those theoretically responsible for security actually responsible, though that doesn't always seem to be our military's approach.

John Nichols in The Nation suggests, Call Joe Lieberman's Bluff; Have a Real Inquiry 11/10/2009. He's referring to HoJo's seeming desire to investigate Muslims in the military. Nichols' point is that an investigation of how the military treats Muslim soldiers and the various factors including multiple deployments that may contribute to acts like the Fort Hood massacre might actually be a positive thing, though not exactly what Lieberman is picturing.

I think Nichols is half-right. We not only need to know the actual circumstances around this killing. The military needs to take a new attitude toward religious extremism in the military, especially among the officer corps. One of the questions that needs to be officially asked in some is whether the extensive Christian fundamentalist proselytizing that the military allows in its ranks led the military to look the other way at signs of religious/political extremism among officers in general?

Conservatives are grousing that "political correctness" - which to them apparently means "white people having to get along with non-whites" - is the reason that the military isn't exercising more diligence over Muslim soldiers and officers. But if it is the case that the military has been carelessly overlooking signs of Islamic extremism, my guess is that the desire to look the other way at Christianist political extremism among officers is likely to have more to do with it than the "political correctness" bogeyman.

One of the legitimate criticisms made of the military is that even now, nearly 19 years after Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait and the US military buildup in the Middle East for the Gulf War started, the Army still has a limited number of fluent Arabic speakers in its ranks. It's conceivable - though this is pure speculation - that the need for Arabic speakers could contribute to overly-accommodating attitudes toward danger signs in some cases.

The US military is experienced at trying to cover up its own mistakes. If lax base security was involved in the Fort Hood shootings, or friendly fire deaths, or bad responses to danger signals about the shooting suspect Hasan, or general failures in the military being alert to religious extremism among the officer core, the Army's instinct is going to be to cover that up as much as possible. Doing so may serve Army officers' careerist goals. But cover-ups will also feed conspiracy theories about deadly networks or super-efficient Al Qa'ida sleeper cells hiding behind every corner.

Tags: fort hood massacre

More on the Fort Hood killings

This is kind of a long post about some of my thoughts on the Fort Hood mass murder and the fairly pathetic national press coverage of it. Fortunately, not all the coverage was bad.

I won't try to link to all the articles at the Killeen Daily Herald/KDHNews.com site on the Fort Hood. But reading their articles reminds me of how having reporters familiar with the local scene can provide important context for a event like this. Reporters and TV infotainers blowing in New York or Washington are likely to have to rely very heavily on official spokespeople more than a competent local newspaper would. Knowing which locals can get a straight story and which will just blow smoke in your face is valuable for reporters. And a CNN infotainer isn't going to know that an hour after their plane lands.

But then, our TV infotainers who play reporters generally aren't trying to do actual journalism, either. The journalistic information that gets through is almost incidental.

Chris Hayes tweeted on Friday, "Today's probably a good day to stay clear of cable news." I remember on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Eric Alterman wrote that the networks and cable channels wouldn't have nearly the problems covering the one-year anniversary that they had in covering the original attacks in 2001. Because, he said, "coping" is a story that they can handle. So I'm guessing that the TV "news" will be full of coping stories the next few days.

I do hope some professional journalists pursue the question of why the base commander was telling reporters hours after the attack that the man who, from the current state of reporting, was the sole shooter was actually dead. That's not a minor fact point.

Liberal media critics are starting to focus on the coverage of the Fort Hood killings:

Glenn Greenwald, A media orgy of rumors, speculation and falsehoods Salon 11/06/09 (He gives some credit to a conservative site that had some meaningful criticisms of the coverage along with their usual frivolous kind.)

Jamison Foser, Crazy comparison of the day Media Matters 11/06/09

Eric Boehlert, Newsbusters praise ABC News for getting Ft. Hood shooting report wrong Media Matters 11/06/09

Glenn G on why the early reporting can be disproportionately influential on how people understand the story:

But shouldn't there be some standards governing what gets reported and what is held back? Particularly in a case like this -- which, for obvious reasons, has the potential to be quite inflammatory on a number of levels -- having the major media "report" completely false assertions as fact can be quite harmful. It's often the case that perceptions and judgments about stories like this solidify in the first few hours after one hears about it. The impact of subsequent corrections and clarifications pale in comparison to the impressions that are first formed. Despite that, one false and contradictory claim after the next was disseminated last night by the establishment media with regard to the core facts of the attack.

Sadly, this advice is probably worth following:

I'm obviously ambivalent about the issues of media responsibility raised by all of this. It's difficult to know exactly how the competing interests should be balanced -- between disclosing what one has heard in an evolving news story and ensuring some minimal level of reliability and accuracy. But whatever else is true, news outlets -- driven by competitive pressures in the age of instant "reporting" -- don't really seem to recognize the need for this balance at all. They're willing to pass on anything they hear without regard to reliability -- to the point where I automatically and studiously ignore the first day or so of news coverage on these events because, given how these things are "reported," it's simply impossible to know what is true and what isn't. In fact, following initial media coverage on these stories is more likely to leave one misled and confused than informed. Conversely, the best way to stay informed is to ignore it all -- or at least treat it all with extreme skepticism -- for at least a day. [my emphasis]

And the Radical Right proves once again that a total lack of scruples can provide a short-term advantage in spinning the meaning of events. Or, at least that some people have a total lack of scruples. Sarah Posner reports in Conservatives Stoke Fear of Fifth Column Religion Dispatches 11/06/09. Also from Sarah at Religion Dispatches comes this story about Mike Huckabee supporter and Christian nationalist Rick Scarborough, Religious Right Leader Claims Hasan Motivated By "Animus Toward Christians and Jews" 11/06/09.

Progressives and other cautious news consumers are understandably and commendably concerned about applying the term "terrorism" to the Fort Hood killings. Not every mass murder is an act of terrorism. And not every act of violence by a Muslim or someone with an "Arabic-sounding" name is terrorism, either. And unlike the zealots of the right who are eager to feed Islamophobia, I'm still reserving judgment until I have a more reliable account of the facts. The base commander's statement hours after the attack claiming the shooting suspect was dead really has me wondering what is going on with the Army's providing of information on this case.

That said, it seems to me that what the base and eyewitnesses are reporting about the event certainly has the form of a terrorist act. I won't try to parse the vexed question here of how to define terrorism exactly. But it appears that the shooter targeted a group of soldiers in a crowded facility and intended to kill a number of them without any particular regard to their individual identity. Even if the shooter's motivations were primarily personal or pathological, what is publicly known of the killings at the moment certainly suggests that whatever they were, he staged the action in a way to spread fear. And that's a big part of what terrorism is about.

Having a broken national press certainly complicates understanding an event like this in major ways. The typical press script for Muslim perpetrators is "jihadist", and the Radical Right will encourage such interpretations in every way they can, whether there is a factual basis for it or not. But in the cases of non-Muslim far-right perpetrators, even ones who express explicitly political motivations for their crimes, the favored press script is the "lone nut".

And even when the perpetrator is explicitly motivated by a religious belief, and that happens not just in the case of anti-abortion terrorists but also other far-rightists motivated by Christian Identity beliefs, the major Christian denominations don't feel compelled to make specific condemnations of those acts of "Christian terrorism". Though anti-abortions groups typically do make declarations against the violence, sometimes practically rolling their eyes at their own hypocrisy as they do it.

And as much as those of us who have been critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would like opposition to the war to be somehow pristine, some acts of opposition are not pristine. One symptom of the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the problems it was causing more generally in American society was the numerous incidents of "fragging", the slang term then for assassinating unpopular officers in the field, sometimes by tossing a fragmentation grenade into their tent, which is where the term "fragging" came from. While I don't know of anyone who would want to encourage such a thing in any way, we could be missing something important if we just brush such incidents off as "lone nut" actions.

Here's an article from the San Antonio Express-News, Fort Hood shooter's neighbors say he was friendly, but a loner by Scott Huddleston 11/06/09, giving a "lone nut" take on the case. Is there ever a mass shooting case where we don't see this particular kind of stories? The reporter talks to the guy's neighbors, they say we was kind of quiet, seemed to be a loner, they're shocked to hear he might do such a thing. Later investigations into people who actually knew the guy show something different. What would you say to a reporter if your next-door neighbor was accused of being a mass murdered? "Sure, I used to hang out with him all the time and we watched sadistic videos together and talked about jihad." Why do reporters bother with these stories? Why do their editors wave them into print?

Pat Lang seems to be kind of a prick and he doesn't much like of what I have to say, at least not about his romantic fondness for things Confederate. He even invited me once to not quote him even when I agreed with him. But he often has useful things to say. And, prick or not, he actually has a point in Major Hasan's Alienation 11/06/09. Even though he opens with a quote from FOX News, Lang is actually careful about parsing facts (at least when it doesn't have to do with the CSA). He writes:

It is sadly amusing how much people do not want this to be about the man's religion or his Palestinian ancestry.

His relatives understandably want other Americans to believe that he was traumatized by listening to soldiers' stories about the wars. They certainly don't want people to think that there was anything about the atmosphere in his father's house that caused this man to reject the land of his birth and the obligations of his oath.

Lang is not pimping some phony wingnut theory here. He's pointing out that the accused shooter's political and religious outlook may have been major influences on his actions in the killings of which he is accused. While it's also sadly true - but not at all "amusing" to me - that the Christian Right is quick to look for religious motivations in Muslim perpetrators and quick to deny them in the case of religiously motivated Christian terrorists, understanding why people do such things involves looking at them as they are.

"Subject to revision as more becomes known," Lang adds several observations as of the time of his post, including:

- He avoided other officers socially and professionally to the extent he could manage. He avoided women colleagues. He would not be photographed with a woman. He asked his prayer community to find him a wife. They did not do so. He had no visible sexual relationships.

- He was transferred to Hood to do what the Army had trained him to do. Inevitably the Army decided that it was his "turn in the barrel" and sent him orders to deploy to one of combat areas to practise his medical specialty.

- He told people that he did not want to participate in wars against Muslims in a non-Muslim army. He tried to get out of the Army. Not surprisingly, the Army would not hear of that. Security camera video in a convenience store in Killeen, Texas outside the gate of the post shows him wandering around wearing strange garb apparently intended to set him apart in that town full of soldiers, present and past.

- He is reported to have uttered "Allahu Akbar" before he opened fire on what he seems to have seen as God's enemies.

I don't want to detract anything from the actions of Officer Kimberley Munley, who is reported to have stopped the shooter by wounding him with her gun and being wounded herself. But given the false information that even the base commander himself has been putting out - e.g., the accused shooter was dead, hours after the event - I'm worried that it may be a bit premature to turn her into a plaster saint, like this Huffington Post article seems to do: Kimberly Munley: The Hero Cop Who Ended The Fort Hood Rampage 11/06/09? Remember Pat Tillman? Remember Jessica Lynch? See Jessica Lynch Sets Record Straight: The Former POW Discusses Her Testimony In Pat Tillman Probe CBSNews.com 04/25/07.

There is the question of whether there were "friendly fire" injuries in the Fort Hood shootings. Current reports say that the shooter had two pistols, one semi-automatic. It's also my understanding that under base rules, the soldiers waiting for their shots and eye exams would not have been armed and that only police were allowed to carry their guns walking around the base. So it's not like there was a room full of armed soldiers returning massive fire at the shooter. Again, nothing at all against Munley. I just want to hear an accurate story.

I wonder at this point if it's advisable for Islamic groups to relexively issue statements condemning such actions. CNN's Tom Cohen reports in Alleged shooter's name prompts response from American Muslims 11/06/09 that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) thought they needed to issue a special statement of condemnation just because the first reports naming the alleged shooter said he had a name that sounded kind of Muslim:

Ibrahim Hooper knows the drill.

When news first broke Thursday that a shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, killed and injured U.S. soldiers, the national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote a statement of condemnation.

He only sent it out later, when reports emerged that the alleged shooter's name was Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

"As soon as we saw what appeared to be a Muslim name, we issued our statement," Hooper said. "Until that time, we were praying that no Muslim would be involved."

That's the reality of crisis management for the Muslim-American community, said Hooper, who handles communications for the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group.

Even without confirmation that the alleged gunman was Muslim -- there was no immediate determination of any religious affiliation for Hasan -- the mere reporting of a possible Muslim name required an immediate comment, he said.

"That's unfortunately the world we live in nowadays," Hooper said. "So often, Muslims are accused of not condemning these kind of acts."

But the reality is our xenophobes and Muslim-haters aren't going to stop condemning all Muslims for the acts of some. And their accusations that Muslims aren't loud enough in condemning violent acts by other Muslims is just a way of saying that all Muslims are guilty. Now it's reached the point that a group like CAIR is quick to condemn acts of violence by a Muslim even before it's clear that a Muslim is actually even a suspect! The Islamophobes will just say, yeah, that's fine, but they aren't enough Muslims condemning such acts and they aren't condemning them with enough condemnation.

It seems to me that CAIR's action in this case only encourage our sad excuse for a press corps to expect that the ordinary Muslims do have some special obligation to condemn violence by anyone with an Arabic-sounding name, an obligation going way beyond what American Christians consider themselves obligated to do. Does the National Council of Catholic Bishops issue a special statement every time someone named Murphy is accused of a murder? Does the Southern Baptist Convention, the country's largest Protestant denomination, issue formal condemnations every time a Baptist is accused of being involved in a shooting, political or not?

No, and there's no reason they should. What Christian denominations should do more of, though, is to address the very real problem of far-right Christian terrorism in a more serious way. Calling a permanent moratorium on frivolous comparisons between abortions and the Holocaust - most of which have more-or-less blatant anti-Semitic overtones - would be a good start.

Tags: fort hood massacre

Fort Hood massacre and early news

When the news was coming out this afternoon about the mass murder at Fort Hood, I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker who was also following the news. He currently has two sons in the military so, as he said, the news "hits too close to home".

I said something to the effect that it was a horrible event. But I also said I was reserving judgment on the specifics until we heard some more solid news. He said that he believed what the base commander, Gen. Robert Cone, had reported in the first news conference he held after the incident. I said, "But the military's first statement on things like this is always a lie." He was taken aback by that. And we had an interesting talk about it.

I showed him the one of the first news articles I had seen about it from La Opinión - I actually first heard about it from the paper's Twitter feed - which at the time was reporting seven dead and 20 injured, apparently based on Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's statement using information from the base. It was also said shooting had been reported at two locations on the base, and that there was believed to be one shooter and one additional suspect. I also showed him a Salon report that had been updated in an additional section after Cone's press conference. Then we were talking about 12 dead, 31 wounded, the shooter and a police officer also killed (the shooter maybe or maybe not one of the 12), and two additional suspects in custody.

I explained that expected just this kind of changing reporting from a situation like this. And that even if we assumed that the base commander had the best of intention, he might actually have good reason to give out incomplete or false information at that moment when they were still trying to resolve the immediate situation and make arrests. But I was a little surprised myself at how totally skeptical I was of Cone's information. As far as I recall, I've never heard of the man before. But as I explained to my co-worker, an endless number of false statement about battle situations has had it's effect. And especially the Pat Tillman case, in which senior Army officers knowingly lied to the public and to Tillman's family about his being killed in a "friendly fire" incident, because they wanted to cover up their own mistakes and also use his death as propaganda.

I also said that I could see reasons for the base commander to have not so admirable reasons to lie. After all, this is the largest US military base anywhere. And one of the worst terrorist-type incident, a real mass murder, had just taken place on the base under his command. Reading about recent German history, I know there were incidents in which the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) terrorist group attacked US military bases, sometimes killing several Americans. And there have obviously been deadly attacks on American bases in combat zones. But I don't recall ever hearing of one this costly in lives happening in the US outside actual combat situations like the Civil War. So he very well might have incentive to dissemble. As citizens and news consumers, we'd be foolish to overlook that possibility.

But I did say that I would be surprised if the death toll or the number of wounded turned out to be lower than reported, because I couldn't see any motive for the base commander to exaggerate those figures.

Well, here we are a few hours later. As the subtitle on this Alex Koppelman report at Salon puts it, "Much of what was initially reported about the mass murder at an Army post turns out to have been wrong." And while the last I saw, the count of dead and wounded is still at 12 and 30+, respectively, it appears I was a bit too optimistic about the likely accuracy of the Gen. Cone's information. Because the officer that was being reported killed at one point was wounded but not killed.

Even more surprisingly, the alleged shooter is still alive. Now, that's a real surprise. And somebody along the chain from the wounded but alive suspect to Cone's press conference to us was almost certainly knowingly lying. It's not unthinkable that there could have been a legitimate reason to disseminate that bit of disinformation. I can't think of what that might be. But if there was, I want to hear about it. As Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher observed on Twitter, "Military says they reported Hasan dead due to confusion at hospital. Huh?"

If the top brass at the base really thought there was a sole shooter and that he was dead, I'm not sure if that's more worrisome in its own way that the fact that they just lied about it. How good a job were they doing handling the emergency if they could get something that important wrong? As Mitchell said in another Tweet, "Get ready for days of jokes, old and new, about 'military intelligence.'"

But we also can't forget what kind of country we live in after the Cheney-Bush years and the Obama administration extreme claims of government secrecy for "national security" issues. Did the military initially make the false claim that the shooter was dead because they thought they might ship him off to Gitmo or some CIA gulag station and torture him for the next 10 years? Or did they say he was dead because they were torturing him already? Until there is a full legal investigation and prosecution of the known torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush administration, we have to learn to ask these questions.

Sen. Levin Carl Levin said early on that his Senate Armed Services Committee was calling for "a detailed accounting" of the incident. I hope they don't just take the base commander's word for it. We'll see if Levin's makes a decent follow-through. I've been disappointed by him more than once.

I suppose I should add that the military should look closely at Cone's performance in this matter. I won't hold my breath they they will do it responsibly. We've seen too much too often of how our glorious generals operate in such matters the last eight years.

Tags: fort hood massacre, us military